Of Heaven and Hell: C.S. Lewis’s Religious Fiction

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Of Heaven and Hell: C.S. Lewis’s Religious Fiction Clive Staples Lewis, an Oxford professor, famous Christian theologian, and children's author, was born in Belfast, Ireland on November 29, 1898. He went on to author more than forty books on topics ranging from science fiction to essays on Christian themes to children's books. His core writing scheme is distinctly religious, and his fantasy novella The Great Divorce is no exception. In this famous work, Lewis conveys an imaginary, dream-like encounter between souls in hell and souls in heaven. Thus, it is in his works of fiction that his religious concerns are memorably animated. The novel’s popularity demonstrates that the means of imaginative fiction can be successfully used for religiously-motivated ends. In his biography of Lewis, Douglas Gresham argues that Lewis had the most fun with imaginative works of literature; he notes that “Lewis thrived on the imaginative portrayals of Christian doctrine envisioned by George Macdonald” (212). The imagination permits, to be sure, the exploration of things religious precisely because it involves other-worldly events and characters that fit some of the fantastic concepts in religious stories or figures. This is not to say that imaginative literature is fake in any way; it suggests that everyday language is simply insufficient for the exploration of religious paraphernalia, the concept of sacrifice, for instance. Other writers agree that Macdonald’s oeuvre was a keen influence on Lewis’s craft. William Zinsser’s essay, for instance, records that Lewis was “consoled in his loneliness” by frequently reading about the comforts of heaven that he discovered in medieval writings and the fantasy novels of the Victorian era (46). Heaven is not simply a panacea for Lewis, but rather an objective, external reality that corresponds with an inner longing. For Lewis, each and

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