Between Heaven & Hell by Peter Kreeft
I found this small book, Peter Kreeft’s Between Heaven & Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley (yes, an extremely long subtitle), to be a surprisingly good read. The premise of the book itself greatly attracted me. It’s not generally well known that C. S. Lewis, John F. Kennedy, and Aldous Huxley all died on the very same day in 1963. The Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft (teaches at Boston College) decided he’d have some fun with the coincidence and write up an imaginary dialogue the three might have in a sort of state of limbo or a way station after death where they would discuss the mystery of life and death from their (very) different perspectives. Great idea, but I had tried to start it a couple of other times and my initial impression of the depiction of Lewis was one of disapprobation (to use too big of a word)—it didn’t strike me as authentic. This time I felt the same initial annoyance but plugged through it and things got better.
But in any case, Kreeft does explain up front that his intention is not historical precision. What attracted him to the idea of the imaginary dialogue was what the men represented, which was three major philosophical perspectives (or “worldviews”) on the nature of reality prevalent in history and in the world today: Western theism (orthodox Christianity), Western humanism (in the sense of being focused strictly on natural human concerns with no concerns for the supernatural), and Eastern pantheism. So while trying to stick pretty closely to their historical personalities, the argument between perspectives is what he’s chiefly concerned with. Lewis, the famous Christian apologist, represents the first. Kennedy, a modernist (or liberal) Catholic, represents the second. And Huxley, an advocate of what he himself called the “perennial philosophy” (heavily influenced by Eastern mysticism), the essential oneness of all things, represents the third. Thus commences the Socratic-style dialogue between the three, with Lewis playing the part of Socrates (in life a master debater).
With Kreeft being a (historic) Catholic (and something of a Lewis scholar), the reader has a pretty good idea of what’s ahead, but his arguments aren’t for that reason any weaker. In the end I found myself excited to watch the unfolding of the arguments from different perspectives—I found Kreeft’s central argument (via Lewis), on the identity of Christ, to not necessarily be conclusive but to nevertheless be compelling. My chief reservation in his depiction of Christianity is that salvation and redemption entail that we become divine (in union with Christ), an idea, or at least language, that I think is far mistaken (I don’t think union with Christ is of that sort). But in the end I appreciated the sense of having a basic understanding of the big picture panorama of the essentially different perspectives—together encompassing a vast number of people—on the nature of reality that the dialogue gives. And it deals with some important issues regarding the nature and history of Christianity, perhaps both helpful for those within and without, in a way that’s generally easy to follow.
