It’s an everlasting movement away from God.
Heaven is this ever-increasing, further up, further into joy, into God, into life. It is, in one sense, the opposite of heaven. It’s a gnawing and an ache, but it’s oriented inward, downward into the abyss. Hell is an everlasting ruin, a decay, crumbling, retreating into yourself, a loss of all rationality and joy, a plunging into misery. This is where Lewis is brilliant in his depictions. At the same time, when Paul describes the wrath of God being poured out (Romans 1), it looks like an increasing process of dehumanization-God giving us over to our desires and finding that we become less and less human. Sinners are cast or thrown into hell, into the lake of fire. I’ve tried to do a lot of thinking about that because I don’t think that those two ways of thinking are mutually exclusive.
Lewis affirmed that hell is retributed wrath, but tended to accent (almost in everything he wrote) the more self-inflicted side with statements like “Hell is locked from the inside.” The Bible seems to talk a lot about the pouring out of God’s wrath and yet what Lewis is talking about is something we do for ourselves.
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