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| Travis Wilson Class of 2016 |
This fall at the McConnell Center, we have taken the opportunity as living, breathing, imaginative students to spend some time envisioning the unknowable afterlife. One particularly interesting conception I encountered was through my independent study of The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. The text was an excellent read alongside the C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, which highlights similar themes of choice in the eternal context and discusses sins which prevent the enjoyment of an afterlife in paradise. Lewis uses the concept of a “holiday” for the damned to illustrate the choices of individuals which lead either to heaven or to hell.
Emerging on a bus from a boundless gray city to the pleasant but painfully solid foothills of heaven, the protagonist spirit is able to observe a wide variety of souls and their respective shortcomings. Other souls meet a variety of solid heavenly beings they knew in their life on Earth. Without coercion, the guides attempt to coax their loved ones toward the innermost regions of heaven and away from their life in the miserable gray city. Many reject these pleas as their most dominant sins shine through, rejecting heaven and thus choosing hell. The residents of heaven, who serve as guides to the visiting ghosts, are solid and large, comfortably living in the land that is painful to the undecided. The protagonist, presumably Lewis, finds his own guide in the Scottish writer George MacDonald. His inclusion seems almost humorous at first, but if this system of spiritual guides towards heaven were to exist, MacDonald would be an appropriate choice for Lewis. MacDonald serves as a guide, very much like Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy; he explains the sins of others, the layout of the eternal world, and why and how to remain permanently in heaven.
Aside from the instructive nature of the painful conversations between the damned with their guides, the most interesting aspect of the book is the conception that is presented of the mechanism by which individuals are damned, atone for their sins, and are saved. Lewis’s understanding is summed up in the following quote from MacDonald’s character: “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.” Every effort is made to save those who are damned from their own pride; “the smallest spark” is nurtured by heavenly guides until they are able to choose Heaven over Hell.
When asked for an explanation of the gray city and the arrival of the bus, MacDonald explains that everyone arrives from what is called Hell by the damned and Purgatory by the saved. Hell, in this conception, is merely smaller than an atom in the world of Heaven and is “shrunk, shut up in itself.” Souls in this land exist with their “fists clenched, their teeth clenched, their eyes fast shut.” At first, these souls have hope; because they do not desire Heaven, they cannot enter Heaven. However, he notes that for those who enter Heaven, all of their soul’s existence shall be considered Heaven and for the damned, everything should seem as if it had always been Hell. He draws this explanation from the belief that all that has ever existed and will exist, exists simultaneously at the moment of “His [Christ’s] descending.” This conclusion is properly drawn from the understanding that time is merely a lens by which souls view eternal reality, which is far too great for those lesser than God to understand.
The text concludes with what seems to be the beginning of the Second Coming of Christ. While we cannot know what the afterlife will actually be like, it is an instructive and useful endeavor to imagine. Lewis leaves the reader with an incredible longing for this to have been an authoritative description of life after death, but it is at best a theologically sound allegorical dream.
Travis Wilson, of Burlington, Ky., is a senior McConnell Scholar majoring in history and economics.
Travis Wilson, of Burlington, Ky., is a senior McConnell Scholar majoring in history and economics.