But it’s monstrously unjust the other way around, too! I could not possibly rejoice in heaven, knowing that anyone is suffering in hell. For this to work, I would have to be altered in my basic moral character – I would no longer be the person I am.
That seems too much like God playing a weird game of solitaire. “Aw, you feel sympathy for those in hell? [Flash of Divine Magic.] Okay, now you don’t feel any sympathy for them at all. Is that better? Just nod your head for ‘yes.’”
It’s said that Adam and Eve had to have free will; if they had been created without it, they would have not been able to experience that touch of the divine that comes with being made in God’s image. But, now, in heaven, that moral faculty is to be taken away from us?
If there is no free will in heaven – then why was it given to Adam and Eve in the first place? And if there is free will in heaven, then, by heaven, I will find myself in disagreement with the binding of anyone in hell.
There are people on Earth that are making what you think are bad choices and thereby making themselves miserable. So Heaven would be just like Earth in that respect. Isn’t this a necessary consequence of free will?
And it’s an important point that it’s people rejecting God, not the other way around. One sometimes encounters the question of why Aslan rejected Susan, but really, she rejected Him. She stops believing in Narnia in favor of ephemeral worldly things, but consider that when she was in Narnia, she had all of those things she desired, to an incomparably greater degree than she could ever hope for in our world. She was, literally, the most desired woman in the entire world, and she gives that up for being the most popular girl in her high school?
That only works given the conceit that people “choose” to be in hell.
Since that violates standard Christianity – and also completely violates human nature! – it seems an ass-backward kind of reasoning.
Yeah, one jackass with a book of matches can “veto” the fire department of any given city. Does that mean we don’t fight fires?
It’s too facile. It excuses misery. And it absolutely fails in a situation, such as held by most Christian theologians, where God hurls sinners into Hell and does not permit them out.
In a situation where there is a path out of Hell, and anyone can take it if they are willing, then – I still hold that I could not properly enjoy heaven until the very last soul had made it along that path and was out.
As long as there is misery, anywhere in the cosmos, God is not “perfect.”
ETA; I read The Great Divorce, but seem to have misread it, as what I got from it was that no one ever actually followed that path out of Hell. It seems, though, that in the book, at least one person does, so my interpretation was wrong. But since, in the book, there are millions who don’t, my objection has to stand.
Let me begin by saying that it reflects well on your character that your first reaction to snark is to inquire after the well-being of the snarker.
I’m fine, and I thank you for your concern. I did sense the possibility that I was coming off as condescending (or even sneering) toward the child you were describing, but I allowed expediency to dictate my choices anyway (I am currently limited to posting from my phone, which is something of a PITA, so I took a short cut to telegraph my stance on the question of chronological v. publication order). Please accept my apologies.
> And it absolutely fails in a situation, such as held by most Christian theologians,
> where God hurls sinners into Hell and does not permit them out.
This illustrates one of the problems with criticizing Lewis that I’ve seen a lot. There’s a tendency to assume that if something is believed by a lot of Christians, then Lewis must believe it. In fact, there’s often the implicit belief of a lot of Lewis’s critics that some particular doctrine must be held by Lewis, since they happen to know some Christians who believe that doctrine and they recall once hearing one of them praise Lewis, so obviously they can attribute any belief held by that fan of Lewis’s to Lewis himself. If you’re going to criticize Lewis, look at what he believed, not what other people believe. For what it’s worth, a lot of Lewis’s fans make the same mistake. They attribute their own beliefs to Lewis. Lewis say nothing in The Great Divorce about God hurling sinners into hell.
There’s a further common mistake in interpreting Lewis. Lewis considered The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters to be fiction. He didn’t consider them to be his definite statement on what hell or devils are like. He says specifically that he doesn’t know what hell is like. He says specifically that he doesn’t consider belief in devils or even in the Devil to be necessary parts of Christian belief. Much of both these books is about how people here on Earth mistreat each other. A lot of people insist on making themselves unhappy and demanding that others remain equally unhappy. A lot of hierarchies have people in them who insist on stepping on anyone below them and brown-nosing anyone above them. Those two books are no more his firm beliefs about what hell or devils are like than Out of the Silent Planet or Perelandra are his firm beliefs about what Venus or Mars are like.
Indeed, even in-story in The Great Divorce the George MacDonald character makes it quite clear that the narrator is not to write down his story under any pretence that he is telling what any part of the after-life is actually like. Whether Hell is really like the grey town - and whether it is possible for some of its inhabitants to go on a day-trip to the vestibule of Heaven, in which case the town will have been Purgatory for them, not Hell at all - is not important; still less is the narrator to concern himself whether it is possible for all, some or none to accept God after death. The story is to draw attention to the choices people make in their lives that draw them closer to God or drive them further away.
Thanks – so the “not another fucking Elf” thing was not from Lewis, but from the Dyson guy. I’d wanted the words to be Lewis’s, because of liking the notion of L and T as a grouchy “odd couple”, despising each other’s works, but finding value criticism-wise, in that circumstance. Right – the dislike ran only one way, then, and that maybe for only some of the stuff which was involved. Ignorance fought !
Re the bolded – can only say: somewhere in the little of his non-fiction that I have read (decades ago). I’ll allow that I might – rather improbably – have come across that opinion in the writings of some other Christian; and, with the passage of time blurring things, and my being disposed to considering Lewis a dickhead; to have wrongly conflated that idea of somebody else’s, with what I thought to have read by Lewis.
This thread has brought me to the conclusion that I may have done a lot of misunderstanding of, and wronging of, Lewis. Realistically, I’m not likely – fairly late in my life – to go back to reading his works (whose general tone I always found off-pissing) to see whether I was thus wrong; but am looking at, for the rest of my life, reckoning that “the jury is out” on CSL’s views.
I totally understand the posting - I’ve been using a tablety thing and it is not agreeing with me either. Apology accepted, and if it means anything to you, if I have kids, they’re reading the series in publication order. It seems to kill a lot of the energy and flow to do it chronologically, although that may also have been due to reading them for school.
Re: Where did he say explicitly that no non-Christian could be in heaven?
Lewis actually explicitly states the opposite, in The Great Divorce (and in the Last Battle too, I guess). A big theme of the Great Divorce is that it’s possible to repent and turn to Christ even after death, and Lewis mentions the Emperor Trajan (following Dante) as one who did.
Incidentally, neither Lewis nor George McDonald were the first or the only people to believe that the mercy of God extends beyond the grave, and that it will be possible even for those in hell to repent and be saved if they sincerely choose it. Lewis got his idea of the dead taking ‘vacations’ from hell, from a lot of medieval vision-literature in which this was a common theme. (Some medieval writer claimed to have been sailing out near Iceland and to have encountered Judas, of all people, sitting on a rock in the ocean, for his yearly vacation from hell). Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov also plays with the idea, and was apparently drawing on the Eastern Orthodox mystical tradition, where the idea of salvation after death has generally been more common than in the west.
That’s good to hear - with due allowance for the fact that I have known and loved his works for forty-odd years and am overly eager to leap to his defence. He can be heavy going at times and I strongly doubt that, clever man though he was, he got everything right; but he’s one of those authors I like to turn to when, as an old friend put it, I want to remind myself of what I really believe in.
To add to your comments, Hector_St_Clare, in their Inferno, Jerry Pournell and Larry Niven have Carpentier conclude that the purpose of Hell is to shock unregenerate sinners into accepting God, that it’s the only way they will accept His mercy.
> Re: Where did he say explicitly that no non-Christian could be in heaven?
>
> Lewis actually explicitly states the opposite, in The Great Divorce (and in the Last
> Battle too, I guess).
Let me note that, in the sense that I defined above, Lewis didn’t explicitly state the opposite. I specifically asked for a citation from his nonfiction, and The Great Divorce and The Last Battle aren’t nonfiction. But this is precisely the point that we’ve been talking about in the most recent posts of this thread. Lewis made no claim to know what would happen to non-Christians after death. For a couple of pieces of his fiction, he postulated that non-Christians could be saved after death. He explicitly said that he did not know that this was true.
Agreed. He said pretty much the opposite. I didn’t say that he said this: I said that conventional Christianity says this, and that Lewis’s variations on the theme don’t work in their context. For his ideas to work, he would be, in essence, making up his own new religion, or at least inventing differences larger than those between many modern denominations.
I think everyone here knows that. He didn’t believe in Aslan, either. He was engaging in the literary game of metaphors and allusions.
My objection is with the implications of his metaphors. He invents a new kind of hell, and then argues that heaven must have certain qualities on the basis of his own invention. There’s nothing wrong with this as a literary game. It’s a lot older than Dante…or even Homer. The problem is that he lets this hypothetical and imaginary world-view leak over into his real-life sermonizing. He would say, in other contexts, that God doesn’t throw people into Hell, but that they throw themselves in. This has taken on some currency in modern American theological discussion. That is flatly contradicts the Bible is only a minor grievance for me: my major objection is that he’s making shit up, and then arguing on that basis.
I’m also never going to forgive him for the artificial forced trilemma of “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.”
This is one of the worst offenses against logic, history, theology, tolerance, moderation, and reason in the history of religion. “No, you cannot ‘admire’ my idol, you must worship him.” Well, sorry, Clive, you’re jack full of poop on this one. I can (and do) admire Jesus as a good (not great) moral teacher, but absolutely reject claims that he was God. Lewis put his foot way down his mouth with this one.
As I said in post #155, I think people misunderstand the trilemma (as I will have to refer to it, although maybe it’s not a trilemma at all). Consider who Lewis was aiming Mere Christianity (and the radio lectures that inspired it) at. There were many people in the U.K. at the time who had been baptized in a Christian church and perhaps attended church as children. Some of them perhaps still occasionally attended church. These people he was aiming the book and the radio lectures at didn’t believe any of the supernatural claims of Christianity. They still thought that the morality taught by Jesus was correct though. Lewis said to look at the claims of Jesus in the Bible that seemed to imply his divinity. How could the greatest moral leader make such claims?
I’m not sure if Lewis really meant that three remaining options - God, madman, devil - to be the only possible ones. Suppose a couple of police detectives come to see a crime scene. The more experienced one immediately points out that possibility A couldn’t be true in that scene. The less experienced one immediately jumps to the conclusion that possibility B must be the case then. The more experienced one says that possibilities C or D could also be true too. That doesn’t mean that the more experienced one is claiming that B, C, and D are the only possibilities, only that there are more than just the one possibility B.
The main point that Lewis was trying to make was that the sort of kind of vaguely Christian view of Jesus (held by many Britons of his time), that he was the greatest moral leader but not supernatural, didn’t make much sense. Jesus in the Bible seems to be claiming divinity. The problem, and Lewis should have thought of this, is that there are other possibilities. The Bible could be a flawed record of what happened, and Jesus might not have claimed divinity. It could be that Jesus was sufficiently inspired by God to make moral pronouncements but not enough to know that he wasn’t divine. In any case, a lot of Lewis’s arguments are against the muddled thought of many people of that time and place (the U.K. in the early 1940’s) who wanted to preserve moral (and aesthetic) judgments while claiming that they came from natural causes and not supernatural ones. That’s what The Abolition of Man is about.
I think the trilemma is way overestimated as a part of Lewis’s thought. He didn’t mean it to be a knock-down argument, I think. Too many of Lewis’s fans take Mere Christianity as if it were the Summa Theologica. I don’t find the trilemma to be a particularly useful argument, and I wonder if Lewis really thought it to be that major a part of his thought. Incidentally, Lewis didn’t invent the trilemma. On the other hand, when you say, “This is one of the worst offenses against logic, history, theology, tolerance, moderation, and reason in the history of religion,” I think you’re wildly exaggerating. There are vast numbers of minor league Messiahs and gurus who’ve said stupider things than that:
The bolded part of your quote is very Bodhisattva-like. It’s lovely that you want to save all people. It’s also Christ-like.
However, what “most” (and are you sure of that “most”? Can you find cites breaking down the numbers of what most Christian theologians believe?) Christian theologians believe is not particularly relevant to what Lewis thought or believed. What a historian drafted to teach high school physics* teaches, thinks, and believes about the nature of the material world is very different from the theoretical physicist teaching particle and quantum physics in a doctoral program. The high school teacher fumbling with Newtonian concepts does not invalidate the ideas of particle physics. Nor does the fumbling with concepts of Christianity by a limited preacher invalidate more sophisticated concepts.
In my rural high school, we didn’t have a genuine science persont o teach physics, and the history teacher was drafted. He studied the textbook the night before teaching it. It was not as effective a means of teaching as Heinlein described in Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
I confess to some minor identification with the role of savior. (When I was in high school and we took “The Lifeboat Game” test, I offered to be the one to jump overboard, if that would save other people’s lives.)
I also note, looking back, I’ve been too argumentative in this thread. This isn’t Great Debates, just Cafe Society. So I’m gonna ease back, and I apologize to all for being too aggressive.
FWIW, I liked the Narnia books. Yeah, the allegory was obvious. “Aslan is Christ.” Okay, I got that, and then continued to read, because Puddleglum and Reepicheep were so much fun. The books just kept my interest. The actual writing – narrative, dialogue, pacing, action, imagination – was all very good.
I still get a shudder at the thought of landing on the island where all your dreams come true. If you could see some of the things I’ve dreamed…
