Well, since last year I read my first C.S. Lewis book in English, and a friend asked me recently what I thought of Lewis' ideas in The Great Divorce, I thought it about time to tackle a second work. Also, it's a very slim volume.
Lewis writes in his preface that the work is a conscious reply to Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and that it is. It's a book that fits into a long line of narrative journeys into the afterlife, with antecedents and influences a-plenty. Dante, Milton, Blake, maybe a smattering of Vergil lurking in the deep background. Bunyan, Augustine, Swedenborg. Some of these are more dialogue partners who Lewis is refuting.
The narrative itself places us in medias res, as the narrator finds themself in a rather bleak grey town, which turns out to be Hell/Purgatory (no, these aren't spoilers, it's not a book that can really be spoiled); they wait for a bus and the bus flies up to a place where the Ghosts of those in Hell can encounter, in a kind of way, some of the spirits of saved people, on the very outskirts of Heaven, so to speak.
This device gives the work its primary conceit - conversations between the Ghosts, who are very insubstantial, and the Spirits, who are very much substantial, in which the latter try to convince the former to come and journey on towards God, in which case they shall become more and more substantial, and the grey city below will for them have only been a kind of Purgatory. Though the book holds out the idea that some do, all but one of the conversationalists choose to do so.
I don't know Lewis' more plain views on Heaven and Hell, I suspect that they are a piece with his general theological cloth. A traditional orthodoxy not highly vested in theological minutiae, but shaped by a very English Anglicanism of his time. I don't think that Lewis actually believes such post-death conversions and purgatory are real, per se. But the device allows him to explore a number of key ideas that he does hold.
I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course— or I intended it to have— a moral. But the trans-mortal 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. ~ Preface
The recurring theme of the Ghosts' conversation is that they are, in all their variety, unwilling to give up their particular sins and underlying idols, which are the very things they would have to in order to journey onwards and come to glory and joy. In this way, their after-life is a continuation of their life, a refusal to have God as god, and they indeed 'choose' Hell. I think there is a theological truth to that - people who will not give up their luggage to go on a journey where no luggage can go, in the end have chosen their luggage over the journey. And so they get what they have chosen - luggage.
One of the things I personally find hard is the question of why isn't universalism true. And if God can make all evil unravel, and become ultimately untrue, and set wrong things right, why doesn't he do so for all people? And how can people be happy in eternal bliss, if those they loved in life are not there? Those are not easy questions with easy answers. There's a discussion of some of this in the latter chapters, between the narrator and his Afterlife guide, George Macdonald:
‘I hardly know, Sir. What some people say on Earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.’
‘Ye see it does not.’
‘I feel in a way that it ought to.’
‘That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it.’
‘What?’
‘The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.’
...
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. I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye’ll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe.’
Then follows a discussion of the passion of pity and the action of pity. The former, the feeling which we suffer, the latter the pity that transforms evil into good. In the end, Lewis' argument has teeth. Those who would blackmail others with pity should not have the final say. Just as in life, it's not right for one person's joy and life to be beholden to the will and whimsy of another, so to on the cosmic scale.
The book closes with a confusing discussion of time, perspective, providence and free-will. All such discussions are confusing, have to be confusing, because they are trying to grasp something so very difficult. I don't fault Lewis for trying. I'll leave you to read those final chapters for yourself, and backtrack to something else to close with.
For, just as heaven and its beings are so much more real and solid, while hell and its denizens are less and less real, shadows and ghosts; so too from the perspective of heaven, hell seems infinitesimally small. Now remember, Lewis is writing a fable, a parable if you will. So it's not the geography or the physics that matters, it's the point he's making here. Hell is real, but from the perspective of heaven it's utterly insubstantial and insignificant. For its inhabitants, it's all consuming, and their torment is primarily to be left with their own sin forever.
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.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.’
Well, I had been content to leave this with Lewis, but while convalescing from recent surgery I watched all of the television series, The Good Place, and while I’m several years too late to offer anything like a hot-take, I did have some thoughts on how it relates to Lewis, and to some bigger questions about the afterlife and human nature.
Question 1: What are humans like?
In the initial set-up of TGP, the world runs on a points system of good and bad behaviour, and if you get enough good points in your lifetime, you go to the Good Place. Otherwise you go to the Bad Place for eternal torment.
Such a world basically treats life as a test, and however you score on the test determines your eternity.
As the show develops, the main characters come to believe, show, and argue that this doesn’t match the nature of life on earth, nor human nature, because humans are always capable of improving, given the right conditions. What “the test” treats as an immutable value (a particular person is good or bad, and that nature cannot be changed), they treat as mutable (any particular person can become good, and humans tend towards the good over time, provided with the right stimuli).
C.S. Lewis’ view, above, is that human beings in hell demonstrate by their attachment to sin and rejection of God that they would always and ever choose to reject God and pursue their sin. No amount of time nor good conditions would change their fundamental choice. He doesn’t quite get into the counter-side, but it’s plenty there in Lewis (and Christian theology more broadly): but no human being would reject sin and pursue God except for the intervention of divine grace.
I’m not really interested in those theological takes that critique The Good Place for not being a reflection of Christian Orthodoxy. That’s incredibly boring. I’m much more interested in considering its underlying philosophies and the questions it raises. TGP raises the question of human nature and human virtue; Christianity’s answer, per Lewis, is that humans will never repent, not on an infinite time-frame, apart from divine intervention at the level of nature.
Question 2: the meaning of life
I think TGP’s answer to this is subtly “friends”. Which, you know, I’m a big fan of friendship but I wouldn’t quite go so far. But the thing that makes all four of the human beings better over the course of the show is their friendship together. However, the common denominator of the original quartet is that Chidi always helps the others. He is the Aristotelian friend par excellence: committed to virtue himself, he helps his friends acquire virtue too. When they run an experiment with another 3/4 people, it struggles precisely because of the failure to have a friend like Chidi, except when they do have Chidi. But even Chidi, lover of virtue, cannot help people who don’t love virtue.
On this particular point, I’m not going anywhere except that you should love virtue, and have friends who love virtue, and help your friends to pursue virtue. Be an Aristotelian friend.
Question 3: What is eternal bliss like?
You have to get to late season 4 to get TGP’s answer. They finally get to the actual Good Place, and… it’s boring and full of brain-dead blissed out zombies. Why is this? Here are my thoughts:
The Good Place (rightly) refrains from ever showing you ‘God’. Human media almost always does a terrible job at this, so there’s a level of supernaturality that always lies beyond TGP’s purview. So, God is just absent.
I think humans simply cannot imagine an eternal existence in a way that makes sense, given our current existence. Our current frame of reference makes it too difficult.
Example: in this world, if you get everything you ever want, and never struggle or suffer, you will be a soft, entitled, mostly useless person; pain has redemptive purposes in this world. And yet heaven seems like it should be pain-free. We can’t reconcile these.
Example: Our whole existence here is framed by natality to mortality; we can’t mentally put ourselves into a world not characterised by death because we’ve just never known it.
And so on.
Which is why, I think, TGP ends up with this position. If you imagine this world, with everything good available on-tap, and nothing bad, and forever, then ennui seems the logical end result.
The solution of TGP, in the very last episodes, is that they reinvent death. Self-chosen eternal euthanasia. It is, as so many have said, incredibly dissatisfying for the show, but I’m not really sure what else they would have come up with. If struggle, suffering, improvement, and death all frame the good human life, then the absence of these things de-humanises the after-life, and only be reintroducing them could they rectify it.
I’m not offering a fully worked solution. Yet, the absence of God in TGP is part of its problem, because the ultimate good, the summum bonum of human existence, is to know God and enjoy him forever, which suggests a solution at least.
I think, for me, the main take away here is the point that I made earlier: I simply think we are incapable of properly imagining “heaven”, i.e. a world of perfect good with no evil, moral or natural, and eternal existence. All our efforts to do so represent our deep longing, and yet are marred by our fallen imaginations.
Perhaps this is one reason why Lewis’ The Great Divorce speaks of hell, purgatory, and the foothills of heaven, but never dares to treat closer to God. No fable-like description of the blessed realm, and the Blessed One, could ever do enough justice. We get hints, and a splendid image in Sarah Smith (ch 12) of a person so ordinary in life, but so extraordinary in eternal perspective. But hints nonetheless. Lewis’ imagination takes its halt at a certain point, and leaves the rest of mystery to holy silence.