We arrive today at the final chapter of The Great Divorce. Lewis sees a vision of a chessboard to help him understand the relationship between time and eternity and the sun, which throughout this book has been hidden, finally rises…
S2E21: “Sunrise” (Download)
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Time Stamps
In case your podcast application has the ability to jump to certain time codes, here are the timestamps for the different parts of the episode.
09:20 – Chapter 150-word Summary
10:20 – Chapter Discussion
38:49 – “Last Call” Bell
42:02 – Haikus
Show Notes
• The quote of the week was the climax of the book:
Screaming, I buried my face in the folds of my Teacher’s robe. “The morning! The morning!” I cried, “I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.” But it was too late. The light, like solid blocks, intolerable of edge and weight, came thundering upon my head.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 14)
• I saw the Tolkien movie this past week and, despite the fact that Tolkien’s faith pushed deep into the background, I did enjoy it. Matt referred to Bishop Barron’s recent videos (Video #1 | Video #2) on J.R.R. Tolkien.
• I met Peter Kreeft, an author and Philosophy Professor from Boston Collage. He came to San Diego to promote his new book Symbol or Substance, in which he proposed an imagined conversation about the Eucharist between C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Billy Graham. We will be giving away a free signed copy of the book at the end of this Season by randomly choosing a review of our podcast on iTunes.
• I read from an article in which Lewis is attacked for not accurately representing the eating habits of non-talking beavers:
“The United Kingdom is suddenly bereft of beavers and apparently it’s all C.S. Lewis’s fault. The Times of London and the Daily Mail report that a certain Mr. Ben Goldfarb is on a crusade to reintroduce the mighty beaver to Great Britain, and is finding that “The Chronicles of Narnia,” which features a married beaver couple…is standing in his way. In Lewis’s iconic tale of a fantasyland accessed through the back of a magical wardrobe, the beaver pair is depicted as sharing a hot fish supper with the some of the book’s human characters… “They’re totally herbivorous. That’s one of the funny things about beaver reproduction in the UK: every British schoolchild reads Narnia and they grow up thinking that beavers are going to eat all the fish. That is biologically inaccurate,” The Daily Mail reports that Goldfarb did acknowledge that he was complaining about fictional character”
Daily Wire Article
• I read my summary of this chapter:
Lewis sees “a great assembly of gigantic forms…standing…about a little silver table…[with]… little…chessmen…[who] went to and fro…[each a] representative of… one of the great presences that stood by… the immortal souls of those same men and women”.
This vision terrifies Lewis and he asks MacDonald whether “these conversations between the Spirits and the Ghosts were they only the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago?”. His teacher says that you might alternatively say they were “anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all things”, but that it would be better to say neither. The important point was that, on this journey, Lewis had seen the choices we make a bit more clearly than he had on earth.
The story culminates with the sun rising… and Lewis waking up on the floor of his study, to discover that it had all been a dream.
Summary of Chapter 14
Matt learnt from my summary how to correctly pronounce “mimicry”…and then mispronounces it for the entirety of the episode.
• This chapter begins with Lewis seeing a vision:
I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence, standing forever about a little silver table and looking upon it. And on the table there were little figures like chessmen who went to and fro doing this and that. And I knew that each chessman was the idolum or puppet representative of some one of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimicry or pantomime, which delineated the inmost nature of his giant master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 14)
I suggested that this image could have been improved by the “gigantic forms” visibly changing as a result of the moves on the chessboard, rather in the way that the portrait of Dorian in The Picture of Dorian Gray changed over the course of the book to reflect the state of his soul. This would have been another way of communicating Lewis’ teaching about Heavenly and Hellish Creatures. I connected this to the health meter in video games such as Batman.
In his spiritual autobiography, Surprised By Joy, Lewis describes his life as a chess game, titling chapters “Check” and “Checkmate”. I suggested that this offers us hope because that means that God Himself is involved in this game.
Matt connected this vision of time and timelessness to a line from Mere Christianity:
Humanity is already “saved” in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation. But the really tough work-the bit we could not have done for ourselves-has been done for us. We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts; it has already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves open to the one Man in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of being God, is also a real man, He will do it in us and for us. Remember what I said about “good infection.” One of our own race has this new life: if we get close to Him we shall catch it from Him.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 5)
• Lewis reacts badly to the vision because it might suggest that everything we have seen thus far pointless:
“Is that the truth? Then is all that I have been seeing in this country false? These conversations between the Spirits and the Ghosts were they only the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago?”
“Or might ye not as well say, anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all things? But ye’d do better to say neither. Ye saw the choices a bit more clearly than ye could see them on earth: the lens was clearer. But it was still seen through the lens”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 14)
MacDonald says that he was brought here so he could see clearly the choices that we make.
• Lewis discovers that this has all been a dream:
Then-then-am I not really here, Sir?”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 14)
“No, Son,” said he kindly, taking my hand in his. “It is not so good as that. The bitter drink of death is still before you”
I compared this to a line of Lewis which is often quoted out-of-context about there being “better things ahead”. Lewis had been writing to a lady who thought that she would soon be dying:
“Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady
As it turned out, Lewis would die before her. I read an extract of a letter which Lewis wrote to Sister Penelope, an Anglican nun, about his experience of nearly dying in 1963:
“I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma and perhaps the almost continuous prayers of my friends did it – but it would have been a luxuriously easy passage, and one almost regrets having the door shut in one’s face… To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard… When you did, and if ‘prison visiting’ is allowed, come down and look me up in Purgatory”
Letter from C.S. Lewis to Sister Penelope
Matt and I discussed what it would be like to be on the cusp of Heaven and then to be brought back and I referenced an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Matt mentioned the controversial book Heaven is for real.
• MacDonald emphasizes that what he has experienced was a dream:
“…if ye come to tell of what ye have seen, make it plain that it was but a dream. See ye make it very plain. Give no poor fool the pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows. I’ll have no Sweden-borgs and no Vale Owens among my children”
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 14)
I have met lots of people who read The Great Divorce and miss this point, despite that it is emphasized at both the beginning and end of this book!
MacDonald references are Emanuel Swedenborg, a 17th/18th Lutheran theologian from Sweden who, in his book The Heavenly Doctrine said that God had opened his eyes so that he could see the afterlife and converse with spirits. He was an inspiration for Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the book to which Lewis is responding in The Great Divorce!
MacDonald also refers to George Vale Owens, an Anglican Vicar in 20th Century who was praised by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
• The sun then begins to rise:
I saw there something that sent a quiver through my whole body. I stood at that moment with my back to the East and the mountains, and he, facing me, looked towards them. His face flushed with a new light. A fern, thirty yards behind him, turned golden. The eastern side of every tree-trunk grew bright. Shadows deepened.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 14)
• As the sun rises, the world breaks into song:
“All the time there had been bird noises, trillings, chatterings, and the like; but now suddenly the full chorus was poured from every branch; cocks were crowing, there was music of hounds, and horns; above all this ten thousand tongues of men and woodland angels and the wood itself sang. “It comes! It comes!” they sang. “Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.” One dreadful glance over my shoulder I essayed-not long enough to see (or did I see?) the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 14)
I compared this to the prologue of John:
In [the Word] was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:4-5
• Lewis buries his face in MacDonald’s robe:
“I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.” But it was too late. The light, like solid blocks, intolerable of edge and weight, came thundering upon my head…
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 14)
• We chatted about our participation in salvation and I quoted a passage of Scripture cited in Mere Christianity which Matt had somehow forgotten about:
The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one amazing sentence. The first half is, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling”-which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, “For it is God who worketh in you”- which looks as if God did everything and we nothing.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 12)
I have a suspicion that Matt’s memory is so terrible that some day he will almost certainly go on the same first date with a girl, much like Ted from How I met your mother.
• …but then wakes up to discover that it has all been a dream:
Next moment the folds of my Teacher’s garment were only the folds of the old ink-stained cloth on my study table which I had pulled down with me as I fell from my chair. The blocks of light were only the books which I had pulled off with it, falling about my head. I awoke in a cold room, hunched on the floor beside a black and empty grate, the clock striking three, and the siren howling overhead.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 14)
Matt realized the significance of the clock, the time at which Jesus died:
And at the ninth hour… Jesus uttered a loud cry, and breathed his last.
Mark 15:34,37
• In the retrospective episode in a couple of weeks, Matt and I are going to be talking about what we would write if we were ghosts in a chapter of this book. My girlfriend, Marie, already identified Matt’s chief flaw – being satisfied with “good enough”…
• In Season 3, we’re going to have someone else doing the editing, but Matt doubts that I’ll be able to relinquish control.
• Tolkien hated this ending because he thought that you shouldn’t pull readers out of a world into which you’ve drawn them. Matt really liked the ending because it shows that Jack now has the opportunity to put what he has learned into practice. I compared it to A Christmas Carol and Matt compared it to Ghosts of Girlfriends Past… pretty much tells you everything you need to know, right there… 😉
• Already we’ve finished the book, this Season will not end just yet. We will have several more “After Hours” episodes, a retrospective of the book and we will also be discussing Prince Caspian. This Season will end with a preview for Season 3…
• I shared my haikus for the chapter:
Lewis
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 14)
What is this vision?
Are my choices set in stone?
Or can I yet choose?
This is all a dream
to teach about our choices.
Death is yet to come.
Sunrise comes at last!
But how ill-prepared am I
to receive the light…
Summary
Pray, what is Hell like?
It’s “incurvatus in se”
Each soul turned inward…
• In the next few weeks Matt and I will be doing some informal YouTube videos.
