A Losing Battle Against Reality: C. S. Lewis On The Nature And Necessity Of Hell

By Gavin R. Ortlund

[Gavin R. Ortlund is senior pastor, First Baptist Church of Ojai, Ojai, California.]

I have met no people who fully disbelieved in hell and also had a living and life-giving belief in Heaven. The Biblical teaching on both destinations stands or falls together.

—C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

Abstract

C. S. Lewis has been accused of downplaying the role of God’s judgment in the doctrine of hell. While Lewis did describe hell as a form of self-chosen exile, he saw this self-exile as corollary to God’s judgment, not as an alternative to it. For Lewis, the doctrine of hell was a logical implication of the related doctrines of God and sin. Nor were Lewis’s thoughts on hell entirely eccentric, for there are definite points of continuity between his thoughts and the premodern Christian tradition.

* * *

In his theological fantasy The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis popularized an innovative way of thinking about hell as a kind of self-choice or self-exile. As the character George McDonald puts it in perhaps the book’s most famous passage, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.”[1] The Great Divorce has provoked varied reactions. Apologists use Lewis’s insights to defend the justice of hell from secular critique.[2] Conservative critics, as well as some universalists, claim that Lewis “takes the hell out of hell” by compromising an adequate doctrine of divine judgment.[3] Proponents of purgatory, postmortem salvation, and/or universalism see in The Great Divorce a support and imagination of their hope.[4]

This article attempts a theological engagement with Lewis’s view of hell. It begins by briefly responding to some of the common criticisms Lewis receives (hoping to clarify his view in the process). It then suggests that Lewis helps us envision the necessity and plausibility of hell, particularly in relation to the doctrines of God and sin. Finally, it traces points of continuity between Lewis and premodern theologians. The upshot is that for all the difficulty that the doctrine of hell admittedly presents, it is the kind of thing that you might expect in a reality that contains God, evil, and choice. To put it another way, in Lewis’s vision hell has the same logical correlation to God that down has to up and dark has to light: its difficulties are those necessary difficulties that must exist in a world where all goodness and reality stems from one primal source, from which it is possible to be finally separated.

Does Lewis “Take The Hell Out Of Hell?”

It is precarious to derive Lewis’s view of hell exclusively from The Great Divorce. Even Lewis’s friends like J. R. R. Tolkien were lukewarm about the idea of the book,[5] which Lewis’s brother Warnie said was not developed in the abstract but rather inspired from the medieval concept of the Refrigerium (or so-called “holiday from hell”).[6] Lewis never intended The Great Divorce to be a literal description of the afterlife. He described his work as “an imaginative supposal” designed to make a point, and he begged his readers to remember that “the last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity about the details of the after-world.”[7] Throughout the book, Lewis’s deepest concerns are with the psychology of sin, not the metaphysics of the afterlife.[8]

Even factoring this in, however, the concern that Lewis “takes the hell out of hell” by making divine judgment too passive has a sting to it. Some of Lewis’s statements, particularly when taken in isolation, can easily leave him vulnerable to this concern. At the same time, a careful look at all of his writings suggests that Lewis himself seemed to conceive of hell in terms of both self-choice and divine judgment. It is sometimes assumed that everything Lewis ever thought about hell is encapsulated in The Great Divorce. The calmer, drearier view of hell reflected in this story is then set at odds with biblical depictions of the terror of judgment—for example, those who call upon the rocks and hills to hide them from the wrath of the Lamb (Rev 6:16–17). But of course, Lewis had other things to say about hell and judgment. These complicate the picture somewhat.

In the first place, we must consider Lewis’s vigorous defense of retributive punishment. This is a hallmark of his thought and recurs throughout various writings.[9] If we have doubts that God can be the agent who punishes evil, in addition to the state, or if we think that for Lewis divine punishment is always mild and non-coercive, we will be in for quite a shock when we get to the end of That Hideous Strength, where the evil characters are destroyed by a series of gruesome animal maulings (together with an avalanche).[10] For these depictions Lewis has received the opposite critique—his view of divine judgment is too violent (thus Rowan Williams: “I think it’s when the elephant breaks loose and comes into the dining room and begins trampling people to death that I feel something has snapped in the authorial psyche”[11]).

With respect to hell specifically, Lewis’s chapter on the topic in The Problem of Pain must be considered, where his lengthiest point is once again a defense of divine retributive judgment. He grounds this defense in the fact that “our Lord often speaks of Hell as a sentence inflicted by a tribunal,”[12] and only then develops the self-exile motif as in harmony with thinking of hell as a divine judgment. Similarly, he later acknowledges Christ’s three-fold imagery of punishment, destruction, and privation for hell in the Gospels, arguing that destruction and torture are not mutually exclusive in such imagery:

Now it is quite certain that all these expressions are intended to suggest something unspeakably horrible, and any interpretation which does not face that fact is, I am afraid, out of court from the beginning. But it is not necessary to concentrate on the images of torture to the exclusion of those suggesting destruction and privation.[13]

Lewis’s emphasis on the horribleness of hell, here and throughout this chapter, undermines the claim that he makes damnation dreary. Furthermore, from Lewis’s subsequent exposition of these biblical images it is clear that for him, the self-exile theme is compatible with divine retributive judgment, not an alternative to it. Even when Lewis stresses the self-exile theme in this chapter, he qualifies the sense in which the damned choose hell:

I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man “wishes” to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.[14]

So there is a sense in which, for Lewis, the damned wish the cessation of the agonies of hell, but another (deeper) sense in which they are unwilling to take the essentially moral step that would actually reverse those agonies. Whatever one makes of this, it is something more complicated than is touched by many of the popular critiques.

Can the self-exile motif be compatible with divine judgment? Logically, it seems at least possible to conceive of hell as both what God does to sin and as what sin is and does in itself—rather like a sentence imposed by a judge that accords with the wishes and trajectory of behavior of the criminal. Theologically, the traditional distinction between God’s active and passive wrath may establish some initial categories by which to conceptualize hell in this way. Biblically, we can recognize some prima facie support for the claim that divine judgment is both an imposition on a sinner (for instance, the falling fire and sulfur of Genesis 19:24, or the consuming worms of Acts 12:23) and an act of giving evil over to itself (Rom 1:24–32). With regard to hell specifically, it is portrayed as the “outer darkness” into which people are forcibly “cast” (Matt 25:30); at the same time, the darkness is precisely what evil chooses: “People loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (John 3:20). All this invites consideration of how Lewis’s insights about the self-choice motif might be taken up into a larger constructive effort to understand the doctrine of hell today.

Approaching Hell In A Broader Context

Toward the beginning of his treatment of hell in The Problem of Pain, Lewis claimed that there was nothing he would more willingly remove from Christianity than this doctrine.[15] This sentiment has been shared by other Christian minds.[16] Nonetheless, Lewis showed restraint by not allowing his feelings to dictate the shape of his theology of hell; this was partly a result of his awareness of the eccentricity of his cultural and historical location in the modern West. In his brief introduction to a new translation of Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, Lewis observed that “every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.”[17] He therefore argued that we must read books from periods other than our own in order to gain a sensitivity to our cultural blind spots. Perhaps nowhere else is this historical perspective and humility more necessary than in relation to the doctrine of hell, for other eras did not react against the notion of hell as we do.[18] While one can find a few precursors to universalism here and there in premodern Christianity, particularly in the East, universalism as a major alternative to hell did not gain traction until the nineteenth century.[19] For the vast majority of church history, the reality of hell was nearly ubiquitous, even achieving creedal status.[20]

Because Lewis approached hell from a broader historical context, he saw it in a broader theological context as well. For Lewis, hell is a doctrine that creates tension on its own, but nonetheless produces harmony when joined with other doctrines—like a spice that it is too strong to be eaten on its own, but is still an important ingredient in the recipe as a whole. It makes sense to consider hell, in particular, in relation to other doctrines because our view of the afterlife is often vitally related to our entire worldview. In his preface to The Great Divorce, Lewis described different conceptions of good and evil as premised more basically in different conceptions of the world we inhabit. Specifically, he compared different conceptions of moral choice to radii in a circle versus forks in a road, and different conceptions of reality to a river versus a tree:

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it.[21]

Here we explore the larger view of reality in which hell made sense to Lewis, and in particular, how the doctrines of God and sin suggest its plausibility.

Hell As A Logical Implication Of The Doctrine Of God

In Surprised by Joy, Lewis narrates his journey from theism simpliciter to a specifically Christian conception of God. In narrating his journey toward understanding God’s power and necessity, it is noteworthy how naturally heaven and hell flow out of this context and how he limits them to this context:

The primal and necessary Being, the Creator, has sovereignty de facto as well as de jure. He has the power as well as the kingdom and the glory. But the de jure sovereignty was made known to me before the power, the right before the might. And for this I am thankful. I think it is well, even now, sometimes to say to ourselves, “God is such that if (per impossible) his power could vanish and His other attributes remain, so that the supreme right were forever robbed of the supreme might, we should still owe Him precisely the same kind and degree of allegiance as we now do.” On the other hand, while it is true to say that God’s own nature is the real sanction of His commands, yet to understand this must, in the end, lead us to the conclusion that union with that Nature is bliss and separation is horror. Thus Heaven and Hell come in. But it may well be that to think much of either except in this context of thought, to hypostatize them as if they had substantial meaning apart from the presence or absence of God, corrupts the doctrine of both and corrupts us while we so think of them.[22]

In other words, Lewis regards a static view of hell, conceived of outside of the context of the doctrine of God, as not only erroneous but actually dangerous. Heaven and hell are not two different “places” that God creates so that he can send people to them. They are, and can only ever be understood properly as, the presence or absence of God himself. If we fail to remember this, the doctrines can corrupt us. Similarly, in his Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis claims that when we construct a doctrine of hell outside of the context of the doctrine of God, it becomes only “a mischievous superstition.”[23] Perhaps much of the modern difficulty in conceptualizing hell comes from making this exact error.

On the other hand, with a conception of God as the primal reality, hell becomes a more natural and (at least for some) instinctive implication. According to Lewis’s way of thinking, hell is simply being banished from God’s presence and favor. So we might say, hell is to God what depth is to height, what nothingness is to quiddity. It is, as it were, the shadow of God, the necessary darkness that floods into reality wherever his light is withdrawn, the awful negation of all that he positively is. Given this conception of God as the source of all good, the extremism of hell starts to make more sense. One cannot reject God and be only half miserable. And one cannot possess God and be only half happy. And apparently one cannot half reject or half possess God forever. As Lewis puts it:

To be God—to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response—to be miserable—these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows—the only food that any possible universe ever can grow—then we must starve eternally.[24]

Or, as he puts it in Mere Christianity: “Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?”[25]

Defining hell as the absence of God, for Lewis, takes some of the sting out of the charge of injustice. If hell is simply a matter of creatures reaping the consequence of their rejection of God, then it is unreasonable to fault him that such a state can come about.

In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of Hell is itself a question: “What are you asking God to do?” To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what he does.[26]

This view of hell may also explain why Lewis finds no reason to maintain that hell’s perspective on its own agonies is accurate. As he puts it:

There may be a truth in the saying that “hell is hell, not from its own point of view, but from the heavenly point of view.” I do not think this belies the severity of Our Lord’s words. It is only to the damned that their fate could ever seem less than unendurable.[27]

So while Lewis affirms a species of what is commonly called eternal conscious torment, the word “conscious” for him has a somewhat relative, fluctuating meaning insofar as consciousness is a good thing, and hell warps all good things. How could one be cut off from the source of goodness and yet retain a fully lucid, conscious self-awareness? This also may explain why for Lewis the question of whether hell is some kind of spatial environment or some kind of mental state is ultimately irrelevant. In 1946 he wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves:

About Hell. All I have ever said is that the N. T. plainly implies the possibility of some being finally left in “the outer darkness.” Whether this means (horror of horror) being left to a purely mental existence, left with nothing at all but one’s own envy, prurience, resentment, loneliness & self conceit, or whether there is still some sort of environment, something you cd. call a world or a reality, I wd. never pretend to know. But I wouldn’t put the question in the form “do I believe in an actual Hell.” One’s own mind is actual enough. If it doesn’t seem fully actual now that is because you can always escape from it a bit into the physical world—look out of the window, smoke a cigarette, go to sleep. But when there is nothing for you but your own mind (no body to go to sleep, no books or landscape, nor sounds, no drugs) it will be as actual as—as—well, as a coffin is actual to a man buried alive.[28]

Some object that creaturely happiness need not be conceived as so tightly dependent on God. Charles Seymour, for example, objects, “Judging other people’s psychological states is sometimes difficult, but there appear to be people who give no thought to God but who live enjoyable lives.”[29] But this seems to assume that dependence on God requires consciousness of dependence on God. A proper view of creaturely existence as a gift from God makes it conceivable that all kinds of different states of happiness are attainable without conscious awareness of God as their source, just as one can enjoy a movie without knowing who the director or producer is. So long as God is conceived as the source of all good, which is essential to the classical conception of God, it is difficult to see how separation from God be anything other than what we call “hell.” What else is there that could prevent it from being so?

Hell As A Logical Implication Of The Doctrine Of Sin

But, one might ask, why must separation from the infinite good (God) be a possibility at all? For Lewis, the very act by which one is united to the supreme good, by definition, is that which cannot be coerced. It is this emphasis on the dignity of moral choice that leads Lewis away from universalism:

If the happiness of a creature lies in self surrender, no one can make that surrender but himself (though many can help him to make it) and he may refuse. I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully “All will be saved.” But my reason retorts, “Without their will, or with it?” If I say “Without their will” I at once perceive a contradiction; how can the supreme voluntary act of self surrender be involuntary? If I say “With their will,” my reason replies “How if they will not give in?”[30]

But still, one might ask, why would anyone not make the ultimate act of surrender? If that act is as basic to happiness as sleep is to rest and eating is to nourishment, why don’t all make it? This is where Lewis’s account of the nature of good and evil is essential to his doctrine of hell.

As an entry point into Lewis’s thought on this point, I begin with an anecdote. Several years ago I was reading through the book of Proverbs. I was somewhere around chapter 12 when it occurred to me how frequently the book asserts that righteousness leads to life and unrighteousness leads to death. For instance, verse 19: “Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue is but for a moment.” Or verse 28: “In the path of righteousness is life, and in its pathway there is no death.” The claim in such verses seems to be not merely that God grants life to the righteous (though I take that also to be true on other grounds), but that righteousness itself is the kind of thing that is inherently friendly to life.

Now of course such verses are not referring directly to heaven and hell. But they do reinforce a Christian way of thinking about good and evil that may go some distance in making heaven and hell appear less like arbitrary sentences and more like extensions from the temporal to the eternal realm of the rational workings of morality that we already see around us (and within us) each day. Most people, whatever their religious views, would acknowledge that moral choices are invariably bound up with the happiness or unhappiness of the person making them. Plato, for instance, taught that happiness is bound up with virtue, and in The Republic he claimed that the happiest man is the most just man.[31] One does not need to trace out his argument to imagine why this argument has been picked up by so many other philosophers. Blatant selfishness and greed over a duration of seventy-five years lead very naturally to a certain kind of hell even before death, whereas there is a certain kind heaven that I suspect Mother Theresa experienced before she ever went there. As Lewis put it in The Great Divorce:

Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.[32]

Now suppose that evil is more a trajectory or journey than a state, more like a road you travel on than a room you stay in. This would entail, in turn, that the choice between good and evil (to return to Lewis’s images) is more like a tree than a river; more like going one way at a fork in the road than like traveling ever closer toward the center of a circle. If good and evil are dynamic, ever-expanding paths rather than static, frozen states, then it is meaningful to ask how they could play out across the planes of time and eternity and lead to anything other than heaven and hell. As Matthew Lee summarizes, for Lewis hell is simply “the culmination of a pattern of free choice to turn away from God and to be on one’s own.”[33] Lewis put like this:

Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only 70 years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse—so gradually that the increase in 70 years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be.[34]

Or as he states elsewhere, “In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”[35] To put it another way: we might wonder in the abstract why anyone would deliberately choose unhappiness, but if we think about it, we see this every day all around us, and if we are honest, even within ourselves.

Many people argue that the doctrine of hell is itself a moral evil. Belief in such a horrible place produces horrible actions and behavior. But it can be argued that no idea, actual or conceivable, is more likely to make the choice of good versus evil more morally significant. Such a vision of the world, in which the metaphysical and ethical are so intimately wrapped up together, ratchets up the seriousness of each day’s moral choices. In Lewis’s view of created reality, it is as if all of reality pulls in two opposing directions, like a massive earthquake splitting the ground and pulling the gap ever wider. The dignity of being a created moral creature in such a moral universe is the potential for choosing which side of the divide one lands on. We are all, every day, every decision, moving one way or the other: either toward God and reality and goodness or—a sobering thought—toward self-sovereignty and self-confinement and unreality. From this vantage point, the doctrine of last things is simply a portrait of the finally completed process that has already begun, that we see around us every day; it is what it looks like when the divide has become infinite and irreversible.

Premodern Antecedents To Lewis’s Conception Of Hell

It might be objected that this way of conceiving of hell is merely a modern innovation that is out of step with the harsher images and tone of premodern Christian depictions of hell. Why should we care what some twentieth-century Oxford don said, as opposed to canonical theologians like Augustine and Aquinas? Yet Lewis’s self-exile conception of hell should not be dismissed as a capitulation to modern sensibilities. For one thing, it is hardly amenable to modern ways of thinking. Many people, in fact, find it far more terrifying than fire-and-brimstone preaching. Charles Williams regarded the chapter on hell in The Problem of Pain as “especially terrifying.”[36] Many, I think, have a similar feeling. Consider the experience that Tim Keller describes:

I’ve found that only stressing the symbols of hell (fire and darkness) in preaching rather than going into what the symbols refer to (eternal, spiritual decomposition) actually prevents modern people from finding hell a deterrent. Some years ago I remember a man who said that talk about the fires of hell simply didn’t scare him, it seemed too far-fetched, even silly. So I read him lines from C. S. Lewis: “Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others. . . . In each of us there is something growing, which will be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”

To my surprise he got very quiet and said, “Now that scares me to death.” He almost immediately began to see that hell was a) perfectly fair and just, and b) something that he realized he might be headed for if he didn’t change. If we really want skeptics and non-believers to be properly frightened by hell, we cannot simply repeat over and over that “hell is a place of fire.” We must go deeper into the realities that the Biblical images represent. When we do so, we will find that even secular people can be affected.[37]

In addition, while we can obviously recognize the differences between The Great Divorce and Dante’s Inferno, the central pillars of Lewis’s view have points of continuity with the history of Christian thought.

One example lies in the notion of good and evil as their own punishment, which was a common idea throughout the medieval era through the influence of the sixth-century philosopher-theologian Boethius (whom Lewis very much admired). In The Consolation of Philosophy (probably the most influential book within the medieval church after the Bible), Boethius argued that good and evil are always justly rewarded because they are their own reward. Toward the end of the book, Boethius’s teacher, Lady Philosophy, instructs him about the problem of unpunished evil. After an extended dialogue on the nature of will, the highest good, and the nature of evil, Lady Philosophy concludes: “Do you understand, then, in what a hog-wallow wickedness finds itself, and with what brilliance goodness shines? We can declare confidently that good deeds never go unrewarded and that wicked deeds never go unpunished. In every action, the result of the action is its reward.”[38]

Boethius acknowledges Lady Philosophy’s reasoning but expresses a sentiment common in discussions of Lewis’s view of hell, namely, the wish that God did not grant the wicked the power to accomplish their will. Lady Philosophy responds, “The wicked are all the more unhappy as their desires are fulfilled. If it is wretched to have evil desires, it is even worse to have the ability to carry them out. . . . If suffering is a result of evildoing, then, if their evildoing were endless, their suffering would be infinite and eternal.”[39] It is commonly claimed, as an explanation of the justice of hell, that damned souls are not perfected but rather left in an impenitent and unredeemed state for all eternity, and that this fact explains something of their agony as well as something of the justice for their agony. Such a view is involved in Boethius’s reasoning here. But when Boethius explains that he finds this notion counterintuitive, Lady Philosophy informs him that she has an even more counterintuitive notion to explain: “The wicked are actually happier being punished than they would be if there were no retribution to restrain them.”[40] She goes on to explain that this is not merely because punishment provides an incentive or an example to warn against further evildoing, but rather because if the wicked escape punishment, they are led into further evil and injustice, which necessarily leads to unhappiness. In other words, the punishment of evil is actually better for evil than its nonpunishment, because it acts as a restraining influence against evil getting worse and worse. This sounds much like Lewis’s argument in The Problem of Pain: “If evil is present, pain at recognition of the evil, being a kind of knowledge, is relatively good; for the alternative is that the soul should be ignorant of the evil.”[41]

Similarly, Lewis’s effort to connect the doctrine of hell tightly with the doctrine of God as the source of all good has precedent in the Christian tradition. In his eleventh-century Monologion, for example, Anselm claimed that rational creatures were made to love God, and that the happiness of the human soul therefore consists in loving God.[42] The soul that obtains God enjoys an eternal and supreme happiness.[43] Moreover, Anselm maintained that the human soul is eternal, and therefore must necessarily be either always miserable or at some time truly happy.[44] One will either have the object for whom one is made, or one will not. What can this be but either happiness or ruin? Anselm therefore held that “the human soul was made in such a way that if it disdains to love the supreme essence, it will suffer eternal misery. Thus, just as one who loves him will rejoice in an eternal reward, one who disdains him will suffer under an eternal punishment.”[45] Note the way Anselm derives this conclusion: there is no thought of God arbitrarily creating hell as a place to which to consign the damned. Rather, Anselm understands hell as a natural explication of his doctrine of God as the essence of human happiness. If one rejects the one for whom one was created, what can it be but misery? One thinks of Lewis: “Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?”

We must not stretch the similarities between Lewis and Anselm (or Lewis and Boethius) too far. There are obviously many points of difference in their respective views on hell. The point is simply that Lewis’s instinct to understand hell in relation to the larger categories of God and sin has precedent in the Christian tradition. It is not just the eccentricity of an Oxford don.

Conclusion

This article has found leverage in Lewis’s conception of hell as a kind of self-exile. None of this, however, entails that hell is not also a divine judgment. The point is that the judgment of hell is not an arbitrary one—it is a natural and just response, on the eternal plane, to the trajectory that sin already sets in our temporal lives, and to the nature of our created reality as an extension of the goodness of God. Now if we can understand hell more deeply by placing it next to the doctrines of sin and God, perhaps we might also benefit from placing it next to those deeper and more intrinsically Christian doctrines of incarnation and atonement. To that end, one final quote from The Problem of Pain:

The problem is not simply that of a God who consigns some of His creatures to final ruin. That would be the problem if we were Mahometans. Christianity, true, as always, to the complexity of the real, presents us with something knottier and more ambiguous—a God so full of mercy that He becomes man and dies by torture to avert that final ruin from His creatures, and who yet, where that heroic remedy fails, seems unwilling, or even unable, to arrest the ruin by an act of mere power. I said glibly a moment ago that I would pay “any price” to remove this doctrine. I lied. I could not pay one-thousandth part of the price that God has already paid to remove the fact. And here is the real problem: so much mercy, yet still there is Hell.[46]

From this vantage point, the problem of hell is not simply the presence of a difficult and sad reality. It is the presence of a sad and difficult reality in conjunction with a God of infinite love and self-giving. This is in many ways a deeper problem—as Lewis puts it, “something knottier and more ambiguous.”

But it may also be the way out of the problem. When we look at the cross, we do not know what the answer is to the problem of hell. But we know what it cannot be: it cannot be that God is anything less than fully generous. Like Lewis, I therefore choose to trust that whatever difficulty still remains with respect to the doctrine of hell will one day be resolved—and in the meantime it need not lead us to question the justice or goodness of God.

Notes

1. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (1946), reprinted in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002), 340.
2. Tim Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton, 2008), 77–78, draws on Lewis’s insights.
3. This language is drawn from criticism by the universalist Thomas Talbott, “Freedom, Damnation, and the Power to Sin with Impunity,” Religious Studies 37 (2001): 429–30. William M. Schweitzer, “ ‘Brimstone-Free’ Hell: A New Way of Saying the Same Old Thing about Judgment and Hell?,” in Engaging with Keller: Thinking through the Theology of an Influential Evangelical (Darlington: EP Books, 2013), 65–95, makes the same critique from a different angle.
4. Cf. David G. Clark, C. S. Lewis Goes to Heaven: A Reader’s Guide to The Great Divorce (Hamden, CT: Winged Lion, 2012). A number of responses to Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), connected Bell’s book and Lewis’s The Great Divorce. In one conversation a friend stated that he believed that the account of The Great Divorce was a literal picture of the afterlife, and therefore he didn’t find the idea of hell at all terrible or frightening.
5. After Lewis read several chapters of what was then called “Who Goes Home” to the Inklings in April and May of 1944, Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher that “he did not think so well” of the book’s concluding chapter. Philip and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015), 315.
6. “J[ack] has a new idea for a religious work, based on the opinion of some of the Fathers, that while punishment for the damned is eternal, it is intermittent: he proposes to do a kind of infernal day excursion to Paradise.” In Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 280. Lewis’s inspiration for the idea of The Great Divorce evidently came in the early 1930s when he came across the idea of the Refrigerium in the writings of the seventeenth-century Anglican Jeremy Taylor (ibid., 279–80).
7. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 314.
8. As Walls puts it, in The Great Divorce Lewis “is not interested in speculation about the ‘conditions’ of the afterlife, but only in showing more clearly the ‘nature of the choice’ that leads either to heaven or to hell” (Walls, “The Great Divorce,” 252). See also Jerry Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).
9. Lewis was alarmed at the humanitarian theory of punishment, writing in protest: “I urge a return to the traditional or Retributive theory not solely, not even primarily, in the interests of society, but in the interests of the criminal.” C. S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Retributive Punishment,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (1970), reprinted in The Collected Works of C. S. Lewis (New York: Inspirational, 1996), 496.
10. Although Merlin’s interpretation of their demise in terms of the Tower of Babel clearly portrays these events as divine judgment, even here, these characters are well on their way to hell before the judgment ever comes. The character Wither represents separation from reason, and the character Frost represents separation from will—both of which lead each character so progressively away from humanity and goodness and reason that the translation from earthly life to hell is hardly abrupt. Lewis narrates, “The last few moments before damnation are not often so dramatic.” C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups (1945; repr., New York: Scribner, 2003), 350.
11. Rowan Williams, “That Hideous Strength: A Reassessment,” in C. S. Lewis and His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society, ed. Roger White, Judith Wolfe, and Brendan N. Wolfe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 99.
12. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, 418.
13. Ibid., 418–19.
14. Ibid., 419–20.
15. Ibid., 416.
16. John Stott writes with admirable candor: “Emotionally, I find the concept [of eternal conscious torment] intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterising their feelings or cracking under the strain. But our emotions are a fluctuating, unreliable guide to truth and must not be exalted to the place of supreme authority in determining it. As a committed evangelical, my question must be—and is—not what does my heart tell me, but what does God’s word say?” David Edwards with John Stott, Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988), 315–16.
17. C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,” in St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. a religious of C. S. M. V., Popular Patristics 3 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977), 4.
18. Tim Keller makes this point forcefully in his defense of divine judgment (Keller, The Reason for God, 72–73).
19. For a history and critique of universalism, see Michael J. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).
20. The earliest and most ecumenical creeds, the Apostles’ and Nicene, both affirm that “[Christ] shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” The Athanasian Creed (also ecumenical) specifies that Christ’s judgment involves the sentencing of the unrighteous into everlasting fire. The conclusion of this creed reads: “And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil, into everlasting fire. This is the catholic faith; which except a man believe truly and firmly, he cannot be saved.”
21. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 313. This is similar to the contrast of Lewis’s image for hell in The Great Divorce as a sprawling suburb (in which everyone is moving further away from each other) with his image for heaven in The Last Battle, where each character is going continually “further up and further in.”
22. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955), reprinted in The Inspirational Writings of C. S. Lewis (New York: Inspirational, 1987), 127.
23. C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, reprinted in The Inspirational Writings of C. S. Lewis, 152
24. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 390.
25. Lewis, Mere Christianity, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, 96.
26. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 420.
27. Ibid., 419.
28. C. S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves, May 13, 1946, in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963), ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 508.
29. Charles Seymour, “Hell, Justice, and Freedom,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 43 (1998): 77. See also Charles Seymour, A Theodicy of Hell, Studies in Philosophy and Religion 20 (New York: Springer, 2000), 81–84.
30. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 416.
31. Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1196. 
32. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 338.
33. Matthew Lee, “To Reign in Hell or to Serve in Heaven,” in C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, ed. David Baggett, Gary R. Habermas, and Jerry L. Walls (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 167.
34. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 47.
35. C. S. Lewis, “ ‘The Trouble with “X”…,’ ” in God in the Dock, 404.
36. As cited in Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, 302.
37. Tim Keller, “The Importance of Hell,” http://www.timothykeller.com/blog/2008/8/1/the-importance-of-hell, accessed June 18, 2015.
38. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. David R. Slavitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 116.
39. Ibid., 121.
40. Ibid., 122.
41. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 418.
42. Anselm, Monologion 68–69, in Anselm: Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007).
43. Anselm, Monologion 70.
44. Anselm, Monologion 72–73.
45. Anselm, Monologion 71.
46. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 417.