David was invited onto the Risking Enchantment podcast with Phoebe and Rachel to discuss The Great Divorce.
S4E73: “The Great Divorce” with Risking Enchantment (Download)
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Timestamps
00:00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:00:12 – Welcome
00:00:40 – Risking Enchantment
01:20:55 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Thoughts
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
No Skype Session today!
Show Notes
Subtitle
- The episode where Rachel and Phoebe spoke about Till We Have Faces
The Imaginative Supposal
- Lewis loved what he called “imaginative supposals”. The most famous of which was The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe. Lewis explained it like this:
- “What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?”
- In The Great Divorce, Lewis asks a different question. I would describe it like this:
- What would it be like if souls from Hell could visit Heaven?
- What would happen if they actually had the option to remain there?
- Would they want to?
side note re still having a choice in this book verses Christian belief about tfinal choice made at the moment of death
Quick Outline of The Great Divorce
- The story begins with Lewis waiting at a bus stop in a sprawling grey town at dusk. We later find out that this grey town is Hell…or Purgatory if the inhabitants choose to leave.
- A bus arrives, looking magnificent amidst the grey town, and it takes the group of quarreling inhabitants of the town up to what we later learn to call Heaven (or at least its foothills).
- They arrive and it is now early morning, just before dawn in this beautiful land of trees and grass, with mountains in the distance.
- But it is also a hard land, more real than the folks getting off the bus, making them look like ghosts in comparison. The grass is as hard as diamonds and difficult to walk on.
- Figures come down from the mountains. These bright spirits, or solid people, come to meet these ghosts, and the rest of the book is a series of meetings between the ghosts from the grey town and the bright spirits who are trying to convince them to journey with them up to the mountains.
- Really, this book is somewhat like Lewis’ own version of The Divine Comedy where the author, Dante, is taken on a tour of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.
- As his guide, he has the Roman Poet Virgil (an author Dante adored),
and later he’s guided by the love of his life, the lady Beatrice. - In The Great Divorce, Lewis is taken on a similar tour of the afterlife,
with his guide being an author whom he really admired, George MacDonald.
- As his guide, he has the Roman Poet Virgil (an author Dante adored),
Main points of the book
Point #1: Revealing the true nature of grace/sin/Heaven/Hell
- Lewis communicates these truths through the landscapes and people
- He wants to show us what sin does to us, and what virtue does to us.
- He wants to show us the emptiness of evil things and the majestic richness of God.
- Sin is drab, individualistic, competitive, self-obsessed and prideful
- Incurvatus In Se
- Lewis’ profound ability to make goodness attractive, appealing, more real than sin. Something we’ve noted throughout his fiction. Goodness feels very alive and active, not bland nor insipid.
- Heaven as more real, more concrete as compared to the Grey Town. (not the ethereal vision of clouds etc typical in art)
- Similarly, while the journey to heaven is often seen as a process of losing or depriving oneself (giving up on earthly pleasures), Lewis is able to portray how we gain everything on the journey to heaven. Explanatory quotes below:
“I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) was precisely nothing: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in “the High Countries.”
― The Great Divorce
“Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? . . . No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.”
― Pope Benedict XVI
The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyse them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst offs, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance.
— Thomas Merton
We can trust our Lady’s love for us too and her knowledge of God. The woman who says, /Do whatever he tells you,/ is the girl who sang the /Magnificat/, rejoicing that her Son had come for our joy, and this first miracle, symbol as it is of Christ’s life in us, was not a miracle related to suffering, but one designed to give an increase of joy to people already rejoicing.
— Caryll Houselander
Point #2: Why do people choose hell [Incurvatus In Se]
“There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy – that is, to reality.”
― The Great Divorce
The Self-Righteous Man
- The ghost and the other man knew each other in their earthly life
- The ghost was the Bight Spirit’s boss.
- However, the Bright Spirit murdered someone during his earthly life.
- He had subsequently repented of what he had done and threw himself on the mercy of God, which is how he came to be in Heaven.
- However, the ghost is self-righteous…
- He thinks he deserves Heaven based on his own merit, rather than by grace (“the bleedin’ charity”).
- We also find out that, despite his affirmation to the contrary, he wasn’t a very good man.
- Ultimately the ghost refuses to stay in Heaven unless the people whom he deems unworthy are kicked out!
Other Ghosts
- Over subsequent chapters, we meet many other ghosts….
- A businessman who thinks that all problems can be solved with economics.
- A theologian who has squandered his intellect.
- A cynic who refuses to be vulnerable and who insists on being disappointed with everything, even Heaven!
- We meet a famous artist who doesn’t want to stay in Heaven if he won’t be someone important there and when he discovers that his fame is fading on earth.
- We meet a lady called Sarah Smith, someone that nobody ever heard of on earth, but who is a great Saint, reminding us that earthly success and heavenly success are not the same thing…
The Incurvatus In Se is characterised by self-delusion, the inability to reckon with the reality of the heavenly landscape they find themselves in: Wanting to take apples back, not admitting that heaven is real. But also the inability to see how their sins have held them captive and hurt the people they love.
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
― W.H. Auden
“I do not know how her affair will end. But it may well be that at this moment she’s demanding to have him down with her in Hell. That kind is sometimes perfectly ready to plunge the soul they say they love in endless misery if only they can still in some fashion possess it.’
― The Great Divorce
“Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.”
― The Great Divorce
Lewis hints at the need to have these conversations on earth and not just in the afterlife. If seemingly small sins can ultimately hinder us from entering heaven, then we should start rectifying them on earth. Firstly, by being brave enough to name what sin is. The Great Divorce is excellent at showing the effects of sins which most of us would normally shrug off and not try to change within ourselves or others.
“I don’t know that I dare repeat this on Earth, Sir,” said I. “They’d say I was inhuman: they’d say I believed in total depravity: they’d say I was attacking the best and the holiest things. They’d call me . . .” “It might do you no harm if they did,” said he with (I really thought) a twinkle in his eye.”
― The Great Divorce
“But someone must say in general what’s been unsaid among you this many a year: that love, as mortals understand the word, isn’t enough. Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.” “The saying is almost too hard for us.” “Ah, but it’s cruel not to say it. They that know have grown afraid to speak. That is why sorrows that used to purify now only fester.”
― The Great Divorce
Modern mentality of counting tolerance as the highest good, and that allowing others to do whatever they think best is a form of love.
“We say we want a renewal of character in our day but we don’t really know what we ask for. To have a renewal of character is to have a renewal of a creedal order that constrains, limits, binds, obligates and compels. This price is too high for us to pay. We want character but without unyielding conviction; we want strong morality but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend’ we want good without having to name evil; we want decency without the authority to insist upon it; we want moral community without any limitations to personal freedom. In short, we want what we cannot possibly have on terms that we want it.”
Yet today’s propagandists urge us to adopt a new morality, a self-esteem-filled, feel-good morality. In Lewis’s view, “Out of this apparently innocent idea comes the disease that will certainly end our species (and, in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed; the fatal superstition that men can create values, that a community can choose its ‘ideology’ as men choose their clothes.”
― “C.S. Lewis Explores Vice and Virtue” by Gerard Reed
The Ghost with a Lizard on his shoulder
- Most of the ghosts choose to return to the grey town. However, there is one ghost we meet who does actually choose Heaven.
- We see him with a little red lizard on his shoulder who is a manifestation of his lust.
- This ghost meets an angel who offers to kill it.
- The ghost makes every excuse under the sun, all of the excuses we make for indulging in a sin, but eventually relents.
- “You’re burning me. How can I tell you to kill it? You’d kill me if you did.”
“It is not so.”
“Why, you’re hurting me now.”
“I never said it wouldn’t hurt you. I said it wouldn’t kill you.”
― The Great Divorce
- “You’re burning me. How can I tell you to kill it? You’d kill me if you did.”
- The angel kills the lizard and the lizard transforms into a magnificent stallion which he uses to ride into Heaven.
- What could have kept him out of Heaven, when submitted to God’s will and to the angel’s hands actually ends up being the very means of his entry.
Point #3: No marriage of Heaven and Hell
- Lewis wrote this book partially in response to William Blake’s poem,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.- See, Blake believed it was ultimately unnecessary to separate the two, Heaven and Hell, that ultimately one doesn’t have to choose God and reject evil.
- In contrast, the central point of The Great Divorce is that there can be no marriage between Heaven and Hell.
- “If we insist on keeping Hell…we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell”.
- As the Book of Revelation says, nothing unclean can enter Heaven. Why then, do we insist on keeping our pet sins and their souvenirs?
- Lewis says that they all have to go.
- However, Lewis also promises us that, in abandoning sin, we will have lost nothing, that in Heaven we will find what it was we were really seeking in those wrong places.
Lewis’ section on pity’s ability to hold goodness and holiness ransom is relevant here. We can’t shackle virtue to vice because of pity. Feels very relevant today, picking back up on the earlier point of modern virtue is characterised by tolerance and acceptance. Failing to demand virtue from those we love is the feeling of pity rather than the action of pity.
“Stop what?”
“Using pity, other people’s pity, in the wrong way. We have all done it a bit on earth, you know. Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.”
― The Great Divorce
- Hell vetoing Heaven..
“And yet . . . and yet … ,” said I to my Teacher, when all the shapes and the singing had passed some distance away into the forest, “even now I am not quite sure. Is it really tolerable that she should be untouched by his misery, even his self-made misery?”
“Would ye rather he still had the power of tormenting her? He did it many a day and many a year in their earthly life.”
“Well, no. I suppose I don’t want that.”
“What then?”
“I hardly know, Sir. What some people say on earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.”
“Ye see it does not.”
“I feel in a way that it ought to.”
“That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it.”
“What?”
“The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.”
“I don’t know what I want, Sir.”
“Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye’ll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe.”
“But dare one say-it is horrible to say-that Pity must ever die?”
“The passion of pity, the pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth, the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity and many a statesman out of his honesty-that will die. It was used as a weapon by bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken.”
“And what is the other kind-the action?”
“It’s a weapon on the other side. It leaps quicker than light from the highest place to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. It changes darkness into light and evil into good. But it will not, at the cunning tears of Hell, impose on good the tyranny of evil. Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world’s garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses.”
― The Great Divorce
Ultimately no good can come from us staying in our sins
“But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all this earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me but have this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death”
Point #4: The Nature of Choice
- Many people, both Christian and non-Christian, struggle with the idea that God would send someone to Hell. However, in The Great Divorce we see that Hell is a choice.
- Time and again the souls which come up from Hell choose to return.
- There is something of which they cannot let go of. They want to take these hellish souvenirs into Heaven with them.
- Or, put another way, there is something which they prefer to Heaven.
- Really, this book isn’t so much about the destinations of Heaven and Hell, but of the choices we make in this life which end up preparing us for those destinations. This is is summarized very neatly in something MacDonald says:
- “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell
- However, MacDonald also reassures us…
- “No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”
Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle
- Similar visions of the afterlife
- Niggle is almost the opposite of Lewis’ Artist ghost.
- He comes to see his true virtue lay in mundane acts, he’s able to leave behind his ego about his painting and in fact sees the need for collaboration with Parish. The result is an artistic expression that does actually lead people to God.
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