“Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.”

Author: C.S. Lewis

In The Great Divorce a dreaming man (Lewis himself) takes an allegorical bus ride from hell to heaven. The story, surreal and dreamlike, yet also sharp with Lewis’ keen insight on humanity and how we strive to deceive ourselves and others, tackles the big questions: why does God allow a hell and why does He send creatures He supposedly loves to hell?

The basic tenant of the story is that people choose hell. Ultimately, they love sin more than goodness, and if ferried from the depths of hell to heaven, they would reject God’s kingdom and go right back to the comforts of hell, where their hatreds and sin cause hell to continually spread.

It begins at a bus stop on the outskirts of hell, where a few of the wary damned (represented as ghosts) are undecided. Everyone is welcome to take this bus trip, where Jesus is obviously the driver. The bus itself goes to the outskirts of heaven, where the few souls willing to seek out better lands are confronted by their insubstantiality and smallness. The grass is sharp blades in their ghostly pale feet, and to grow into a creature suitable to walk in reality, they must confront their sins and allow the angels and heavenly visitors to help them kill the sin within themselves. Many turn back before even getting on the bus. Those ghosts who, along with Lewis, do make it into heaven are each confronted, one by one, with people they knew in life who went to heaven and have made the long journey to the outskirts to try and help their fellow man see the beauty in God’s kingdom.

One by one, we follow Lewis and George McDonald, the spirit who is Lewis’ special companion for the journey, and watch the various ghosts as they meet with reality and ultimately flee, except for one. While the story in and of itself is captivating and imaginative, it’s the words and arguments between the shades and the saved that truly captivate our hearts and our minds. The most affecting is Lewis’ prescience. He sees so clearly where our own vulnerabilities lay and through each exchange between the damned and the saved, we see ourselves and squirm.

One of the most interesting elements of The Great Divorce is how the most dangerous sins are not the ones that are necessarily the flashiest or the ones that come to mind first. Indeed, many sins represented here devolve from something good and pure: such as a mother’s love. These sins are seen as more dangerous and harder to escape, because they started from something that in and of itself is good and noble. One of the shades we follow loves her son dearly – or so she says. But it tuns out that her love is a cloying thing, and she would snatch him from heaven and drag him to hell with her if she was only allowed. Her love morphed into possession and like so many of the other ghosts we see, she hangs onto her sin and retreats back to hell.

We see other sins represented here as well, each with startling clarity. We see pride, we see rampant intellectualism that prefers being touted as an expert over facing reality. We see abusive relationships that are about control and manipulation. We see a person who uses self-pity to attempt to corral his wife to leave heaven. We see lust. We see selfishness. We see cynicism.

Image by Roger Casco from Pixabay

We also see the saved. These glorious ghosts are not what we expected either. They are not great men and women. Indeed, the most beautiful of all the saved is an ordinary woman – a housewife who lived and died unknown but is one of the greatest in heaven. Another we see is a repentant murderer. Through this Lewis breaks apart our preconceptions and prejudices and forces us to focus on the scripture and the true meaning of God’s love and our unworthiness and complete inability to make it on our own.

Now – while the narrative does allow those in hell to escape to heaven, this does not represent Lewis’ own feelings. Indeed, this is where allegory and imagination come into play, and the story is not necessarily saying that there are second chances after death. Instead, it shows the stubbornness of humanity and how we reject the obvious, preferring damnation to salvation. It’s a theme used to make a point, and not a factual representation of how salvation works, as Lewis himself admits through George McDonald, the guide.

The Great Divorce is a surprisingly short book with a hard-hitting lesson. The images and arguments made between the shades and the saved linger as we turn the pages, and the fairytale presentation makes a point that a stolid non-fiction exegesis could never bring alive. This remains one of my favorite works by Lewis and, I feel, one of his most impacting. It serves as entertainment, yes, but also as a continual warning about how we allow our love of sin to override God’s love of us and His ultimate gift of salvation. In the end, like the one shade who makes the transition, we must accept God’s help and go through the temporary agony of giving up a destructive sin to discover something far better, far more beautiful, and ultimately true. Highly recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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