“It is more important that Heaven should exist than that any of us should reach it”

“It is more important that Heaven should exist than that any of us should reach it” is the maxim C. S. Lewis draws from his passage through Idealism. It names that philosophy’s paradoxical religious value: its Absolute could remain beyond human beings, yet the existence of a reality in which finitude and contraries are reconciled mattered more than the prospect of personal arrival.

The maxim within Idealism

Lewis describes the Absolute as an impersonal or elusive principle, safely distant from the demands of a personal God. Idealism could supply religious language and emotion without requiring obedience: the Absolute was there, but would not come here to act upon human lives. Lewis characterizes this arrangement as a one-way movement of desire, without a responding divine love or anything to fear or obey.

That distance, however, did not make the Absolute worthless to him. It contained, in his account, the reconciliation of contraries, transcendence of finitude, and hidden glory that constituted the perfectly real. Its quality resembled Heaven, though the philosophy’s own terms denied access to it: human beings were appearances, and to be in that ultimate reality would mean no longer to be themselves. Lewis consequently compares adherents of the philosophy to Dante’s virtuous pagans, living in desire without hope, and to Spinoza, whose love of God did not include a wish that God love him in return.

Why existence matters more than arrival

The maxim gives priority to the reality of Heaven over the individual’s reward. It does not claim that reaching Heaven is unimportant; rather, Lewis’s formulation makes its existence the more fundamental good. A transcendent reality can be worthy of gratitude even when the person who recognizes it cannot claim a place within it.

Lewis says he would be sorry not to have undergone this experience and judges it more religious than many experiences called Christian. The qualification matters: Idealism offered him something genuine, but incomplete. Its unreachable Absolute allowed him to affirm a glory beyond appearances while insulating that glory from any direct claim upon him.

Retrospective significance

In retrospect, Lewis calls the Absolute’s attraction one stage in a movement he had not understood at the time. He suspects willful blindness in treating this position as distinct from theism, and describes the Absolute as a kind of protected substitute that supplied some of the conveniences of belief without belief in God. Nevertheless, the experience brought him closer to understanding the words of thanksgiving for divine glory. He connects that advance with Bergson’s demonstration of necessary existence and with an earlier hint supplied by the Norse gods, whom he had not believed in.

The maxim thus preserves both the strength and the limit of Lewis’s Idealist phase. It records his willingness to value a reality beyond the self even when it offered no promise of personal fulfillment; at the same time, the surrounding reflection points toward a more consequential question than whether the Absolute is there: whether the divine can come here and make a claim upon human beings.