HEAVEN
by C.S. Lewis
It is required
Plunged in thy depth of mercy let me die
COWPER out of Madame Guion
You may think that there is another reason for our silence about
heaven - namely, that we do not really desire it. But that may be an
illusion. What I am now going to say is merely an opinion of my own
without the slightest authority, which I submit to the judgement of
better Christians and better scholars than myself. There have been
times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find
myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever
desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you
really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very
well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though
you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it
at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that.
Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to
embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then
turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you
saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you
realise that this landscape means something totally different to him,
that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the
ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your
hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which
the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be identified
with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut
wood in the workshop or the clapclap of water against the boat's
side?
Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at
last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint
and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were
born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in
all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and
day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for,
watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things
that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it
- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that
died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really
become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away
but swelled into the sound itself you would know it. Beyond all
possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was
made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret
signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable
want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our
friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our
deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work.
While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
This signature on each soul may be a product of heredity and
environment, but that only means that heredity and environment
are among the instruments whereby God creates a soul. I am
considering not how, but why, He makes each soul unique. If He
had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should
have created more souls than one. Be sure that the ins and outs of
your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no
longer be a mystery to you. The mould 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. For it is
not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you, you, the
individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and
fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's.
All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His
good way, to utter satisfaction. The Brocken spectre "looked to every
man like his first love", because she was a cheat. But God will look
to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. 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.
It is from this point of view that we can understand Hell in its
aspect of privation. All your life an unattainable ecstasy has
hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is
coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have
attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost
it forever.
This may seem a perilously private and subjective notion of the
pearl of great price, but it is not. The thing I am speaking of is not
an experience. You have experienced only the want of it. The thing
itself has never actually been embodied in any thought, or image, or
emotion. Always it has summoned you out of yourself. And if you
will not go out of yourself to follow it, if you sit down to brood on the
desire and attempt to cherish it, the desire itself will evade you.
"The door into life generally opens behind us" and "the only wisdom"
for one "haunted with the scent of unseen roses, is work." This
secret fire goes out when you use the bellows: bank it down with
what seems unlikely fuel of dogma and ethics, turn your back on it
and attend to your duties, and then it will blaze. The world is like a
picture with a golden background, and we the figures in that
picture: Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large
dimensions of death you cannot see the gold. But we have
reminders of it. To change our metaphor, the black-out is not quite
complete. There are chinks. At times the daily scene looks big with
its secret.
Such is my opinion; and it may be erroneous. Perhaps this secret
desire also is part of the Old Man and must be crucified before the
end. But this opinion has a curious trick of evading denial. The
desire - much more the satisfaction - has always refused to be fully
present in any experience. Whatever you try to identify with it,
turns out to be not it but something else: so that hardly any degree
of crucifixion or transformation could go beyond what the desire
itself leads us to anticipate. Again, if this opinion is not true,
something better is. But "something better" - not this or that
experience, but beyond it - is almost the definition of the thing I am
trying to describe.
The thing you long for summons you away from the self. Even
the desire for the thing lives only if you abandon it. This is the
ultimate law - the seed dies to live, the bread must be cast upon the
waters, he that loses his soul will save it. But the life of the seed,
the finding of the bread, the recovery of the soul, are as real as the
preliminary sacrifice. Hence it is truly said of heaven "in heaven
there is no ownership. If any there took upon him to call anything
his own, he would straightway be thrust out into hell and become
an evil spirit" But it is also said "To him that overcometh I will give
a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man
knoweth saving he that receiveth it" What can be more a man's own
than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret
between God and him? And what shall we take this secrecy to
mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and
praise some one aspect of the divine beauty better than any other
creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God,
loving all infinitely, should love each differently? And this difference,
so far from impairing, floods with meaning the love of all blessed
creatures for one another, the communion of the saints. 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. Aristotle has told us that a city
is a unity of unlikes, and St. Paul that a body is a unity of different
members. Heaven is a city, and 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 (and that by means
whereof earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is
also among the ends for which the individual was created.
For union exists only between distincts; and, perhaps, from this
point of view, we catch a momentary glimpse of the meaning of all
things. Pantheism is a creed not so much false as hopelessly behind
the times. Once, before creation, it would have been true to say that
everything was God. But God created: He caused things to be other
than Himself that, being distinct, they might learn to love Him, and
achieve union instead of mere sameness. Thus He also cast His
bread upon the waters. Even within the creation we might say that
inanimate matter, which has no will, is one with God in a sense in
which men are not. But it is not God's purpose that we should go
back into that old identity (as, perhaps, some Pagan mystics would
have us do) but that we should go on to the maximum distinctness
there to be reunited with Him in a higher fashion. Even within the
Holy One Himself, it is not sufficient that the Word should be God,
it must also be with God. The Father eternally begets the Son and
the Holy Ghost proceeds: deity introduces distinction within itself
so that the union of reciprocal loves may transcend mere
arithmetical unity or self identity.
But the eternal distinctness of each soul - the secret which
makes of the union between each soul and God a species in itself
will never abrogate the law that forbids ownership in heaven. As to
its fellow-creatures, each soul, we suppose, will be eternally
engaged in giving away to all the rest that which it receives. And as
to God, we must remember that the soul is but a hollow which God
fills. Its union with God is, almost by definition, a continual self
abandonment - an opening, an unveiling, a surrender, of itself. A
blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more patient of the bright
metal poured into it, a body ever more completely uncovered to the
meridian blaze of the spiritual sun. We need not suppose that the
necessity for something analogous to self conquest will ever be
ended, or that eternal life will not also be eternal dying. It is in this
sense, 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).
For in self giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all
creation but of all being. For the Eternal Word also gives Himself in
sacrifice; and that not only on Calvary. For when He was crucified
He "did that in the wild weather of His outlying provinces which He
had done at home in glory and gladness" From before the
foundation of the world He surrenders begotten Deity back to
begetting Deity in obedience. And as the Son glorifies the Father, so
also the Father glorifies the Son. And, with submission, as becomes
a layman, I think it was truly said "God loveth not Himself as
Himself but as Goodness; and if there were aught better than God,
He would love that and not Himself.” From the highest to the
lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes
the more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so
forever. This is not a heavenly law which we can escape by
remaining earthly, nor an earthly law which we can escape by being
saved: What is outside the system of self-giving is not earth, nor
nature, nor "ordinary life", but simply and solely Hell. Yet even Hell
derives from this law such reality as it has. That fierce
imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self giving which
is absolute reality; the negative shape which the outer darkness
takes by surrounding and defining the shape of the real; or which
the real imposes on the darkness by having a shape and positive
nature of its own.
The golden apple of Selfhood, thrown among the false gods,
became an apple of discord because they scrambled for it. They did
not know the first rule of the holy game, which is that every player
must by all means touch the ball and then immediately pass it on.
To be found with it in your hands is a fault: to cling to it, death. But
when it flies to and fro among the players too swift for eye to follow,
and the great master Himself leads the revelry, giving Himself
eternally to His creatures in the generation, and back to Himself in
the sacrifice, of the Word, then indeed the eternal dance "makes
heaven drowsy with the harmony". All pains and pleasures we have
known on earth are early initiations in the movements of that
dance: but the dance itself is strictly incomparable with the
sufferings of this present time. As we draw nearer to its uncreated
rhythm, pain and pleasure sink almost out of sight. There is joy in
the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy. It does not even
exist for the sake of good, or of love. It is Love Himself, and Good
Himself, and therefore happy. It does not exist for us, but we for it.
The size and emptiness of the universe which frightened us at the
outset of this book, should awe us still, for though they may be no
more than a subjective bye-product of our three dimensional
imagining, yet they symbolise great truth. As our Earth is to all the
stars, so doubtless are we men and our concerns to all creation ; as
all the stars are to space itself, so are all creatures, all thrones and
powers and mightiest of the created gods; to the abyss of the self
existing Being, who is to us Father and Redeemer and indwelling
Comforter, but of whom no man nor angel can say nor conceive
what He is in and for Himself, or what is the work that he "maketh
from the beginning to the end". For they are all derived and
unsubstantial things. Their vision fails them and they cover their
eyes from the intolerable light of utter actuality, which was and is
and shall be, which never could have been otherwise, which has no
opposite.
You do awake your faith. Then all stand still;
On; those that think it is unlawful business
I am about, let them depart. SHAKESPEARE, Winter’s Tale.
The death that every soul that lives desires.
"I reckon", said St. Paul "that the sufferings of this present time
are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed
in us." If this is so, a book on suffering which says nothing of
heaven, is leaving out almost the whole of one side of the account.
Scripture and tradition habitually put the joys of heaven into the
scale against the sufferings of earth, and no solution of the problem
of pain which does not do so can be called a Christian one. We are
very shy nowadays of even mentioning heaven: We are afraid of the
jeer about "pie in the sky", and of being told that we are trying to
"escape" from the duty of making a happy world here and now into
dreams of a happy world elsewhere. But either there is "pie in the
sky" or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this
doctrine is woven into its whole fabric. If there is, then this truth,
like any other, must be faced, whether it is useful at political
meetings or no. Again, we are afraid that heaven is a bribe, and that
if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not
so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is
safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the
pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives.
A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to
marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to
read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants
to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition; seeks to enjoy its
object.
END