Published by If I worked for the Barna Group, I would make a survey. I would find about one hundred people and ask them, “What will heaven be like? Be specific.” And, what would most likely follow would about as many different responses as people asked. Why is this? Why is the description of heaven so variegated? C.S. Lewis, in several of his fictional writings, started to look at the notion of heaven. He treats heaven with different emphases and different “lenses” in different places, but I believe when one starts to piece together some of the fragments, Lewis had an interesting concept of heaven.
The Great Divorce is, in many respects, Lewis’ response to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; instead of a marriage, Lewis describes the “divorce,” because heaven and hell are radically different places. He describes heaven quite vividly in The Great Divorce, but it is not his only discussion on the topic.
In The Chronicles of Narnia, especially in The Silver Chair and The Last Battle, Lewis again describes heaven…Aslan’s world. Aslan, of course, is the great lion and represents the God/savior figure in The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis’ description of Aslan’s country bears some similarity to the heaven he describes in The Great Divorce, but there are some differences as well.
What will arise in the following, then, will be a look at Lewis’ description of heaven in these three places. It will be particularly important to draw out some of the differences between the depictions. Then, I will attempt to draw some implications about the nature of heaven, and relate them back to Lewis’ work. The Great Divorce will be a great place to start.
The Great Divorce opens with a group of people waiting in line, and is objectified through the eyes of a man waiting in this line. As the story unfolds, the reader finds out that bus is departing from what is supposed to, in some way, be representative of an earthly existence; some call it the “grey town” and it is given a new name later in the story.
Upon arriving at the bus’ destination, the man quickly learns that he is in a place quite unlike any place he has previously been. He describes it.
The first bit of description follows an earlier, non-fiction discussion that Lewis has about heaven, taken from The Weight of Glory. In this work, he describes “Glory,” or what heaven will be like, as “fame” and “luminosity.” And it is this latter description that initiates his discussion in The Great Divorce.
As they approach the new land, they enter very intense, “cruel light.” He describes the faces around him and suggests that they “might fall to pieces at any moment if the light grew much stronger.” But the light increased. And, when the bus landed and the passengers vacated, the man himself exited the bus, and for the first time, he felt what is was like to stand on the ground of heaven.
He says, “The light and coolness that drenched me were like those of a summer morning, early morning a minute or two before sunrise, only that there was a certain difference. I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before…” He continues his description of heaven. He notices that the passengers of the bus were, different from earlier, transparent and somewhat insubstantial in the light. Further describing the situation, he decides that the people weren’t different at all, they were the way they had always been, but the substance of the land they were visiting was somehow different. He says, “I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed.”
He also describes the landscape. The man could not even pick a flower, bend its stalk, or lift a small leaf. He sees mountains and meadows. He says, “But very far away I could see what might be either a great bank of cloud or a range of mountains. Sometimes I could make out in it steep forests, far-withdrawing valleys, and even mountain cities perched on inaccessible summits…The height was so enormous that my waking sight could not have taken in such an object at all.”
In these brief descriptions Lewis gives, a couple of significant truths can be noted. On the one hand it seems as though Lewis is making heaven a truly better version of our earthly, this-worldly experience. All the colors are so much brighter, the light so much lighter, and immensity so much more immense. We will see Lewis echo this description in other places, as well. There is another aspect at which I think Lewis may be hinting here.
One of the first reforms in historical philosophic discussion was introduced by a philosopher named Xenophones. Xenophones critiqued his compatriots and those within his society who viewed God in anthropomorphic terms. In other words, they described or understood God in terms of human nature; God just had a much greater allotment of “human” powers than did humans…he was different in degree. But, this notion was intolerable to Xenophones, who say God as different in kind. God was (to borrow other philosophical language) “wholly-other.” In this way, God did not merely exceed humans by some huge gradient of “quantity.” Rather, God was qualitatively different from humankind. It seems that Lewis suggests this about heaven as well.
He describes his characters being in heaven as, “being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space…” In other words, the quality of the substance of heaven is of a different sort. It is different in kind. Therefore, it absolutely, unequivocally exceeds or transcends every category of human rationality, perception, or experience. It is wholly incomparable to the measly pittance we humans call life. We will revisit this, but for now, let’s look a bit further.
In The SilverChair, Lewis again metaphorically speaks of heaven. He achieves this through a brief description of Aslan’s country. The story opens with Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole running from their evil, bullying classmates. They call on Aslan to free them from their world and allow them into Narnia; he appeases their requests, at least partially. He frees them from the earthly world of men, but they find themselves, for a moment, in his country.
In Aslan’s country, they find themselves in the cover of a rich forest, riddled with huge cedar-like trees, and great birds of yellow, blue and rainbow plumage flying about. Shortly, however, they find themselves on the edge of a cliff.
Lewis’ first description of the vast difference of Aslan’s land is his depiction of the size of the cliff. It is ten times, twenty times as far down as any distance in our world. While Jill tried to show off on the cliff’s edge, Eustace’s conscience was called on to save her, and in the process, He was thrown from the cliff, but was rescued by a lion.
Jill was very thirsty, and off in the distance she heard running water; with no sight of the lion, she resolved to find the source of water. She found the water, “bright as glass,” and yet she could not drink, for the lion lay just on her side of the bank. She was frozen and couldn’t make up her mind, but after a short and not very reassuring exchange with the lion, she decided to drink. “It was the coldest, most refreshing water she had ever tasted. You didn’t need to drink too much of it, for it quenched your thirst at once.”
This, indeed, is a very brief look into Aslan’s country, and more will follow in the near future, but nonetheless it is a telling glimpse. In this particular instance, Lewis seems to be suggesting a model of heaven that is different in degree. Or, in other words, it seems that here Lewis is describing heaven as the fulfillment of earth…earth in perfection.
As his description claims, heaven (or Aslan’s country) is not of another sort, altogether, but rather is vastly grander than earth; distances are bigger and tastes are sweeter. Many in history have seen heaven in this way. Many continue to see heaven in this way. Some wish for a far-off land in which all of the desires they have had in this world will be fulfilled; this is viewing heaven as different in degree.
Perhaps the most interesting glimpse Lewis creates (within his fiction) is to be found in The Last Battle. The Last Battle, which is the final installment of the Chronicles of Narnia, tells the story of the last days of Narnia, and movement into a new, eternal land-Aslan’s country-heaven.
In The Last Battle, a battle is being waged for the fate of Narnia and its inhabitants. It is a battle fought by mortals: humans, Dwarves, Calormen, etc. In the end, however, it becomes a battle for eternity.
The Pevensies (Peter, Lucy and Edmund…without Susan), Eustace, Jill, Tirian (King of Narnia), and his companion Jewel (a unicorn) are trying to help the dwarves out a stable. All of the sudden, with a bright flash of light, Aslan appear before them to begin the “curtain-call” for Narnia. Aslan went to the door, lifted his head and roared, ““Now it is time! then louder, “Time!”; then so loud that it could have shaken the stars, “TIME.” The door flew open.”
Time had collapsed, Narnia was at its end, and a new life lay through the door that Aslan’s cry had opened. One of the first changes about the world was father time, who had at one time been a giant sleeping in the land of Narnia. Aslan says, “Yes, while he lay dreaming his name was time. Now that he is awake he will have a new one.”
When they had finally closed the door on Narnia, it had turned to ice and blackness, but when they turned, they were in pure daylight, warmth. Alan’s eyes were lit with laughter, and he leaped and shouted, “Come further in! Come further up!”
The children, Tirian, Jewel, a Calormene (known as Emeth), and many others made their ways deeper into the new land. And with each new step and new sight, the place became more beautiful, more surpassing of their former home. When they had gone far enough in, they found that they were in Narnia…the real Narnia, and everything was somehow different, better. Then, Lord Digory says, “The Eagle is right. Listen, Peter. When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia…It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia.”
They could run without growing hot, tired, or out of breath. They finally came quite a way through the land, when they met Aslan again. The first creature he talked to was Puzzle, the humble donkey. He whispered to the donkey and then spoke to the rest, “You do not yet look so happy as I meant you to be.” Lucy told him that it was because they were scared of being sent away. But Aslan responded, “No fear of that, have you not guessed…” He then informed them that there had been a railway accident and that they and their parents were “dead.” Then Aslan exclaimed, “The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.” And, Lewis say, after that the things that began to happen were “too great and beautiful that I cannot write them.”
The notion of heaven in Lewis’ fiction seems to come to its most meaningful conclusion in The Last Battle. He describes heaven as both different in degree-everything was “somehow different, somehow better”-and different in kind-“…so beautiful I cannot write them.” Heaven is utterly beyond us, and in following defies our attempts at binding it through language.
Lewis also has a particularly Platonic view of heaven (or the world of the Forms , for Plato). This world in which all humans live is but”…a dim reflection, as in a mirror.” Our world is a mere world of shadows. What is real is totally different, totally full, of another sort, and regardless of one’s particular philosophy it is, or ought to be the stuff of hope.
The answer to the question I posed earlier-“why is the description of heaven so variegated?”-I think is a simple one. It is infinitely bigger than us, and wholly other, but even these descriptions fail to communicate, and all we have is imagination on imagination. We are living in the Shadowlands; let’s live toward the day we can answer the question, or rather the day it will be answered for us…in the mean time, let’s hope.
“It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and the cried: I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason we love the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in.”
