XII

Apologist of the Forties: Reason as Master

 

 

THE 1940s were a richly productive period for Lewis. In addition to twelve books, there were scholarly essays, regular contributions to religious periodicals, book reviews, prefaces, poems, scholarly talks, talks to the Royal Air Force, radio talks, sermons, letters to newspapers and magazines—and a growing correspondence. A survey of the entire output would not be pertinent to the interests of this book. Rather, this chapter will demonstrate Lewis’s increasing skill at and commitment to the use of reason in the apologetic books of the period, and, at the same time, point to an important enlargement of his ideas about myth and the place of the imagination. Imagination and reason intermingle throughout the decade—some of his most carefully reasoned pieces are also strongly imaginative, in language and conception, and the imaginative writings always rely also on reason. But an element of tension remains, as evidenced by the narrative works, particularly The Great Divorce. The increasing confidence in the power of reason in the forties dramatizes how great the change to an imaginative emphasis in the fifties was, even as the increasing interest in and broadened understanding of the mythical prepares for that shift.

Because reason contributed significantly in drawing Lewis to Christianity, it is not surprising that Lewis’s early emphasis in writing about Christianity is in the field of apologetics, reasoned efforts to demonstrate the truth of the faith. The three major apologetic works display growing [< p. 128] skillfulness in the handling of dialectic, and increasing reliance upon dialectic as a method. Each of the three presents an argument on its specific topic—suffering, guilt, miracles—but each also offers a proof of the existence of God, and it is the latter particularly that shows a growing confidence in the adequacy of reason. In a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths in 1938, Lewis wrote, “As to whether reason can rigorously prove God and immortality, what is one to say? I do not remember to have seen a proof that appeared to me absolutely compelling, but that may be only my reason or the writer’s reason: At any rate it is obvious that pure reason, in human beings, is very often in fact not convinced.”¹ In spite of that, he puts increasing effort into such proofs and eventually speaks of them, in Miracles, as if they were entirely compelling.

The tone of the case presented in The Problem of Pain is quite in keeping with the comments of that letter. In the opening chapter, which presents the case, Lewis states, “In what follows it must be understood that I am not primarily arguing the truth of Christianity but describing its origin.”² He goes on to discuss the numinous and the universal moral law, the combination of the two in the Jews, and the union of that background with the historical events surrounding the life of Christ; he then mixes in some hard argument:

 

          The fourth strand or element is a historical event. There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be “one with,” the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law. The claim is so shocking—a paradox, and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly—that only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way. If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable, you must submit to the second. (pp. 11-12)

 

The passage may well be “arguing the truth of” rather than just “describing"; perhaps the disclaimer itself, that it is primarily describing rather than arguing, is itself a rhetorical ploy, designed to help cover the gap reason cannot fill. Lewis makes the best case he can, but knowing that reason [< p. 129] alone is insufficient to establish the existence of God, he carefully acknowledges that the case is not intended to be sufficient.

As he moves on to deal with pain itself, he uses reason and argument to meet and deal with a problem which long had haunted him: “If God is good, why does he allow so much suffering in the world?”³ He proceeds to clarify the nature of God’s power and of his goodness, and reconciles them with the existence of pain as a part of a fallen world and as a means of drawing people away from the false appeal of that world: “We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities. . . . But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (p. 81; Ch. 6).

The procedure is highly systematic, with orderly outlines—numbered series of the various types of love and of the different explanations used by people to deal gently with the reality of wickedness, for example—and carefully shaped arguments. Because of its systematic nature and its inclusiveness, extending to a chapter on hell, another on heaven, and one on animal pain, the book is a valuable source of, even introduction to, Lewis’s ideas on and approaches to a wide range of issues. It contains many moving, beautifully written passages, like the one quoted just above. And it anticipates Till We Have Faces a number of times, as in its lengthy discussion of death to self (“to surrender a self-will inflamed and swollen with years of usurpation is a kind of death”—p. 79; Ch. 6) and its repeated use of the “veil” image: “No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul” (p. 83; Ch. 6).

There is very little use, yet, of the analogies which later become almost the defining characteristic of his apologetic style. Through example, authority, and explanation, he simply tries to lay out a convincing case, a case which will make a reader "see” and thus accept the truth.[< p. 130]

The logical approach is strong also in the first series of radio talks Lewis delivered on the BBC in 1941 and subsequently published in Broadcast Talks.⁴ His explicit purpose in those talks is to convey to a twentieth-century audience a sense of guilt or sin. It was in these terms that he described his proposed topic to Dr. James W. Welch of the BBC:

 

I think what I mainly want to talk about is the Law of Nature, or objective right and wrong. It seems to me that the New Testament, by preaching repentance and forgiveness, always assumes an audience who already believe in the Law of Nature and know they have disobeyed it. . . . The first step is to create, or recover, the sense of guilt. Hence if I give a series of talks I should mention Christianity only at the end, and would prefer not to unmask my battery till then.⁵

 

A few years later, in an essay entitled “Difficulties in Presenting the Christian Faith to Modern Unbelievers,” he returned to the same issue:

 

The [second] greatest barrier I have met [in presenting the Christian Faith to modern unbelievers] is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin. . . . The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers, whether Jews, Metuentes or Pagans, a sense of guilt. . . . Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.⁶

 

Although he mentions, in the essay, the need for “awakening the sense of sin” in people, his method in Broadcast Talks is not to create feelings of guilt in his listeners. Rather, he seeks to demonstrate in logical fashion the need for repentance in human beings over their failure to live in accord with their knowledge of the right and wrong they know exists.

The method he employs in pursuing that purpose is empirical and logical. He begins with observation (listen “to the kind of things [people] say,” like “‘that’s my seat, I was there first’”) and proceeds to inference: “It looks . . . very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or [< p. 131] Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have” (p. 9; Bk. I, Ch. 1). This Rule of Right and Wrong is a real thing, outside of and separate from human beings and not simply made up by them: “A real law which we didn’t invent and which we know we ought to obey” (p. 24; Bk. I, Ch. 4). That failure to obey perfectly puts human beings at odds with whatever power is behind the universe and made up the law. Only when Lewis reaches this point is he willing to bring in Christianity and admit that to be his “real subject":

 

Christianity simply doesn’t make sense until you’ve faced the sort of facts I’ve been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who don’t know they’ve done anything to repent of and who don’t feel that they need any forgiveness. It’s after you’ve realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it’s after all that that Christianity begins to talk. (p. 32; Bk. I, Ch.5)

 

In his letter to Dr. Welch, Lewis wrote, “In modern England we cannot at present assume [a sense of sin], and therefore most apologetic begins a stage too far on.”⁷ His central purpose in the first half of Broadcast Talks is to go back to the prior stage and lay the proper foundation for further evangelization.

A secondary purpose in the talks, however, is readily discernible: he uses the existence of moral law as a basis not only for bringing out the reality of sin, but also for a proof of the existence of “a Power behind the law.” The proof begins with the existence of an objective moral law: “It begins to look as if we’ll have to admit that there’s more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there’s something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behaviour, and yet quite definitely real—a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us” (p. 23; Bk. I, Ch. 3). It moves then to the origin or source of that law: either the universe and its moral laws just happened by chance, or there is something behind them, something [< p. 132] "more like a mind than it’s like anything else we know,” something which is “conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another” (pp. 27, 24; Bk. I, Ch. 4). That Something appears “in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong” (p. 27; Bk. I, Ch. 4). From the universe and from the moral law, one should conclude that there is a Lawgiver and that the Lawgiver is a being “intensely interested in right conduct—in fair play, unselfishness, and decency” (p. 30; Bk. I, Ch. 5).

Surely Lewis was as aware then as a year or two earlier of a gap which reason cannot bridge, but the argument, or rhetoric, does not allow for it explicitly, as it did in The Problem of Pain—on the contrary, it seeks to distract attention from such a gap. This appears first in the movement from law to Lawgiver. The existence of an inner moral sense, after being used as the proof for existence of a universal moral law, is used also as the evidence of a Lawgiver: “The only way in which we could expect [a Power behind the law] to show itself would be inside us as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that’s just what we do find inside us” (p. 26; Bk. I, Ch. 4). Thus the argument is this: if there were a Power behind the law, it would be evident within us as an inner moral sense; there is evidence of such an inner moral sense; so there must be a Power behind the law. But such reasoning assumes what it must prove. The existence of an inner moral sense, though it may be evidence for a universal moral law, is not in itself evidence of anything concerning the origin of that law.

To say this is not to deny or diminish the value of the radio talks as a whole. Lewis’s initial purpose, of awakening a sense of personal moral responsibility in the modern world, is as timely and necessary in the 1980s as it was in the 1940s, if not more so. His exposition of the atonement, of various facets of Christian ethics, and of the transforming power of Christianity in the three series which follow is clear, powerful, and memorable. Perhaps one needs only to assume, as one reads the argument for the existence of God, that the qualifiers in the letter to Griffiths and in The Prob-[< p. 133]lem of Pain are operative here as well: it will then appear not as a proof for God, but as a valuable instance of the use of reason to do as much as reason can do, and should do—even must do—in supporting belief in God. The failure to make such qualifiers explicit may be a result of compression due to time constraints, or simply Lewis’s thinking that they would be taken for granted. Or it may be a signal that he is beginning to regard them as less necessary because of his increasing confidence in the adequacy of the proofs he presents. Miracles suggests it may well be the latter.

Miracles also has a two-level argument, for the existence of God and for the possibility of miracle, but in this case the two are closely intertwined: the latter position is based upon the former one. The interdependence is clear from the definition of miracle: “An interference with Nature by supernatural power.”⁸ The reliance on reason is heightened by this interdependence, and by the philosophical nature of the issue: Lewis stresses that it is a study “preliminary to historical inquiry” (p. 13; Ch. 1). It is not an attempt to prove that miracles have actually occurred historically, but an effort to clear away obstacles which hinder or prevent belief in the miraculous: “The result of our historical enquiries . . . depends on the philosophical views which we have been holding before we even began to look at the evidence. The philosophical question must therefore come first” (p. 12; Ch. 1). Because the proof for God is not a supplementary issue but the foundation upon which the central investigation rests, Lewis is forced to a greater emphasis upon reason here than in his earlier apologetic works.

The central difference between Miracles and the two earlier apologetic works is its detailed refutation of Naturalism. Its inadequacy was assumed, or mentioned, in the others, but not demonstrated successfully, as it is here in what Lewis called “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist.” Naturalism believes that Nature is independent and self-existent, “a vast process in space and time which is going on of its own accord” (p. 16; Ch. 2)—and that “nothing else exists” (p. 19; Ch.2). But, Lewis goes on, if anything else exists which has an independent existence, Naturalism [< p. 134] would be refuted. And, for Naturalists to argue the truth of Naturalism is, in fact, evidence of the existence of one such thing, reason: “All possible knowledge . . . depends on the validity of reasoning, . . . and we must not believe in anything inconsistent with its validity” (p. 26; Ch. 3). But Naturalism is based on such an inconsistency, for it ascribes nonrational origins to rationality: thought is merely a product of physical processes within the Total System, which “is not supposed to be rational” (p. 28; Ch. 3). Lewis concludes that the position of the Naturalist is self-contradictory:

 

Each particular thought is valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Obviously, then, the whole process of human thought, what we call Reason, is equally valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Hence every theory of the universe which makes the human mind a result of irrational causes is inadmissible, for it would be a proof that there are no such things as proofs. Which is nonsense. (p. 28; Ch. 3)

 

To posit a theory by which the universe is known is thus to grant that reason exists on its own, independent of Nature. And since existence “on one’s own” means what Supernaturalists attribute to God, reason must be a product of “an eternal, self-existent rational Being, whom we call God” (p. 36; Ch. 4). That such a Being exists, however, does not mean that there would necessarily be “interference with Nature” by that Being. The rest of the book—after a supplementary refutation of Naturalism on the basis of moral judgments and a handling of difficulties—argues for the possibility and propriety of such interferences.

It is a tight and carefully articulated argument, much more thorough, subtle, and precise than a summary can indicate. But it too leaves the unavoidable gap, for Lewis does not actually establish in positive terms the existence of reason, which is the foundation of his proof of God. The entire argument builds on the self-contradictoriness of developing a theory by which to know the universe without granting the independent existence of reason. But perhaps it cannot be known: Skepticism remains, at least in theory, a possible alternative to Naturalism and Supernaturalism. The case leaves open the possibility that the Total System [< p. 135] of Naturalism is indeed all that is, but that we could not know it or know anything about it. Lewis shows that Naturalism can offer no substantive arguments against reason; but a negative proof is not the same as a positive one. Thus when he says “If any thought is valid, such a Reason must exist. . .” (p. 36; Ch. 4), we are inclined to accept the conditional clause as self-evident, but it has not been proved.

I mention what appears to me a gap in Lewis’s discussion not to undermine or disparage it as an argument: its value to readers does not depend on the absence of such a gap. My interest, rather, is what his failure to acknowledge such a gap suggests about Lewis himself at that point. He makes claims for reason here which exceed those he makes elsewhere. In Chapter 3, for example, there is his perplexing claim, quoted above, that “all possible knowledge . . . depends on the validity of reasoning.” This contradicts Lewis’s acceptance, in other works, of authority and revelation as means of knowledge,⁹ and it clashes with Chapter 6, where mystical knowledge is allowed as a source of knowledge about God (p. 52). There are, later, further unqualified expressions of confidence in the adequacy of his approach: “I do not maintain,” he notes in Chapter 4, “that God’s creation of Nature can be proved as rigorously as God’s existence” (p. 42); and in Chapter 6 he reminds the reader that “Human Reason and Morality have been mentioned not as instances of Miracle . . . but as proofs of the Supernatural” (p. 54). All this suggests that in the course of writing Miracles Lewis became so enrapt in the case he was developing and, momentarily, so captivated by reason itself that he forgot about its limitations and believed he had constructed the “absolutely compelling” case he had earlier despaired of. If that is correct, it would help account for the sense of surprise and defeat attributed to him when the case was attacked by another Christian; but it would also suggest the possibility of an element of satisfaction, almost of pride in his achievement, shortly to be humbled: an experience which could well have enriched the writings on Christianity in the decade ahead.

About the same time Lewis was involved in thinking [< p. 136] through the closely reasoned argument of Miracles, he was also giving a great deal of thought to myth, out of which came the altered emphasis and enlarged perspective of his valuable essay of 1944, “Myth Became Fact.” The new perspective was not a sudden realization that Christianity combines the mythical and the historical: that goes back as far as the letter to Greeves and is stressed in Miracles and “Is Theology Poetry?” The new element seems to have grown out of his reflection upon a real or imagined dispute with a real or imaginary “Corineus,” a spokesman for the modernist view that the old mythological elements of Christianity should be dropped so that Christians will focus instead on the theological “essentials.” As Lewis’s earlier perspective was a response to those who dismiss myth as error or falsehood, so the perspective in “Myth Became Fact” is a response to those who dismiss myth as outdated imagery which detracts from the enduring principles which underlie it. It is not that he has rejected the perspective of The Pilgrim’s Regress: he still would insist that myth is truth, not falsehood; nor is the approach in “Myth Became Fact” wholly new: what he now emphasizes was implicit in his previous statements, but had not yet crystallized, and its deeper, richer significance had not yet become apparent to him.

He begins, in “Myth Became Fact,” by asserting that without the mythical, religion lacks the element which enables one to experience it as reality: “It is the myth which is the vital and nourishing element in the whole concern. . . . It is the myth that gives life. Those elements even in modernist Christianity which Corineus regards as vestigial, are the substance: what he takes for the ‘real modern belief’ is the shadow.” To emphasize myth’s expansiveness and vitality, Lewis contrasts it with the limitations of intellectual inquiry. “Human intellect is incurably abstract. . . . Yet the only realities we experience are concrete—this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality.”¹⁰ This is certainly not new for Lewis: it is a restatement of what he adopted from Samuel Alexander’s Space Time and De-[< p. 137]ity,¹¹ and had stated in his writing a number of times.¹² But he now applies it more directly to the realms of reason and imagination: “This is our dilemma—either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste—or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand."¹³

As at least a partial resolution of this dilemma, Lewis turns to myth considered not as a form containing truth but as an embodiment of imaginative experience. That also is not entirely new: as far back as “The Personal Heresy” one can find him discussing the imaginative experience in reading poetry. If there is a difference between the two essays, it is a matter of emphasis, or greater precision—but there does seem to be a shift, signaled by a difference in metaphor: in “The Personal Heresy” poetry, through the imagination, enables one to “see” universal objects; in “Myth Became Fact,” myth enables one, through the imagination, to “taste” reality. In the earlier essay Lewis asserted that “see” is used for “apprehension,” in a nonintellectual sense; but the metaphor, in Lewis, can never be totally disassociated from intellect. Just before the footnote disclaiming intellectual overtones for the metaphor, Lewis used sight imagery both ways in the same sentence: “I see that ‘liquefaction’ is an admirably chosen word; but only because I have already found myself seeing silk as I never saw it before.”¹⁴ And although by “universal objects” Lewis meant the utterly Real, the metaphors could allow it to seem abstract, particularly when one such “object,” which the poet causes us to see in a new way, is “the age and mystery of man.”

Because of these intellectual and abstract overtones, I think, Lewis does not use the metaphor “see” in “Myth Became Fact"—the word does not appear even once, in striking contrast to its frequent use elsewhere. Lewis uses instead the metaphor of “taste” and emphasizes its distance from the abstract: “When we translate [state the principle of a myth] we get abstraction—or rather, dozens of abstractions. [< p. 138] What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.” Even more important than the shift of metaphor is the resulting difference in his use of Alexander’s terminology, a use which has the potential for resolving the tension between reason and imagination. The previous references had juxtaposed knowing and experiencing, the outside view and the inside one, “contemplating” and “enjoying.” The “tasting of reality” seems to unite them, for in receiving the myth one experiences a principle: “In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.”¹⁵ In his previous references to Alexander’s ideas, Lewis emphasized the separation and incompatibility of contemplation and enjoyment: “You can see any eyes rather than the pair you see with, and if you want to examine your own glasses you must take them off your own nose”;¹⁶ now he suggests one way in which they might be united.¹⁷ Myth, in a sense, combines the outside view and the inside view, contemplation and enjoyment, in a single act. The metaphor he uses for characterizing myth at the end of a key section of “Myth Became Fact” highlights that reconciling potential: “Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.”¹⁸ Thus myth has the potential for joining the outside view with the inside view, contemplation with enjoyment, and the rational with the imaginative.

The potential for reconciliation is there; but such a reconciliation does not yet appear as accomplished fact. In the stories of the early and mid-1940s statement of principle exists side by side with the imaginative depiction of experience offered by the story as story, with an element of tension between them. Lewis continues to be careful not to leave imaginative modes to themselves, without expository or dialectical devices for conveying theme. This is not to say that imaginative achievement is lacking, or insignificant—[< p. 139] it is certainly there, and of highest quality, particularly in Perelandra—but to indicate the continuing limits Lewis placed, perhaps unintentionally or even unconsciously, on the imaginative mode.

Nowhere did Lewis create a more richly imaginative world than in the second book of the “space trilogy”: the tastes, sounds, and sights of Perelandra create in the reader, as they did in Lewis,¹⁹ a sense of longing, of sweet desire, for the world his imagination had created:

 

At long last he reached the wooded part. There was an undergrowth of feathery vegetation, about the height of gooseberry bushes, coloured like sea anemones. Above this were the taller growths—strange trees with tube-like trunks of grey and purple spreading rich canopies above his head, in which orange, silver, and blue were the predominant colours. Here with the aid of the tree trunks, he could keep his feet more easily. The smells in the forest were beyond all that he had ever conceived. To say that they made him feel hungry and thirsty would be misleading; almost, they created a new kind of hunger and thirst, a longing that seemed to flow over from the body into the soul and which was a heaven to feel.^2O

 

And nowhere except in Till We Have Faces is he as successful in setting before us “an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.”²¹ The reader, like Ransom, feels that here the mythical is very much being achieved: “If a naked man and a wise dragon were indeed the sole inhabitants of this floating paradise, then this also was fitting, for at that moment he had a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth.”²² But even here Lewis is not content to leave the imaginative unaided by the conceptual. The heart of the book—not the most memorable aspect, but the dominant part in terms of length and placement—is an extended philosophical-theological discussion between the unfallen queen of the planet, Weston, who tempts her to sin, and Ransom, who defends her and helps her to retain her purity.

The reliance upon the conceptual in That Hideous Strength is readily evident. The imaginative appears in the narrative—a theological thriller, in the Charles Williams mold rather than the fantasy-romance of the previous vol-[< p. 140]umes—and in the Williams-like spirit world which surrounds and penetrates ours. But the burden of the book is the exposure and defeat of evil and the conversion of the two central characters, Jane and Mark Studdock. The exposure of evil and instruction in the good are achieved largely through exposition of ideas, often in the kernel ideas of what later became such essays as “Vivisection” and “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,”²³ and in stimulating and engaging mini-essays, like William Hingest’s demolition of sociology:

 

          That’s what happens when you study men: you find mare’s nests. I happen to believe that you can’t study men, you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living, and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.²⁴

 

The conversions of Mark and Jane in no sense involve the mythical—his comes through exposure to disproportion, which gives rise somehow to a sense of its opposite, the sweet, the straight, the “Normal"; that sense grows increasing solid, becomes personal, and ends up as awareness of the divine. Jane’s acceptance of God grows out of her personal relation to and experience with Ransom, and through the convincingness of the arguments he propounded to her.

Of particular importance in showing the continued tension between reason and imagination is The Great Divorce. It uses imagination strikingly, in story, in sketches of character, and in the imaging of Reality. But all of this is done in a work whose appeal to the head outweighs its imaginative appeal to the heart and the emotions.

The Great Divorce, like The Pilgrim’s Regress, is a dream poem, but it is not a dream allegory: rather than using material images to stand for immaterial qualities (a slough for despondency), it uses material images to stand for supernatural matters and offers a fine example of what Lewis called “sacramentalism."²⁵ Thus the story uses realistic details of a bus, a city, a meadow, and ordinary people to depict [< p. 141] hell, heaven, and the choices and attitudes that determine the ultimate destinies of persons in their life journeys. The story tells of a group of ghosts on a day’s outing from hell paying a visit to heaven: a holiday there is an alternative to visiting earth to haunt houses or accommodate mediums. Unlike these other alternatives, this journey can be permanent: the ghosts may remain in heaven if they really desire to.

The story focuses on the choices the ghosts from hell face and on the efforts of old acquaintances now in heaven to persuade them to stay. Each of the ghosts, to stay in heaven, would have to get beyond and outside his or her self; each must heed the call to “fix your mind on something not yourself."²⁶ All have “something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery” (p. 64; 69). The fate of one or two is left unclear, but most of the others choose to return to hell: throughout their lives their choices pointed them toward and prepared them for hell—now they can desire nothing else. One ghost, however, asks to be purged of his lust and turns into a heavenly creature. It is not that he is given a second chance after death: as Lewis puts it in The Problem of Pain, “I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given. But a master often knows, when boys and parents do not, that it is really useless to send a boy in for a certain examination again” (p.112; Ch. 8). Rather, in life he desired good but was plagued and defiled by lust, and he went to a place of purging rather than directly to heaven. Now, cleansed of his faults, he is ready to enter the presence of God.

The Great Divorce handles several of the themes which appear later in Till We Have Faces. The theme of longing, Sehnsucht, is important. It was emphasized by the title of the work when it was published serially in The Guardian as “Who Goes Home?”, a phrase shouted by the policeman on duty through the lobbies and corridors of the House of Commons when it has concluded a session and is about to close its doors.²⁷ The phrase also invokes “the idea of the spiritual world as home. . . -–the feeling that you are coming back tho’ to a place you have never yet reached,”²⁸ which [< p. 142] Psyche experienced throughout her life. The original title enhanced the irony when the Big Man refuses to accompany his former employee into deep heaven and says, “If they’re too fine to have me without you, I’ll go home. . . . That’s what I’ll do. . . . I’ll go home. I didn’t come here to be treated like a dog. I’ll go home” (p. 34; 36). Even without that title, one thinks of longing when one reads of the mountains: “Very far away I could see what might be either a great bank of cloud or a range of mountains” (p. 29; 29). These are, of course, the originals, the “forms” or “ideas,” of the mountains which Psyche sees and longs for in Glome. Thus the artist ghost, when he was still alive and before he became interested in paint for its own sake, was able to catch “glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape” and through his paintings he enabled others to see the glimpses, too: “It is from here that the messages came” (p. 73; 80). Here too they signify that toward which one’s longings really are directed: “Every one of us,” the spirit of MacDonald tells the narrator, “lives only to journey further and further into the mountains” (p. 66; 72).

The theme of love is developed in The Great Divorce in very much the same way as in Till We Have Faces. There is the same warning about the natural loves: “They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods” (p. 84; 93). Details surrounding the domineering wifely ghost and Pam, the possessive mother ghost, closely resemble those characterizing Orual, as indicated previously in Chapter IV. There is the same attention to the evil of manipulating others by playing on their pity. The Tragedian used it so throughout his life, as Orual did in attempting to force her will upon Psyche. Sarah Smith’s reply would apply to Orual as much as to her husband: “Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing” (pp. 107-8; 117). And there is the same emphasis on the need for divine love, agape, to infuse and convert the natural loves if they are to be saved: “He wanted your merely instinctive love for your child . . . to turn into something better. He wanted you to love Michael as He [< p. 143] understands love. You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God” (p. 84; 92).

And The Great Divorce, like Till We Have Faces, focuses on the theme of death to self. To attain heaven, one must be freed from self: “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” (p. 63; 69). Only if one dies to self before dying, before one’s choice is fixed on the self, can one find salvation. Thus it is so important, at the end of the story, that the story-teller is only dreaming and has not yet died physically: there is yet time for him to conquer self before he dies. The theme of the natural loves—of the need for their conversion by divine love and their potential as precursors to love of God—is tied nicely to the die-before-you-die theme: “Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried” (pp. 88-89; 97).

The themes of The Great Divorce, then, resemble in many respects the themes of Till We Have Faces. Equally significant, however, is a particular contrast, the difference in the handling of sight imagery. Throughout the apologetic works sight is used regularly in Plato’s sense of intuitive understanding. This meaning is made explicit in Miracles:

 

I believe that the primary moral principles on which all others depend are rationally perceived. We “just see” that there is no reason why my neighbour’s happiness should be sacrificed to my own, as we “just see” that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. If we cannot prove either axiom, that is not because they are irrational but because they are self-evident and all proofs depend on them. (pp. 43-44; Ch.5)

 

The metaphor of “sight” in The Problem of Pain is closely linked with the reason: “Everyone who stops to think can see that when we meet the enemy this neglect is going to cost every man of us his life” (p. 52; Ch. 4). Similarly, “I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really [ <p. 144] see it, a horror to ourselves” (p. 55; Ch. 4). It is used similarly in Broadcast Talks: “And when you’ve grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips” (p. 50; Bk. II, Ch. 3); or, “Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this” (p. 14; Bk. I, Ch. 2). As Lewis gained experience as an apologist, he began to use analogies to help readers “see” the point he is making. They appear occasionally in The Problem of Pain and the first series of radio talks, and frequently thereafter. Analogy creates an image—thus it appeals to the imagination; but the formation of analogical comparisons is mostly an intellectual process. Here too imagination cooperates with reason, but still in serving reason, as it does in The Pilgrim’s Regress and the Ransom trilogy.

The Great Divorce takes that cooperation a significant step further in its handling of sight imagery. Throughout the work, “see” is used again and again in a number of different senses. It is used literally, of course: the fashion-conscious lady ghost says, “How can I go out like this among a lot of people with real solid bodies? . . . They’ll see me” (p. 56; 61). But mostly “see” is used as a metaphor. Sometimes it means, figuratively, to “meet”: “My dear boy, I’m delighted to see you” (p. 35; 38). There is “see” as to “perceive": “Ye see it in smaller matters,” George MacDonald says to the narrator (p. 66; 71-72). There is “see” as “find out, discover”: Sarah Smith says to her husband, “I am full now, not empty. I am in Love Himself, not lonely. Strong, not weak. You shall be the same. Come and see” (p. 104; 113). There is “see” as “understand”: “Oh—I see” (p. 73; 79), or “Go away! Can’t you see I want to be alone?” (p. 55; 60), or “If you’ll only wait you’ll see that isn’t so” (p. 103; 113).

That Lewis is aware of the word and deliberately developing its significance is confirmed by his playful and multiple uses of it, as with the Big Man and the disillusioned world traveler. The Big Man uses “see” as a habit of speech; for emphasis—“But I done my best all my life, see?” (p. 31; 33)—at the same time that he admits he does not “understand”: “And what I don’t see is why I should be put [< p. 145] below a bloody murderer like you. . . . I don’t see myself going in the same boat with you, see?” (p. 32; 34). The world traveler says, “I guess I’ve seen about all there is to see.” He “likes to see things for himself,” and everything he sees ends up “not worth looking at.” Thus he does not “understand” why there was so much excitement about Heaven: “Well, I don’t see what all the talk is about” (pp. 49-50; 54-55).

As “see” recurs in the story, it establishes itself as an important structural and thematic motif. It is noteworthy that all this “seeing” and “understanding” occurs in a place where, as the traveler complains, the fruit is so solid that ghosts cannot eat it, the water so hard they cannot drink it, and the grass so sharp they cannot walk on it. They are experiencing Reality, where truth is as firm and touchable as the apples and raindrops. It is a place where thoughts themselves have solid qualities, where one can “see an un-heard-of idea trying to enter his little mind” (p. 103; 112), where one can round a bend and “see” an explanation (p. 45; 48), and where one can “see” an absurdity (p. 106; 115). This world, then, is the source of the objective truth and the “Real Law” whose “concreteness” Lewis had long been attempting to convey, often through sight images. “The light, the grass, the trees . . . were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison” (p. 27; 28). Here is the “otherness,” the solidness, of the utterly Real—of Heaven, of God, of Truth, of Value.

Thus The Great Divorce in some instances retains the earlier intellectual emphasis in its uses of sight imagery, but in other instances goes beyond it. Lewis attempts to give an additional sense to “see”—the significance of “taste” in “Myth Became Fact.” That significance stands in direct and deliberate contrast to the abstract. Says one heavenly Spirit, “We know nothing of speculation [here]. Come and see. I will bring you to Eternal Fact, the Father of all other facthood” (p. 42; 44). This “seeing” would be the original, the model, of which the imaginative experience of reality is the echo: “When you’ve grown into a Person,” the artist is told, [< p. 146] “there’ll be some things which you’ll see better than anyone else. One of the things you’ll want to do will be to tell us about them. But not yet. At present your business is to see. Come and see. He is endless” (pp. 73-74; 80). One should notice, however, that even here the “see” image is not adequate: Lewis shifts metaphors in the next sentence: “Come and feed” (italics added). And in the fullest statement of the “experience of reality” theme, he does not use “see” at all: “Hitherto you have experienced truth only with the abstract intellect. I will bring you where you can taste it like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom” (p. 41; 43).

Although The Great Divorce talks of tasting reality, it does not itself offer such a taste, for it is not myth: its effect is to convey a message, not to give an imaginative experience. Chad Walsh sums it up well when he writes, “In its thin, serious way it preaches a sermon that reaches the will and the heart as well as the intellect.”²⁹ But the attempt in The Great Divorce to use sight for such an experience stands as a major step toward the use of pure myth in Till We Have Faces, and toward the union of imagination and reason in the fifties and sixties. [ <p. 147]