C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle: Christianity & Plato

On the Narnian heaven.

Jun 17, 2025

Cover image from my Mother’s 1980 Lions edition of The Last Battle

Nietszsche once called Christianity ‘Platonism for the masses.’ He said in Beyond Good and Evil that: "The worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error—namely, Plato's invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself.”

He is referring to Plato’s idea of the form of forms, the Good, described by Socrates in the well known allegory of the cave, the crescendo of Plato’s Republic. ‘The Good,’ is the final point of ascent out of the cave, past the light that reflects shadows onto the wall, out of the cave into the ‘real world’":

…the last thing to be seen in the realm of knowledge is goodness;[…]it is responsible for everything that is right and fine, whatever the circumstances, and that in the visible realm it is the progenitor of light and the source of light, and in the intelligible realm it is the source and provider of truth and knowledge.

Nietszsche saw this as an “error” because he despised Christianity and everything it represented, but he is right about the influence of the idea to Christianity, this short passage from a text largely about the ideal city state and its philosopher kings threads through the history of Christianity, and in 1956 it found itself as the inspiration for a children’s story by C.S. Lewis, the last book in his Narnia series, perhaps his most controversial, questionable, but arguably his best: The Last Battle.

The Last Battle culminates with the end of the Narnian world, and in the final chapters the children step through a stable door which turns out to be a doorway into another world. As they go further into this sublime and sunlight world they find it to be strangely similar to Narnia, in fact a kind of exact copy of it. As they go further in they find it somehow contains in it England as well, eventually one of the characters, Digory, realises where they are, he cries “It's all in Plato, all in Plato: Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?”

This new Narnia, they discover, is somehow more real than Narnia ever was, Narnia it turns out, like England, was only a shadow or a copy of a real world: “the new Narnia was a deeper country, every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can’t describe it any better than that: if you ever get there you will know what I mean.”

This is essentially C.S. Lewis’ attempt to describe or imagine heaven by employing Plato’s idea of the forms. Lewis had an obsession throughout his life with the idea of longing, and he believed that all of our desires ultimately directed us towards a transcendent horizon fulfilled by something ultimately more real than what we are experiencing now, the form or reality of existence for which we are made.

You may question whether this is a proper understanding of Plato’s original idea of the forms. Socrates’ arguments seem to portray the forms not as something that actually exists but as a kind of qualification for intelligibility through participation in an absolute. Given that he claimed there was a form for everything including “largeness” or “smallness” or “two-ness,” it seems less an argument that there is a perfect chair somewhere that all chairs participate in in order to be chairs and more a hierarchy of a kind of understanding. The ascension to the good has much tradition in the neoplatonist ideas but seems in Plato to be more about the role of the mind to possess knowledge and wisdom, and so is more about transcendental intelligibility.

But the Narnia stories themselves are essentially a mythology, and the idea that myth originates as a belief in participation in a world more real than our own has much precedent, represented by an African bushman’s description of their rock paintings as representing “the world behind this one that we see with our eyes.”1 We find in sites such as Lascaux in France images of a world that Carl Jung would call archetypes, and that historian of religion Mircea Eliade would call illud tempus, a phrase in Latin that means “that time” and refers to a kind of archetypal sacred time in which myths take place, particularly of creation and regeneration. Karen Armstrong describes it: “All ancient religion was based on ..[seeing].. every single person, object or experience as a replica of a reality in a sacred world that is more effective and enduring than our own. When an Australian aborigine hunts his prey, he feels wholly at one with the First Hunter, caught up in a richer and more potent reality that makes him feel fully alive and complete.”2

This to some degree is C.S. Lewis’ interpretation of Plato. Out there is a world we are made for, and this shadowland world is flooded with meaning to the degree that we participate more fully in that archetypical reality upon which this one we experience depends. For Lewis one of the important ways we experience this is represented by Narnia itself, in creativity and imagination. Narnia is after all a metaphor for childhood imagination, he says in The Voyage of the Dawntreader that Narnia “was the name of their own private and secret country. Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect their secret country was real. They had already visited it twice; not in a game or a dream, but in reality.”

So does his metaphor at the end of The Last Battle work? The answer is yes, but only to the extent to which we admits its failure. Something of the portal image, the stable door into a world more real, more archetypal and more familiar, a world related to the transcendent horizons of our desires is a potent and intriguing metaphor and one of the profound ways in which C.S. Lewis expressed some of his philosophical ideas within his narratives. Its problem, though, is that beyond the things the metaphor insinuates, all you can really then go on to, as he does, is to basically describe something symbolically like our reality but…better. Hence why the children can run really fast, a unicorn can climb a waterfall, and the fruit tastes incredible. But since the portal has ultimately arrived at another world in which everyone is the same person, partaking in the same contingent narrative existence, the result is something that might work as a happily ever after motif for a story, but that in reality sounds kind of boring. You might wonder if the children would eventually want to go back to the old Narnia just to have some excitement and adventures once they’d got bored of eating amazing tasting fruit and running around.

Of course no metaphor is perfect as a description of something or it wouldn’t be a metaphor, metaphors work by feeling and association and necessarily employ our imagination. But as far as the metaphor works I think Lewis’ heaven gets at several important ideas, that of formal participation and that of a reality conceived as having the possibility of being or feeling more real.

Many may know something of the strange way in which a sense of participation in myths and stories gives life a greater sense of meaning. Karen Armstrong’s description of a reality “more effective and enduring than our own” that “makes us feel fully alive and complete” might well describe a significant part of why we watch movies and care about stories, because we partake in them by imagination and our lives are then given greater meaning by the degrees to which we feel ourselves to be participating in those more ideal representations of the stories we act out. We may lose sight of this as many of the story formats in our culture degrade into entertainment and spectacle driven by little but profit, but the attachment so many feel to Tolkien’s Middle Earth mythology in both his books and Peter Jackson’s movies gives a good example of this.3

Yet C.S. Lewis only argued that we can know this by desire. In spite of the metaphor that ends the last battle, he didn’t specifically argue in his writing that heaven would be a replica of England, but instead that we know something about heaven through our longing for something beyond all the objects of our desire. His point is that what we long for is somehow in the things that are familiar to us, but that those things only signify that which we truly desire, and what we truly desire is something more real.

There may be a weird analogy here in the experiences of psychedelics. The now late-Psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths led some of the first significant research into the benefits of a psilocybin trip, in which volunteers experienced “a sense of unity, a feeling that all people and things are connected, accompanied by a sense of sacredness… love, joy, and a deeply felt sense of encountering ultimate reality.” Interestingly Griffiths then said that “These experiences are felt to be more real and more true than everyday waking consciousness.”

I doubt C.S. Lewis would approve of psychedelia, but surely something in this statement of a transcendent unity that is more real than our ordinary consciousness is something he might recognise as the ideal of the Christian heaven. He might also point out that the idea that we can get there by taking a pill or that simply having an experience of it would actually be the thing itself is misguided and wrong, for all these things would for Lewis be signposts towards the coordinating Christian story that he described to Tolkien on their famous walk together that led to Tolkien’s conversion as a “true myth.” Like the true Narnia, all of our reality is true to the degree that it participates in the Christian story, that reality that we know now only by imagination and its generation of longing, as Lewis beautifully describes it in the final chapter of the Last Battle:

“Perhaps you will get some idea of it if you think like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a looking-glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different — deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know.”

This Isle is Full of Noises

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