“To choose heaven is to live in reality, whereas to choose hell is to live within what is unreal – namely, a self-constructed lie.” who is so beautiful that she is like a goddess. The Lady declares that she has everything in Christ: “‘What needs could I have, now that I have all? I am full now, not empty. I am in Love Himself, not lonely. Strong, not weak.’”[29] Thus heaven and hell, one real and the other not, seem utterly irreconcilable to each other. The physical size of each perhaps helps us to grasp this concept: Lewis notes that the Lady, bright and solid, simply could not fit into hell.[30] Yet how, then, can any be saved? The answer lies at the very center of the Christian gospel. Lewis’s Spirit guide explains that only Christ, who is the greatest, was – and is – able to make himself small enough to enter into hell. Apart from the fixed reality of Christ, we cannot help but live in our self-constructed unrealities. Yet to find Christ is to find heaven itself. Even now, he is near to us, compelling us, with all the Lady’s sweet compulsion, to enter into Love himself. If we will but consent to “come and see,” our feet too will begin to grow hard enough to walk on heaven’s grass.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 28.
[2]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 33.
[3]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 35.
[4]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 105.
[5]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 38.
[6]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 49.
[7]
Jerry L. Walls, “The Great Divorce,” The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, ed. Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 251.
24
The Williams Telos
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 29.
[9]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 36.
[10]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 35.
[11]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 111.
[12]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 107.
[13]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 107.
[14]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 112.
[15]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 111.
[16]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 110.
[17]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 112.
[18]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 113.
[19]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 69. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (Great Britain: Pearson Education Limited, 2007), I.263.
[20]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 108.
[21]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 113.
[22]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 74.
[23]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 119.
[24]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 120.
[25]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 120.
[26]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 68.
[27]
Colossians 1:17 (ESV).
[28]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 33.
[29]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 111.
[30]
Lewis, The Great Divorce, 120.
Shirley Li ’13 is a math and English major from Cranbury, N.J. She wants to join heavenly lions in solemn romp someday. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jillibee/7096482669/
[1]
[8]