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Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
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And I'm Juan Davalos. We are back with CS Lewis on Christianity, the last lecture of the course today, Heaven and Hell.
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There's a striking scene in the Last Battle in which the dwarves, who are for the dwarves, they fight for themselves, have been transported to Aslan's country and they're surrounded by beauty and a rich feast is laid out before them, but they think they're still in the dark shed in the middle of a war and they're surrounded by filthy hay and they cannot see that they're actually in the bright sunlight of paradise.
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Lewis paints these pictures so well, and he does that also in the Great Divorce, which if you have not read that book again, it's one of the greatest books that I've read to understand the this problem that a lot of non believers, and I think believers also have of how can a good God send people to hell? Does he not love them? And I think the way that Lewis answers that question in the Great Divorce is actually people choose hell because when they are brought to heaven, when they are brought to the possibility of heaven, they just don't want it. It's too costly. And people love their vices and the things that keep them away from their full humanity and from. With God, from being with a righteous God. And so they choose not to enter heaven and they choose to go back to hell. It's a beautiful book. I think, obviously it's fiction, but I think it's a beautiful picture on helping us understand that part of Christianity.
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It takes us back to the very first lecture in this course where Lewis, through Dr. Ward, asserts that there is an objective standard for good, there's a moral law. And until someone recognizes they've transgressed the moral law and seeks repentance, they. They can't have the true joy that awaits them. And of course, the ultimate consequence of that might be an existence in hell through adherence to one's own choices and stubbornness rather than embracing the standard and embracing the forgiveness of Jesus and spending the rest of your existence in paradise.
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I hope you've enjoyed this course as much as we enjoyed making this course. I think it's a beautiful course. It's an extremely helpful course in understanding Christianity and the way that we view God and understand God. And I'm not sure if you're going to listen to it 11 times like I did when creating this course, but I do encourage you to go through it again because it's that good and Every time you listen to it, you will learn something new. And if you're enjoying it and you think others will enjoy it as well, we ask that you support us. The courses. We don't take any government money, either state or federal, to make the courses, but of course they cost a lot of money to make and we want to share them for free with as many people as we possibly can because we think this is helpful to human beings to become fully realized human beings the way that God intended them to be. So if you're willing and able to help us, please go to Hillsdale Edu course. That's Hillsdale Edu course.
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Now let's turn to Heaven and Hell, the final lecture in C.S. lewis on Christianity.
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We started this six part lecture series by looking at C.S. lewis's views about good and evil. But one thing we didn't have time to look at in that first lecture is the question of dualism. Dualism, Lewis says, is the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything. One of them good and one of them bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight an endless war. If dualism is true, then these two powers of good and evil must be equally powerful and equally eternal. They are independent of each other. Neither one made the other, and neither one is more original than the other. So why should we side with good rather than evil? On what grounds can we claim that good is better than evil? For they are both equal to each other and each regards itself as the right way to approach reality. One happens to like love and mercy, while the other favors hatred and cruelty. And how are we to choose between them which is superior? What do we really mean when we call one of them good and the other evil? We're surely saying more than that. We happen to prefer good over evil, like we might happen to prefer tea over coffee or meat over fish. What we're really saying is that whatever the two powers themselves may think about it, and whichever side we ourselves may happen to prefer at any given moment, one of these powers is actually wrong, actually mistaken in regarding itself as the right way to approach reality. For goodness means what you ought to prefer, irrespective of what you happen to like at a given moment or what might happen to be convenient for you. If being good means simply siding with the power you happen to fancy for no reason other than your private whim or personal taste, then goodness would not deserve to be called goodness. It would deserve to be called your preference, but nothing more than that. So in using the terms good and evil, we must mean that one of the two powers is really wrong and the other really right. But as soon as you say that, you're introducing into the universe a third thing. Alongside these two supposed equal and opposite powers, you're introducing a standard, a yardstick, a rule of goodness, and you're saying that one of the powers meets this standard and the other one doesn't. But since the two powers are judged by this third thing, this standard is itself more original, more fundamental than either of the two powers. In fact, what we mean by calling the two powers good and evil is that one of them is in a right relation to this ultimate standard of good and the other is in a wrong relation to it. And that's why dualism won't work as a philosophy. It doesn't push the question of good and evil back far enough and think it through hard enough. CS Lewis did not regard good and evil as equal and opposite things. And the same could be said about his views on heaven and hell, which is the subject of this final talk. Heaven and hell are not equal and opposite things. Ask yourself the question, who is the opposite of the devil? This is a good way of testing whether you're secretly a dualist or not. Who is the opposite of the devil? Who is Satan's opposite? And if you find yourself wanting to reply, God. If you think God is the devil's opposite, then you are actually a dualist rather than a Christian. Because of course, the devil is only a created thing, an angel, a fallen angel, and a powerful one, but a creature nonetheless. The opposite of such an evil creature can't be the perfect and eternal source of all being that we call God. God has no opposite. The opposite of Satan, the leader of the fallen angels is not God, but Saint Michael, the Archangel Michael, the leader of the unfallen angels. Lewis points out how in the parable of the sheep and the goats, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place prepared not for them, but for the devil and his angels. Hell is and heaven are not equal and opposite places as far as human beings are concerned. Hell is a place never made for men at all, but rather for X men ex people. To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth. To enter hell is to be banished from humanity. And we might here remember the title of Lewis's book, A Vision of a Hellish Future, the Abolition of Man. It's possible for human beings effectively to abolish themselves, to undo their humanity. And this explains why Lewis writes in the Problem of we know much more about heaven than hell, for heaven is the home of humanity, but hell is not our home. Humanity was not made for hell. Heaven and hell are not equal and opposite destinations in the afterlife. Rather, as Lewis puts it, hell is the darkness outside the outer rim, where being fades into nonentity. Lewis writes extensively about both hell and heaven in his nonfiction, most notably in the Problem of Pain, where he remarks that there's no doctrine which which he would more willingly remove from Christianity if it was in his power. However, it's not in his power. Hell has the full support of Scripture and especially of our Lord's own words. Christians throughout the ages have held it to be a reality, and it has the support of reason as well, Lewis says. He writes, if the happiness of a creature lies in self surrender, no one can make that surrender but himself, though many can help him to make it, and he may refuse. I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully, all will be saved. But my reason retorts, without their will or with it, if I say without their will, I at once perceive a contradiction. How can the supreme voluntary act of self surrender be involuntary? If I say with their will, my reason replies, how if they will not give in? Very good reasonable points. If someone decides that they wish to turn their back on God, God will go to any length to dissuade them from such a catastrophic turning away any length except overriding or cancelling their freedom. For if our love for God is not freely offered, then it's not love. Those who choose hell over heaven prefer the prison of their isolation to the self abandonment required for love. As Lewis puts it, the doors of hell are locked on the inside. As for what he says about heaven in the Problem of Pain, one of the most important aspects of his understanding is that the saints in heaven become more and more themselves, more and more unique individuals, more and more distinct from every other created person, and yet at the same time more and more united with them in love. This is what he if all experienced God in the same way and returned him an identical worship, the song of the Church Triumphant would have no symphony. It would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note. Heaven is a city, a body, because the blessed remain eternally different, a society because each has something to tell all the others, fresh and ever fresh news of the my God whom each finds in him whom all praise as our God for doubtless the continually successful yet never completed attempt by each soul to communicate its unique vision to all others is also among the ends for which the individual was created, not that the distinctness of these saved individuals represents some kind of ownership or possession, as if the whole point of heaven were self actualization. No, Lewis says, the eternal distinctness of each soul is intended for the good of every other soul, not the individual concerned. Each soul, Lewis supposes, will be eternally engaged in giving away to all the rest that which it has received from God to make it its distinct self, and not only giving it away to all its fellow creatures, but giving it back joyously and freely to God. Lewis observes that the soul's union with God is almost by definition a continual self abandonment, an opening, an unveiling, a surrender of itself. And he goes on to say that we need not suppose that the necessity for something analogous to self conquest will ever be ended in heaven, or that eternal life will not also be eternal dying. It is in this sense, he says, that as there may be pleasures in hell, God shield us from them. There may be something not all unlike pains in heaven. God grant us soon to taste them. And this is a key part of Lewis's whole vision, what we might call the bittersweet or the tragi comic note that he strikes, which makes his doctrine both of salvation and of the afterlife in general so bracingly realistic. In his fiction, Lewis writes about heaven and hell in a number of places. For instance, in the Last Battle he depicts the Narnian version of heaven in great and glorious detail, with just a brief glimpse at what a Narnian hell might be like. However, I shall be leaving Narnia aside and hope to return to it on another occasion. The other two main fictional treatments of heaven and hell in Lewis's works are to be found in the Screwtape Letters and the Great Divorce. Let's talk about how those two books depict first hell, then heaven. Hell in the Screwtape letters is not a bottomless pit or a lake of sulphurous fire, but rather amusingly, a government department. A vast bureaucracy teeming with secretaries and under secretaries filing dossiers and writing memoranda. The main character, Screwtape, is a demon, and a demon depicted in a very unfamiliar way. We don't have an insinuating trident wielding horned figure in red tights delighting in his wickedness. We have instead a serious minded bureaucrat, self important, imperceptive, pedantic, a sententious uncle giving what we presume is mostly unwelcome advice to his struggling nephew, the junior tempter Wormwood. Screwtape is Writing his letters to Wormwood. And the other devils that we hear about also have very amusing names. Slubgob, Slumtrimpet, Toad, Pipe, Trip, Tweeze. Unlike the traditional roster of names from the Bible, such as Beelzebub, Molech, Belial and the rest of the. Lewis is giving us an unexpected angle on Hell, showing us its absurdities, its stupidities. And one of the juiciest skewerings is in the 22nd letter where Screwtape is forced to admit that, and I quote, in the heat of composition, I find that I have inadvertently allowed myself to assume the form of a large centipede. I am accordingly dictating the rest to my secretary. We should feel free to laugh heartily at Screwtape and at his secretary, not feel sorry for them. The book is a satire, and as Lewis points out elsewhere, there are generic conventions in a satire that are peculiar to it and that need to be understood. In particular, the butt of a of a satirical joke exists precisely in order to be laughed at and doesn't require any pity, as would a real life person who was being ridiculed. And there's good reason to ridicule Satan, as the two epigraphs to the Screwtape letters make plain. One of these epigraphs comes from Martin Luther and the other from Thomas More, two figures of the 16th century whom Lewis studied closely. Martin Luther wrote that the best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn. Sir Thomas More wrote that the devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked. And there's some humor even involved in the choice of these two sources, Luther and More, because those two men were of course, on opposite sides of the Reformation. They couldn't agree about God and his church, alas, but they did agree about the Devil. How ironic. So, in reading the Screwtape letters, we should enjoy laughing at the devils and at those they try to tempt, particularly the patient, who is the main object of Screwtape and Wormwood's concern. He's this unnamed man on earth who Screwtape and Wormwood are trying to suck down into this hellish kingdom, this government bureaucracy, which they help run. We should enjoy laughing at all this because Lewis is satirizing not just the demons, but of course, ourselves. Much of the effectiveness of the book lies in the humorous way in which he exposes our own moral compromises and evasions and hypocrisies, our little lies that we Tell ourselves and tell ourselves aren't important because they're so little. We don't expect perhaps to receive so much wisdom through laughter in this book. Yet we do. And that's one reason why it is such a classic work. I think of all Lewis's books after the Narnia Chronicles, it is the Screwtape letters which will last the longest in the Great Divorce. Hell is depicted differently. Hell is a sprawling suburb, a grey town full of shabby shops and greasy little streets. A number of characters in this grey town get on a bus and take a day trip up to heaven. Lewis himself, who's the narrator of the tale, is one of these day trippers. So he's positioned himself in hell at the start of the tale, and we'll see later what happens to him as the story progresses. The story of the Great Divorce is a dream. Lewis presents us with various characters who, in his dream, face a choice after death. Will they advance from hell up to heaven, enter deep heaven, or will they, having looked around the outskirts of heaven, decide they don't like it and go back to hell? Now, this does not mean at all that Lewis believed in a real choice, facing real people after real death. It's just a conceit, a way of exploring moral choices, a way of depicting why some people prefer hell and some heaven. He calls the book the Great Divorce because he's playing on another title, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by the romantic poet and mystic William Blake. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which Blake wrote in about 1790, consists of a series of paradoxical aphorisms in which Blake turns conventional morality on its head. And in his preface to the Great Divorce, Lewis remarks that whereas Blake wrote of the marriage of heaven and hell, I have written of their divorce, there's no way that hell and heaven could ever be married. As St. Paul writes in the New Testament, what partnership have righteousness and iniquity? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with belial? These pairings, these couplings, are fundamentally incompatible. And given that they can't both be had, one of them must go. A choice has to be made, a painful choice, as painful as the choice to dissolve a real life marriage. The epigraph to the book is interesting. Again, it's a quotation from George MacDonald, as with the Problem of Pain. And this is how the epigraph no, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it, no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets out. Satan must go every hair and feather. That's the choice. Do the souls visiting heaven from hell wish to retain some particle of the underworld, however small? Or are they ready to completely abandon such hopes and enter heaven? Given the painfulness of the choice, it's perhaps hardly surprising that the visitors from hell nearly all fail to make the right choice. Because if they choose to stay in heaven, if they choose life, they're choosing death. They're choosing the death of their old familiar selves. In retrospect, if they make that correct choice, no doubt it will appear to have been the best decision they ever made. But when the decision is still to be made, it looks very unappetizing.
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Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being, and we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at Podcast Hillsdale. That's Podcast Hillsdale Edu or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio.
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The Great Divorce tells the stories of ten visitors from hell, only one of whom makes the right choice. Not everyone in the grey town gets as far as the bus queue. Not everyone who joins the bus queue gets on the bus. Not everyone on the bus gets off the bus when it reaches heaven. Not everyone who gets off the bus meets an angel. Not everyone who meets an angel is actually recorded as being spoken to by an angel. Only 10 characters do, and only one of these has an encounter which leads to salvation. Just the 10. And whether Lewis intended an echo of Christ's healing of the 10 lepers, only one of whom was thankful, it's hard to say. I expect he did. The more you read Lewis, the more you realize that there are no accidents in what he wrote. These echoes are not there casually. We don't have time to look at all 10 characters, but I'll focus on just two of them. A man with a lizard on his shoulder, a lizard of lust who whispers constantly in his ear. And also a more mysterious 10th leper that we might call him, whose identity I'll come back to at the end of the talk. The lizard man is a very interesting character, and the killing of his reptilian lust on his shoulder comes at the climax of a long conversation between him and the angel who is guiding him round the outskirts of heaven. These are the final exchanges between the ghostly lizard man and the bright spirit who's encouraging him to let go of his lust. Have I your permission? Said the angel to the ghost. I know it will kill me. It won't. But supposing it did? You're right. It would be better to be dead than to live with this creature. Then I may damn and blast you. Go on. Can't you get it over? Do what you like. Bellowed the ghost. Bud ended whimpering. God help me. God help me. The next moment the ghost gave a scream of agony such as I never heard on earth. The burning one closed his crimson grip on the reptile, twisted it while it bit and writhed, and then flung it broken, backed on the turf, the lizard dies, the lust is destroyed, and in its destruction it is transformed into a glorious stallion which the man now rides as previously he had been ridden by his lust out. Satan goes every hair and feather. The lizard man's face, we're told, shone with tears. But it may have been only the liquid love and brightness. One cannot distinguish them in that country which flowed from him. It was good that the lizard man had tried to make himself more lovable by leaving hell and visiting heaven. But he has to learn that his own good intentions aren't enough. He needs help from the angel. He needs outside surgery. Lewis says somewhere that it was only after he'd made a sustained effort to obey his conscience for about a year that he realized he couldn't do it in his own power and turned for help to Christ. Likewise, the lizard man must realize that his hope of gaining admittance simply on his own terms is a hope which he has to relinquish and replaced with a better hope, a more realistic hope. Above Dante's Hell in the Divine Comedy was a sign which read, abandon hope, all ye who enter here. We might almost expect to see A similar sign over Lewis's heaven. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. That is to say, abandon all your natural human hopes, your natural, regular, ordinary desires of self improvement, self control. You need to submit to the control of your Creator and your Redeemer. And that is a bittersweet exchange. Tragicomedy was Lewis's preferred term for the genre of the human story. And that's precisely what we see in this story of the Lizard Man. Our most joyous festivals, Lewis wrote, speaking of church worship, center upon the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus Christ. Our most joyous festivals. And there is thus a tragic depth in our worship which can't and mustn't be avoided. Our joy has to be the sort of joy which can coexist with sacrifice. And what the Lizard man does in the Great Divorce is just that. He acknowledges the need for sacrifice. He acknowledges that it would be better to be dead than to live with this creature, this lust, any longer. And so, by embracing death, or what he thinks is going to be his death, the Lizard man actually takes away the power of the lust which has been controlling him all this time. And as a result, he enters unexpectedly into the rose red brightness of heaven. The Screwtape letters also ends with a character entering heaven because the patient, the man that Screwtape and Wormholmer are trying to tempt, dies in an air raid during the Second World War. @ the close of the book, Screwtape writes furiously to Wormwood about this, explaining what the patient must have experienced at the point of death. This animal, Screwtape says, this animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on him, meaning God, what is blinding, suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him is clarity itself, and wears the form of a man. You would like, if you could, to interpret the patient's prostration in the presence of God on the analogy of your own choking and paralyzing sensations when you encounter the deadly air that breathes from the heart of heaven. But it's all nonsense. Pains the patient may still have to encounter, but he will embrace those pains. The saints would not barter them for any earthly pleasure. All the delights of sense or heart or intellect, with which you, you, Wormwood, could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself now seem to him in comparison. But as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved, whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead, is alive and even now at his door. So the Screwtape Letters ends with the absolute rout of Screwtape and his minions and the triumph of the patient's joyful meeting with his true beloved. This is a marvelously comedic conclusion from one point of view, but it's not simply comic. Notice also how for the patient there may be pains in heaven, pains that he will embrace. Yet again we see Lewis depicting the heart of reality as tragicomic. As he writes elsewhere, the whole cosmic story, though full of tragic elements, yet fails of being a tragedy. Christianity offers the attractions neither of optimism nor of pessimism. It represents the life of the universe as being very like the life of mortal men on this planet, of mingled yarn, good and ill together. That phrase about the mingled yarn is a quotation from Shakespeare's play All's well that ends well. The Screwtape Letters ends well for the patient. If not for Screwtape, heavenly bliss wins the day, even in the context of a World War II air raid. Interestingly, the Great Divorce also ends with an air raid, but this air raid has an entirely different result. It doesn't send the protagonist off to heaven, but drags him out of heaven, at least out of the outskirts of heaven where so much of the dream has been set, and deposits him. We're talking about Lewis. The narrator deposits him back in war torn England in a cold room, hunched on his floor, the clock striking 3 o' clock in the morning and the air raid siren howling in his ears. This protagonist is Lewis himself. He puts himself into the story as I said, and he doesn't come out of the story very well. Not only has he been found at the start of the story in the grey town, but he's not very dissimilar from the other inhabitants of this hellish place. When he gets on the bus in heaven, we're told that he glanced round the bus. I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but of impossibilities. Some gaunt, some bloated, some glaring with idiotic ferocity, some drowned beyond recovery in dreams, but all in one way or another, distorted and faded. Then there was a mirror on the end wall of the bus. I caught sight of my own face. And there's a similarly self critical passage later on in the book when Lewis has reached the outskirts of heaven and his guide says to there have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself. As if the Good Lord had nothing to do but exist. There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. Moved by a desire to change the subject, Lewis is not the hero of his own dream. Rather, he ends up shrieking, I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost. And this is typical of Lewis, who is always ready to notice how moral questions come home to roost. There's only one soul for which you and I are responsible, and that is our own. We have no grounds for complacency. So the narrator of the Great Divorce, Lewis himself wakes from his dream hunched on the floor next to a black and lifeless fireplace, which is an image of damnation. There are no glowing embers in this great nothing that can be fanned back into flame. And there's no comedy in that, certainly. But there's no tragedy either, interestingly, just blank, meaningless waste, because tragedy, in Lewis's view, is the unavoidable. But hell is avoidable. We don't have to go to hell. The doors of hell are locked on the inside. What is truly unavoidable? What is truly tragic? The pain involved in sanctification. That's the tragic element of the tragi comic destiny that awaits the saints in heaven. Getting to heaven involves a process which is both harrowing and hallowing. It's a process that involves death and rebirth, just as Christ's redemption of the world involves both his crucifixion and his resurrection. And absolutely crucially for Lewis, the rising from the grave of Jesus Christ does not cancel the reality of his dying on the cross. Rather, it transforms it and reinterprets it. But it doesn't pretend that it never happened. I think that Lewis's vision of Christianity could hardly be better summed up than by that moment at the end of John's Gospel, when doubting Thomas meets the risen Lord, whose body still bears the scars of his passion and death. It's a beautiful, risen body, but the tokens, the glorious tokens of his passion are still visible. Jesus says to Thomas, reach here with your finger and look at my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. And do not doubt, but.
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