CS Lewis (29^th November, 1898 - 22^nd November, 1963¹), was an author and a Professor of Literature at Cambridge. He was famous for his much beloved fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia as well as being a prolific and very popular author in other genres.

Lewis's short novella The Great Divorce (1945) gets its title from a William Blake Poem ?The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The divorce is the separation that exists between the two afterlife concepts - and deals with the journey of a soul (the narrator) as it progresses through different levels of awareness in this supernatural afterlife.

In this respect it has literary parallels to Dante's The Divine Comedy,Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. In some ways one can also see the association with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as characters shrink and expand as the move from one world to another, meeting characters along the way hinting as to the meaning of the place.

The key message is in how it deals with the questions arising from those religions that believe there is a Hell to which wicked people go. The book explores Lewis's thoughts on the question of 'how could a loving God consign to Hell his creations for reasons from say genocide to simply not being able to commit to the faith after a sincere search?'

The narrator meets with a mentor (Lewis's friend George MacDonald) who helps to explain what is going on. In short the narrator starts off in Purgatory, a grey dreary wet town filled with boredom (neither quite Heaven or Hell but a no man's land between them). The souls of the lost that choose to remain gradually decay to Hell, whereas those that are saved progress to Heaven. The message is - it's we who make the choice, not God. In a sense the Purgatory was Hell for those who ultimately arrive at Heaven - purified. Whereas for the lost it is a point of descent to misery. Ultimately those who willfully seperate themselves from God in life will choose to do so in the afterlife; this is Lewis's thesis.

The assumption is that the life we live on Earth prepares us for the choice we will make beyond it.

The book ends with the narrator, like Alice and the Pilgrim, waking from the dream.

To the committed atheist the book is unlikely to make a lot of sense, and even some theists may argue the theology. It is probably best read as the author's exercise of artistic license on what things might be like in Heaven/Hell, so as to explore the question of 'is God just to consign people to Hell?'. Lewis's point is that a just God would not do unjust things - so if Hell is that bad it must be because some people nevertheless find themselves incapable of making a choice otherwise. In Lewis's afterworld, like the real world here and now, God gives us free will to choose.

The American philosopher Thomas Nagel, forthrightly said:

'...I want atheism to be true and I am uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and naturally hope that I'm right about my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that'.²

Prior to his death in 1989 A J Ayer the English philosopher, a lifelong and famous religious skeptic, had a vivid near-death experience after choking on a piece of smoked salmon that stopped his heart for at least four minutes. Of the experience, Ayer said that it:

'...slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death ... will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be.'³

It's interesting to compare the opinion of Nagel and Ayer to that of Lewis, who as a atheist in his early life, said that God and an afterlife was the last thing he wanted to believe in, but as he came to have faith he was 'the most reluctant convert in all England'. ⁴

Theists are frequently accused of wishful thinking, accustomed to the arguments of Marx and Freud. Perhaps wishful thinking is something we all engage in. There is that old oxymoronic quote about 'being careful about what you wish for as it may come true', and this needs to be given thought if Lewis's point is right. It was Plato that said;

...times will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain, therefore, awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters.

Selected Quotes

• 'I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) was precisely nothing: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in the High Countries'
• 'But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself'
• 'Yes. 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'
• 'Not only this valley [in Heaven] but all this earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only [Hell] but all their life on earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering... No future bliss can make up for it, not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. [Others take pleasure in sin], little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sins...What happens to [the Saved] is best described as the opposite of a mirage. What seemed, when they entered it, to be the vale of misery turns out, when they look back, to have been a well; and where present experience saw only salt deserts memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water.'
• 'Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death.'
• 'There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself...as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organiser of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares'
• 'Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both.'
• '…every disease that submits to a cure will be cured'?'we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world's garden for the sake of someone who cannot abide the smell of roses.'
• '...hitherto you have experienced truth only with abstract intellect. I will bring you where you can taste it like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom'
• 'Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.'
• 'There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks at Him and bad when it turns away from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demonic it will be if it rebels. It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels.'
• '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'
• Look here for more CS Lewis quotes.