The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Great Divorce is an episodic book by C.S. Lewis that sets out to teach us that, in the words of George MacDonald as an epitaph for this work, “there is no heaven with a little of hill in it—no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.”

In class we talked a lot about the title and the significance of that. Lewis is clear in this book, as in his others, that pacifism and relativity is not acceptable. To enter Heaven, the only reality, we have to put everything that makes us hellish out of our hearts. The interesting thing that stood out to me, mainly because of the parallel I feel it has to my own faith as a member of the LDS church, is that while Lewis says that he did not mean this to be “a speculation at what may actually await us” (x) in the afterlife, there is something about eternal and gradual progression that he puts a lot of focus on.

I think that gives hope to imperfect people like me, who probably have plenty of hell that they have not divorced in their hearts, to feel like they can still make the choice to become perfected. You have to start somewhere. “It’s only the little germ of a desire [or mustard seed] for God that we need to start to process” (98). I think that was one of my favorite messages from this book—at the end of the day, it is a choice. A lot of the characters we meet in this story were at the point of choosing heaven, but there was always something left in their hearts that they were just not willing to give up, “choices that had really been made long ago” (144). However, once someone decided to give the place a try and put off their natural selves, they gradually get “solider—grow acclimatized” (53). I like how Lewis wrote it. “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” (75). As a Latter-day Saint, this almost feels like reading scripture.

I think that the form of this book lends itself to lots of symbolism, but the main thing we discussed in class was that of substance—comparing the ghosts to hell and then to even that tiny apple from Heaven, which was “made of some different substance, so much solider” (21). At one point a voice shouts at the ghost trying to take this apple back on the bus to “put it down” since “there is not room for it and hell” and he should instead “learn to eat such apples” (49). Heaven is described as being the only place where reality actually exists. Hell was basically the size of a crack in the ground compared to the reality of Heaven (137-138). “Hell is a state of mind…but Heaven is not…Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly” (70).

Something else I learned in class that I did not know from simply reading was that our guide, George MacDonald (in many ways a parallel to Dante’s Inferno Heaven guide, Beatrice), was a real character in Lewis’ life who he claimed “baptized” his imagination as a teenager even though he was not yet committed to Christianity. Brother Young, my professor, suggested that MacDonald’s teachings might be even more similar to LDS doctrine than Lewis’. This is definitely something I would be interested in learning more about.

And then our protagonist wakes up. Was it really all a dream? I like that instead of just waking up that he wakes up to “the clock is striking…and the siren howling” to warn of the England bombings. It does not matter what is going on in life, hard or lukewarm, we need to remember that we need to make the choice to divorce hell from us at all possible costs.


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