When Lewis finds the queue for the bus he has been walking in endless rain in a twilight town that is ever expanding but mostly empty. The line for the bus is something different than the monotonous city blocks, and he joins it as two others—a couple, apparently—end a disagreement by leaving the line. Others are fighting, jostling for position. Still others are disgusted by the class (or lack thereof) of the people in line. There’s a moment where someone cheats their way to a place further up in line. There’s a fistfight. Through it all there’s a sort of certainty that there won’t be room for everyone on the bus. And yet, when Lewis finally boards there’s plenty of room…indeed, it could have held every poor soul who had initially been in the line.
Lewis has made his choice and joined the tour, and others have made their choice and stayed in the grey city. The story of The Great Divorce hinges on this precisely: the choices that human beings make, and how those choices may or may not influence their place in eternity.
This is no great surprise. As we mentioned last time, he said this in Mere Christianity: “[e]very time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses…either into a Heavenly creature or into a Hellish creature.” And we’ve noticed in earlier posts in this reread that the Narnian idea that one is always either growing or devolving is central to Lewis’s understanding of human spirituality.
In chapter seven we meet a “hard-bitten ghost” who thinks that the idea that any of the denizens of Hell could stay here in this Heavenly kingdom is “pure propaganda.” They can’t eat the food, can barely walk on the grass. Of course he’s never liked anywhere he’s been, whether China or Niagara Falls. It’s all tourist traps and advertising. Even Hell is, in his words, “a flop.” “They lead you to expect red fire and devils and all sorts of interesting people sizzling on grids—Henry VIII and all that—but when you get there it’s just like any other town.” Heaven isn’t great either. In fact, it’s “darned uncomfortable.”
Lewis suggests that perhaps one becomes comfortable over time, and the Hard-Bitten Ghost goes on to say that, no, he suspects Heaven and Hell are run by the same team, that there’s no war, no disagreement. What’s the point of staying in heaven then?
Lewis finally asks him, “What would you like to do if you had your choice?”
The ghost, triumphant, points out that this is precisely what the problem is. All this insistence that he make a choice, instead of giving him something great. It’s all deception, it’s all dishonest. Lewis isn’t particularly impressed with the argument.
Lewis has already decided he will stay if it’s allowed. “If only I could find a trace of evidence that it was really possible for a Ghost to stay—that the choice were not only a cruel comedy—I would not go back.” This is, in fact, his first question to his guide George MacDonald: “Is this a real choice?” Does anyone choose to stay, and are they allowed to do so? Can one really change places from Hell to Heaven?
MacDonald answers in the affirmative, and then suggests an example that Lewis would be familiar with: “Ye’ll have heard that the emperor Trajan did.” This is almost certainly a reference to Dante’s Paradiso, where Trajan is shown to be the first of the “pagan converts” —those who chose to follow Jesus after their deaths. In medieval times the story went that Trajan died, and Pope Gregory, so impressed by the emperor’s justness, prays that he’ll be resurrected, which he is. Trajan, having seen the spiritual reality after death, quickly prays to become a follower of Jesus and is baptized before he dies again.
Lewis is astonished by this and pushes MacDonald to explain, then, how there can be free will or any sort of choice after one’s life is judged. How can you be sent to Hell and choose to leave? MacDonald then explains one of the more interesting theological ideas of this book…the grey town is not Hell. Not exactly. It’s—as Lewis says it—“a state of mind.” For those who choose to stay there, it will have always been Hell. For those who choose to leave, it will have never been Hell at all, but rather Purgatory. So some residents of the great town will have never been in Hell, and others will have always been in Hell. Hell is a state of mind because to be trapped in one’s own self is Hell. (Heaven, on the other hand, is pure reality…it’s the Platonic Ideal of all existence, more real than anything anyone has ever known. And, ironically, we cannot inhabit Heaven until we become more fully ourselves…more “real.”)
Lewis pushes on this again, because what MacDonald appears to be saying is that there is no final judgment. Not really. Not if people can just go back and forth whenever they feel like it. He says that both Catholics and Protestants would object to this. Because a soul in purgatory is “already saved” in Catholic theology, just being purified for Heaven. And the Protestants say that “the tree lies where it falls.” When a person dies, their chance to make a choice has already passed, there is no post-mortem decision to be made.
Here we see Lewis move into one of his favorite theological structures. Lewis is not afraid of a theological vision that appears to be in conflict, or that sidesteps hard questions with the answer “maybe it’s just a mystery.” MacDonald answers Lewis by saying, “They’re both right, maybe.” Don’t bother yourself with such questions. You can’t, after all, truly understand what Time is when you are still in it. You can’t understand how Time and Choice are related when you’re still wrapped up in it all. “And ye were not brought here to study such curiosities. What concerns you is the nature of the choice itself: and that ye can watch them making.”
Buy the Book
In the Watchful City
Lewis, always pragmatic about the vagaries of theological musings, pushes us to see that it matters very little exactly how it all works…what matters is that there is a choice to make. There is something happening here, and Lewis (the character) has been brought here so that he can observe those choices.
Then MacDonald says something that may be the core thesis of this entire novel. Lewis asks him, how can these souls choose to return to Hell? (At this point in the book it’s the only choice he has seen the souls make.) MacDonald says, “The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery.”
MacDonald’s quoting Satan from Paradise Lost, there. “The damned” are all consciously choosing Hell rather than entering into relationship with God…a relationship that might require them to give up something along the way. Like Satan, they look at what is available to them in Heaven, and what is available outside of Heaven, and they say, “I choose Hell.” The so-called damned are not damned by God but by their own will, of their own volition. It is a preference, and God gives them what they want.
MacDonald says there are innumerable examples of this choice. There is the Christian who has become so focused on proving God’s existence that they cease to care about God as a person. It’s like someone who collects rare books but doesn’t read them. Or someone who works for a charity but hates the poor. Heaven is full, and many of its residents were not religious in their earthly lives. Hell is sparsely populated, but there are plenty of “good Christians” in the outer reaches of that grey town.
As the book progresses, they get into deeper questions about all this.
Lewis (the character) says he knows MacDonald was a universalist in life. We should pause on that for a moment. “Universalism” is a theological idea that says all people will “be saved.” There are a lot of different versions of Universalism, and a lot of strong feelings and beliefs about those who are universalists in different branches of Christianity. MacDonald never used this term to describe himself, but he often said things like, “When Protestant decided three places in the afterlife were too many, they got rid of the wrong one” (Protestants don’t typically believe in Purgatory).
MacDonald believed that God would “punish souls” after death, but those punishments weren’t punitive. They are designed, rather, to bring a soul to a revelation of what is broken in itself, and then to turn that person back toward healthy relationship with God. He said many times that it might take thousands or even millions of years, but that he believed that all people—without exception—would one day be made healthy, whole, and connected to God.
In fact, MacDonald fought strongly against Calvinism, a strong and respected theology in Scotland during his life. He saw it as evil, a misunderstanding of God that didn’t allow God to be loving. There’s even a story (which may be a legend, I haven’t been able to track down a firsthand account) that when George MacDonald was first told about the Calvinist theology of Predestination (which teaches that God chooses some people, but not others, to be in eternal relationship and enter Heaven) he burst into tears. In one of his novels, he does have a young boy who hears something similar and says, “I do not want God to love me if he does not love everyone.” (The Calvinism of MacDonald’s day taught that God loved “the elect” but not the damned.)
An important distinction of MacDonald’s theology is that he doesn’t believe God will force anyone to salvation. He believes, rather, that God is patient, and whether it takes a thousand years, a million years, or “ages upon ages,” that God will never give up on any human, until they come to a place where they can choose of their own volition to enter Heaven.
Here’s a quote that gives you a good taste of how MacDonald spoke about these things: “There is no salvation but having God in the heart. The very life of your life; all that is good and true and noble and grand—there is no salvation but that, and that our Lord is moving every one of us to accept. He has done all—except what is still waiting to be done for each individual—that He might get you into His kingdom of light, and love, and truth.”
In any case, Lewis’s question in the novel at this point is, well, “How can there be true choice if—as you say—all souls comes to heaven in time?”
MacDonald (like Lewis) basically sidesteps the question, because it’s the wrong question. As creatures of Time, every answer about Eternity is necessarily limited. “All answers deceive.” We’re looking at the question through the lens of time, and the lens distorts the image. Predestination is true in one sense: there is a “final” state for every soul. But the way it’s described removes human Freedom (the “deeper truth” of the two). Universalism—the “opposite” theology—would also remove human choice, and thus must also be rejected as little more than a symbol, an image that gives us some facet of the truth but not the truth itself. “Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived.”
Lewis wonders if these choices were all made long ago, then, and MacDonald says, hey, why not suggest they are choices that were all made at the end of time, or after? One is the same as the other. He tells Lewis, this is a dream. It’s a vision. Don’t try to make complete sense of it, but realize that it’s the story, it’s the picture, the image, that matters. Human choice, the freedom of the human soul is real…despite what any theological construct might suggest. That’s a great mystery, but it must be embraced.
MacDonald says it most concisely like this: “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.”
When I first read this book, I was shocked by these ideas. In my churches in those days I had been taught a very traditional Protestant theology about this whole thing: you die, and if you know and follow Jesus, you go to Heaven. If you die not knowing Jesus, you’re off to hell. It’s the driving engine of evangelism (telling others the good news about God). It’s the stick and the carrot. It brings up constant questions like, “How is that fair if someone lives in some remote island, never hears about God, and dies? Is God loving then? Is God good?” And there are, of course, entire libraries of answers to such questions, some more compelling than others.
Lewis’s answer is simple, and it’s not much different than McDonald’s: What we know is that God is good, and that God loves people, and God both desires to be in relationship with human beings and requires that human beings choose to be in that relationship…God cares about human volition and won’t lightly override it. If those things aren’t true, then God is not God, but a monster.
If we know all these things, then, who cares what the theological constructs look like that try to explain it? They are metaphors and theories only. What matters is that human beings have a choice. MacDonald believes that door remains always open, into eternity. Lewis believes that maybe, at some point, the door is shut…or at least that no one chooses to walk through it ever again.
I, for one, find it comforting to read theologies that say what MacDonald and Lewis do here: If one is mistaken about God, and discovers it after death, then God would still allow us to grow in knowledge after death. If one chooses in life to turn away from God, one can still choose in Life that comes after death to turn toward God.
Hell is a choice.
But so is Heaven.
And God keeps giving us the choice, over and over, in the hopes that we’ll choose what’s better.
Matt Mikalatos is the author of the YA fantasy The Crescent Stone. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on Facebook.
The Great Divorce is my favorite among Lewis’ works of Christian apologetics. I don’t find his arguments in Mere Christianity convincing, and it’s been a long time since I read Screwtape but I don’t think it convinces either. Also, I too am comforted by Universalist arguments (and I think Calvinist argument oddly limit the power of an all-powerful God.)
I made my big say on what is heaven and what is hell in the last installment. TL;DR – it’s here on earth by the choices we make.
That said I’d offer one correction: Calvinism still preaches that only the elect are saved and that you can know who is elect because they’re rich and the rest of us poor sods are just passing time till we’re thrown in hell. The (so-called) Prosperity Gospel: It’s about as pure an expression of the heresy at the heart of American Protestantism as exists.
@1/ecbatan. It is interesting how much Lewis leans into the philosophical and especially Platonist philosophy to make his cases in this book!
@2/wlewisiii. While there is certainly overlap between some prosperity gospel folks and some Calvinists, that’s not the majority (stated) position. For instance, a major figure in the neo-Reformed movement would argue that whether you are rich or poor that’s the “best possible life” for you. He famously wrote about “not wasting your cancer.” God gave you cancer as a gift to teach you something or accomplish something good in the world, being the idea. God’s favor in the afterlife is no guarantee of clear skies in the present.
@2/wlewisiii : Most serious Calvinists — who would call themselves “Reformed” — find the Prosperity Gospel folks absolutely appalling. To associate the contemporary American “Prosperity Gospel” movement with Reformed churches (contemporary Calvinism) is really a serious mistake. I suppose some might claim to be Calvinist who subscribe to some version of the Prosperity Gospel, but … well, I wouldn’t believe them! As you suggest, the Prosperity Gospel is quite purely heretical.
As someone who grew up in a Calvinist tradition and also read a lot of science fiction about multiverses and alternate worlds, I tend to think about predestination as a consequence of God being omniscient – He can see all the possible choices you could make, and all their consequences, and all the choices you will make after that, ad infinitum, until eventually you reach some sort of final destination. (Or maybe there are infinite versions of you, and some are saved and some are not!)
A great reading, Matt. I love The Great Divorce so much. My first time was in one sitting, and now it’s been quite a few. I was fortunate to have seen The Fellowship for Performing Arts‘s production back in 2019. I had a hard time visualizing how to pull it off, but they did a decent job.
@2/wlewisiii – Prosperity Gospel “Preachers” are not Calvinists. They probably have no idea what one is.
@5/kaiphranos. That’s a SUPER interesting thought about a Calvinist God in a multiversal context. It’s interesting how broad reading also broadens our philosophical understandings!
@6/JLaSala. I’ve never seen the stage play but have heard great things about it! Also, I just found out this week that the alteration of Napoleon to Hitler that is sometimes quoted by people is actually because in the stage adaptation they use Hitler!
How to reconcile a just or compassionate God with infinite punishment for finite transgressions? Those who aren’t content with “it’s ineffable” mostly wind up playing Choose-Your-Own-Heresy… apparently all the way back to the Apocrypha. Good to see Lewis wrestling with this; “we build Hell” is at least a plausible gloss on the advertised torture chamber.
@9/JGtheOK. Yes, exactly, Lewis says those who remain in Hell prefer it. He does think at some moment it’s “too late” but given that we’re creatures of Time, what that means is sketchy. McDonald, by contrast, says that Hell is not eternal in any appreciable sense, because the option to leave remains open until everyone chooses to do so.
I took a theology class in college that examined all the major religions of the world. When discussing Christianity we read a book called “No Other Name” by John Sanders that objectively explores many various reconciliations of how God judges non-believers in the afterlife. That was 20 years ago so I can’t remember it well enough to vouch for it anymore but college age me found the book fascinating. My memory is that it was very fair in presenting multiple concepts and ideas and didn’t take sides. It’s interesting how everyone from Universalists to the most firebrand Southern Baptist preacher can use Bible verses that back up their theologies.
I’ll point out that a lot of modern intellectual Calvinism is influenced by Barth (who Lewis couldn’t stand) but who also rejected a lot of the idea that most humanity was damned.
I have also seen the FPA stage play and it is wonderful! (As are their interpretations of The Screwtape Letters and of the life of C.S. Lewis).
Historically, I think my own theology has been pretty close to MacDonald’s – it’s the only thing that seemed to really make sense for God to be both loving and omnipotent. I have to accept the possibility that someone might choose hell permanently, but it seems like eventually they would be ready for something else even just out of sheer boredom.
On the other hand, “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” is a thing that I understand, having felt it myself. The question is whether the things that I feel that about are the things I’ve actually required to give up in the way I was thinking about giving them up. Many people, for various reasons, have been told by people claiming to speak for God that they have to give up who they are to go to heaven. I’m thinking particularly of gender/sexuality things, but there are surely others, often involving not fitting into societal expectation one way or another. When I’ve felt that way, it’s seemed as if the choice being offered was to become no longer myself or to go to hell. When the choices seem to be hell or personality dissolution, hell can seem preferable. I don’t mean here the sort of natural growth and change that allow one to become more truly themselves while having continuity and being recognizable to themselves at each step; I mean change that seems like excising a central and wanted part of oneself.
I would like to see the stage play. I hope it will make its way near me.
This is one of my favorite books of Lewis’s and I haven’t reread it recently. This is prompting me to do that.
Re moving from hell to heaven and choosing to do so, at the end of Shaw’s play Saint Joan, there’s a scene with the people who were involved in Joan of Arc’s trial and burning. They are in a dream state, after she’s been canonized. One of them is a soldier who made a cross of two sticks and gave it to her as she went to the stake. He says that he’s given one day off a year from hell as an allowance for that good action. Later he says “The day off was dull at first, like a wet Sunday. I dont mind it so much now. They tell me I can have as many as I like as soon as I want them.”
@14 That scene with the soldier seems to play into another cultural trope, in which heaven is portrayed as boring and stuffy, and while hell might be awful, at least it has interesting people. There seems to be this idea that anything fun and exciting, as well as some things that are largely just aesthetic choices, are somehow unheavenly. And I think that has a lot to do with sanctimonious Christians interfering with people’s harmless joy for hundreds of years.
@15 Agreed that there’s often an unfortunate conflating of “holy” with “boring” and a number of Christians who reinforce that by disapproving of way too many things. Although when I saw the play I interpreted this particular exchange more as the soldier being given the time he needed to be comfortable with this “holiness” thing he’d never thought applied to him. It may have been in the the way it was staged.
And now I’m reminded of the scene in Bujold’s “Penric and the Shaman” novella, where the Son (god of autumn, the hunt, comradeship, etc.) is inviting a ghost to cross over into the afterlife instead of staying sundered. The ghost, a jovial hunter type, says “Yes, but will there be good beer?” And the Son says, “If there is beer, it will be very good. If there’s not, it will be because there’s something better. It’s not a wager you can lose.” Although it’s not an exact parallel since the theology of the five gods universe doesn’t include a hell as we think of it; the souls of the dead are either taken up by the gods (nearly always) or they dissolve away to nothingness.
@15. Yes, and I have always disagreed with that particular idea. However, it depends a great deal on how one defines both joy and what is harmless.
@@@@@#33: I imagine Tizathy is easiest to find by the light of a dawnzer.
Steve Morrison, I think you meant to comment on a different thread :)
@16, the competition for “favorite scene in all of Bujold” for me is steep, but that scene is right up there, along with the end of The Hallowed Hunt, the moment in Curse of Chalion when Cazaril Realizes Things, and some choice bits of Memory and A Civil Campaign.
If at some point the door is shut forever, wouldn’t that imply that God’s mercy and patience have limits, which would make God not infinite?
@21 Human capacity for growth might be finite. Perhaps God never shuts the door, but some souls become so ossified that they never will go through it? What happens to a personality, in unlimited time? Imagine someone “set in their ways,” and raise to the n-th power. This interpretation doesn’t appeal to me – if people eventually reach some end state, then free will becomes as useful as a shiny new vehicle with no fuel – but doesn’t require an unjust God.
SaintTherese @20 it sounds like our Bujold taste is very similar, but I would add a couple of scenes from Paladin of Souls. (“Your Father calls you to his court. You need not pack. You go garbed in glory as you stand.”)
@23 Yes! How could I forget that one!
I encountered some of these ideas recently while dangling from a tall ladder cleaning gutters.
God’s “chosen people” are those who choose to accept His invitation. He chooses everyone to attend the banquet, but you can choose not to attend ir even RSVP. Cool, and straightforward – and likely in conflict with every established denomination on some level.
Once I had this idea, I looked up and thought “no fair knocking me off the ladder, I want to tell a few people!”.
@25, though in one of Jesus’ parables, the king goes off practically dragging people to his wedding banquet and then gets all grumpy because they’re not wearing the right clothes
@13: On the other hand, “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” is a thing that I understand, having felt it myself.
I find that this idea fits right in with verses from the book of Isaiah: “For thou hast said in thine heart . . . I will be like the most high.” In other words: “I have to be in control. I refuse to yield to a power greater than myself. I refuse to believe that I might have to change the way I think, the way I behave, or the way I am.”
Yes, I’ve been there too. And I have to guard daily against that way of thinking.
Forgive me, as I’m new to discussing theology, but is there a reason theologians believe what they believe, or is it just choosing whatever you’d prefer to be true? It seems, and pardon me if this is offensive, that “truth” for Lewis and the others is based more upon what they regard as the more righteous, charitable, or morally-correct position to take. For instance, this article seems anti-Calvinist. Lewis was not a Calvinist. Where, however, is the evidence that Calvinism is incorrect? It may appall some (just as an example), but where is the evidence that it’s wrong? If there is none – if it’s just personal preference guiding one’s conception of free-will, choice, and the after-life, what’s the point of debating the topic?