The Value of CS Lewis

I have just finished reading student essays on Lewis's The Great Divorce. What strikes me is how much people can learn from Lewis about the meaning of life, from a Christian perspective.

To enable them to interpret GD, students read Mere Christianity -- book four, Beyond Personality is the key -- and selections from The Problem of Pain, Miracles, Letters to Malcolm, The Four Loves, "Transposition," and The Chronicles of Narnia:

• "Heaven"
• "Hell"
• "Christianity and Religion"
  
• "The Grand Miracle"
• the story in The Silver Chair about the confrontation between a witch preaching projectionism and believers in Aslan
• the story of Emeth in The Last Battle

What students learn is that the purpose of human life is to be "taken into the life of God" -- theosis! All of one's pursuits are to be oriented to this one end (telos). The person experiences a longing (Sehnsucht) for this end, but is prone to choose other ends (power, sex, intoxication) to fill the emptiness within -- "How easily the longing accepts false objects, and through what dark ways the pursuit of them leads us," Lewis wrote in 1943.

These freely chosen ends become one's hell, when viewed from the perspective of eternity. On the other hand, if one chooses to identify one's hobbies, friends, and aesthetic desires as pointers to one's telos, the human person can begin to experience the bliss -- heaven -- for which God has designed the human person.

The key for the person is to submit, to release oneself, to the "treatment" of the Creator. This is a death to Self, but a Yes to one's Design. The No dis-orders the person, but the Yes aims one at the God-designed home port.