Was C.S. Lewis An Annihilationist?
Exploring the Problem of An Everlasting Hell (Part 2)
“There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.” -Dr. Bertrand Russell (Analytical Philosopher and Atheist) in his essay, “Why I Am Not A Christian” (pg. 17).
In our last post, we explored why C.S. Lewis could not be a universalist or hold to an empty hell theory. Today, we will explore whether Lewis held to annihilationism which states that a soul in Hell will eventually be totally annihilated and no longer exist. Here are a few of the arguments in favor of this view:
Biblical: This theory certainly fits much easier into the language and literary framework of Scripture than universalism. Lewis writes, “If we stick to the Dominical language [of Scripture], the dust-bin or rubbish-heap image is perhaps more prominent than the prison image.”
Patristic: This theory is built upon ‘conditional immortality’ which some of the church fathers may have believed. If everything exists in God, and we become completely severed and separated from God, how can a person continue to exist? Immortality and everlasting life are then offered only to those in Heaven while those who are ‘cut off’ from Him experience destruction with everlasting consequences. Arnobius of Sicca (303AD) writes, “The wicked go into the fire of Gehenna [Hell], and will ultimately be consumed or annihilated”1
Apologetic: This theory is a good response to the atheist accusation that an eternal hell makes God immoral. When Cameron Bertuzzi was considering a move from Protestantism to Catholicism, he was concerned that he could still be an annihilationist or have the option of being a universalist. Why? In part because he runs a YouTube channel dedicated to Christian Apologetics and annihilationism was clearly a doctrine close to his heart. See this clip here:
However, Catholics and Orthodox cannot embrace annihilationism, because it was condemned with finality at an ecumenical council as not consistent with Divine Revelation found in Scripture and the preaching of the Apostles. With one anathema, both annihilationism and universalism were taken off the table for Christians to believe:
“If anyone says or thinks that the punishment of demons and of impious men is only temporary, and will one day have an end, and that a restoration (ἀποκατάστασις) will take place of demons and of impious men, let him be anathema.”
St. Augustine also addressed the problem of annihilationism in The City of God:
“If both destinies are eternal, then we must either understand both as long-continued but at last terminating, or both as endless. For they are correlative — on the one hand, punishment eternal, on the other hand, life eternal. And to say in one and the same sense, life eternal shall be endless, punishment eternal shall come to an end, is the height of absurdity. Wherefore, as the eternal life of the saints shall be endless, so too the eternal punishment of those who are doomed to it shall have no end.”
But did Lewis agree with St. Augustine and the 5th ecumenical council? He was an Anglican Protestant and may not have felt obliged to follow either as authoritative. Perhaps his views were similar to the Anglican preacher and Biblical scholar, John Stott, who would came out as an annihiliationist in the late 1980s?
Lewis Rejects Annihilationism
After reading The Problem of Pain, it becomes clear that he believed the realities of Heaven and Hell last forever. He writes,
“The damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; the doors of hell are locked on the inside. . . . They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved.”
But what does this ‘forever’ mean? Does it mean a conscience awareness of time and its duration moment by moment? Here Lewis opens up different possibilities:
“I notice that Our Lord, while stressing the terror of Hell with unsparing severity, usually emphasizes the idea not of duration but of finality… That the lost soul is eternally fixed in its diabolical attitude we cannot doubt; but whether this eternal fixity implied endless duration — or duration at all — we cannot say.”
He goes on to say in his letter to Mr. Fairhurst that everlasting destruction is the more dominant image of scripture than an everlasting prison:
“The regular emphasis is on the finality of rejection or exclusion —on the negative, not on any positive, aspect of damnation. If we stick to the Dominical language, the dust-bin or rubbish-heap image is perhaps more prominent than the prison image…. P.S.# To picture the foolish virgins in perpetual torment is perhaps just as blunderingly prosaic as to picture the wise ones as perpetually at supper! Both are prosaic, therefore false, extensions of the real poetic image which simply seizes the moment of to ‘Come me inside’ or ‘Go away’?”
Lewis continues in The Problem of Pain to give an analogy of how the soul may keep on existing:
“(P)eople often talk as if the ‘annihilation’ of a soul were intrinsically possible. In all our experience, however, the destruction of one thing means the emergence of something else. Burn a log, and you have gases, heat and ash. To have been a log means now being those three things. If soul can be destroyed, must there not be a state of having been a human soul? And is not that, perhaps, the state which is equally well described as torment, destruction, and privation?… What is cast (or casts itself) into Hell is not a man: it is ‘remains’. To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man — to be an ex-man or “damned ghost” — would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centred in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will. It is, of course, impossible to imagine what the consciousness of such a creature…”
As we can see, Lewis views hell as a fixed state of collapse. The soul becomes almost frozen in its own sins, and the ego caves in on itself forever. The best analogy I have ever read in modern physics that most expresses Lewis’ understanding comes from Rod Dreher in his book “How Dante Can Save Your Life.” He writes,