C.S. Lewis: Finally, a Conclusion
I promise to wrap this up quickly.
When Lewis says "nature makes nothing in vain," he implies that if all sane people long for perfect happiness, there is a good chance that God intends us to take this as a sign that the goal is real, although we may have to struggle for it (achieve heaven, and avoid hell).
In saying "nature makes nothing in vain," Lewis is more or less quoting Aristotle. There is some similarity or overlap between Lewis and Aristotle, and there is even some truth to Lewis's suggestion (in The Abolition of Man) that there is a "tradition" that is with Aristotle, and then there is "modernity" that is against Aristotle.
In both the Ethics and the Politics, Aristotle describes peaks of excellence available to human beings, and strongly suggests that nature supports these peaks--even that it is the peaks that are truly natural, not the messy alternatives that are all too common. Yet somehow Aristotle is firmly "this-worldly," not otherworldly. Leo Strauss says in The City and Man (p. 41) that Aristotle displays "'optimism in the original sense of the term: the world is the best possible world; we have no right to assume that the evils with which it abounds, and especially the evils which do not originate in human folly, could have been absent without bringing about still greater evils; man has no right to complain and to rebel...the nature of man is enslaved in many ways so that only very few, and even these not always, can achieve happiness..."
As far as immortality is concerned, Aristotle says matter-of-factly in the Ethics that "death is the end." More importantly, in Book I he deals with concerns about the "ancestors": does the happiness of dead ancestors depend on their living descendants? This seems to be an indirect way of dealing with concerns about what happens to us after death. Aristotle doesn't simply dismiss such concerns, like the village atheist, but he does strongly imply that people should not be led by fear to trust the priests.
In Plato's Apology of Socrates, Socrates implies that if the afterlife is a place where he can cross-examine famous people, this is about as good as life could get (40e-41d). Such a thought does not seem totally lacking from Dante's description of "limbo." Lewis, by comparison, "moralizes."
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