Heaven in C.S. Lewis's Cosmology

Abstract

In the last chapter of the last volume of The Chronicles of Narnia, the protagonists arrive in Aslan’s country, Narnia’s equivalent of Heaven, or at least its outskirts. C.S. Lewis’s portrayal of this imaginary world is of course inspired by the Bible, and by previous literary depictions such as Bunyan’s Celestial City in The Pilgrim’s Progress or Dante’s Paradiso in The Divine Comedy, but it also has a unique quality. Although on the surface Lewis sometimes seems to contradict the Biblical hypotext, he never betrays the spirit of Chapters 21-22 of the book of Revelation. Indeed, he achieves the masterstroke of fleshing out this highly symbolic description of the new Jerusalem by presenting his young readers with a vivid and concrete picture, reassuring those of them who might dread being bored in paradise. The way in which he represents Heaven is arguably one of his most successful attempts at overcoming children’s potential misgivings and he accomplishes it by addressing the reader’s imagination through myth.