The Great Divorce

“They won’t like it at all when we get there, and they’d really be much more comfortable at home.” 

On the bus to the Valley of the Shadow of Life, Ikey correctly predicts that many of the Ghosts will not enjoy the new scenery despite its beauty in comparison to the Grey Town. The Grey Town is where they feel comfortable, and, with only one exception, they choose that miserable comfort over the glorious risk of killing their sinful nature to enter Heaven.

“‘It will be dark presently,’ he mouthed.

‘You mean the evening is really going to turn into a night in the end?’

He nodded.”

Though none of the residents of the Grey Town have definitive proof that they are in Hell, Ikey’s statement to the narrator here indicates that he thinks they exist in a Purgatory that will one day turn into Hell. This prospect frightens him, which means that he has a much clearer view of the reality of his situation than many of the Ghosts. However, rather than accepting God’s offer of salvation to escape this fate, Ikey thinks he can use earthly socioeconomic strategies to transform the Grey Town into a safe, protected city.

“There’s not a shred of evidence that this twilight is ever going to turn into a night. There has been a revolution of opinion on that in educated circles. I am surprised that you haven’t heard of it. All the nightmare fantasies of our ancestors are being swept away.”

In response to Ikey’s predictions that the Grey Town’s evening will turn to night, the apostate accuses Ikey of anti-intellectualism. The apostate does not take the fact that he is experiencing an afterlife in a miserable place as evidence that something like the Christian version of Hell exists. He holds to the worldview he held during his lifetime even though contradictory evidence stares him in the face.

“I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before […] It gave me a feeling of freedom, but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed.”

The metaphysics of the Valley of the Shadow of Life and the accompanying feeling of danger are just some of the many things the narrator cannot fully understand or explain throughout the book. The idea of proximity to God as both a glorious and dangerous state comes up again and again in Lewis’s works, including in his famous Chronicles of Narnia series. Lewis cultivates the impression that many things about Heaven can only be vaguely imagined until one gets there, as expressed in 1 Corinthians 13:12: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully.”

“‘I only want my rights. I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity.’

‘Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything here is for the asking and nothing can be bought.’”

In the first Ghost-Spirit interaction the narrator witnesses, the Spirit explains to the Ghost that God offers Heaven as a free gift. The Ghost can have it if only he asks for it as a gift of grace rather than insisting that he deserves it. This is the one thing the Ghost cannot do; he holds too much pride in the idea that he can take care of himself. 

“You have been in Hell: though if you don’t go back you may call it Purgatory.”

As one of the Spirits explains, for those Ghosts that one day choose Heaven, the Grey Town will appear to always have been Purgatory. For those who do not, the Grey Town will always have been Hell (though they may continue to delude themselves on this point). MacDonald describes this further in a later chapter, calling the reality of the Grey Town “retroactive” rather than fixed.

“Oh, as you love your own soul, remember […] We were afraid of crude salvationism, afraid of a breach with the Spirit of the age, afraid of ridicule, afraid (above all) of real Spiritual fears and hopes.”

The apostate’s Spirit friend attributes the pair’s falling away from the faith mainly to peer pressure and fear. He and the apostate were regularly exposed to the popular secularism of their age in their scholarly training, and they did not want to look foolish and naïve. Moreover, they found it easier to turn to secularism than to live according to a moral code by which they would be held accountable one day. 

“For me there is no such thing as a final answer. The free wind of inquiry must always continue to blow through the mind, must it not? ‘Prove all things,’ to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.”

In this passage, the apostate articulates an intellectual error that afflicts many of the Ghosts. The Spirit who talks to him argues that to travel hopefully is not at all better to arrive; arriving at a final truth, a final reality, matters. Emphasizing the process rather than the end result reflects humankind’s pride in their own intellectual capacities. The sin of the Ghost’s perspective lies in glorifying his own capacity for intellectual inquiry rather than God’s created reality. 

“Ah, but when I became a man I put away childish things.”

In the apostate’s conversation with his Spirit friend, the Spirit encourages him to remember his state of mind as a child, when he asked questions because he genuinely wanted to know the answer and not just as a mental game. In response, the apostate quotes 1 Corinthians 13:11. His use of a biblical passage to back up his salvation-rejecting ideology evokes Shakespeare’s observation in The Merchant of Venice that “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” The apostate does not suffer from a lack of knowledge of biblical doctrine, but rather from a lack of courage.

“They told me in the nursery that if I were good I’d be happy. And they told me at school that Latin would get easier as I went on. After I’d been married a month some fool was telling me that there were always difficulties at first, but with Tact and Patience I’d soon ‘settle down’ and like it! And all through two wars what didn’t they say about the good time coming if only I’d be a brave boy and go on being shot at? Of course they’ll play the old game here if anyone’s fool enough to listen.”

The hard-bitten Ghost’s doubts about Heaven plant fear in the narrator’s mind because the Ghost speaks with an air of knowledge and authority. Yet upon close examination, his statements do not adhere to ironclad logic. A disinclination toward marriage, for instance, is not evidence of conspiracy, but rather evidence that the cynical man feels differently than his friends. The narrator eventually realizes that the Ghost’s thinking is a form of intellectual laziness rather than extreme canniness.

“I tried […] to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I first bought a copy of Phantastes (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the New Life.”

In this passage, Lewis makes his narrator conspicuously similar to himself, as he personally considered MacDonald a major influence in his faith and his writing career. Phantastes is a work of fantasy, and Lewis wrote extensively in the fantasy genre, most famously in The Chronicles of Narnia, but also in other, lesser-known works of fiction. He also explicitly evokes the parallels between this novel and other classic works of fiction about spiritual journeys, including Dante’s Divine Comedy. He invites comparison between his vision of the afterlife and other such visions from the literary canon. 

“Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind—is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly.”

The major distinction between Lewis’s idea of Hell and other famous literary depictions of Hell from figures like Dante and Milton is that Lewis portrays the agony of Hell to be its residents’ complete surrender to their own delusions. Hell is not so much a punishment as it is a self-imposed inevitability for those who won’t accept God’s grace. In this telling, one of the main effects of sin is that it distorts the sinner’s understanding, separating them not only from God but from reality. Lewis expresses that God is reality; the closer one gets to him, the closer one gets to objective reality.

“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.”

Lewis calls the book The Great Divorce to indicate that entrance to Heaven always involves an act of death. The sinful self must die, which involves the surrender of something humans love and prize about themselves–love for dominating others, in the case of one Ghost, or love for fame, in the case of another. The titular “divorce” refers to this act of separation, this choice to permanently sever the sinful self.

“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.’”

To many people, being permitted to retreat into their preferred self does not sound like a punishment but rather a reward. Lewis, however, contends that no human’s own innate will leads to their flourishing. Sin, which every human is born with, only leads to misery. Many Ghosts refuse to acknowledge their own misery and insist on their enjoyment of the Grey Town, but this does not mean that they experience true joy.

“All alike […] were wholly unreliable, and all equally incurious about the country in which they had arrived. They repelled every attempt to reach them, and when they found that nobody listened to them, they went back, one by one, to the bus.”

The Ghosts are invariably self-involved. In fact, Lewis portrays the primary manifestation of sin as repellent self-interestedness. While the Valley could not be more different in appearance from the Grey Town, many Ghosts barely seem to take it in because they are so intent on communicating their own thoughts to anyone who will listen. Watching from a distance, the narrator finds this behavior pitiable, as the Grey Town is so dull and changeless that it hardly merits discussion.

“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.”

Most of the ghosts try to frame their intentions nobly, and the one featured in Chapter 10 is initially no exception. However, by the end, she admits the truth: She does not want to make her husband a better, happier man. She only wants to be in total control of someone. All of the Ghosts have some sinful, ugly intention at their core, no matter how they try to present themselves.

“There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly.”

MacDonald expresses this idea in response to the narrator’s questions about the Ghost mother who never stopped mourning her deceased son. MacDonald explains that loving one’s son or mourning his death are not inherently sins–far from it. However, because those feelings and actions are noble, many people think they are a good enough person simply for experiencing them. MacDonald explains that as beautiful as love is, and as central as it is to God’s character, the mere experience of loving someone is not a substitute for accepting God’s gift of salvation.

“I know there are no pleasures now, only dreams. But aren’t they better than nothing?”

The lizard feeds this idea to the Ghost whose shoulder he sits upon. This is one of the only places in the novel where a Ghost or Ghost associate admits that the life they have chosen is not actually pleasurable. Still, a known misery is often easier to choose than an unknown joy, the lizard’s words suggest.

“Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a Spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak.”

Here again, Lewis emphasizes that God and Heaven embody a reality more real than anything on Earth: God is reality itself. The Ghosts struggle to acclimate to the Valley because they are not substantial enough, not real enough, to thrive there. Their opaque bodies cannot tread on the diamond-tough grass without difficulty and pain. This natural environment demonstrates that sin does not prevent one from getting into Heaven because it offends God per se, but because it does not meet God’s standard of reality.

“What we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. In the main I loved you for my own sake: because I needed you.”

Sarah Smith, a woman who enjoys a magnificent processional in Heaven because of her godliness on Earth, speaks this dialogue to her former husband, Frank. The fact that Sarah, a model of godly love, recognizes that her love was incomplete on Earth shows that any human being’s love will be incomplete by virtue of their sinful nature. Humans constantly experience emotional needs, and therefore their expression of love is always partly a request to be loved in return. In Heaven, however, they have no unmet emotional needs and can love purely, needing nothing in return.

“Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.”

After witnessing Frank’s decision to reject Sarah’s offer and Sarah’s subsequent calm reaction, the narrator struggles with the idea that Sarah will not suffer over her loved one’s absence. He feels that if two people love each other, the suffering of one ought to affect the other. In voicing this thought, he expresses a philosophical stumbling block many people have with Heaven: How could anyone be truly happy in such a place if they knew some of their loved ones were in eternal torment? MacDonald responds that in a universe with free will, those who reject joy cannot hold captive those who do.

“If all Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.”

Not only is Lewis’s Heaven much more solid and heavy than his Hell, but it is also infinitely bigger. The miniscule size of the Grey Town and its residents mirrors the pettiness of unfettered self-interest. Just as the concerns of the people in the Grey Town are small and inconsequential, so also are their surroundings.

“For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom.”

Through the symbol of the chessboard in the novel’s final chapter, MacDonald offers the narrator a glimpse at how free will and God’s eternal control over the universe can coexist. His statement here, however, clarifies that the symbol does not perfectly resolve the paradox, for the paradox simply cannot be understood by humans who have only ever existed in time.