The sobering reality remains that this glorious world of life-after-death is not ours for the taking but only ours for the asking. If we will not ask to be admitted, we cannot enter. It is not ours by right but is offered as a gift. If we won’t accept the gift, we won’t be forced to receive it.
Over the past two weeks, we’ve discovered the deep theology to be found in Narnia for those who accept C. S. Lewis’ invitation to go “further up and further in”. In “Resurrection in Narnia”, we looked at the ways in which Aslan’s self-sacrificial death and resurrection in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe parallels the Gospel narrative of the death and resurrection of Christ. Then, in “The Creation of Narnia”, we focused on the deep trinitarian theology which animates Aslan’s singing of Narnia into being in The Magician’s Nephew. This week, completing our Narnian triptych, we’ll come to the End of the World as Lewis depicts it in The Last Battle.
In the climactic moments of Narnian time, in the last battle itself, the forces of evil are on the verge of final victory over the virtuous few. The final remnant of the faithful are being forced through a door to a stable in which the demonic “god” Tash awaits them.
“I feel in my bones,” says Poggin, “that we shall all, one by one, pass through that dark door before morning. I can think of a hundred deaths I would rather have died.”
“It is indeed a grim door,” says Tirian. “It is more like a mouth.”
“Oh, can’t we do anything to stop it?” says Jill, her voice quaking.
“Nay, fair friend,” says Jewel. “It may be for us the door to Aslan’s country and we shall sup at his table tonight.”
There is much of great value in this brief exchange between four friends, comrades in arms against an evil enemy. Knowing that they are about to be forced through the stable door into the demonic presence of Tash is a fate worse than any death imaginable. It is not merely meeting the face of death, grim enough in itself, but coming face to face with the devil.
Who would not quake at such an encounter? It is, as King Tirian professes, a grim door, the threshold of doom, an all-devouring mouth, the jaws of all-consuming destruction. And yet, as the faithful Jewel proclaims, even the gates of hell might be, for the true believer, the door into heaven itself.
For the wicked soul, doomed to damnation, the door of death is the gate of hell, the place where all hope is abandoned and eternal fate is sealed. The faithful soul must also pass through the same door of death but, for him, it becomes the gates of heaven, the place where all hope is fulfilled and where the eternal life in the presence of God begins. It may be for us the door to Aslan’s country and we shall sup at this table tonight. It is with such hope that the friends fight courageously to the very last, finally being forced through the stable door.
The door of the stable, the moment of death, is like the wardrobe in Lewis’ earlier story. It takes us out of our world into another. In this case, however, it takes us not only beyond our physical world but beyond our physical life. It takes us into the realm of life after death, beyond death itself. It is into this realm that we will now pass, taking the ultimate adventure into those mystically wonderful places that are further up and further in, beyond time and death.
The fellowship of friends, finding themselves in a postmortem paradise, see trees bearing fruit far more beautiful than anything they’d ever seen. Wondering whether they should pick them, or whether doing so would be a sin, it is Peter who perceives the wondrous reality in which they now find themselves. “It’s all right,” he says. “I’ve a feeling we’ve got to the country where everything is allowed.” This profound insight arises from the knowledge that they are in an Immaculate Kingdom, unstained by sin and, even more wonderful, unstainable by it. Sin is impossible in the heavenly realm in which they now find themselves. It is a place where faith and reason are both fulfilled in Reality. In such a place, it would be impossible to believe anything evil because its unreasonableness would be starkly evident from the reality experienced. It is a world in which the thing beheld is seen perfectly because the eye of the beholder has been cleansed of all the pride and prejudice which had blinded it. It is a world in which sanity and sanctity are indivisible and indistinguishable because they are one. Sin, being a violation of right reason and a denial of the good, is impossible where reason is righted and the good is all there is. Only in such a place, where evil is impossible, can everything be allowed.
And yet the sobering reality remains that this glorious world of life-after-death is not ours for the taking but only ours for the asking. If we will not ask to be admitted, we cannot enter. It is not ours by right but is offered as a gift. If we won’t accept the gift, we won’t be forced to receive it. This is made evident in the willful blindness of the dwarves who refuse to see the heavenly reality that surrounds them. The dwarfs see nothing and they smell nothing and they believe nothing because all they know is the “no-thing” that they believe is at the root of the cosmos. Once a cynic believes in this almighty No-Thing, nothing will convince him that he is wrong, not even were the Something who created the very cosmos to reveal himself to him. We see this when Aslan arrives on the scene, making his first appearance towards the very end of the story, after all of the protagonists have already passed through the door of death. Lucy asks him to “do something for these poor Dwarfs”.
Aslan explains that he can only help those who are willing to accept the gits of light and life that he offers. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”
Aslan will not deprive the dwarves of their freedom. He is not a tyrant or a rapist who forces himself upon those who refuse his love. Ultimately, the dwarves are given what they want. They have chosen a blindness that binds them to their self-inflicted hell. The choice is between hell and the healer. Those who refuse healing, choose hell.
Leaving the dwarfs to their miserable selves, we’ll move onto the newer and greener pastures of Paradise.
With laughter in his eyes, Aslan calls on the fellowship of Narnian friends to follow him. “Come further in! Come further up!”. He then shoots off like a golden arrow over the carpet of flowers into the distance.
As the Kings and Queens and their companions journey further up and further in, they begin to see that they are now experiencing the Real Narnia, the Narnia which has always existed in the mind of God. It is the divine Narnia, the perfect Narnia, that they are now seeing. It is the Narnia that basks in the light of God’s undimmed and undiminished Presence. In such a Narnia, there is nothing of the Fallenness or Brokenness of the world of shadows. There is no decay, no entropy, no ill-health, no impediments to the perfect goodness of things. Thus the companions find that they can run faster and faster without getting hot or tired, or out of breath (perfect fitness), and they can do all things without feeling the least afraid (perfect fearlessness). It is the Perfect Paradise, eternally beyond the reach of any evil.
As well as perfect fitness and perfect fearlessness, the perfect paradise also has perfect time and perfect space. There is no way of knowing if something takes half an hour or half a century, “for time there is not like time here”. As for space, as the Faun tells Lucy, “the further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets”.
On the final page of this most wonderful of stories, Aslan tells the children that there was a real railway accident in their own world and that they are dead, “as you used to call it in the Shadowlands”. And yet this death leads to the true fullness of life. “The term is over: the holidays have begun,” Aslan proclaims. “The dream is ended: this is the morning.”
The world in which the children had been born, and in which they had lived and died, had been only a Shadow. It was a projection or a shadow of the real world which had always existed in the mind of God. They had left the Shadowland in which they had been born and had entered the Real World, without shadows, in which they are being born again into a life far more real, far more alive, than anything in the dream that they had experienced thus far.
As for the rest, there is no better way of concluding than with the words with which C. S. Lewis concludes The Last Battle:
And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
Joseph Pearce’s book Further Up and Further In: Understanding Narnia is available from TAN Books.
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