Introduction

There are dangers in talking about a cosmic battle between good and evil. Most of all, it implies for many people that a permanent battle is raging between the forces of darkness and light. This is far from the understanding of C. S. Lewis and his friends in the now famous Oxford literary group, the Inklings. They mainly saw a figure such as the devil not as equal with God but as a created spiritual being of some kind, an angel of high rank, who had turned deliberately to evil from his original goodness. Though we are used to thinking of the universe very much in material, physical terms, the friends believed—and Lewis was in the vanguard of arguing for—a larger view of reality, a supernatural one.

Nevertheless, it was clear to them that a battle between good and evil was in process, both in the unseen world and in the physical and psychological horrors of human warfare. Most of the core members of the Inklings had experienced battle in World War I. Some bore physical or mental scars. Were they alive today, their view of a spiritual conflict behind physical battles, which affected whether or not people could live at peace and free from terror, would undoubtedly be reinforced. J. R. R. Tolkien for instance considered that the weapons of Sauron, the Dark Lord ofThe Lord of the Rings, had been used by the allies as well as the enemy in World War II, and C. S. Lewis expressed grave doubts about the massive bombings of civilians.

Because, among the Inklings, Lewis was at the forefront of writing on human pain, suffering, devilry, miracles and the supernatural, he provides the main focus of this book. This is not to say that other Inklings members did not write extensively on these themes—most famously, Tolkien in hisThe Lord of the Rings. They therefore come into my book, where relevant, as much as possible in its short compass. The chronology of Lewis’s writings is followed to a large extent in part two. In part one, his writings are more tied into his experience of two world wars, even though the more recent war was not a firsthand one for him. In part one, we also look at Tolkien’sThe Lord of the Rings, in its relevance to the imagery of war and evil. Tolkien’s story, of course, is well known throughout the globe in its original print form, and now through Peter Jackson’s blockbuster movie version.

It is worth pointing out from the onset that C. S. Lewis had no interest in writing literally about what goes on in the afterlife to satisfy curiosity about this. He doesn’t take up popular imagery that is supposedly describing what happens when the spirit leaves the body at death, imagery that might portray a tunnel with light in the distance (based on accounts of near-death experiences). His accounts of heaven and hell are very different from each other according to the purpose of the book: there are different sets of imagery in his dream story,The Great Divorce, which is about an excursion by bus from hell to the borderlands of heaven, and the Narnian storyThe Last Battle.The Screwtape Letters is cast in yet another pattern of imagery, in which hell resembles a mixture of rampant bureaucracy like in Hitler’s Third Reich and a ruthless modern corporation. His treatment of the afterlife and the supernatural world is therefore in stark contrast to Richard Matheson’s bestselling novelWhat Dreams May Come (also made into a movie), which claims to be based on research and to give factual details of heaven and hell. In his brief prologue to his reader, Richard Matheson says, “Because [the novel’s] subject is survival after death, it is essential that you realize, before reading the story, that only one aspect of it is fictional: the characters and their relationships.” He adds, “With few exceptions, every other detail is derived exclusively from research.”1 He even provides a bibliography, including titles that are based on theosophy, a movement which seeks hidden knowledge for enlightenment and salvation.

Lewis was careful to state the opposite. Where he writes fictionally about the unseen world, and heaven and hell, he is not writing factually and literally about the afterlife. He warned in his preface toThe Great Divorce:

I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course—or I intended it to have—a moral. But the transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us. The last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity