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| Lewis reading an early draft of my book |
One more chapter from C. S. Lewis in Crisis (set for 2014) in draft form. I mean, really in draft form. Let me know what you think.
The
deaths of two significant women define the boundaries of C. S. Lewis’s life,
his mother and his wife. And right in middle of his life stands the long-term
relationship with Jane Moore. His mother provided him with an early sense of
comfort and joy. But her death initiated his realization of the horrors that
stand around the borders life. There would be “no settled happiness.” The
death of his wife, Joy, stirred a profound crisis for Lewis. We do not have the
same record of distress over the death of Mrs. Moore, perhaps because it was a
release from her suffering and, to some degree, her tyranny of demands over
Lewis.
Here I must offer an aside on Lewis’s
views of women, which may present a crisis for contemporary readers of Lewis.
His early writing includes a dismissive attitude toward women in light of his
time in the early twentieth century, when the world of Oxford was a male
bastion. He
rarely encountered women who were equals intellectually. But, when he met Joy
Davidman and eventually married her, he came to a different understanding of
women—this one clearly held her own in arguments or “dialectics.” One of the
discoveries of reading Joy’s copy of The
Problem of Pain at the Wade Collection was her frank assessments of the
book. In the margins on one page, she exclaims, “This is hardly Jack at his
best.” And yet earlier, she underlines the phrase “dreaming inner warmth”
and comments: “This for such phrases I love him. What a perfect image of the
secret self!”
For that reason, Joy’s death brought a
profound crisis—not only had he lost his companion, his soul mate, but it
reminded him horribly of his mother’s death, a death that left two small boys
without a mother, just as Joy’s did. Joy late arrival in Lewis’s life (he was
almost sixty) brought a new understanding of, appropriately enough, joy. And so
correspondingly, with her death, the cries of anguish are stunning: “Did you
ever know, dear, how much you took away when you left?”
Between those boundaries, Lewis faced
several other significant experiences with death. We also cannot overlook the
fact that Lewis experienced death first-hand, and at a fairly young age, as a
soldier in World War I. He spoke about the war and “the horribly smashed men
still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses.”
War is one colossal death event. In fact, his famous pact with Paddy Moore to
take of his mother was initiated by Paddy’s death in World War I. And he lived
through the horrors of World War II. After all, Lewis sets The Chronicles of Narnia within the bombing raids of London.
So death, in some way, confronts us all.
It is not particular to atheists or believers. “A mortal, born of woman, few of
days and full of trouble,” as Job 14:1-2 soberly reminds us, “comes up like a
flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last.” One common assault
on Christian faith is that it is generated to solve the problem of death and
annihilation. But this is certainly not true for Lewis’s thought or his own
experience. His resolution to this crisis of death emerged for him over time as
his faith grew. And as I noted earlier, as we’ve already seen, Lewis concluded
that God implanted us a desire, and a hope, for something beyond this life. That
is a pointer that death—which marks our lives as boundaried—must have a
resolution somewhere beyond this life, namely in heaven. Joy leads to hope in
heaven. Still, even if God implants in us the desire for heaven, Lewis was
quite convinced that we cannot seek life beyond this earth before we seek God.
Faith
in God first
Lewis did not believe that proper
religious faith “solved” the crisis of death. He was utterly convinced that faith
in God must be our starting point.
Put another way, Lewis himself did not
believe in Christ (or early, God) because of a need to believe in life after
death, he believed in life after death because of his faith: “I… was allowed
for a whole year to believe in God and try—in some stumbling fashion—to obey
Him before any belief in future life was given me.”
This he discerned in the ancient Jews who—in great contrast to their
neighboring Egyptians—had no strong belief in an afterlife. It is, in fact, my experience
as well.
Similarly Lewis expressed disdain for
those who valued immortality above knowing God. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis notes—with some level of horror and
disdain—the story of a priest he knew who simply valued the afterlife without
any belief in God,
an old, dirty, gabbling, tragic Irish
parson who had long since lost his faith but retained his living. By the time I
met him his only interest was the search for evidence of “human survival”…
[and] the ravenous desire for personal immortality co-existed in him with
(apparently) a total indifference to all that could, on a sane view, make
immortality desirable.”
Lewis
then comes to two conclusions of note: “I was too young and hard to suspect
that what secretly moved him was a thirst for the happiness which had been
wholly denied him on earth”—the argument from desire that I outlined earlier,
but that reappears in this chapter. Secondly, Lewis, now in his early ‘20s
concluded, “The whole question of immortality became rather disgusting to me. I
shut it out.” This
comment—despite whatever clarity later reflection provides to what was probably
a more muddled conclusion at the time—helps us to understand his comments in Reflections on the Psalms that he came
to faith without a desire for immortality. This experience, it is likely,
provided the context for his contention that faith in God first was healthier.
Notably, Lewis’s feelings about the
relationship of belief in immortality and God also worked in reverse: to
believe meant that we desired heaven with God. Therefore we become more
committed to afterlife. In about 1947, Lewis had some major musings on death:
“I have, almost all my life, been quite unable to feel the horror of nonentity,
of annihilation, which, say, Dr. Johnson felt so strongly. I felt it for the
first time only in 1947. But that was after I had long been reconverted and
thus began to know what life really is and what would have been lost by missing
it.”
Still, Lewis came to terms with death in
his final year. As he wrote to Mary Willis Sherburne (apparently because she
was dying too): “Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well?
Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that
body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hair-shirt or getting out of a
dungeon. What is there to be afraid of?”
The
death of another: A Grief Observed
So the resolution of death is not
insistence on immortality, but belief in the immortal God who promises eternal
life, or “heaven” in Lewis’s terminology. Once we have tasted a relationship
with this God, we hate losing it. But just as death meets us individually and we
can contemplate our own non-existence, we can also hit head-on the terrible
reality of losing someone we love. The latter horror first hit Lewis when he
was nine, with his mother’s demise, and then at the end of life with the death
of Joy. Death of others was much harder to contemplate than his own. Here
again, note Lewis’s poignantly beautiful style, that glimmers with a surprise
in the very first sentence, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
Lewis realized that our experience with
the death of someone we treasure initiates not a moment, but a process
of grief: “I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow.
Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.”
As I mentioned above, his honesty, particularly his anger even at Joy is
striking. It both demonstrates the depth of this crisis. Most of all—death of
another can shake our belief in God. And in Grief
Observed, we see a new Lewis, a rawer still, and it is his honesty with God
that remains the most arresting feature of this book: “Not that I am (I think)
in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to
believe such dreadful things about Him.”
The death of another—and the closer that
person is, the more we feel it—shakes us to the core. But the question of death
does find response in the Christian doctrine of hope for the life to come.
The reality of heaven and hell
Probably as
much as any writer, Lewis worked to make heaven a subject worthy of our
reflection. Lewis in this passage seeks to describe “heaven,” our future life.
(Our future is really a “new heaven and a new earth” but I hate to quibble with
St. Clive.) He reflects on the way heaven will be a fulfillment of each
person’s life in this striking passage:
The mold in which
a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the
key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a
curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the
infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors
in the house with many mansions.
Your place in
heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it
-- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.
Heaven is our real home, but this is also
the place to make a brief comment on the reality of hell. Since Lewis connected
heaven with faith in God, conversely hell is moving away from God, who is the
source of life. Lewis offers this astounding statement, which really works as a
summary of his thought: “The gates of hell are locked from the inside.” This
view has been revived by the former mega-church rockstar pastor and writer, Rob
Bell in Love Wins. It
is significant to note that Fuller Theological President Richard Mouw offered
his own support of Bell—in the midst of the firestorm around the book—by
comparing Bell’s views on hell to Lewis’s.
As opposed to Bell’s flirtation with
universalism (although he is not in Love
Wins), Lewis was not a universalist. This fact unsettled Joy. When I read
through her copy of The Problem of Pain,
Lewis is responding to the assertion, “All will be saved,”: “If I say ‘With
their will,’ my reason replies ‘How if they will
not give in?”
In the margin of her copy, Joy writes, “I think they will in the end.” Lewis
would not make that connection: the will for him (as we’ve seen in the section
on feelings) was essential. God must respect our will, the will to reject God. Hell
then only makes sense in light of heaven. It is the refusal to accept the offer
that God has given us. For this reason “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”
Hell for Lewis is really only a shadowy
place, a place never meant for human beings.
What is truly real is heaven, even more real than our “shadow lands”
of earth. Here Lewis’s love of Plato—and particularly the latter’s sense that
there is another world for which we all long and to which we are headed, the
world of the Forms—colors his understanding. The most sustained literary
treatment of the afterlife comes in his final installment of The Chronicles of Narnia, namely The Last Battle, where all the key
protagonists are killed.
They see a world that is like their Narnia, but as Lucy explains, “This is
still Narnia, and, more real and more beautiful than the Narnia down below….” In
case this sounds to the reader considerably like Plato’s Forms, Lord Digory
explains it quite clearly, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!”
Going to heaven means continuity with our earthly experience, but ultimately
fulfillment.
Living
in light of heaven
“Aim at Heaven and you will get earth
“thrown in”: aim at earth and you will get neither.”
To take in the reality of heaven significantly our life in the here-and-now. Lewis’s
vision of heaven was that there was fulfillment, but he could not be blamed for
thinking that we what do today does not matter. At the Wade Collection, I had
the unusual discovery of In an unpublished Manuscript (MS-190), named (somewhat
uncreatively), “Fragment about the Parable of the Unjust Steward.” Lewis makes
several points on this passage from Luke 16:1-9. Here are the final two:
4. The Summons,
and the threatened dismissal from the stewardship means the steward’s
realization – gradual, or leaping full-grown upon him in a doctor’s consulting
room – that his employment under the World is temporary. He is going to get the
sack. And to be given the sack by this employer is to die. In other words, the
soul becomes aware that its real well being must be sought elsewhere. It
undergoes conversion.”
5. Now comes the joke. For though this story has a very serious moral, it is in
the form of a comic story. It is in fact the archtypically [sic] Jewish comic
story, the joke the Jews never got tired of; the joke of spoiling the Egyptians
or hanging Hanan on his gallows. Why not use all this property, which World
[sic] has put in our hands, for the purposes to those World [sic] had in mind?
Use it to feather nests for yourself in that region which the World has never
dreamed of – by preaching the gospel, feeding the hungry, building a Christian
home.
To
be sure, Lewis began to reformulate his ambitions in light of heaven. The fame
he craved as a poet in his young adult years, he abandoned when he took on
Christian faith. When it did arrive through apologetics and children’s fiction,
he didn’t seem to care.
Lewis helped me grasp how to understand
earth in light of heaven. He also guided me to grasp the reality of our future
hope. And here I trust the reader will allow me one more reflection on how
Lewis’s reflections on heaven profoundly affected my own crisis the realization
that I would did. While on a post-college celebratory vacation to France, I can
remember reading Lewis’s insights about the afterlife from Reflections on
the Psalms that knocked me off my metaphorical feet. He pointed
out human beings are not made for time, but instead, for eternal
life. And I remember several years later as a newly minted pastor—when I had to
preach my first Easter sermon and sought to somehow make our hope for
another, better life something real and vital for the congregation—I turned
to Lewis to help me demonstrate where our recurrent human experience resonates
resurrection. Here's that passage:
We are so little reconciled to time that
we are even astonished at it. “How he’s grown!” we exclaim, “How time flies!”
as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty.
It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of
water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were
destined to become, one day, a land animal.
There
is inside us that profound yearning for something transcendent, that surpasses
time particularly. We are made for fulfillment, for heaven.
God did seem to give Lewis a nice passing.
When he almost died in the summer of 1963, he expressed some regret that he was
brought back. But a few months later, just before his sixty-five birthday the
pen of C. S. Lewis would never write another of his insights. I find the words
of his brother spare and moving about his last day on earth:
Friday, the 22nd of November
1963, began much as other days: there was breakfast, then letters and the
crossword puzzle…. Our few words then [at four] were the last: at five-thirty I
heard a crash and ran in, to find him lying unconscious at the foot of his bed.
He ceased to breathe some three or four minutes later.
Warren
could only add, in his brief memoir, “nothing worse could ever happen to me in
the future.” He too
knew the sorrow of losing someone close. Indeed he could not bring himself to
attend his beloved brother’s funeral.
It’s clear what Lewis believed about
heaven, and thus life after death. If he was right about what he wrote, his
place is secure now. As he wrote so movingly in some of the final words from
The Chronicles of Narnia:
All their life in this world and all
their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at
last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth
has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one
before.
