Book Review

Heaven and middle earth

Inklings of Heaven: C.S. Lewis and Eschatology

I am always mildly apprehensive of books purporting to explain the metaphysical theories behind literary texts. There is a danger in trying to make explicit what underpins, or informs, a particular imaginative work: a temptation peculiar to the literary critic, of detecting clues to a metaphysical back story that never was. Here, however, neither of our detectives has (I think) discovered only his or her own invention.

With C.S. Lewis, we have the advantage that he left a significant quantity of theological work as well as his narrative fictions. There is a persistent tendency among academic theologians to dismiss this as simple, even simplistic, popularising; Sean Connolly, however, does him the courtesy of taking him seriously. For Lewis, Connolly argues, as for most traditional formulations of Christian belief, heaven is not an extra, a "moral bribe" to underwrite good behaviour; rather, it is the core of Christian belief, the end and goal of all Christian life: "how can the ‘rest of Christianity' - what is this ‘rest'? - be disentangled from it?" Lewis', he claims, is "essentially an eschatological worldview".

Lewis is impatient of talk of heaven as some sort of cure-all for human grief: "don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand ... All that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore', pictured in entirely earthly terms, is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs." Most attempts at a more detailed exposition of likely heavenly reality fall victim to a "thinness, an unbelievable literalism". Christian hope, rather, is precisely not for what we can imagine: what "the heart of man has not conceived".

Moreover, Lewis insists, concern with the next life is not a substitute, or competitor, for action in this: "If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffectual in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in'; aim at earth and you will get neither."

What heaven is not, then, is (perhaps) clear enough; but what about what it is? What should we make of the scriptural images of banquets, liturgies of praise, the heights of God's holy mountain? Here Lewis drew on one of the assertions by his friend and intellectual sparring-partner Owen Barfield, that all language is fundamentally metaphorical. "We must not smuggle in the idea", wrote Lewis, "that we can throw the analogy away and, as it were, get behind it to a purely literal truth ... freedom from a given metaphor ... is often only a freedom to choose between that metaphor and others." Scriptural images are hints of a continuity between what we know, are, and (most importantly) long for now, and what we are promised. One of Lewis' most famous insights was that we fail to recognise the desire for heaven in our lives for what it really is - his theory of "joy", or unsatisfiable desire, triggered by some aesthetic or emotional encounter, but pointing beyond itself.

This, in fact, is our innate desire for heaven. We can settle for a thin diet of theologically phrased abstractions, but this is ultimately destructive: "We feel, if we do not say, [wrote Lewis] that the vision of God will come not to fulfil but to destroy our nature; this bleak fantasy often underlies our very use of words such as ‘holy' or ‘pure' or ‘spiritual'." Lewis is obstinate about the greater density and reality of heavenly things, compared with their earthly shadows, and their precise ability to satisfy longings in us we barely recognise. Heavenly realities will be like themselves, but more so: the grass on the margins of heaven in The Great Divorce is so solid, so sharp, it pains the feet of the insubstantial visitors from this side.

In her turn, Alison Milbank takes a broader look at what two flagship Catholic writers, Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton, assume behind their stories. At its most basic level, as she notes, all storytelling implies an assumption of meaning to existence; all storytellers, then, are to some extent theologians, or at least philosophers, despite themselves. So far, so obvious. She focuses on particular techniques common to the two: rendering all experience, even the apparently commonplace, fantastic; and using paradox and the grotesque. She analyses these in the highfalutin language of postmodernist discourse, but the points are nonetheless well made. Tolkien's literary work is much the more substantial, although his theoretical pieces are not negligible; Chesterton's observations are perhaps more telling than his practice, although many find The Man Who Was Thursday, and his slighter fictions, both enthralling and illuminating. Others, however, will sympathise with the reviewer who said paradox should be "used like onions to season the salad. Mr Chesterton's salad is all onions."

In considering Tolkien, we are on surer literary ground. He does not need explicit allegory or subtext, Milbank argues, to make his imaginative writing Christian: it exhibits the Thomist aesthetic qualities of integrity, proportion and clarity, and thus "provides a philosophical clue to the primary world we know" - a real creation of art that yet witnesses to a reality beyond itself. The artist, Tolkien claimed, may "dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation". Milbank concludes: "If Tolkien and Chesterton are theologians ... it is because they offer a theology of art as practice ... making - poiesis - opens the way to God."

Along the way, there are some excellent side-lights. She has a fascinating discussion of the moral obligations implicit in Tolkien's world in the light of Teutonic "gift-theory", familiar from Beowulf. Sauron's bestowal of rings on his adherents links them to his own Ring; their happiness now depends, reciprocally, on his good pleasure. On a theological level, this is a perversion of God's role as "giver of all good things". She also gives an excellent analysis of the eschatological models implied in The Lord of the Rings, which yet fall designedly short of their Christian antitypes. It is no coincidence that the Ring is destroyed on 25 March, the Annunciation: a world is rescued from evil, but (there) in an imperfect and partial way. Tolkien's Middle Earth is a place where the traditional theology of the "virtuous pagan" is played out, showing the human predisposition to, and preparation for, Christianity, but also the inadequacy and limitations of these foreshadowings. Tolkien illustrates "the inability of the world to save itself".

Milbank's book is a stimulating read; it suffers from a barnacle accretion of academic jargon, from slipshod proofreading and from an outrageous price-tag, but if you see it in a library, read it.

Back to homepage

       

The clear message that emerged from the symposium on child sexual abuse held in Rome from ...

According to the chairman of governors at the Cardinal Vaughan School, west London, one ...

There was an old Sixties TV series, Branded, about a disgraced soldier that always began ...