While Heaven and Hell are so closely related, paradoxically they cannot exist at all together: total acceptance of Heaven implies the total rejection of Hell. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good.Įvil, according to Lewis, cannot be magically erased by the passage of time and turned into good it must be wholly rejected for Heaven to be embraced. He writes in the preface:Ī sum can be put right: but only by going back until you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.
Lewis states even before his narrative begins that he does not believe in the idea of eternal damnation being a fate rather, he describes it as the sum of a total of error and rejection of God’s mercy and goodness. Lewis utilizes this image across the narrative of The Great Divorce in order to show that Heaven is the result of a choice given over and over again and that Hell is not an irreversible fate. The boundaries between Heaven and Hell are easily traversed, but a person must be wholly remade if they choose to enter Heaven. The narrative itself is revealed to be a dream, and it is this characteristic that makes it all the more real. Heaven is shown over the course of the narrative to be the result of a choice freely offered to humankind to make. The narrator and his traveling companions on the bus ride find that they are ghosts, imperfect shadows against this country of impermeable beauty. The narrative develops from the narrator taking a bus ride up and out of a grey and dank city away to the countryside he finds himself within the earliest parts of Heaven upon getting off the bus, a land of intense beauty and perfection. Lewis undertakes the task of redefining the relationship between Heaven and Hell for the purpose of dispelling the belief that “mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain” (Lewis Preface). Lewis’ work entitled The Great Divorce is an allegory of the way that Lewis himself views Heaven and Hell.
Lewis’ The Great Divorce: The Nature of Heaven and HellĬ.S.
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