Hell is portrayed as a bleak, dreary place. This suggests that the reality conceptualized by materialists, namely a reality with no transcendent significance in heaven, is the place to which all human beings who are believers are damned. As in the Screwtape Letters, a failure of religious intensity is shown as being linked to a kind of failure of imagination. When confronted by heaven, the souls of human beings are awestruck, not at the surreal nature of heaven, but how real it seems, compared to their own, past existences. It is the spirits who are ghostly, not the actual substance of heaven.
In hell, those who are damned are not necessarily those who committed the worst crimes -- in heaven, there are even murderers. Instead, the damned are those who adopt the type of materialistic mindset that Wormwood attempted to coax 'the patient' into adopting -- a mindset that salvation does not come because of God's infinite grace, but as a kind of bargaining. One damned man asks for justice, claiming that because murderers are saved, he should be saved as well. Another figure, a man called the Episcopal ghost, who is a skeptic and denies heaven and hell, despite their evident materiality in the book, states that Jesus should never have died but instead tried to have saved himself and matured his philosophy -- once again reflecting a narrow conception of life as something that can merely be redeemed by the mind, not belief. He says that his denial of the Resurrection is an "honest belief" borne of his God-given critical faculties (Lewis 36)....
'It is this type of mindset that the 'patient' resists when he becomes a Christian.
Both The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce take a humorous view of a lack of faith. However, in The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis tackles the problem of unbelief head-on. The most frequent objection human beings raise regarding the existence of God is this: how can a good God allow evil to exist in the world? Lewis traces this to humanity's free will -- through the fall from Eden, human beings were sundered from their perfect connection to God. Once again, evil is conceptualized not so much as active instigation, but as the absence of good. Only through striving for spiritual perfection, however unattainable that may seem, can human beings be one with the divine again.
In The Problem of Pain, Lewis states directly what his allegories in his other works suggest -- if there is evil, it is not a positive force in the world. Rather evil is a hollow, an absence in which we turn from our God-given potential to find something higher in the world than the here and now. The arrogant belief that intellectualism can set us free is similar to the sin that first took place in Eden, ripping us away from our rightful place near God, and rewarding us instead with only cold learning that provides no true insight into reality at all.
Works Cited
Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. Harper One, 2001.
Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. Harper One, 2001.
Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. Harper One, 2001.
