The Life & Legacy of C. S. Lewis #5
“The Great Divorce”
Matthew 7.7-13
This weekend we’re continuing our series on The Life and Legacy of C. S. Lewis by turning our attention to one of his most intriguing works of fiction, The Great Divorce. The title The Great Divorce is a twist on William Blake (1757-1827), a British poet, painter, mystic, and engraver who wrote a piece called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. “If I have written of their Divorce,” Lewis tells us in his preface, “this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure I know what he meant. But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable ‘either-or’; that granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error.” (1)
The story, which Lewis insists is a fantasy, tells how people in hell are offered a free bus trip to heaven. Remarkably, they get to decide if this trip will be one-way or round trip. In other words, they can stay in heaven if they choose to do so. This device gives Lewis an opportunity to make one of his most important points about hell, that it is a place people choose to go, not a jail they’re sent to by God. While the book was written in 1943, Lewis was exposed to the idea that inspired the book a decade earlier. He’d been reading the works of a 17th century writer named Jeremy Taylor when he came across an old, odd theological idea called the Refrigerium. While punishment in hell is never-ending, God in His grace grants intermittent periods of relief, a sort of Holiday from Hell. While there is absolutely no biblical basis for the idea, Lewis thought it would be a useful plot device. Like The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce was published in 14 weekly installments in The Guardian from November 1944 to April 1945.
In this message I’d like to highlight five great ideas that are either explored in or assumed by The Great Divorce. First, C. S. Lewis embraced the biblical view that Heaven and Hell are real places. They are not symbolic representations of spiritual truths but actually locations [thus the capitalization]. One of the more memorable characters in The Great Divorce is the Episcopal Ghost, a theologian who arrives in Heaven all the while insisting that neither Hell (from which he’s come), nor Heaven (on whose outskirts he is standing), are anything more than symbols. Ironically, the Episcopal Ghost decides to return to Hell because he is scheduled to deliver a paper to the Theological Society there. While Lewis believed in the literal reality of Heaven and Hell he was deeply troubled, as we all should be, by the idea of Hell. In The Problem of Pain (1940), a book in which he explores how some people choose to use the gift of free will that God has given them to make self-destructive choices, Lewis writes, “Some will not be redeemed. There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, our Lord’s words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.” (2) The question, of course, is why someone would want to choose hell, which is precisely the point of The Great Divorce.
Second, Lewis insists that Heaven and Hell are diametrically opposed. That is why the book is called The Great Divorce. There is no place for evil in Heaven; there is no desire for good in Hell. The two are polar opposites. Quoting his mentor George MacDonald (who appears as a character in the book) Lewis reminds us on the title page, “No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little hell in it– no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.” (3)
Third, Lewis tells us that Heaven and Hell are not comparable. While they are polar opposites, they are not remotely equal. For instance, Hell is drab, boring, dreary, and uninteresting. Hell, in The Great Divorce, is pictured as a place where it is always raining. It is dismal, dingy, empty, a place where people snap at one another, scowl, whine, and growl. Heaven, on the other hand, is a place of breathtaking, literally unimaginable beauty. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2.9, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imaged, what God has prepared for those who love him.”
Hell, while a place, is also a state of mind. “Hell is a state of mind– ye never said a truer word,” George MacDonald tells the narrator. “And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind– is, in the end, Hell.” In calling hell “a state of mind” Lewis is not say that it is imaginary or does not exist. Hell is a kind of self-imposed imprisonment, a choosing to be miserable. In a letter written to his brother Warnie on January 28th, 1940 (the year The Problem of Pain, which explores similar themes, was published) Lewis says, “I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don’t.” (5) People who don’t like happiness, who don’t want to be happy, can get a head start on Hell, so it seems, by being miserable in this world.
One of many interesting points Lewis makes in The Great Divorce is that Hell is nearly nothing. “The whole difficulty of understanding Hell,” says George MacDonald, “ is that the thing to be understood is nearly nothing.” (6) “All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.” When the narrator says, “It seems big enough when you’re in it,” MacDonald answers, “And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.” (7) So we learn that when the bus travels from Hell to Heaven, it does not just travel but grows. Those who populate hell are themselves nearly nothing, just the remains of what was once a human being, like the gases, heat and ash that’s left when a log has burned. When the narrator asks why an unhappy old woman is in Hell, MacDonald answers, “The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman– even the least trace of one– still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again.” (8) In contrast to the ash or smudge-like nature of those who choose to live in Hell, Lewis calls the inhabitants of Heaven the Solid People. As the creeds reminds us, after all, we believe in the resurrection of the body. Thus for Lewis Hell is a Ghost Town, while Heaven is substantive, the Ultimate Reality of which these Shadowlands in which we live are but a dim reflection.
It becomes clear, as we’re introduced to the different characters in The Great Divorce, that those who choose to inhabit Hell have a common characteristic. They are self-absorbed and full of pride. We meet the Big Ghost who keeps insisting on his rights. “I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity.” ”Then do,” his guide, a man who had committed a murder but who came to know God’s grace, tells him. “Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.” When the Big Ghost insists that he deserves to be in Heaven because he’d been a decent man, his guide, mirth dancing in his eyes, says, “It isn’t exactly true… You weren’t a decent man and you didn’t do your best. We none of us were and none of us did. Lord bless you, it doesn’t matter.” The Big Ghost self-righteously concludes Heaven is a clique and decides to go back to Hell. “I’d rather be damned than go along with you,” he says and is. (9)
Another memorable figure is the Possessive Mother who comes to Heaven insisting that she see her son. When she is told that she’s not ready, that she hasn’t yet learned to love and is treating God as a means to get to her son, she explodes. “If He loved me he’d let me see my boy. If He loved me why did He take Michael away from me?” (10)Insisting that Mother-love is “the highest and holiest feeling in human nature” she is told that “no natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.” (11) She argues, “I don’t believe in a God who keeps mother and son apart. I believe in a God of love. No one has the right to come between me and my son. Not even God. Tell Him that to His face. I want my boy, and I mean to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever and ever.” (12) Later MacDonald points out the difference between self-giving, godly love and the selfish, lesser love which is not so much love as need. “She loved her son too little, not too much,” he explains. “If she had loved him more there’d be no difficulty. 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.” (13)
There are countless other characters, only one of whom decides to stay in Heaven. The rest are driven by selfishness, self righteousness, or pride to return to Hell. Here is where we come to discover one of the key features in Lewis’ theology, an insistence that God does not send people to Hell. Some people refuse to believe in Jesus Christ because they have trouble understanding how a good and loving God could send someone to hell. Lewis’ answer is both simple and biblical: He doesn’t. Heaven was created for human beings; Hell was not. In The Problem of Pain Lewis writes, “You will remember that in the parable (cf. Matthew 25. 34, 41) the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never intended for men at all.” (14) He considers it a miracle that God would give us the freedom to reject Him and His blessings. Yet he does, and so Lewis concludes in The Problem of Pain, “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” (15) MacDonald says the same in The Great Divorce: “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, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice there would be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock, it is opened.” (16)
One last issue: How can those who are saved experience eternal joy if there are people who have chosen Hell? Doesn’t mercy require that everyone be in Heaven? “That sounds very merciful,” MacDonald says. But see what lurks behind it… 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 shall be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven…” Heaven will not be blackmailed. “It must be one way or the other,” Lewis says. “Either the day will 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 the Manger the tyrant of the universe.” (17) The Dog in the Manger image refers to one of Aesop’s fables about a dog who lies in a feedbox full of food that he can’t eat, refusing anyone who can the opportunity to do so.
C. S. Lewis helps us understand how Heaven and Hell both have a part to play in the plan of God. Realizing that the idea of Hell may be as hard for others as it was for him, Lewis writes in The Problem of Pain, “In the long run the answer to all who object to the doctrine of Hell, is itself a question: ‘What are you asking God to do?’ To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.” (18)
Each of us is given a choice and the choice, it would seem is so obvious: to claim our inheritance, the kingdom that was prepared for us since the creation of the world, or to go our own way, insisting on our rights, rejecting Bleeding Charity, successful rebels to the end. Why would anyone do that? That’s precisely the question Lewis poses in The Great Divorce.
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Endnotes
(1) C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, (Harper:San Francisco), pp. vii-viii.
(2) C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (Harper:San Francisco), pp. 119.120.
(3) C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, p. iii.
(4) Ibid., p. 70.
(5) Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Writings, (Harper:San Francisco), p. 281.
(6) C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, p. 77.
(7) Ibid., p. 138.
(8) Ibid., p. 77.
(9) Ibid., p. 28-29.
(10) Ibid., p. 99.
(11) Ibid., p. 100.
(12) Ibid., pp. 102-103.
(13) Ibid., pp. 114-115.
(14) C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 127.
(15) Ibid., p. 130.
(16) C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, p. 75.
(17) Ibid., pp. 135-136.
(18) C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 130.
