Once again we return to The Great Divorce! Today we get to meet a new visitor from Hell, “The Hard-Bitten Ghost”…
S2E11: “The Hard-Bitten Ghost” (Download)
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Time Stamps
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10:22 – Chapter 150-word Summary
11:23 – Chapter Discussion
40:09 – Haikus
Show Notes
• Matt’s mother finally started catching up on our podcast…and heard me call her out. Sorry Mrs. Bush!
• The quote-of-the-week:
“That’s just where all the parsons and moralists have got the thing upside down. They keep on asking us to alter ourselves. But if the people who run the show are so clever and so powerful, why don’t they find something to suit their public?”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 7)
• Our drinks this week were very boring, given that I gave up alcohol for Lent and Matt is doing Exodus 90. He had a La Croix and I had a coffee, but with oatmilk after Kate recommended it.
• Matt and I had a bit of a catch-up as we haven’t actually recorded together for a few weeks. Matt has been journeying with two people who will be entering the Church this Easter. I’ve also got two friends entering the Church this year too, Jerry from our C.S. Lewis bookclub and my nextdoor neighbour, Megan.
Matt has been reading Cold-Case Christianity by J. Warner Wallace, who also happens to follow us on Twitter!
We spoke about my interview last week with Joseph Pearce. We’ve had good responses from both Catholic and Protestant listeners. Some Protestant listeners have asked us to explain the Catholic belief in the Papacy and Mary. Matt and I haven’t quite decided whether or not we’re going to do this on the show, but we’re thinking of bringing in a guest to explain it, who is also a great C.S. Lewis fan! If you have any strong feelings about this, please contact us.
I’ve also given a few talks recently in LA and Kansas:
- What is the point of Christianity?
- Doing what you love for Jesus
- Life in Christ, not mere improvement but transformation
• Matt then gave a 150-word summary of today’s chapter:
Heading downstream, Lewis meets The Hard-Bitten Ghost who asks him if he’s going back to the town. The ghost was a well-travelled man on earth, but singularly unimpressed by what he saw. He’s likewise disappointed with both Heaven and Hell.
He argues it’s impossible to stay in Heaven due to the hardness of the environment. When Lewis suggests that they will become acclimatized, the ghost says he’s been told that lie his entire life. He cynically asks Lewis what he would think of a hotel which told you that you’d grow to enjoy eating bad eggs eventually! He also complains that there’s nothing to do and that “It’s up to the Management to find something that doesn’t bore us”.
The ghost prepares to leave and asks Lewis if he’ll join him. Lewis cheekily responds that “There doesn’t seem to be much point in going anywhere on your showing”.
150-word summary of Chapter 7 of The Great Divorce
• I gave a summary of the previous episode where the Bowler-Hatted Ghost tries to take apples from the tree by the waterfall.
• Lewis heads downstream, back towards the bus. He seems to be faltering… It’s at this point that he meets the Hard-Bitten (cynical, jaded) Ghost:
“I turned and saw a tall ghost standing with its back against a tree, chewing a ghostly cheroot. It was that of a lean hard-bitten man with grey hair and a gruff, but not uneducated voice: the kind of man I have always instinctively felt to be reliable.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 7)
A cheroot is a kind of cigar that is untapered and open at both ends.
• The Ghost asks Lewis if he’s going back and Lewis says he’s unsure. The Ghost says that he is and says he doesn’t think staying is even a possibility:
“Of course there never was any question of our staying. You can’t eat the fruit and you can’t drink the water and it takes you all your time to walk on the grass. A human being couldn’t live here. All that idea of staying is only an advertisement stunt”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 7)
When asked why he came in the first place, the Ghost says he came to just look around.
• It turns out that the Ghost was very well-travelled on earth. Although he’s seen many wonders of the world, he doesn’t think much of them:
“Not worth looking at. They’re all advertisement stunts. All run by the same people. There’s a combine, you know, a World Combine, that just takes an Atlas and decides where they’ll have a Sight.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 7)
• Matt and I talked about an article I found which listed the most overrated tourist traps. I wasn’t impressed with the Golden Gate Bridge. I explained why this was the case and what I should have done instead. I wasn’t impressed with Plymouth Rock. Both Matt and I were disappointed with Stonehenge. We argued a bit over Times Square. We both loved The Tower of London.
Listeners, please message us with your most disappointing tourist traps!
• The Ghost is even disappointed with Hell, expecting it to be more existing!
• The Ghost thinks it’s a lie that one would grow more solid the longer one stayed:
“They told me in the nursery that if I were good I’d be happy. And they told me at school that Latin would get easier as I went on. After I’d been married a month some fool was telling me that there were always difficulties at first, but with Tact and Patience I’d soon ‘settle down’ and like it! And all through two wars what didn’t they say about the good time coming if only I’d be a brave boy and go on being shot at? Of course they’ll play the old game here if anyone’s fool enough to listen.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 7)
I suggested that perhaps he is expecting challenges to cease as time goes on. I shared this rhyme we had at school regarding Latin:
Latin is a dead language,
English schoolboy rhyme
As dead as dead can be,
It killed the Ancient Romans,
And now it’s killing me!
Matt suggested that the Ghost’s problem might be that he’s trying to do all this in his own strength, rather than by the grace of God.
• The Ghost is a conspiracy theorist:
“It’s never a new management. You’ll always find the same old Ring. I know all about dear, kind Mummie coming up to your bedroom and getting all she wants to know out of you: but you always found she and Father were the same firm really. Didn’t we find that both sides in all the wars were run by the same Armament Firms? or the same Firm, which is behind the Jews and the Vatican and the Dictators and the Democracies and all the rest of it. All this stuff up here is run by the same people as the Town. They’re just laughing at us.”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 7)
He argues that, if Heaven and Hell were really at war, Heaven would be able to rescue everyone in Hell easily. I compared it to rescuing a fish from a river and putting it on the riverbank.
• The Ghost questions the good of being rescued:
“What the hell would there be to do here?”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 7)
I think this is a wink from Lewis in the text. Hell has no place in Heaven!
When Lewis asks the Ghost what he would like to do, if he had the choice, he says:
“It’s up to the Management to find something that doesn’t bore us, isn’t it? It’s their job. Why should we do it for them? That’s just where all the parsons and moralists have got the thing upside down. They keep on asking us to alter ourselves. But if the people who run the show are so clever and so powerful, why don’t they find something to suit their public?”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 7)
The Ghost wants morality and Heaven to fit themselves to him, rather than for him to change to how he ought to be.
• The Ghost announces that he’s leaving and asks if Lewis is coming with him. Lewis points out that if the Ghost is right, then it doesn’t matter either way!
When Jack remarks that at least here it’s not raining, the Ghost points out that when it does rain in this country, it’ll shoot you full of bullets! With that, he leaves…
• I argued that the Ghost refuses to allow himself to be vulnerable and has therefore lost the ability to experience Joy and love. Love, in particular, requires vulnerability:
To love at all is to be vulnerable
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
It reminded me of the Dwarfs from The Last Battle:
“We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs…”
C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle
Matt referred to this Instagram post where I quote Lewis from God in the Dock:
“I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of port could do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable I certainly don’t recommend Christianity”
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock
• I suggested that there is a Christian version of the Hard-Bitten Ghost, the one who goes to church, but doesn’t want to change and certainly doesn’t want to be challenged. Such a person finds fault with everyone – his Pastor, wife, children, job, boss, …
• I ended our discussion of this chapter by talking about the chapter on Hope in Mere Christianity:
There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 10)
Doesn’t this sound like our Hard-Bitten Ghost? Lewis goes on to explain that there are three different ways of dealing with this disappointment:
The Fool’s Way – He puts the blame on the things themselves. He goes on all his life thinking that if only he tried another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday, or whatever it is, then, this time, he really would catch the mysterious something we are all after.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 10)
Was this this reason that the Ghost was so well travelled? Was he looking for something new and better?
The Way of the Disillusioned “Sensible Man.” – He soon decides that the whole thing was moonshine… It tends to make him a prig (he is apt to be rather superior…)
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 10)
This certainly describes how he speaks to Lewis in Heaven. However, Lewis says that the right way to respond to this disappointment is the Christian way:
…supposing infinite happiness really is there, waiting for us? Supposing one really can reach the rainbow’s end? In that case it would be a pity to find out too late (a moment after death) that by our supposed “common sense” we had stifled in ourselves the faculty of enjoying it.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 10)
Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex.
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.
• As usual, I ended with some Haikus, firstly for the Hard-Bitten Ghost:
Choose Heaven or Hell,
Haikus for the Hard-Bitten Ghost
And they’ve got you either way!
The same firm in charge!
Why ask me to change?
Make me happy without it…
…if you are so great
Heaven does not care
If it did, Hell would vanish,
wiped out by angels
…and I even wrote one for Lewis, following his conversation with the Hard-Bitten Ghost:
That was depressing!
Haiku for Lewis
Can I really not stay here?
Is it all a trick?
