C. S. Lewis Called the Apostle Paul a Universalist

During his fictional journey to heaven in The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis imagines himself saying to George MacDonald: “In your own books, Sir, you were a Universalist. You talked as if all men would be saved. And St. Paul too.” Then, four years before his own death, Lewis wrote in a private letter to Alan Fairhurst on September 6, 1959: “Need I add that I should very much prefer to follow George MacDonald in this point if I could?” Lewis wanted to affirm the universalism taught by both George MacDonald and the Apostle Paul. However, Lewis lays out in his letter to Fairhurst that “the finality of the Either-Or, the Sheep and Goats, the Wheat and Tares, the Wise and Foolish Virgins” is all “so emphatic and reiterated in Our Lord’s teaching that, in my opinion, it simply cannot be evaded.” This, writes Lewis, is “my sole reason” for not joining Paul and George MacDonald as universalists. This was the first of two short letters by Lewis to Fairhurstin in September 1959 that were not published until 2017 (by Reggie Weems in the Journal of Inklings Studies with an article titled “Universalism Denied: C. S. Lewis’ Unpublished Letters to Alan Fairhurst”).

Before these letters were published in 2017, what exactly Lewis believed about eschatology was a much debated topic. Lewis has moments of clarity within his published works such as here in The Problem of Pain:

Some will not be redeemed. There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of Our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.

Still, Lewis makes far more complex and seemingly contradictory claims in other places. As a result, there were prominent thinkers who argued that Lewis was a hopeful universalist while others argued that he clearly believed in an eternal hell and yet others claimed that he was an annihilationist. Finally, a few scholars argued that it was impossible to tell what Lewis thought on this topic. All of these scholarly debates are nicely summarized by Weems in his 2017 article that included the text of the two letters to Alan Fairhurst. Scholars since 2017 have generally agreed that the Fairhurst letters and the overview by Weems brought substantial clarity to the issues. What Lewis did believe was a fairly convoluted vision of eternal hell as a place where souls give up their own humanity and yet cannot entirely uncreate or annihilate themselves. It is therefore accurate to say that Lewis did not think that any humans would suffer eternally in hell. At the same time, some humans could choose to forsake the offer to take up their humanity forever within the household of God and to instead face an eternity of hiding from God in a state where “the soul never ceases to be but exists as dehumanized humanity” in the form of “an ex-man” or “damned ghost” (The Problem of Pain) or an “un-man” (The Space Trilogy). In A Grief Observed, Lewis says that we all have only two options, to bid “for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity.” Some famous images of this in The Great Divorce include moving forever farther and farther away from everyone else who exists (as we see early in the story with Napoleon) or shrinking into an infinitesimal smallness as a result of having no awareness for anything but yourself (as we see in the husband later in the story who can talk about nothing but his own greatness on the stage while he is actually shrinking entirely out of sight).

These categories are even more complicated when you take into account some points that Lewis makes about time in The Great Divorce. Here is one point that Lewis permits the fictional MacDonald to make about an ultimate horizon that we cannot yet see:

If ye put the question from within Time and are asking about possibilities, the answer is certain. The choice of ways is before you. Neither is closed. Any man may choose eternal death. Those who choose it will have it. But if ye are trying to leap on into eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all.

There is a sense here that—even from the intermediate state after bodily death as the fictional Lewis and MacDonald are talking—the fictional Lewis and MacDonald cannot see the ultimate end of all things when “there are no more possibilities left but only the Real.” Up against this truth that is “too big for ye to see at all,” Lewis allows the fictional MacDonald to voice a hopeful universalism:

Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it’s ill talking of such questions. …Because all answers deceive.

This moment of openness to a hopeful universalism, however, turns quickly again to a set of claims by the imaginary MacDonald that were intentional corrections by Lewis to the explicit and dogmatic universalism that the real MacDonald had taught and defended at length in several writings. It is clear that these fictional corrections of MacDonald by Lewis were done very consciously by Lewis. As we have seen, even years later, near the end of his life, Lewis made clear that he would “very much prefer to follow George MacDonald in this point.” Earlier, in The Problem of Pain, as we have also seen, Lewis wrote that “there is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this.” Such agony is understandable as Lewis also gives one of the most beautiful accounts of humanity needing the help of every individual in order to fully see God (from The Four Loves):

Friendship exhibits a glorious ‘nearness by resemblance’ to heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each of us has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ to one another (Isaiah 6:3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall have.

Taking up the full implications of this, it would seem to mean that the absence in heaven of any friend from this life would render us incapable of enjoying a complete vision of God. Amid all of this soul-searching and complex envisioning of the end by Lewis, one fact that I have not heard talked about much is the point that Lewis considered the Apostle Paul to be a universalist. When his imagined self confronts MacDonald on the outskirts of heaven, Lewis puts MacDonald and Paul in the same camp: “You were a Universalist. You talked as if all men would be saved. And St. Paul too.” Few modern American Christians could imagine an understanding of the New Testament canon that would allow Jesus and Paul to have different eschatologies. However, C. S. Lewis clearly thought this to be the case. In his first letter to Fairhurst, Lewis writes, “I parted company from MacDonald on that point because a higher authority — the Dominical utterances themselves — seemed to me irreconcilable with universalism.” While Lewis is happy to honor MacDonald with the company of Saint Paul himself as a fellow universalist, Lewis himself must stand by the higher teachings of his Lord (“the Dominical utterances”).

For my part, I don’t see the conflict that Lewis sees over this topic in the teachings of Jesus, and I think that Paul, and Origen, and other universalist church fathers clearly understood Christ far better than we later Christians tend to do. However, putting all of these universalist questions aside, one positive lesson that can be learned from this is that Paul and Jesus do not have to agree about every detail within the pages of the New Testament. It is wonderful that Lewis takes this for granted. In fact, I think it belongs in a prominent place among the long list of wonderful things that Lewis believed. In a June 22, 1930 letter to Arthur Greeves, Lewis shared with some glee about Tolkien’s professed (but not widely published) belief in fairies. Although less explicitly than Tolkien, Lewis himself was happy to speculate about the realities of fairies (see the chapter on “The Longaevi” in The Discarded Image). Lewis also clearly believed that domesticated animals would participate in the general resurrection and be able to communicate with us during our shared life in the kingdom of God (an idea developed across several of his nonfiction books including The Problem of Pain more extensively). All in all, the vision of C. S. Lewis regarding God’s creation was far more cosmic than our own visions tend to be, both in this age and in ages to come. It is because of this capacious vision, that Lewis was able to consider that Paul and Jesus would not see the world in the same ways or teach exactly the same things, even on a topic as seemingly critical as the salvation of the cosmos and the destiny of all creatures.

As important as Lewis obviously felt this topic of universalism to be, Lewis also clearly felt that it was understandable for both his own greatest teacher, George MacDonald, and Saint Paul to have been wrong on the issue. There is a clear lesson here in the nature of disagreements as well as in the nature of scriptural authority. Lewis expected the sacred scriptures to reflect differing human understandings or conceptualizations of what had been revealed by the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. Therefore, while there seems to be some reason to think that Lewis considered a hopeful universalism to be legitimate, the more basic point here is that Lewis would have gladly allowed people to be wrong on this topic in almost any direction without condemnation. Lewis very clearly would have been entirely comfortable with this 2015 appeal from David Bentley Hart:

The consensus of the most conscientious and historically literate Orthodox theologians and scholars over the past several decades (Evdokimov, Bulgakov, Clément, Turincev, Ware, Alfeyev, to name a few) is that universalism as such, as a permissible theologoumenon or plausible hope, has never been condemned by the Church. Doctrine is silent on the matter. So live and let live.

This basic step of agreeing to disagree would at least be a helpful first step forward for the church in this area of continued contention. If Lewis was correct that Paul was a universalist, it seems like a very ridiculous thing indeed for us Christians to be so eager to anathematize each other over our different ways of seeking to understand something that is probably “too big” for us to see all at once from our current vantage point.

---

P.S. This little essay generated some great discussion in a few other places. I'm not planning to circle back on this topic any time soon, but I did want to capture a few other thoughts that I've had in those discussions elsewhere.

First, several have argued that Lewis did not say that Paul was a universalist because this is from a work of fiction. I've responded: “Before Lewis takes his favorite teacher to corrective school and has him preach a very sophisticated combo of eternal damnation (temporally) and hopeful universalism (outside time), Lewis has the decency to start by acknowledging that MacDonald was a universalist along with Saint Paul.” And also: “‘In your own books, Sir, you were a Universalist. And St. Paul too.’ That’s an intentional, non-fiction, historical claim at the start of the section. And Lewis did it because he was a decent person who did not want to pull off a fictional *lie* about his favorite teacher. Questions of fiction and nonfiction only reinforce my point.” And finally: “Lewis writes of MacDonald: ‘In your own books, Sir, you were a Universalist. You talked as if all men would be saved. And St. Paul too.’ The only reason Lewis puts this in is because Lewis knows that he is about to rewrite history and *pretend* that MacDonald stopped being a ‘Universalist.’ Lewis wants to be honest about that fact that MacDonald was a ‘Universalist’ and Lewis clearly honors his teacher by saying that St. Paul was also a ‘Universalist.’ The intent and grammar of the simple statements are all clear, and this lines up perfectly with the rest of Lewis’s theology (although that’s way outside the scope of my point in this little essay).”

Second, some have said that Lewis could never have claimed that Paul was a universalist because Lewis would never put himself above Scripture in that way. I replied: “Lewis would not at all be placing himself over Scripture by saying (as Lewis certainly does) that Paul was a universalist. Lewis would simply be saying that Scripture is polyphonic and teaches God’s truth via a wide variety of human conceptions and points of emphasis. Lewis clearly had no issue understanding Paul as being in need of Christ’s corrections and clarifications even from one page to another of our sacred Scriptures. At any rate, my only points in this short article were to point out that Lewis puts the historical MacDonald squarely in the same camp as Paul before then changing MacDonald’s message in the words of his fictional MacDonald (to have fictional MacDonald preach an entirely hidden and atemporal *hopeful* universalism overlayed with a temporal eternal hellfire message that aligns with what Lewis finds in Christ’s teachings).”