Heaven and Hell in The Great Divorce

Today’s blog post was slotted to be something quite different (its elegant title in draft was “First Drafts & Writer’s Block & Snippets”), but then I stumbled upon the Grim Writer’s Remember, O Thou Man Lent link-up…and that put an end to that. Instead, I will be talking about Heaven and Hell in The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. I’ll be talking about C.S. Lewis next week too, for the Maidens of Green Gables’ blog party…but a little extra C.S. Lewis never hurt anyone, did it? I don’t know that I’ve really talked about C.S. Lewis much on this blog (shame on me), but he happens to be one of my favorite authors of all time – perhaps my absolute favorite author of all time.

(Now, before I start rambling at you, I wish to make the disclaimer that The Great Divorce is not in any way trying to be a factual and accurate account of what the afterlife is like. (C.S. Lewis makes this very clear.))

There is a truth about Hell that C.S. Lewis makes very clear in The Great Divorce: nobody in Hell wants to be in Heaven. I think everybody longs for Heaven in a certain way even if they don’t know it; that being said, souls can choose to reject that longing. In The Great Divorce, we see soul after soul – souls which have been in Hell and know what it’s like – offered happiness: no, begged to accept happiness, and they refuse it. They don’t want happiness. I think this is such a profound insight, and something which is sometimes misunderstood about the afterlife. Souls in Hell go there of their own accord. Are the souls in Hell happy? No. But they didn’t want to be happy. They chose not to be happy. They clung to their misery. It’s not souls who mess up but want to be better who end up in Hell. It’s souls who don’t want Heaven.

Another interesting thing about Lewis’s depiction of Hell is that – as a character states in the book – on the surface level it seems very much like an ordinary town. There are just two things which make it different. One is the people: as Lewis-as-narrator talks to the souls there, we see how inward-turned they all are, and how nobody likes or trusts their neighbors. Two is the fact that nothing is solid, nothing substantial, nothing real. Obviously, we don’t know what Hell is really like. But would an eternity of selfishness, surrounded by people who are all just as selfish, in a world where nothing was real, be bad enough to be Hell? I rather think it might.

And the different people that Lewis-as-narrator comes across in Hell are so realistic. The young man who is convinced that the whole universe is set up just to work out to his maximal inconvenience – the artist who’s only interested in Heaven to put it on canvas, not for itself – the intellectual who completely misses the point of everything in trying to be intellectual, who was going to give a talk about how Jesus’s views might have evolved if He had lived, “as He might have done, with a little more tact and patience” – but, as aforementioned, they are all united in one thing: their turning inward, their preoccupation with self. Even the woman so obsessed with her son was really more focused on her own feelings about her son than about the son himself.

And that selfishness is, I think, what makes Hell so unsubstantial. There was no authentic-ness there, and no one sought anything authentic or genuine. They were too busy chasing an unreal image of themselves.

Now, on to the more pleasant part.

Logically enough, one of the first things you can notice about the inhabitants of Heaven is that they are not selfish. We are to understand that the “inner heaven,” the true Heaven – the Heaven which includes the Beatific Vision – is “further up and further in.” The souls from Hell “visiting” Heaven are on the outskirts of Heaven. This means that the Spirits who have come to speak to the souls from Hell have willingly walked away from utter joy, out of the desire to help these souls who have not tasted joy. Of course, the Spirits cannot help but find joy in this too, but as George Macdonald (who Lewis-as-narrator meets in Heaven, and who acts as a mentor to him) puts it, “Ye can hardly blame them for that!”

(Now, I must slip in a note here in case any of my fellow Catholics have begun to shake their heads and tut-tut at me and wonder if this Lizzie person actually knows what her Faith teaches. I am referring to the premise in The Great Divorce of souls from Hell being invited to come to Heaven. Hell and Heaven are permanent destinations; you can’t go to Hell, then later go to Heaven. But The Great Divorce is, as aforementioned, not meant as a factual account of the afterlife;  besides which, this specific issue is brought up in the book. The way it is explained (by Macdonald, again) is that those who were in Hell but chose to stay in Heaven could really be said to have been in Purgatory before, and that in any case the place where the souls from Heaven are meeting the souls from Hell is not really true Heaven, Deep Heaven, but the Valley of the Shadow of Life…similarly, the part of Hell which Lewis-as-narrator experienced was not really Deep Hell, but the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Also, I repeat that this whole thing is meant to be a vision, in any case, not really a factual thingamajig.)

Another thing we notice is the uniqueness of the Spirits. Some are clothed, some are not…some are male, some female…Macdonald has retained his Scottish accent. This speaks to something which I am quite passionate about: human beings are meant to be unique. Each person is meant to display a different facet of the infinite beauty of God. The saints are not boring factory-produced identical beings.

Of course, the very first thing that we notice about Heaven is the realness of everything – in direct contrast to Hell. We find that Heaven is much realer, not only than Hell, but than Earth. The people who seemed perfectly solid in Hell become unsubstantial, wispy ghosts when seen in Heaven – not because they have changed, but because their surroundings have.

This leads to what I think is the most fascinating, most powerful, and wisest insight in this fascinating, powerful, wise book: Heaven, and by extension goodness, is just bigger than Hell, and by extension evil. Lewis puts it much better than I could; here is an exchange between Lewis-as-narrator and Macdonald:

“All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.”

“It seems big enough when you’re in it, Sir.”

“And yet all the 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 the 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.”

I can’t explain exactly how this just makes so much sense to me while simultaneously immensely pleasing and satisfying me, but it does. And it’s so hopeful. Good has to conquer…evil just doesn’t have a chance. (Unless we let it, of course. But even then it can only conquer in a very limited way, and in any case that’s a topic for another post. I’d rather end this post on a happy note, thank you very much.)

So despite the fact that Hell and the condemned souls there are very prevalent in The Great Divorce, I think this book is completely, utterly joyful. Not only that, but it is telling us that reality itself is completely, utterly joyful. And do you know, I think that it’s absolutely right.