When it comes to the value of Great Books, there are few better modern defenders than C.S. Lewis. Lewis commends the self-transcending and humanizing worth of reading when he says, “But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”[1]
1. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 111.
But Lewis did not merely read the classics—Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Austen. He also wrote classics. And I use that word advisedly. It’s risky to evaluate such a recent author, but I would venture that Lewis will be read with profit by people centuries from now. The enduring value of his work lies not only in his native brilliance (which is substantial) nor his deep evangelical faith (which is also substantial), but in his capacity to digest and repurpose Great Books for a contemporary audience.
I’m fond of asking my students, “How many great books did Lewis have to read (and internalize) before he was qualified and able to write the Chronicles of Narnia?” And not just Narnia. All of Lewis’s writings are saturated with the wisdom of the ages, gleaned from reading and re-reading great texts, both for instruction and for joy.
Often Lewis’s dependence on great books is obvious. The Pilgrim’s Regress is an obvious riff on Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Lewis adopts Bunyan’s form and structure, and retells his own conversion as allegory. His novel Perelandra is deeply indebted to Milton’s Paradise Lost; in fact, Lewis wrote his academic study of Paradise Lost while completing that novel. And his final novel Till We Have Faces, which he regarded as his best book, is a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth from antiquity. In each of these cases, Lewis channels the genius of his source material in his own creative, Christian, and apologetic direction.
Which brings me to the subject of this essay, Lewis’s short supposal The Great Divorce. This is Lewis’s modernized reworking of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In Dante’s work, the poet writes himself into the story, as he journeys down through Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory, and then ascends into the heavens. Dante the pilgrim is guided in his quest, first by Virgil, and then by Beatrice. Along the way, he encounters and converses with the damned in Inferno, the saints being sanctified in Purgatorio, and the saints in glory in Paradiso.
Lewis, deeply appreciative of Dante, takes up all of this and reworks it into a modern work of apologetics, evangelism, and devotion, one that, like all good literature, both teaches and delights.
Holidays for the Damned?
In the story, Lewis the narrator journeys from the outskirts of hell (the “Grey Town”) to the outskirts of heaven (the green plains), meeting and observing conversations between damned souls and saved Spirits, many of whom had known each other on earth. For much of his journey, he is guided by his mentor, George MacDonald (much as Virgil is Dante’s guide in The Divine Comedy). While written in the form of a dream, the story is an imaginary tour of the afterlife, one which puzzles many of his evangelical fans. In the story, the damned souls can take excursions—leave hell and journey either to earth or to the doorstep of heaven (what MacDonald calls “the Valley of the Shadow of Life”). More than that, Lewis suggests that these damned souls have another chance to repent after death. They can, in fact, choose to stay in heaven (though we witness only one soul making such a choice). Finally, Lewis suggests that if a ghost on an excursion chooses to stay in heaven, its time in the Grey Town will have really been purgatory.
Holidays for the damned, second chances after death, and purgatory. It’s no wonder that evangelicals have at times been wary of this book. So let’s address these features first. To begin, we cannot deny their presence. They are really in the story and, at least in the case of purgatory, seem to represent Lewis’s actual beliefs. Having said that, we must be clear that Lewis is emphatically not teaching or speculating about the afterlife. In the preface, he calls this book an “imaginative supposal.” The transmortal conditions “are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us.”[2] He reiterates this point at the end of the book in the mouth of George MacDonald. When the narrator discovers that he is dreaming, MacDonald says, “And if ye come to tell of what ye have seen, make it plain that it was but a dream. See ye make it very plain. Give no poor fool the pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows.”[3]
2. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce: A Dream (New York: HarperOne, 2001), x.
3. Lewis, Great Divorce, 144.
So if Lewis is not trying to give us detailed knowledge of the afterlife, and if he’s not attempting to give us a treatise on the relationship between eternity and time, what is he doing? MacDonald tells us plainly: “Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both. And ye were not brought here to study such curiosities. What concerns you is the nature of the choice itself.”[4]
4. Lewis, Great Divorce, 71.
This is the fundamental purpose of the book: to clarify the nature of the Choice (in honor of that, I will capitalize “Choice” for the rest of the essay). And what is the Choice? George MacDonald states it plainly.
‘Milton was right,’ said my Teacher. ‘The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” 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.[5]
5. Lewis, Great Divorce, 71.
In other words, the basic Choice is between God and Self. Either we will put God at the center of reality, or we will put ourselves there.
MacDonald goes on to explain that “there are innumerable forms of this choice.” We give it many fine-sounding names: “Achilles’ wrath and Coriolanus’ grandeur, Revenge and Injured Merit and Self-Respect and Tragic Greatness and Proper Pride.” Each of these are ways of masking and deflecting the self-will and self-love at the heart of our Choice. But make no mistake; all of these are simply variations on the Choice to put ourselves at the center. “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.’”[6]
6. Lewis, Great Divorce, 75.
The dream of journeying into the afterlife enables us to see the Choice more clearly than we see it on earth. The imaginative supposal gives us a clearer lens. Thus, we need not accept the possibility of a second chance after death or the existence of purgatory in order to benefit from the book (anymore than we must accept Dante’s sketch of the afterlife in order to be edified by The Divine Comedy). Instead, we ought to use the story to see the various forms of the Choice more clearly and to prepare us to make the right choice in our own lives.
Forms of the Choice
Lewis expounds on the Choice in a number of different ways. For example, in some of the conversations, the damned ghosts mistake the means for the end, as in the case of the Artist who has come to love paint more than the object he paints. Such an artist has curved in on himself, descending from love of the Thing he tells, to love of his own telling, to love of himself as the teller (which eventually means a concern for his own reputation among posterity). I have explored this form of the Choice elsewhere.
Lewis also describes the Choice in terms of the natural loves going wrong and becoming demonic, a truth that he expounds in his book The Four Loves. The thesis of that book is that “love [i.e. natural love] ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god.” Family affection, friendship, and romantic love all become demons when they are untethered from love for God.
We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. Then they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.[7]
7. C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (HarperOne), 8.
In The Great Divorce this truth is illustrated by Pam, the mother of Michael, who has so elevated her Mother-Love that she is filled with hatred for God and her brother (and is even perhaps ready to plunge the soul of her “beloved” son into endless misery if only she can still in some sense possess it). I have also explored this dynamic elsewhere.
The Poet
But for the remainder of this introductory essay, I want to explore the way that Lewis displays the self-justifying, rationalizing, and excuse-making that accompanies the Choice for Self. We can begin with the first ghost that Lewis the narrator converses with on the bus—the Tousle-Headed Poet. Here is Lewis’s account of their conversation.
He appeared to be a singularly ill-used man. His parents had never appreciated him and none of the five schools at which he had been educated seemed to have made any provision for a talent and temperament such as his. To make matters worse he had been exactly the sort of boy in whose case the examination system works out with the maximum unfairness and absurdity. It was not until he reached the university that he began to recognise that all these injustices did not come by chance but were the inevitable results of our economic system. Capitalism did not merely enslave the workers, it also vitiated taste and vulgarised intellect: hence our educational system and hence the lack of ‘Recognition’ for new genius. This discovery had made him a Communist. But when the war came along and he saw Russia in alliance with the capitalist governments, he had found himself once more isolated and had to become a conscientious objector. The indignities he suffered at this stage of his career had, he confessed, embittered him. He decided he could serve the cause best by going to America: but then America came into the war too. It was at this point that he suddenly saw Sweden as the home of a really new and radical art, but the various oppressors had given him no facilities for going to Sweden. There were money troubles. His father, who had never progressed beyond the most atrocious mental complacency and smugness of the Victorian epoch, was giving him a ludicrously inadequate allowance. And he had been very badly treated by a girl too. He had thought her a really civilised and adult personality, and then she had unexpectedly revealed that she was a mass of bourgeois prejudices and monogamic instincts. Jealousy, possessiveness, was a quality he particularly disliked. She had even shown herself, at the end, to be mean about money. That was the last straw. He had jumped under a train …[8]
8. Lewis, Great Divorce, 7–8.
Note the way that Lewis reveals the real character of the poet through his own self-justifying story. The poet views himself fundamentally as a victim. He has been unappreciated and oppressed his whole life—by his parents, his schools, and even his girlfriend. The poet illustrates the amazing human capacity for self-deception. The story that we tell ourselves and the story that actually happens are frequently not the same. We are cowards; but we call ourselves conscientious objectors. We failed our exams; but we blame the educational system. We are spoiled and entitled; but our parents are oppressors for not paying for our trip to Sweden. And of course, note especially the high-sounding phrases (“bourgeois prejudices and monogamic instincts”) and base accusations (“jealousy, possessiveness”) that are used to mask the simple truth that his girlfriend objected to his infidelity and expected him to marry her. Such are the rationalizations of the soul in the grip of Self-will.
The Cynic
The same blame-shifting and excuse-making appears in the conversation with the Hard-bitten Cynic.[9] Superficially, he is a man of the world, one who can see through the propaganda all around us and knows “what’s really going on.” For example, he “knows” that the idea of the ghosts staying on the green plains is “only an advertisement stunt.” There’s no hope of acclimating to the new environment. He’s heard that lie before.
9. Lewis, Great Divorce, 51-56.
Through the conversation, it becomes clear that he is eminently bored with everything. Everywhere he goes, he finds the environment lacking. And his unhappiness in life is in no way his own fault, but the fault of others. “It’s up to the Management to find something that doesn’t bore us, isn’t it? It’s their job.” In other words, his own misery and unhappiness are the result of injustices perpetrated by others. “They” are the ones who have failed him; he is just a passive victim. The thought that his own entitlement, ingratitude, and cynicism might lurk beneath his boredom and misery never crosses his mind.
The Wife
A third example of this self-justifying self-deception occurs in the person of Robert’s wife.[10] As she relates the story of her life, she is the clear hero and martyr. She sacrificed everything for her husband, in order to make something of him. According to her, Robert was lazy, unwilling to exert himself in pursuit of more money and ambition. He had the wrong sort of friends and the wrong sort of hobbies. She put an end to both, for his own good, of course. She is the classic example of “the sort of woman who lives for others—and you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.” She admits to never giving Robert a moment of peace, to “curing” him of his desire to write a book, and so forth. She pushes and prods and manipulates him into getting her way, mocking him to the new friends that she has acquired for him, until all that is left is a bitter husk of a man, looking at her with hatred (though he must have repented of that at some point, since he’s now in heaven).
10. Lewis, Great Divorce, 89-95.
The story that Robert’s wife tells herself is that “I’ve done my duty by him, if ever a woman has.” She was the faithful wife, always living for her husband. But we see through her excuses to the nagging, quarrelsome, demeaning, ambitious, and manipulative woman that she really is.
But in this case Lewis is not content to let us read between the lines. By the end, Robert’s wife is demanding that she be allowed to take charge of him again, to “take up my burden once more.” When this request is rejected, the truth comes out.
No, listen, Hilda. Please, please! I’m so miserable. I must have someone to—to do things to. It’s simply frightful down there. No one minds about me at all. I can’t alter them. It’s dreadful to see them all sitting about and not be able to do anything with them. Give him back to me. Why should he have everything his own way? It’s not good for him. It isn’t right, it’s not fair. I want Robert. What right have you to keep him from me? I hate you. How can I pay him out if you won’t let me have him?’[11]
11. Lewis, Great Divorce, 95.
And thus reality reasserts itself, despite her excuses and rationalizations. Far from seeking Robert’s good, she had simply desired to possess him, to do things to him, to alter him according to her own self-will.
The Grumble and the Choice
Each of these encounters is a caricature, an exaggeration designed to accent real features of the world and ourselves. The ghosts in Lewis’s story—with their sins and excuses and grievances and complaints and justifications—are all too real and reminiscent of the person we see in the mirror every day. The purpose of The Great Divorce is to furnish us with images, pictures of the person that we might become, if we continue to place ourselves at the center. A final encounter can illustrate the danger.
The narrator and MacDonald overhear a talkative woman complain to her friend about all the trouble she’s had down in the Grey Town. After listening to her grumbling, the narrator is troubled that such a small sin could be damning. MacDonald responds, “The whole question is whether she is now a grumbler.” The narrator thinks the answer is obvious; of course she is.
‘Aye, but ye misunderstand me. The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble…’
‘But how can there be a grumble without a grumbler?’
“It begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.[12]
12. Lewis, Great Divorce, 77-78.
This is the Choice we all face. Like the damned souls in the story, we can sink into our sin, becoming a Grumble, or an Envy, or an Excuse, or a Manipulation. We can dress it up in fine-sounding phrases like Martyrdom and Duty, and shift all the blame for our circumstances to others as we tell ourselves a story of victimhood and oppression and unfairness.
Or, like the one soul who escapes, we can turn from our Self-Will and repent, asking Heaven to kill the Sin that so easily entangles. We can turn to Christ and die with him.
In a subtle way, the Great Divorce confronts us, stares us in the eye, and bids us to make one of two choices. And this is true for almost all of the great books, from the simple allegory of Bunyan to the high theology of Calvin and Edwards. They are great precisely because they attest to the marrow of true reality. They sing in the melody of reality. They hold up a mirror and say “you are the man!”—before we can marshall our self-justifications and defenses. They unblind eyes to the character of man and the character of God. And they show us who we might be if we die and live with the One to whom all the great books look.
The Choice of Ways lies before us.
