Shadowlands. - movie reviews

Christian Century, Feb 23, 1994 by Ralph C. Wood

In A Grief Observed Lewis confesses that Davidman's death served to crush all that was self-confidently rationalistic in his faith. In passages darker than anything in Kafka or Sartre, Lewis accuses God of being a Cosmic Sadist. Yet he does not recoil from such despair into a stoic humanism. He argues, on the contrary, that God taught him to love Joy truly by taking her painfully from him: to make him see that, because their love had achieved its earthly limit, it was ready for heavenly fulfillment. Lewis the Platonist Christian believed that we dwell in a world of shadows, not (as the film suggests) because it is filled with suffering, but because it is a reflection of the eternal world whose Light seeks to pierce and perfect it.

Lewis reports that Davidman's last words were not "You have made me happy," but "I am at peace with God." It is highly significant that they were spoken not to Lewis himself but to Austin Farrer, the Oxford theologian who was also the couple's spiritual mentor. Joy Davidman knew that, undying though her love for Lewis most certainly was, it was not her ultimate hope. "She smiled," Lewis declares, "but not at me. Poi si torno all' eternal fontana." Like Beatrice in Dante's Purgatorio, Joy turned her final smile away from her earthly love to the Eternal Font who is its source and end, its creator and redeemer. The tears of all things are swallowed up in the glad triumph of God.