"I always knew you'd come crawling back."
Despite the low review that we assigned to C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, there is something about the man that draws you to at least hear him out. While the book has much less fanfare, The Great Divorce is perhaps more worth the read than the former.
I first read this book in high school as my senior class went through noteworthy English literature. For me, this book is the one that everyone should use to introduce new readers to C.S. Lewis - even above the Narnia series. This book is incredibly thought-provoking, and the manner in which it presents itself hearkens back to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.
The book follows... come to think of it, I don't think we ever learn the name of the speaker. The main character whose eyes behold the entire story is almost of no consequence to the story itself. He is simply a bystander, vividly describing everything that he is seeing, hearing, and interpreting for the reader to imagine.
In any case, the concept of the book is that there is a bus of individuals who are leaving a terribly dreary city to go to a city that offers an opportunity of a better existence - at a cost. There is no cost to come to the city, but to stay is an altogether different story. Advancing through the story, the reader soon comes to realize that all of the characters are dead and the world in which this is all occurring is the afterlife. With that said, Protestants will be very disappointed (and perhaps shocked at Lewis) when they find out that the grey city from which the characters depart is Purgatory - a middle ground afterlife setting believed in only by Catholics and ancient pagans (often called Elysium).
The value of the book comes in the discussions that occur between these "ghostly" souls and the "spirits" that meet them when they arrive on the outskirts of Heaven (the foothills of the mountain where God lives). Each of these spirits require something of the ghosts to gain admission to God's mountain - from an artist, a reflection on the vanity of art for art's sake; from a mother, an admission that her son is not her own; from a religious scholar, a recognition that there is such a thing as objective truth that judges the opinions as true or false.
With each conversation, the watcher gains insights about what it is to go to Heaven - an odd offshoot of the old Wesleyan idea of Christian perfectionism. This concept is that when a person is "ready" for Heaven, God will bring them there. In The Great Divorce, it appears that rather than salvation being something that is set in stone at death, salvation is something very much left to individuals to determine whenever they like - before or after. There is a conversation about this doctrine directly between the watcher and his personal escort through the land:
"There is a real choice after death? My Roman Catholic friends would be surprised, for to them souls in Purgatory are already saved. And my Protestant friends would like it no better, for they'd say that the tree lies as it falls." To which the Spirit responds, "They're both right, maybe. Do not fash yourself with such questions."
The higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels.
While the theology and doctrine given throughout the book may be questionable (as is evidently typical of Lewis), the dialogue is where this book shines. Take, for example, the quote given above. In a discussion of the goodness and pollution of mankind's virtues, the reader discovers that there are virtues of the highest order that when polluted by sin become vices of the lowest rung in Hell. Sexual passion, a gift from God to husband and wife, is the greatest destroyer of lives in the modern world because it is polluted into sinful lust. Ambition to subdue the Earth is God-given, but the love of money is the root of all evil. In these ways, Lewis points out that the pollution of good is the creation of evil. Upon this conclusion he retorts somewhat humorously, "I don't know that I dare repeat this on Earth... They'd say I believed in total depravity..."
Why yes, dear Lewis, we would.
Towards the end of the book there is an interesting story about a man plagued by a small pet lizard that whispers sinful things in his ear. An angel asks permission to kill the lizard, but the pain of killing the lizard is greatly inflicted on the man. Upon killing it, however, the dead lizard is transformed into a stallion upon which the man rides swiftly up to the mountain of God. This illustration is perhaps the greatest in the book, and the explanation is succinct.
"Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak... Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed."
Lewis gives the impression that it is not the killing of sin that permits a person to go to Heaven as if a check list of requirements must be fulfilled, but rather, it is the killing of sin that makes a person fit to get to Heaven. It is the travail of childbirth that binds a mother and child together, and it is the painstaking work put into a task that makes its completion of value. In the same way, it is the systematic killing of sin in one's life that makes Heaven a place that we would like to be. Having spent our entire lives attempting to rid ourselves of this menace, we find that we have arrived in a place wherein we will never again be tempted or snared by it.
The final note on The Great Divorce is the great explanation that it gives towards answering a question that I have heard again and again in my ministry: Will we know in Heaven that our loved ones are in Hell? The final few pages give a wondrous explanation of this question, as Lewis explains that unless someone is freed from the bondage of misery that a miserable person imposes on them through a form of emotional blackmail, then true victory over sin and misery can never be had. The words that Lewis uses are that those who are in Hell would be able to veto happiness that would be coming to those in Heaven. Notice then the power dynamic - Hell rules Heaven.
Rather, Lewis concludes that Heaven has power over Hell, and that the misery of Hell cannot torment those in Heaven - to the degree that if a single butterfly in Heaven swallowed all of Hell, "Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste... All the loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itching that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven would have no weight that could be registered at all."
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