On Heaven and Materialism

From "Transposition" by C.S. Lewis, in the book "The Weight of Glory."

Let us construct a fable. Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses the hope of deliverance, she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen.

She does it very largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities, and waves on a beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause. For a minute or two they are at cross-purposes. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception.

"But," she gasps, "you didn't think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?"

"What?" says the boy. "No pencil marks there?" And instantly his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition - the waving treetops, the light dancing on the weir, the coloured three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve.

The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother's pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.

So with us. "We know not what we shall be" (1 John 3:2); but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like pencilled lines on flat paper.

....

You will have noticed that most dogs cannot understand pointing. You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the floor, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him, and that is all. His world is all fact and no meaning. And in a period when factual realism is dominant we shall find people deliberately inducing upon themselves this doglike mind. A man who has experienced love from within will deliberately go about to inspect it analytically from outside and regard the results of this analysis as truer than his experience.

As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism. The critique of every experience from below, the voluntary ignoring of meaning and concentration on fact, will always have the same plausibility. There will always be evidence, and every month fresh evidence, to show that religion is only psychological, justice only self-protection, politics only economics, love only lust, and thought itself only cerebral biochemistry.

/End C.S. Lewis, begin Becky

I'm thinking that while we should avoid a purely hedonistic view of heaven, at the same time there is no shame in picturing it as a place of great earthly pleasures. Not that they will exist there in the same sense that they exist here, but that we must associate heaven with our greatest joy. We can't deprive ourselves of picturing any pleasure in heaven simply because we can't now imagine the form it will take. We can't now imagine the incredible relationship we will have with the King, so we must take our best experiences with earthly relationships and with the Holy Spirit and combine them into a promising shadow of what will be. So the view of heaven provided for us in the Bible, a place of feasting and riches, is not an elementary one, but a way of relating for us the joy we are to obtain. And here is where God is once again so wonderful - on one hand, He tells us things we can't possibly understand and can only speculate on until we die, reminding us of His mystery and highness, but on the other hand He speaks of some of our purest, simplest pleasures being present there - aesthetic beauty and good food.