One of the persistent themes that C. S. Lewis addresses in his space trilogy is that humanity has a capacity to unmake itself. Indeed, there is some sense in which Lewis sees sin as being the unmaking of the person and the Last Judgment as being a kind of non-reversible unmaking.
If you read something like The Great Divorce, part of the brilliance of his imagination is that you actually see how people in Hell become less human the longer they are there—they shrink, they become purely inward facing, and they retreat from anything beyond themselves.
You see something similar in the brilliant depiction of the Last Judgment in The Last Battle: Talking beasts who hate Aslan appear before him, see him, and something in their face changes and they lose the ability to speak.
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Jake Meador
Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, National Review, Comment, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. He is a contributing editor with Plough and a contributing writer at the Dispatch. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.
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