The Great Divorce

by C.S. Lewis

This enjoyable little book is the story of a busload of people who travel from hell to heaven and what they find when they get there. Few of the people who make the trip up stay. Nearly everyone finds something they cling too closely to—they cannot let go and cannot stay. The clear teaching of this little book is the danger of selfishness—in all its various forms—to inheriting salvation. Though it is quite thoroughly purgatorial in its teaching, its lesson and themes can certainly be applied to other circumstances, the most obvious being the things that keep people from accepting salvation on the earth.

The descriptions contained of heaven and hell are most certainly inaccurate, but Lewis acknowledges this from the outset. "I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course—or I intended it to have—a moral. But the transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us. The last thing I wish is to arouse a factual curiosity of the details of the after-world" (8).

Perhaps the most intriguing point to me was his explanation of why one particular woman in heaven remained happy even though her husband did not stay—how one could be happy in heaven when loved ones are lost: his response to "the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved." In response: "That sounds merciful: but see what lurks behind it. The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that hell should be able to veto heaven.... Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves" (120-1).

The Great Divorce is a short book and a quick read. If you read it for applications to find in how people respond (or don't) to the gospel today, you will profit from it. If you read it to critique Lewis' depiction of heaven (which he clearly urges you not to!) or you get too hung up on the doctrine of purgatory espoused therein, you will find yourself frustrated. So grab a copy and read it through the former lens.

The Editors do not advocate everything taught by the authors of the books we review. Like us, these authors are fallible humans and those who choose to read these books should measure them by the bible, the one true standard.