Pleasures are to last forever in some form or another. According to Lewis, a pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.[1] This full knowledge and complete fruition of pleasure will only be in the fulfillment of one’s telos. This lapse in knowledge, the separation between the subject and object (the epistemic gap between the subject and the object of desire that full one’s pleasures) is removed in heaven. In Narnia, The Last Battle is the battle of the real forms—a draw to a close between this epistemic gap. Digory, looking at the new Narnia, seeing that it is a fuller, more real version of the old Narnia, comments that, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato.”[2] Lewis’ Platonism is one in which ideas becomes concrete forms. In heaven, Lewis says, is where heaven is a place where subject and object come together: thought and form become one when subject experiences object.[3] Thus, the object one predicates pleasure to is in full knowledge and the ignorance–the lapse–is removed.
There is an epistemic superiority in heaven over epistemology on Earth. Lewis develops this idea in Perelandra.[4] Ransom is frustrated in his attempts to relate his story to his friends on Earth because it is the words that are vague. The reason why the thing cannot be expressed is because it’s too definite for language. Lewis develops his theory of the epistemic split and the fall when Ransom comes to understand that he must defeat his demon-possessed adversary, the Un-man, through combat.[5] Ransom notes,
Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and both from fact was purely terrestrial—was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the fall.[6]
Thus, again, as depicted in The Last Battle, the forms of the abstract are reunited with the physical, which was split from the fall. Lewis makes a prediction to the end of the subject/object split and the problem of knowing:
The old, richly imaginative thought which still survives in Plato has to submit to the deathlike, but indispensable, process of logical analysis: nature and spirit, matter and mind, fact and myth, the literal and the metaphorical, have to be more and more sharply separated, till at last a purely mathematical universe and a purely subjective mind confront one another across an unbridgeable chasm. But from this descent also, if thought itself is to survive, there must be re-ascent and the Christian conception provides for it. Those who attain the glorious resurrection will see the dry bones clothed again with flesh, the fact and myth remarried, the literal and the metaphorical rushing together.[7]
The relation sowing of subjectivity reaps objectivity. This knowledge of objectivity waits in the welcoming of heaven when the lapse of knowledge and illicit pleasures are removed by subject’s revelation of the object. The ultimate fullness of pleasure, the unveiled eudaimonia, is eschatological. The problem that complete and perfect fulfillment of pleasure and happiness for us is that it is such a great intrinsic good that we succumb to the temptation to try to attain this perfection, our telos, in this life, which leads to an evil act. If one is seeking perfect pleasure and happiness in this life this person ought not be a Christian and should look elsewhere.[8]
[1] CS Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Scriber, 2003), 74.
[2] Lewis, The Last Battle, 212. Starr, 166.
[3] Charlie W. Starr, “Meaning, Meanings, and Epistemology in CS Lewis,” Mythlore 97 (2001): 167.
[4] Ibid., 174.
[5] Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 44. Starr, 175.
[6] Lewis, Perelandra, 143-44.
[7] Lewis, Miracles, in The Complete CS Lewis Signature Classics (New York: Harper, 2002), 445. Starr, 175-76.
[8] Lewis, God in the Dock, 58.