This CS Lewis means what I think it means...right?

[Thomas_Jennings]

This is from CS Lewis’s very fine essay ‘Transposition’…One of my all time favourites.

“Our notion of Heaven involves perpetual negations: no food, no drink, no sex, no movement, no mirth, no events, no time, no art. Against all these, to be sure, we set one positive: the vision and enjoyment of God. And since this is an infinite good, we hold (rightly) that it outweighs them all. That is, the reality of the Beatific Vision would or will outweigh, would infinitely outweigh, the reality of the negations.”

…So he’s saying to experience God is infinitely more joyous?- Or (which goes without saying) that such an event would be of infinite moral value, such is the goodness of the Lord?
So, to put it in a ‘low brow’ way, good like the best party/present ever or good like purity, kindness and absenance (I’m not spelling that right- I know but my brain has gone to mush- long day)?

I only ask because if it is a) that’s an astonishingly exciting idea and it’s puzzling that this line is quoted more! Particulalry if he literally means ‘infinitely’, although how temporal beings such as we would experience such…?

 

[Deana83]

I haven’t read this one but now I’m intrigued so will have to find a copy in the library or on amazon. I love what I’ve read by C.S. Lewis so far, “The Screwtape Letters,” “The Great Divorce,” and “Mere Christianity.”

 

[Morwenna]

Here’s another Lewis excerpt on the same theme:

… if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

— from The Weight of Glory