As I was rereading The Great Divorce, written by C.S. Lewis, I was struck by the thought that I hadn’t really understood it as well as I could have. It was not simply a problem of misunderstanding Lewis’ point, or misunderstanding his narrative, (which it was). I did misunderstand, but the point is that I had misunderstood how it worked. It was understanding it on a lower level, so to speak, which works, but once the (or a) higher level is reached, the previous understanding is deemed unworthy. It is like reading fairy tales, and thinking them great kids’ stories, and leaving them at that. But then going back, rereading them, understanding the times in which they were written, and the deeper imagery, the first interpretation, the first view of fairy tales seems small in comparison.
The difference in my reading of The Great Divorce this time is the framework in which I read, not any new knowledge or understanding, but a new way of looking at the work itself. I have been doing a lot of thinking about Lewis and his fiction lately, in the larger picture of apologetics. Lewis didn’t simply write for fun, or just to write a good story, but his fiction seems to have been designed (to some extent) to fulfill an apologetic agenda. This has also been the larger framework of my rethinking Lewis: the apologetic possibilities of literature; how fiction may serve apologetic tasks better than strict, formal argument. Lewis did this using that much-abused (both by those who write it and those who dislike it) genre of allegory.
Allegory is, in brief terms (which is all I can do now, since I have not done much study of it), “a narrative fiction in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived to make coherent sense on the ‘literal,’ or primary, level of significance, and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of agents, concepts, and events.” (M.H. Abrams A Glossary of Literary Terms.) In this genre, things are what they seem, but then are also so much more. Perhaps the best known work of allegory is Gulliver’s Travels, with Dr. Gulliver’s journeys to strange and mysterious islands, which are subtle critiques at people, events, and groups of the 18th Century. Or Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Lewis, to start getting back to the topic at hand, used this genre in order to promote the apologetic task which he is well known for, from Mere Christianity and The Four Loves to name a couple. His numerous essays and addresses also evidence this apologetic task. His fiction, like the Narnia series, or the Cosmic Trilogy , and Till We Have Faces (which is the most unabashedly allegorical fiction he wrote, as far as I can tell). In these works, while not every character, and often not the setting either, may be an allegorical element, there is much that is. They have a task, a message to get across. While the message is too complicated for a single sentence in each of these works, it is primarily (and exclusively) a Christian message. Anyone who is familiar with the Aslan character will realize this.
The Great Divorce is very obviously a theological fiction. It is a discussion of Heaven and Hell, and the great distance between (or not-so-great distance, if you take this literally). It is, as a narrative, the story about a man who travels from Purgatory to Heaven, and what he learns about Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. But more importantly, through the protagonist’s ‘eavesdropping’ in on other souls’ conversations, he also learns about why some people do or do not wish to go to Heaven. That is the literal story. Allegorically, we can view it as an explanation of each person’s acceptance or denial of Christianity.
This is the framework that I have been rereading this work within. I had previously read it as an almost literal account of what Lewis thought that Heaven would be like (or Hell, or Purgatory, for that matter). But now, I think that some of what he writes is a literary device used to further the more important elements; the discussions that we can overhear between the ‘visitors’ from Purgatory (or Hell), and the Heavenly spirits who come to talk to them, and try to persuade them to come to Heaven. And the notion of this ‘Purgatory’ that Lewis writes about may be a literary device, rather than a theological message he wishes to get across.
Now, I don’t yet know enough about Lewis’ theology to say for sure whether or not he believed in Purgatory (although I seem to think that he did). But in reading this work, it seems to me to be more of a plot-furthering device rather than what he actually thinks does or could happen.
To be honest, I was first pointed in this way in reading his "Preface" to this work, which I think I may have ignored the last few times I read this work (which is a terrible thing to do, ignoring a Preface). In this preface, Lewis writes: “I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course—or I intended it to have—a moral. But the transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us. The last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity about the details of the after-world.”
In essence, he is trying to go against the current in his time (and ours to, as far as I can tell), to equate the good an the bad, Heaven and Hell, so to speak. There is no good with some bad in it, and no bad with some good; you cannot have good without bad, or vice versa. Lewis is trying to show that this is a complete lie. The Good and the Bad are two very distinct things, very separate things. In their essences, they are completely pure of any traces of the other. And don’t think that Lewis was a dualist, because of the way I am describing this. Good is primary and complete on its own, and Evil came in afterward, and tries to ruin the Good. And Lewis knows that he is speculating. And he knows, as Calvin stressed 400 years previously, the speculation gets us nowhere but further from God.
But the point that I missed before is precisely that he is speculating. The important thing in all of his speculation is not that he is trying to tell us what Heaven, Hell, and possibly Purgatory are going to be like. even if this is what he honestly believes, he has no desire to push that belief onto other people. The important thing to get from this work is how people react to the Christian message, and how hollow and deceptive these arguments are: we, as fallen human beings, are often the best at deceiving ourselves rather than anyone else.
In this work, souls from Purgatory (which in Lewis’ telling is different from the Roman doctrine of Purgatory, but we’ll get to that later) take a trip to Heaven, or rather the threshold of Heaven. There they are given the choice to enter into Heaven-proper, or to return to Purgatory-Hell. This has been interpreted by some to mean that Lewis believed that people will be able to make a choice after death whether or not to go to Heaven or Hell, to chose to believe in Christ and accept his benefits, or to deny him still. This, I think, is a rather strong conclusion to reach on the basis of this work, which Lewis himself says is mere speculation. In the story, when he first meets his guide after seeing a number of conversations between the visitors and the Heavenly Beings, Lewis (who is himself the narrator) asks: “But 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.” His guide (George MacDonald, for those that are aware of the literary relationship) answers: “They’re both right, maybe. Do not fash yourself with such questions. Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both.” And at the end of his time on Heaven’s Threshold, Lewis asks the question: “These conversations between the Spirits and the Ghosts—were they only the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago?” To which he is answered: “Or might ye not 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.” Essentially, Lewis, in this dream (which it turns out to be), sees almost a caricature of the choices that each person made throughout his or her life which impacted on his or her salvation. Although these decisions and attitudes were those of a lifetime, here in this Heavenly Threshold, the kernel of them was ‘re-enacted’ so to speak, and shown for what it was. All the external show and trappings had been stripped away, and the decisions and attitudes were simply laid bare, and shown for what they are. And in this whole work, we know of only one person who travelled further into Heaven-Proper. Most other returned to Purgatory, which became Hell for them. The choices had been made earlier, because of the nature of each person, but they are here made again, confirmed maybe, but not newly made.
Which now brings up the question of whether or not Lewis believed in Purgatory. From this work alone, I do not think a conclusion could be reached. What is speculation and what is his belief are near impossible to untangle. But what we can say is this: for Lewis, Earth itself is a kind of Purgatory. In The Great Divorce, MacDonald tells Lewis that “If they (the souls) leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand … Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning. … Not only this valley but all their 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.” Heaven and Hell, then, are the only absolutes, and MacDonald here expresses to Lewis (in lines that I have not quoted) that Heaven and Hell work retrospectively, and so all of a person’s life will be freshly understood from his or her eternal perspective. If a person is in Hell, then all of his or her life will have been Hell from the beginning. If a person is in Heaven, then all of his or her life will have been Heaven from the beginning. The latter will every bit of suffering in life into glory, while the former will turn even the glory into suffering.
Thus in this work it is important, vitally so, to determine what is plot and narrative, and what it is that Lewis wants to say using the plot and narrative. The message is one thing, how it is wrapped and presented is something else, and to confuse one with the other will mean a misinterpretation of Lewis here. In fact, this work may not be a strict allegory at all, since the characters do not specifically refer to something else at all. They are simply themselves, the choices they have made and the essential nature of the person they were in their life. But, if we take it as allegory (which I could be wrong on), it points to all people, and we can all see ourselves somewhere in here, I think. But in reading it, we must not take it too literally, but also we must not take it too ‘fictionally’ either. It is what it is, and each element must be understood in its relation to the whole. What is important is a general message voiced a couple of time specifically, and many times hidden in the stories of the souls. What is not important, theologically or apologetically, is the presentation itself. It furthers the message, but must not be mistaken for it.
(It is also great fun to note the Platonism throughout this work (and most of Lewis’ other works as well), but I’ve already rambled on enough, so I won’t get into it.)
The difference in my reading of The Great Divorce this time is the framework in which I read, not any new knowledge or understanding, but a new way of looking at the work itself. I have been doing a lot of thinking about Lewis and his fiction lately, in the larger picture of apologetics. Lewis didn’t simply write for fun, or just to write a good story, but his fiction seems to have been designed (to some extent) to fulfill an apologetic agenda. This has also been the larger framework of my rethinking Lewis: the apologetic possibilities of literature; how fiction may serve apologetic tasks better than strict, formal argument. Lewis did this using that much-abused (both by those who write it and those who dislike it) genre of allegory.
Allegory is, in brief terms (which is all I can do now, since I have not done much study of it), “a narrative fiction in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived to make coherent sense on the ‘literal,’ or primary, level of significance, and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of agents, concepts, and events.” (M.H. Abrams A Glossary of Literary Terms.) In this genre, things are what they seem, but then are also so much more. Perhaps the best known work of allegory is Gulliver’s Travels, with Dr. Gulliver’s journeys to strange and mysterious islands, which are subtle critiques at people, events, and groups of the 18th Century. Or Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Lewis, to start getting back to the topic at hand, used this genre in order to promote the apologetic task which he is well known for, from Mere Christianity and The Four Loves to name a couple. His numerous essays and addresses also evidence this apologetic task. His fiction, like the Narnia series, or the Cosmic Trilogy , and Till We Have Faces (which is the most unabashedly allegorical fiction he wrote, as far as I can tell). In these works, while not every character, and often not the setting either, may be an allegorical element, there is much that is. They have a task, a message to get across. While the message is too complicated for a single sentence in each of these works, it is primarily (and exclusively) a Christian message. Anyone who is familiar with the Aslan character will realize this.
The Great Divorce is very obviously a theological fiction. It is a discussion of Heaven and Hell, and the great distance between (or not-so-great distance, if you take this literally). It is, as a narrative, the story about a man who travels from Purgatory to Heaven, and what he learns about Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. But more importantly, through the protagonist’s ‘eavesdropping’ in on other souls’ conversations, he also learns about why some people do or do not wish to go to Heaven. That is the literal story. Allegorically, we can view it as an explanation of each person’s acceptance or denial of Christianity.
This is the framework that I have been rereading this work within. I had previously read it as an almost literal account of what Lewis thought that Heaven would be like (or Hell, or Purgatory, for that matter). But now, I think that some of what he writes is a literary device used to further the more important elements; the discussions that we can overhear between the ‘visitors’ from Purgatory (or Hell), and the Heavenly spirits who come to talk to them, and try to persuade them to come to Heaven. And the notion of this ‘Purgatory’ that Lewis writes about may be a literary device, rather than a theological message he wishes to get across.
Now, I don’t yet know enough about Lewis’ theology to say for sure whether or not he believed in Purgatory (although I seem to think that he did). But in reading this work, it seems to me to be more of a plot-furthering device rather than what he actually thinks does or could happen.
To be honest, I was first pointed in this way in reading his "Preface" to this work, which I think I may have ignored the last few times I read this work (which is a terrible thing to do, ignoring a Preface). In this preface, Lewis writes: “I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course—or I intended it to have—a moral. But the transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us. The last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity about the details of the after-world.”
In essence, he is trying to go against the current in his time (and ours to, as far as I can tell), to equate the good an the bad, Heaven and Hell, so to speak. There is no good with some bad in it, and no bad with some good; you cannot have good without bad, or vice versa. Lewis is trying to show that this is a complete lie. The Good and the Bad are two very distinct things, very separate things. In their essences, they are completely pure of any traces of the other. And don’t think that Lewis was a dualist, because of the way I am describing this. Good is primary and complete on its own, and Evil came in afterward, and tries to ruin the Good. And Lewis knows that he is speculating. And he knows, as Calvin stressed 400 years previously, the speculation gets us nowhere but further from God.
But the point that I missed before is precisely that he is speculating. The important thing in all of his speculation is not that he is trying to tell us what Heaven, Hell, and possibly Purgatory are going to be like. even if this is what he honestly believes, he has no desire to push that belief onto other people. The important thing to get from this work is how people react to the Christian message, and how hollow and deceptive these arguments are: we, as fallen human beings, are often the best at deceiving ourselves rather than anyone else.
In this work, souls from Purgatory (which in Lewis’ telling is different from the Roman doctrine of Purgatory, but we’ll get to that later) take a trip to Heaven, or rather the threshold of Heaven. There they are given the choice to enter into Heaven-proper, or to return to Purgatory-Hell. This has been interpreted by some to mean that Lewis believed that people will be able to make a choice after death whether or not to go to Heaven or Hell, to chose to believe in Christ and accept his benefits, or to deny him still. This, I think, is a rather strong conclusion to reach on the basis of this work, which Lewis himself says is mere speculation. In the story, when he first meets his guide after seeing a number of conversations between the visitors and the Heavenly Beings, Lewis (who is himself the narrator) asks: “But 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.” His guide (George MacDonald, for those that are aware of the literary relationship) answers: “They’re both right, maybe. Do not fash yourself with such questions. Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both.” And at the end of his time on Heaven’s Threshold, Lewis asks the question: “These conversations between the Spirits and the Ghosts—were they only the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago?” To which he is answered: “Or might ye not 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.” Essentially, Lewis, in this dream (which it turns out to be), sees almost a caricature of the choices that each person made throughout his or her life which impacted on his or her salvation. Although these decisions and attitudes were those of a lifetime, here in this Heavenly Threshold, the kernel of them was ‘re-enacted’ so to speak, and shown for what it was. All the external show and trappings had been stripped away, and the decisions and attitudes were simply laid bare, and shown for what they are. And in this whole work, we know of only one person who travelled further into Heaven-Proper. Most other returned to Purgatory, which became Hell for them. The choices had been made earlier, because of the nature of each person, but they are here made again, confirmed maybe, but not newly made.
Which now brings up the question of whether or not Lewis believed in Purgatory. From this work alone, I do not think a conclusion could be reached. What is speculation and what is his belief are near impossible to untangle. But what we can say is this: for Lewis, Earth itself is a kind of Purgatory. In The Great Divorce, MacDonald tells Lewis that “If they (the souls) leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand … Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning. … Not only this valley but all their 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.” Heaven and Hell, then, are the only absolutes, and MacDonald here expresses to Lewis (in lines that I have not quoted) that Heaven and Hell work retrospectively, and so all of a person’s life will be freshly understood from his or her eternal perspective. If a person is in Hell, then all of his or her life will have been Hell from the beginning. If a person is in Heaven, then all of his or her life will have been Heaven from the beginning. The latter will every bit of suffering in life into glory, while the former will turn even the glory into suffering.
Thus in this work it is important, vitally so, to determine what is plot and narrative, and what it is that Lewis wants to say using the plot and narrative. The message is one thing, how it is wrapped and presented is something else, and to confuse one with the other will mean a misinterpretation of Lewis here. In fact, this work may not be a strict allegory at all, since the characters do not specifically refer to something else at all. They are simply themselves, the choices they have made and the essential nature of the person they were in their life. But, if we take it as allegory (which I could be wrong on), it points to all people, and we can all see ourselves somewhere in here, I think. But in reading it, we must not take it too literally, but also we must not take it too ‘fictionally’ either. It is what it is, and each element must be understood in its relation to the whole. What is important is a general message voiced a couple of time specifically, and many times hidden in the stories of the souls. What is not important, theologically or apologetically, is the presentation itself. It furthers the message, but must not be mistaken for it.
(It is also great fun to note the Platonism throughout this work (and most of Lewis’ other works as well), but I’ve already rambled on enough, so I won’t get into it.)
1 comment:
good info
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