The Great Divorce

This sermon was preached on January 22, 2006, at the evening contemporary service. The focus here is on CS Lewis's book "The Great Divorce."

It’s no accident that CS Lewis wrote so many of his theological works in the form of imaginative and fantastical fiction. He was, after all, a professor of English literature whose academic specialty was Medieval and Renaissance English. By creating magical stories like the Narnia books, unforgettable characters like Screwtape the tempter, and lyrical parables like his book called “The Great Divorce,” Lewis was able to transcend the dry and scholarly language of theology and make his thoughts on Christianity, eternity, heaven and hell accessible, real, and compelling for his readers.

So far in this sermon series you’ve talked already about the imaginative world of Narnia, long beloved as a children’s adventure story, and the theology that lies at its center and makes the whole story a parable about sin, grace, atonement, and resurrection. Last week we talked about Lewis’s short book “The Screwtape letters,” a book narrated by the demonic villain, and the startling and enlightening perspectives on Christianity we can glean from this suprising point of view.

This evening we’re going to focus on Lewis’s book, “The Great Divorce,” published in 1945, another narrative born out of Lewis’s amazing imagination that offers us his views of a complicated theological topic—the subject of Heaven and Hell. Now writing a parable about heaven and hell has a long tradition in literature—from Dante’s Divine Comedy (divided, if you’ll remember, into three parts—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso)—to Milton’s Paradise Lost—continuing, if you like, to the present day and Mitch Albom’s recent bestseller “The Five People You Meet In Heaven.”

“The Great Divorce” takes its name in response and opposition to one such book -- the strange prophetic book by William Blake, published around 1790, called “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. In the preface to “The Great Divorce,” Lewis explains, he is setting out to explore the great divide between Heaven and Hell, not their similarities.

Lewis rejects moral relativism by saying that Heaven and Hell, or good and evil, can never be reconciled, as Blake and other philosophers have attempted to do; instead, he tells us, life and God require us to choose between good and evil, Heaven and Hell, and that choosing one means abandoning the other.

Lewis says, “I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot develop into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, with backward mutters of dissevering power—or else not. It is still either-or. If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven; if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.”

The plot of “The Great Divorce” basically follows an ordinary man—perhaps Lewis himself, as the book is written in the first person—as he finds himself in a grey, rainy, and deserted city; as he jostles other would-be passengers to board a bus; and the bus starts off, then leaves the ground, and flies through a grey abyss until it arrives at a new country, beautiful and green and mountainous, and perpetually on the verge of sunrise.

It is, in fact, heaven—or, as one of the other characters tells him, The valley of the Shadow of Life—and in Lewis’s imagination, heaven is an interesting and confusing place. As Lewis imagines it, everything in heaven—the grass, the rocks, the trees, the flowers, the rain, the fruit—is “much solider than the things in our country.” Everything is hard, like diamonds, and heavy—Lewis can’t pluck a daisy or pick up a leaf, and the grass is sharp and hard.

Even more bizarre, Lewis and all of the others from the bus who have just arrived are strangely insubstantial—like Phantoms, or ghosts. He can see the grass through his feet—and walking is difficult because the hard grass hurts his transparent feet.

Into this strange but beautiful environment come some solid people—they are substantial, timeless, glowing with light and clothed in robes. They are a sort of ambassador from further out and further up in the celestial mountains, come to persuade the ghosts to come with them—to the Higher Reaches of Heaven. On the journey the ghosts will, little by little, become less and less transparent and more and more real—as they prepare for Morning to break, as one day it must.

Much of the action of the Great Divorce happens in conversation—as Lewis converses with other Ghosts, as he converses with the Bright People, and as he witnesses other Ghosts talking to other Bright People. One by one, the characters and the conversations reveal souls that are troubled, that are angry, that are willfully ignorant, that are so attached to the things of Earth that they have no time or attention to pay to the Heaven that lies open before them, beckoning.

One of the ghosts a theologian who, having come from Hell and standing on the brink of heaven, can’t bring himself to say that he believes in a “literal Heaven and Hell”—only that he believes in it in “a spiritual sense”. When the Bright Person who is talking with him says in astonishment, “Is it possible you don’t know where you’ve been?” and tells him, “You have seen Hell; you ar ein sight of Heaven. Will you, even now, repent and believe?”, the theologian ghost says, “I’m not sure that I’ve got the exact point you are trying to make.”

Another lost soul Lewis observes speaking to a Bright Person is an artist ghost who wants to paint heaven and who is absolutely downcast when told that painting for its own sake doesn’t happen in heaven.

The Bright Person tells the artist, “Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you’ll never learn to see the country. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about him.” Ultimately the artist is unconvinced.

This theme of attachment to the things of the world, and setting those things up as idols to be worshipped for their own sake, is a constant theme in “The Great Divorce.” Again and again we see the lost transparent souls give up their hope of heaven and instead cling to their resentments, their failed relationships, their grief, their self-pity, their self-involvement, and their avarice. One by one we see them turn away from the bright mountains and head back to the bus to be taken back down to the grey city which is hell.

And, once or twice, we get a chance to see a transparent ghost—even those burdened down with things like murder and lust—break their attachment to the things of this world and make the choice to continue towards heaven—and we get a chance to see their miraculous transformation as they become bright and holy creatures.

As I was reading the Great Divorce, I was struck by several of Lewis’s theological convictions that seem to be themes not only of this book but of much of his writing.

The first of these convictions is, as I pointed out at the beginning of this sermon, that moral relativism is dangerous and can lead us astray. Lewis is convinced of the absolutes of good and evil, and of heaven and hell—and he is convinced that life is a series of choices, that we are always being asked to choose between right and wrong, that we are always being asked to choose which Master we will serve and to live out that commitment in concrete ways.

The second of these convictions is Lewis’s conception of heaven itself as a pilgrimage or journey. The characters in Lewis’s books always seem to have to work hard at getting to Heaven after they have died. Instead of entering directly into glory, they must spend some time being tested; they must choose to head for the High Reaches and go through pain and turmoil on the way to recognizing and claiming joy. They must all go continually further up and further in, and on the way they discover that the further up and further in they go, the bigger everything gets—like an onion, except that as you go in and in each layer is larger than the last.

The third of Lewis’s convictions that runs throughout his writings is his concept of heaven itself. I don’t think very much about heaven—and I don’t find a lot of the movies and books written about heaven to be completely helpful But CS Lewis is different—his concept of heaven seems to me to be compelling and somehow right.

For Lewis, heaven is reality—and this earth is merely the shadowland, the dull reflection of the infinite love and joy of that heavenly reality. Lewis says, “Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”

At the end of the Chronicles of Narnia, in the book called “The Last Battle,” all of the characters must leave Narnia behind and go into a new land—and despite their sorrow at leaving, they soon discover that the new land is just like Narnia—except that everything is more colorful and more clear and, as one of the characters says, “More like the real thing. . .as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.”

As you explore CS Lewis and his writings for yourself, my hope for each of you would be that, in your own journey through his imaginative and thought provoking books, your own heart and mind and soul will be inspired and challenged and comforted by his vision of heaven—and that you might discover, yourself, the reality of heaven promised to us through Jesus Christ.

Amen.