SEEING THAT FIRST SENTENCE in the first paragraph of the first
chapter of Peter Kreeft’s book Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest
Longing is a quote from C.S. Lewis, my suspicions were aroused
right away. Kreeft hastened to confirm them, quoting Lewis again
four pages further on, and again eleven pages after that, then four
pages on from that, then two pages on from that, then
forty-one more times in the following hundred pages.
The metaphor that comes to mind is the one about conversing with
the monkey when the organ grinder is at hand. I knew, by the time I
reached that second quote, that I had signed up for 152 pages of
Lewisian woo. (No, Mister Editor, I didn’t read the Introduction,
nor the Appendices. How much can you ask of a man?)
And in fact I am pretty well acquainted with the organ grinder.
If you write for conservative American magazines and websites, and
reveal yourself to be an unbeliever, concerned readers will quickly
direct you to C.S. Lewis, with many earnest beseechings. If I had a
dollar for every email I have received that contained the
injunction, “Do please read Mere Christianity,” I
might be able to afford the guided pilgrimage around Lewis’s
childhood haunts on offer from the Northern Ireland Tourist
Board.
Lewis’s writings have been a major inspiration for untold
numbers of American Christians. In the United Kingdom of his birth
he has not much honor, as I suppose is fitting for a prophet. He is
respected around British university Eng. Lit. departments as a
literary critic of insight, and remembered fondly by some among the
general public as the author of some quirky children’s stories, but
Lewis otherwise occupies very little space in the British (or
Irish: his first confession was Church of Ireland, which is to say
the Irish chapter of the Anglican Communion) imagination.
American Christians by contrast have taken him to their bosoms
as a seer of the first magnitude. St. George’s Episcopal Church of
Dayton, Ohio, has actually immortalized him in a stained-glass
window. Nor is his appeal restricted to Anglicans: I know devout
Roman Catholics who swoon over Lewis, and no doubt there are
Baptists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, and Methodists in the fan
club too. It is in fact an interesting question, though one I shall
leave for readers to ponder in their own time, why Lewis’s powers
are great enough to excite such admiration while yet not great
enough to persuade the admirers into his own sect of choice.
I attended services of the ECUSA myself for some years before
losing the sliver of faith I had. Our minister here on Long Island
was a sturdily conservative fellow who did not deviate far from the
Scriptures and the Book of Common Prayer. He used the 1789
text of the latter, of course; I think I should have fallen into
unbelief even sooner than I did but for the satisfaction of hearing
him prompt us to the Lord’s Prayer with “we are bold to say…”
(Cranmer’s translation of audemus dicere) rather than the
slatternly modern option “we now pray…”
I can’t recall hearing that minister mention Lewis. From time to
time, however, the dear man would be absent on some clerical
business and a substitute would be drafted in. These peripatetics
all seemed to be full of Lewis, leaving me squirming and grimacing
there in my pew as they gigglingly retailed some vapid Lewisian
parable, populated by creatures with names dredged from the lowest
sediments of Edwardian nursery-room whimsy: Puddleglum, Reepicheep,
the pfifltriggi.
And ever eager to give my polite emailers the benefit of the
doubt—you need to have endured the long-serving blogger’s
acquaintance with im-polite emailers to understand this impulse—I
actually did give Mere Christianity a try.
What stuff! All right, I am a rather severe empiricist, deeply
unimpressed with introspection as a means for discovering anything
about the world of nature, including human nature. Even after
cutting the guy as much slack as I could, though, and setting aside
the hearty-sober tone of the thing (ported over intact from every
mid-20th-century British schoolmaster’s standard lecture on the
perils of self-abuse), Lewis’s arguments seemed feeble. I got as
far as the famous trilemma in Chapter 4 of Book II:
[Jesus of Nazareth] either was (and is) just what He said or
else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that
He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however
strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the
view that He was and is God.
My reaction to that passage was: Why couldn’t Jesus just have
been mistaken? Answer, after a few more pages of bogus
analogies and unsubstantiated assertions, came there none, and I
never did finish the book.
(I did, though, receive as a gift from one of the kind
beseechers a nice boxed set of the Narnia stories, which
my kids had read to them at bedtimes—all but the last book, which I
myself could make no sense of, and so spared them. The only lasting
effect has been a taste for Turkish Delight, which I still buy as a
family treat at Christmas.)
BUT ENOUGH OF THE organ grinder: what does the monkey have to
tell us about heaven? I follow Kreeft in not capitalizing that
word, and am glad to have been spared the decision. William F.
Buckley, Jr. was of the opposite persuasion, explaining that: “It’s
a place,” a thing he certainly believed.
Is it, though? The fundamental conception of heaven always has
been, and in the minds of the great majority of Christians still
is, of a place the individual personality migrates to after death.
Some irreducible core of one’s personhood, of one’s self, survives
the destruction of the body and goes to heaven. Or not: Entry into
heaven is commonly regarded as conditional, though the nature of
the conditions varies from sect to sect. So do the alternatives,
which come down to either blank extinction or an anti-heaven, a
place of suffering.
It’s all pretty improbable. We know of no aspect of selfhood
that does not depend on functioning brain matter. From the point of
view of simple psychology, though, it is easy to see why such ideas
should be widespread. The hope of something better in a new life to
come has kept innumerable souls slogging forward through drudgery
and pain. This medieval peasant, for example, struggling from his
lice-ridden bed in the damp half-light of an English morning to
slop out the pigs:
Hierusalem, my happy home,
When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end
Thy joys when shall I see?
No dampish mist is seen in thee,
Nor cold nor darksome night;
There every soul shines as the sun,
There God himself gives light.
Similarly with the Other Place, though it is now somewhat out of
favor. (There has even been a school of modern theologians, led by
Hans Urs von Balthasar, who argue that hell is empty.) Resentment
at the misbehavior of others is a natural instinct in any social
animal; yet the most cursory acquaintance with this world reveals
it to be a place where the wicked prosper while the righteous
perish in their righteousness. We need some balm for our
resentment. Our imaginations dutifully supply it. “I hope you burn
in hell!” screams the wife of the deceased as the convicted
murderer is led from the dock, and we all sympathize with her hope,
even if we cannot share it.
However, the less-simple psychology unearthed by researchers of
this past few decades has shown us that the human mind is a great
self-deceiver, with an apparently limitless capacity to cook up
stories to make sense of the world, and even, post facto,
of our own actions. The suspicion arises that heaven and hell
belong to the class of these self-spun tales—-psychologically
healthful perhaps, evolutionarily advantageous even, but without
any foundation in reality.
Kreeft tackles this in Chapter Five:
Whatever the origin of the idea of heaven, doesn’t the idea
actually function as escapism?…The first and simplest answer to the
charge that belief in heaven is escapism is that the first question
is not whether it is escapist but whether it is true.
Aha! Here should come something worth reading: an explanation as
to why one would think the idea of heaven relates to a true
fact.
Whether it makes us happy or not, we must believe only what is
true.
Yes! Yes!
We must be clear about this because we are about to embark upon
a survey of many psychological advantages of belief in heaven, in
answer to the charge of escapism; none of these is a valid reason
for believing it.
Right! Of course not! So the reasons for believing it are…?
Philosophical arguments, intuitive wisdom, faith in divine
revelation in the Bible and the Church, and above all the
resurrection of Jesus.
In short, woo: stuff which, if you’re that way inclined, you
will believe, and if not, not. Nothing in the way of
actual…evidence.
Kreeft follows the master in attaching momentous words to
trivial responses. What to (I imagine) most of us is worth at best
a few seconds’ idle reflection, is to these ponderers “terrifying,”
“awe—inspiring,” or “a sadness larger than the world.” (Which, the
author tells us, lies “at the heart of our greatest pleasures.”
Speak for yourself, pal.)
Imagine God appeared to you and said, “I’ll make a deal with you
if you wish. I’ll give you anything and everything you ask…Nothing
will be a sin, nothing will be forbidden…You will never be bored
and you will never die. Only…you shall never see my face.”
Did you notice that unspeakable chill in your deepest heart at
those last words?
Um, no. Should I try again?
I guess I just have no patience with this stuff. I try to behave
well, according to my nature (a product of Nature) and acquired
habits. I am not aware of having had any existence before my birth,
and do not expect to have any after my death. It’s an odd business,
all right, being alive; but the most parsimonious account of it is
the one offered by a Russian novelist: a crack of light between two
eternities of darkness. The rest is tales we make up for our
comfort.
I’ll hedge my bets and add this, though. If there is a heaven,
and if the admission standards are low enough that I can get in, I
hope it will be a place where I never have to read anything as
boring, self-referential, derivative (of guess-who), clogged with
misplaced superlatives, and devoid of interest or narrative or wit
or empirical observation as Peter Kreeft’s Heaven.
