taken from C.S. Lewis, Mere Christian by kathryn lindskoog...a good summary of lewis' thoughts on various areas
when lewis was a young adult he had been far more eager to escape pain than to achieve happiness,
and he even resented the fact that he had been created without his own permission.
one advantage of the anti christian materialism he clung to
as its limited danger of pain.
no disaster can be infinitude death ends all.
and if this life becomes too painful,
one can always commit suicide for an early escape.
in contrast, the horrible thing about christianity
is that it offers no such escape.
it assures each person that he is going to live forever.
the christian universe has no door marked exit.
perhaps a person's temper or his jealousy are getting worse so slowly that in 70 years
they are not very noticeable.
but in a million years they would be hell itself;
'in fact, if christianity is true,
hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be. '
about 30 years after L's youthful enthusiasm for materialism,
he was asked in public if the devil is as real as we think he is.
he answered that it is quite possible to be a christian without
believing in the devil or devils;
they are not mentioned in the christian creeds.
'i do believe such beings exist,
but that is my own affair.
he eventually got the feeling that he and the devil were all too closely related
in the public mind.
they even appeared together on the cover of time magazine.
on the other hand, L felt that a belief in hell was indeed basic.
God is not safe or tame.
there is that ahead which immortal spirit can desire and dread.
L claimed in his last book that he had never met anyone who fully disbelieved in hell
and yet had a life giving belief in heaven.
there are only three eternal alternatives:
to be God, to be like God or to be miserable.
that means for humans the choice of heaven or hell.
how about earth?
L felt that a person who chooses earth instead of heaven
will find that earth was, all along, just a part of hell.
and the person who puts earth second to heaven will find earth
to have been all along a part of heaven itself.
it is no use crying for something else;
God can only give us what is.
those who want annihilation will find the closest thing to it in hell.
but there is no exit.
infernal fiction
lewis published 4 works of adult fiction in which damnation was a central theme.
they came out between 1942-6.
first was the screwtape letters. ..
no book was ever easier for L to write than this one,
and none left a worse taste in his mouth.
he said it was not fun for long and almost smothered him before he was done.
the state of mind he needed to write from a devil's viewpoint was all
dust, grit, thirst and itch.
although he was often asked to add to these letters,
it was at least 17 years before he indulged in any more 'diabolical ventriloquism'
-and then it was a dinner speech by screwtape, not a letter.
in that speech screwtape expresses in passing the goal of hell.
'the overthrow of free peoples and the multiplication of slave states
are for us a means (besides, of course, being fun);
but the real end is the destruction of individuals.
for only individuals can be saved or damned,
can become sons of the Enemy or food for us.
screwtape advises wormwood that jargon, not argument,
can keep a man out of the enemy's clutches.
he assures him that hundreds of adult converts have been reclaimed for hell.
'keep everything hazy in his mind now,
and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself
by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which hell affords.
the reword for all the labors of devils is the anguish and bewilderment of a human soul;
it becomes a brimful chalice of despair, horror and astonishment
which a devil can drink as wine forever, according to screwtape.
wormwood is reminded not to reveal himself to his patient.
the fact that devils are today pictured as comic figures in red tights will help keep people
from believing in them until it is too late.
although devils can make use of the comic element at times,
joyful laughter is disgusting to them
and a direct insult to the realism, dignity and austerity of hell.
silence and melody are also banished there.
it is the kingdom of noise.
the whole philosophy of hell is one of competition.
every gain by one being in hell is loss to another.
and when a soul manages to go to heaven instead of hell,
everyone in hell loses.
a howl of sharpened famine re echoes all the way down to the throne itself.
a tempter has no need to produce big sins in order to win.
all he needs to do is edge a man away from the Light
and out into the nothing.
'murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick.
indeed the safest road to hell is the gradual one-
the gentle slope, soft underfoot,
without sudden turnings,
without milestones,
without signposts.
screwtape has made the difference between hell and heaven clear.
the devils want cattle who can finally become food;
God wants servants who can become sons.
the devils want to suck in;
God wants to give out.
and in this struggle Hod has limited Himself;
He can woo, but not ravish.
either God or satan will eventually say 'mine'
of everything that exists,
and especially of every person.
God now claims everything on the grounds that He made it.
satan hopes to claim it all by conquest.
man will learn that he cannot in reality claim anything for himself, according to screwtape.
'they will find out in the end, never fear, to whom
their time, their souls and their bodies really belong -
certainly not to them, whatever happens.
in a poem directed to satan, L said,
'all that seemed earth is hell or heaven.
God is: thou art: the rest illusion...'
he concluded his overwhelming realization with a prayer to God.
'Lord, open not too often my weak eyes to this.
the idea of the devil possessing a human mind and body was the horror of the unforgettably
beautiful space novel perelandra which came out one year after the screwtape letters.
in this sequel to out of the silent planet,
the evil physicist, weston, claimed to have come into contact with his life's guiding spirit.
this 'life force' took control of him, using him as a tool
to get the newly created first woman on venus to disobey her maker.
ransom, God's man on venus, soon realized that weston had become
a living corpse, a bogey, an Un-man.
he was a creature who at rare moments cried out to ransom to save him
from some horrors he could hardly describe:
'i'm down in the bottom of a big black hole...he does all my thinking for me.
superficially, the Un-man weston seemed to be pursuing great designs against heaven
which involved the fate of worlds;
but deep within he seemed obsessed with a puerile lust for even tiny, stupid cruelties
performed with the mentality of an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child.
ransom had always pictured hell as containing lost souls
that were still human;
now he saw to his horror that only a ghost would be left-
an everlasting unrest, a crumbling, a ruin, an odor of decay.
elsewhere L called it 'remains'.
he saw that there is a confusion of persons in damnation.
the question whether satan or a person digested by satan is acting on a specific occasion
has in the long run no clear significance.
L described that hideous strength, which follows perelandra,
as a tall story about devilry with a serious point behind it.
the sinister National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.)
was quickly taking over a small university in england,
under the direction of evil Masters.
as this project met its destruction, its senior leader, Wither,
knew with perfect clarity
that he could still divorce himself from the spirits
and save himself.
but in his last moments before damnation he did not implore God for mercy.
seeing that endless terror was about to begin,
he drifted passively into his last moments of murder and devil worship and death,
losing all contact with joy and reason forever,
drowsily watching the trap close upon his sou.
it was similar with his partner, Frost.
suddenly he had a chance to see that he had been on an utterly wrong course;
that souls and personal responsibility existed.
he hated that knowledge, rejected it and entered eternity.
after this book was published, L wrote in a personal letter
that N.I.C.E. is not quite the fantastic absurdity some people think,
but he had thought the part about dabbling in magic was fantasy.
only later did he learn that it was taking place.
he concluded, 'the trouble about writing satire is that
the real world always anticipates you,
and what were meant for exaggerations turn out to be nothing of the sort.
damnation is somehow sadder but less grisly in the great divorce.
L doesn't include devils in that portrayal of hell,
but there, too, all who are in hell have chosen it.
(as L says in 'the magician's nephew,
'all get what they want: they do not always like it.
the whole trouble with trying to understand hell is that
the thing to be understood is so nearly nothing.
all hell is smaller than one pebble on earth and smaller than one atom of heaven.
if a butterfly in heaven swallowed all hell,
hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to even have taste.
hell seems big enough when one is in it.
but if all its loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings were rolled together and weighed
against the least moment of joy that is felt by the least in heaven,
it would have no weight that could be registered at all.
the damned soul is shrunk, shut up in itself; it is nearly nothing.
L wanted to arouse no curiosity about details of the afterlife.
but he portrayed hell as a dismal twilight city in which people,
consumed with self,
moved light years away from each other.
everything there is rather shoddy and insubstantial.
no one has joy, but all can have possessions galore by wishing for them.
as one cynical resident put it, it's a flop, just like everything else he ever visited.
he was led to expect red fire and devils and all sorts of interesting people like henry 8th
sizzling on grids, but when you get there it is just like any other town.
ultimately, the damned will in some sense say that they were always in hell
and the saved that they were always in heaven.
it will be true, because both heaven and hell are retroactive.
heaven will saturate the past life with joy and hell will poison it.
although heaven is reality itself, hell is a state of mind-
the dungeon of self.
good beats upon the damned incessantly,
like sound waves beating on the ears of the deaf.
but they will not, then cannot, receive it.
even in his children's series, L showed some of god's creatures refusing heaven.
millions of creatures streamed up from the dying land of narnia to aslan where he stood at a huge door.
as they came right up to him
they either looked into his face with love and went through the door to his right into heaven
or else they looked at his face with fear and hatred and went to his left.
there they disappeared into his huge black shadow
and were never seen by the others again.
in that story, lucy, being full of love, wanted to no one to suffer.
she found a circle of miserable, surly dwarfs who
insisted that they were in pitch dark, stinky, smelly little hole of a stable.
lucy tried to show them the sky and trees and flowers but they insisted
that it was all darkness and filthy stable litter.
at last lucy implored aslan himself to help them.
aslan agreed to show lucy what he could and could not do.
when he growled softly, the dwarfs claimed that someone was
trying to frighten them with a machine.
when he provided them with a magnificent feast,
they took it to be dirty water and hay
and ended up in a brawl which destroyed the feast entirely.
then they agreed smugly that no one could take them in.
'they have chosen cunning instead of belief, said aslan.
'their prison is only in their own minds,
yet they are in that prison;
and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.
in 'the pilgim's regress john asked his Guide if there is really 'a black hole.
when the guide said yes, john asked then if God is 'so kind and good.
the Guide replied that nowadays God is often accused of cruelty.
to the contrary, God chould be accused of taking risks.
He has taken the risk of making people free.
(chesterton once said that hell is God's great compliment to humanity
-it is part of the reality of man's freedom.)
when man sins, God saves him from it if He can.
but god doesn't save people against their will.
God cannot force a man to do freely what a man has freely made impossible for himself.
god does not make the darkness;
the darkness is there already wherever sin has done its work.
only One is great enought to make Himself small enough to enter hell.
He did not do it just once, briefly, 2000 years ago,
because God is not really in our time.
Christ's descending into hell somehow includes all moments that ever were.
every spirit in prison hears Him preach.
what more can you ask God to do?
to cancel human sins and offer miraculous help?
He has done that on calvary.
to forgive them?
some will not accept forgiveness.
to finally leave alone those who refuse Him?
L says, alas, that is what He dose.
and once a person separates himself from God, L asks, what can he do but wither and die?
a bad person's perdition is not simply a sentence imposed upon him or her,
but the mere fact of being what he or she is.
'it's not a question of God 'sending us to hell.
in each of us there is something growing up which will of itself BE HELL
unless it is nipped in the bud.
the matter is serious:
LET US PUT OURSELVES IN HIS HANDS AT ONE-THIS VERY DAY, THIS HOUR.
part two;: father out
when L was a young atheist, he embraced materialism
and thought he had disposed of christianity forever.
but he learned, to his surprise, that there were some responsible adults who believed,
after all, in a world behind or around, the material world and yet were not christians.
here were unorthodox people who dismissed the whole materialist philosophy out of hand.
it was a disturbing but exciting idea.
perhaps there was 'something else' after all,
and perhaps it had nothing to do with christian theology.
young L developed a ravenous desire for the occult
-a mingled desire and revulsion.
it had a special appeal to him because it was known to very few and scorned by many.
the fact that magic was unorthodox to both christians and materialists
made a special appeal to the rebel in him
he went on a spiritual debauch, and if there had been an experienced dabbler in dirt
of the magical kind nearby to lead him on,
in his own view he might have become a satanist or a maniac.
fortunately, L had no personal teacher at hand.
fortunately, too, he experienced some strong fears from childhood
which made him at least wish at night that the occult were untrue.
and, further, he came to see that even if he had the extremely interesting experience of raising
a spirit, his deeper desires would say, 'what is this to me?
his confidence in materialism had been shaken, but he developed an
absolute antipathy to everything occult and magical
which carried him safely through future temptations of this king.
there were future temptation, to be sure.
but L was set in his refection of the occult
when he saw an acquaintance of his go mad and die in a wretched state after pursuing it.
in his preface to the screwtape letters L declares that devils hail both
materialists and magicians with equal delight.
the devils are had put to choose between those two errors into which men often fall;
disbelief in the existence of devils or an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.
screwtape himself expressed hopes that eventually these two opposite errors
could be combined producing Materialist Magicians.
these would be men who retain their disbelief in God and their allegiance to 'science',
while slipping into a worship of 'Forces' they don't understand,
which are in fact the very devils of christian theology.
this is exactly the extreme case that L illustrated in perelandra and 'that hideous strength
with the exceptional destruction of atheists weston, wither and frost.
in fact after weston became an Un-man, he told ransom how hopeless and horrible death is
from the viewpoint of the damned
-all darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation and stink.
all ghosts, he claimed, are witless, twittering, gibbering, decaying
and full of hatred for the living.
'then there's Spiritualism, he continued.
'i used to think it all nonsense.
but it isn't. it's all true...ectoplasm-slimy films coming out of a medium's belly
and making great, chaotic, tumbledown faces.
automatic writing producing reams of rubbish.
so much for the occult!
the End of Evil
it is obvious that few men fall prey to the devils in this atheist-satanist way.
but it is not obvious that a few men are damned.
after all, Christ said,
'narrow is the way...and few there be that find it.
L considered that the most distressing text in the bible,
although he felt that it certainly was not meant to be simply statistical.
speaking to a minister once about the insanely cruel teacher
they both had suffered under as children,
L said, 'well, we shan't see him again.
'you mean we HOPE we shan't,
the cleric had answered with a grim smile.
it was a joke, but not a joke.
L believed that in all discussions of hell we should have ourselves in mind,
not other people.
L did not pretend to have any information on the fate of the virtuous unbeliever.
he simply assumed that in some way the result of such a life
is less satisfactory than the result of a life based upon the truth...
some will not be saved.
L claimed that he would have paid any price to change that doctrine truthfully
to 'all will be saved.
but scripture (especially the words of our Lord),
tradition and reason all support the former.
it is said that hell is a detestable doctrine; of course it is.
L's favorite writer, G. Macdonald, seemed to be a Universalist,
talking in his books as if all people would finally be saved.
in 'the great divorce L boldly discusses this with macdonald in heaven.
Mac tells L that it is ill to talk of such questions on earth
because the ultimate answers cannot be understood by people who are still in time.
surely anyone may choose eternal death,
and those who choose it shall have it.
in contrast, Universalism, like predestination, would seem to destroy freedom.
Universalism and predestination may be true,
but freedom is a deeper truth.
it is useless now to try to see the shape of eternity.
one of the main objections to hell is the complaint that
life is so short compared to eternity;
death should not deprive people of a second chance.
L believed that if a million chances would do any good, God would give them.
but finality must come some time,
and surely in each case god knows when.
in 'the great divorce people are told on their visit to the lowlands of heaven that
if they don't return to the grey town it will have been purgatory for them;
if they return, it was and is hell.
L frankly admitted believing in purgatory.
to him it was a place for souls already saved but in need of purifying-purging.
he agreed with the protestant reformers in tossing out the distorted idea of purgatory
as a place of torture (worse yet, used as a fun-raising device for the church).
there is no place of torture and punishment for the saved,
only a place of cleansing.
...is it possible for any charitable person to enter into the full joy of heaven
knowing that others are lost in hell?
it has to be.
otherwise hell should be able to veto heaven.
if the makers of misery were able to infect the joy of heaven,
they would destroy in others the happiness they refused for themselves.
...there shall be no suffering of pity in heaven..
besides, hell is in no sense parallel to heaven.
they are not like two neighboring countries,
one starving and the other flourishing simultaneously.
hell has a finality about it that heaven does not have.
hell is only the outer darkness,
the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity.
those in hell enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demand,.
and they are self enslaved.
even if hell contained pleasure instead of pain,
that kind of pleasure would send any soul not already damned
flying to its prayers in nightmare terror.
as L explained in 'the pilgrim's regress,
if hell is a deep hole,
and limit the darkness.
the walls are like a tourniquet on the wound of the lost soul
to stop the flow of evil.
it is God's best service to those who will let Him do nothing better for them.
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