266. The Great Divorce
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: C.S. Lewis
Genre: Fiction, Christian, Theology
146 pages, published 1945
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
The Great Divorce is C.S. Lewis’s vision of the Afterworld in which the narrator boards a bus on a rainy English afternoon and embarks on an incredible voyage through Heaven and Hell. Along the way, he meets a variety of supernatural beings far removed from his expectations, and comes to some significant realizations about the nature of good and evil.
Quotes
“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. Those who knock it is opened.”
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”
“Milton was right,’ said my Teacher. ‘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. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality.”
“You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.”
“The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.”
“Son,’ he said,’ ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…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. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why…the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
“There have been men before … 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 to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”
“Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness; but your darkness cannot now infect our light.”
“That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves part of eternal reality.”
“Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”
“I wish I had never been born,” she said. “What are we born for?” “For infinite happiness,” said the Spirit. “You can step out into it at any moment…”
“And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.”
My Take
I listened to The Great Divorce on the heels of The Screwtape Letters and there is a lot of similarity between the two books. Both books are characterized by admonitions on how to live a holy life dedicated to God, and how we so often get that wrong (even though we may think we are getting it right). Pride truly is the worst sin. If you have an interest in Christian Apologetics, then both The Great Divorce and the The Screwtape Letters are essential reading.
