It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door

Or, in the case of our travelers in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, it’s a dangerous business stepping onto the omnibus that will take them into the Valley of the Shadow of Life. Good can have a sort of Terrible quality to it. A Terrible Good, as our friend Charles Williams says, is perhaps exactly what we might expect.

Overall, I think the book is addressing not only heaven and hell, but also God’s goodness. There seems to be an elephant in the room that American evangelicals are finally recognizing. How on earth (bad word choice?) could some people end up in hell if God is all-good and all-powerful? If Christianity boils down to “accepting Jesus,” what happens to all of the people that never had a chance? Why shouldn’t God bestow his grace upon them? And what about those who have “accepted Jesus,” but failed to actually accept Him? Can their salvation be denied, or are they themselves capable of denying it even as they cry, “Lord, Lord?” If we have a choice to become who we are in Christ, doesn’t that imply that we have a choice to withdraw into ourselves as well? Obviously there are more questions than this, but let’s continue on.

I find two things to be striking in The Great Divorce, as far as structure goes. First, a good deal of the book is made up of overheard conversations between “ghosts,” the remaining fragments of people, and their magnificent, resurrected (fully realized?) friends or family. It is apparent that Lewis is the one listening in, himself a ghost.

Second, Lewis, while explicitly telling us in multiple places not to take any descriptions of the afterlife as literal by any stretch of the imagination, nevertheless employs many scenes in which he uses his imagined (dreamt up?) ideas of what some aspects of heaven or hell might be like. We are presented with specters of half-people, solid water, unimaginably heavy apples, and stampeding unicorns. There is an interesting blend of the familiar and the fantastic.

In addition to these structural observations, a few of Lewis’s reoccurring themes and ideas appear here. Two that particularly pertain to the topic of this class are 1. The idea that everything is coming to a point and 2. Time is a lens that we mortals must look through, but God and the truest of realities exist in an ever-present now. These two ideas are quite intertwined. Lewis thinks that good and evil appear to be, and indeed become more distinct as time goes on, and not only this, but even different goods become more distinct from one another. Things become what they truly are; the past appears as it truly was. Looking at it from the perspective of time, this is a sort of eschatological view of the past. In retrospect, the identity of everyone in the ever-present now of eternity is the sum of all past choices.

With the big picture now laid out, let’s join Lewis in listening in on a few select conversations.
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The Big Man

One of the first conversations we overhear is between the Big Man, an employer, and one of his employees, Len. The Big Man can’t comprehend why he, a self-described honest, hard working man, is in the Grey Town, while Len, who murdered his friend Jack, is in the High Country. He demands his rights, over and over. Len informs him that the only way forward is to give up his rights for something so much better. The Big Man is insulted; he doesn’t want any “bleeding charity,” even though the “Bleeding Charity” is the only thing that can save him. Len didn’t get what he deserved, and he informs the Big Man that he wasn’t such a good chap after all. He was uncharitable and downright nasty to not only his employees, but also to his family. The Big Man appeals to his rights. “I’m not taking any impudence from you about my private affairs.” But of course we find out that “there are no private affairs” in the end.


The Episcopal Bishop

This conversation makes me a little uneasy, probably because I see my own reflection in this man.
Here we have an interesting fellow, an Episcopal ghost who has become so consumed in thinking about God academically that he has completely lost sight of God. He has become so enamored with free inquiry that he cannot palate knowing the truth when it is offered in full certainty. The Bishop’s friend asks, “Because the Middle Ages erred in one direction, does it follow that there is no error in the opposite direction?” Does this mean that all seeking must end, though? Lewis seems to say that searching for the truth with the abstract intellect might end, but it will replaced by the thing itself. Truth will be fully experienced. As Lewis often says, desired were made to be fulfilled, and our longing for truth will be satisfied in full. In the end, the bishop does not wish to be satisfied, and he turns back from the edge of that which he claimed to seek. Lewis seems to think it is fully possible to choose hell, even while humming “City of God, how broad and far.”


The Grumble

The literary Lewis is met by none other than George Macdonald, the man he considered his greatest teacher. From here on, they are together. They come across a poor little ghost, who is incessantly grumbling to the Spirit that has come to talk to her. Lewis feels quite sorry for her. Surely, she should be alright! She is more silly than wicked, having fallen into the habit of grumbling. Macdonald says there is hope for her – if she is still a grumbler, and not a grumble. He goes on to say that the best way of understanding damnation is an approach to nothingness. Hell is chosen when the self is given up.


The Painter

Lewis and Macdonald overhear a few more ghosts before coming upon a ghostly painter, and one of his glorified contemporaries. The ghost is appalled to find out that he cannot continue making art straight away. The Spirit informs him that his problem lies in missing the point of art. “Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light.” There is a danger in art, leading further and further away from this first love of what is, down through the love of telling to the petty hunger for reputation and success. We are granted the gift of seeing all art, even our own, as it truly is, without the cloud of pride or modesty obscuring its true beauty. The ghost wonders in horror, “Do you mean there are no famous men?” To which his old friend responds, “They are all famous. They are all known, remembered, recognized by the only Mind that can give a perfect judgment.” This is too much for the ghost to take in, and he heads back to hell, resolving to save art.


Mother Pam

One of the hardest conversations is between Pam and her glorified brother. Pam seems like the last person to deserve hell. Her crime seems to be that she loved her son Michael too much. But, as we find out, it was not truly love, but a corruption of it. She expected too much from Michael, and after he died, she held it over the heads of everyone, not the least being her husband and daughter. Her problem was she claimed ownership over that which was never hers in the first place. If she had learned to give up Michael, she could have truly loved him. Another one of Lewis’s reoccurring themes is voiced by Macdonald here.

"There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite cold be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly… And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil."

We don’t see the end of this conversation with Pam, but this idea is clearly shown through what was seen.
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There are obviously many more conversations and ideas to be explored, but I’m not going to reveal all of them. There needs to be some incentive to read the book yourself!