Barry's Blog

Some forty-three years ago, on November 22, 1963, three remarkably famous men (but for very different reasons) died within hours of each other. These three men were the philosopher Aldous Huxley, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, and Oxford don and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. While the world watched in horror of Kennedy's assassination, the other two notable personalities quietly exited the world with little fanfare.

Historians to this day debate the Kennedy legacy. During his life he achieved tremendous worldwide popularity, and his life seemed to symbolize a mythical Camelot. It is interesting that while Kennedy's "New Frontier" saw the American space program as the needed answer to Sputnik, Huxley and Lewis had serious misgivings about the totalitarian effect of technological development. While George Orwell in his 1984 imagined a world characterized by totalitarian slavery, Huxley, in his most famous novel, Brave New World (1932), pictured a humanity that could be conditioned to mindlessly embrace slavery (Some argue that BNW grows more plausible each year). Lewis would echo a similar sentiment about the dark irony of technology, which while promising freedom, in the end takes it away, in his work, The Abolition of Man (1943).

Peter Kreeft, a philosophy professor at Boston College, penned an imaginary after-death dialog between these three men which he titled, Between Heaven and Hell. Kreeft's writing style is amusing, as the three men discuss various theological and philosophical perspectives. All three believed, in different ways, that death is not the end of human life. Kreeft presents these three as participating in The Great Conversation that continues to go on over many centuries, presenting Kennedy at a modern humanist, Huxley as an Eastern pantheist, and Lewis as a Christian theist.

The years have diminished Kennedy and Huxley, as Kennedy's habitual indiscretions have been well documented, and Huxley, toward the end of his life, retreated into drugs. He urged his followers, "Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma."

In contrast, Lewis believed in a muscular Christianity that inspired hope not only for this life, but for a life to come: "In Christ," he said, "a new kind of man appeared; and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us." "God," he contended, "cannot give us peace and happiness apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." While Huxley and Kennedy would have given little serious consideration of Lewis' staunch Christian faith, it was Lewis, in his early thirties, who came "kicking and screaming" (his words) into God's kingdom, as he was confronted with the Truth of what he would term "mere" Christianity.

Walter Hooper, Lewis' literary secretary who has served as editor of the Lewis Estate since Lewis' death, is surely right when he observes in the Preface to Lewis' collection of essays, "Christian Reflections," that "the central premise of all Lewis' theological works - a premise implicit - is that all men are immortal. While this may strike the thoughtful christian as a fundamental tenet, the fact that men are immortal is news to many people today. The contemporary preoccupation with "individual rights" and "freedom" has deceived many to imagine we can invent our own theology in lieu of Lewis' orthodox belief in a real Heaven and Hell.

What kind of vision do we have of life? How should our vision impact the way we treat others? Is it possible to truly finish well in life without such a belief that we, and others, will live forever? 

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of those destinations...There are no ordinary people. You have never talked with a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours."

-C.S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory"

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow