What follows is the first post in a series of excerpts from C. S. Lewis' novel The Great Divorce. These excerpts represent my favorite part of the book. The body of excerpts is a fictional account of Lewis meeting his "Master" "Teacher" for the first time. In reality, Lewis never met MacDonald during his natural life. If I remember right, MacDonald died before Lewis was born.
One thing that's so entertaining to me about this part of the story is that this meeting must have been something that Lewis desperately longed for in vain. When faced with the impossibility of a real meeting, Lewis made use of his vivid imagination, sharp intellect, unique scope of theology, and avid reverence of MacDonald and the quality of his writings to conjure up his idea of what a meeting between the two might be like. The other, more significant, part of this excerpt that makes it my favorite is the treatment of the topic that the two characters are discussing: Heaven and Hell. Those two places, after all, are what the book is primarily about.
The following dialogue takes place after Lewis, who's character began the story by riding a bus out of Hell (a.k.a. the grey town) and onto the plains of Heaven, begins to feel the effects of the ultimate reality of Heaven on his shadowy Ghostly form. Lewis' character clumsily and sometimes painfully stumbles around the plain for some time before coming face to face with the guide assigned to him to aid in the journey to the mountains of "Deep Heaven", George MacDonald. Without further delay, here is excerpt I:
'I don't know you, Sir,' said I, taking my seat beside
him.
'My name is George,' he answered. 'George Mac-
Donald.'
'Oh!' I cried. 'Then you can tell me! You at least will
not deceive me.' Then, supposing that these expressions
of confidence needed some explanation, I tried, trembling
to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I
tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead
Station when I first bought a copy of Phantastes (being
then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the
first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the
New Life. I started to confess how long that Life had
delayed in the region of imagination merely: how slowly
and reluctantly I had come to admit that his Christendom
had more than an accidental connexion with it, how hard
I had tried not to see that the true name of the quality
which first met me in his books is Holiness. He laid his
hand on mine and stopped me.
'Son,' he said, 'Your love - all love - is of inexpressible
value to me. But it may save precious time' (here he sud-
denly looked very Scotch) 'if I inform ye that I am already
well acquianted with these biographical details. In fact, I
have noticed that your memory misleads you in one or
two particulars.'
'Oh!' said I, and became still.
'Ye had started,' said my Teacher, 'to talk of something
more profitable.'
'Sir,' said I, 'I had almost forgotten it, and I have no
anxiety about the answer now, though I have still a
curiosity. It is about these Ghosts. Do any of them stay?
Can they stay? Is any real choice offered them? How
do they come to be here?'
'Did ye never hear of the Refrigerium? A man with
your advantages might have read of it in Prudentius, not
to mention Jeremy Taylor.'
'The name is familiar, Sir, but I'm afraid I've forgotten
what it means.'
'It means that the damned have holidays - excursions,
ye understand.'
'Excursions to this country?'
'For those that will take them. Of course most of the
silly creatures don't. They prefer taking trips back to
Earth. They go and play tricks on the poor daft women ye
call mediums. They go and try to assert their ownership
of some house that once belonged to them: and then ye
get what's called a Haunting. Or they go to spy on their
children. Or literary ghosts hang about public libraries to
see if anyone's still reading their books.'
'But if they come here they can really stay?'
'Aye. Ye'll have heard that the emperor Trajan did.'
'But I don't understand. Is judgement not final? Is
there really a way out of Hell into Heaven?'
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