The Wise Imagination

The Great Divorce, written by C.S. Lewis, is a direct response to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Lewis believed Blake’s attempt to marry the two realms was a “disastrous error.” He argues against the notion that “some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development, 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 refutes the idea that all roads lead to God by telling the story of a narrator who boards a bus from a grey, drizzly town and is ushered toward the foothills of Heaven.

Upon arrival, the narrator is met by George MacDonald, who serves as his guide through a series of revelations regarding the nature of eternity. MacDonald’s influence on Lewis is unmistakable; the themes MacDonald was most passionate about—specifically the necessity of death to the self and spiritual sanctification—permeate the story. While Lewis’s prose style differs from MacDonald’s, he shares the same goal: exploring profound theological truths through the medium of fantasy.

MacDonald often questioned the rigid, legalistic finality with which some described the afterlife. Lewis takes up this mantle—albeit with a more orthodox approach—to illustrate the relationship between the two realms. Through the imagery of the “Grey Town” and the bus, Lewis portrays an afterlife defined by the persistence of human choice. He communicates this tension through several vignettes of “Ghosts” who arrive in the bright, solid landscape of Heaven only to choose a return to the shadows.

These phantoms are met by “Solid People” who attempt to guide them toward maturity and, ultimately, the joy of the celestial city. The narrator and MacDonald watch as various Ghosts reject their guides for different reasons, eventually abandoning the quest for Heaven. Observing these rejections, the narrator famously concludes: “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.”

Ultimately, The Great Divorce strives to explore a world that transcends human explanation. In his preface, Lewis reminds readers that he is not offering a literal map of the afterlife; rather, he is deconstructing the dangerous “universalism” of Blake’s era. Like MacDonald before him, Lewis invites his readers to hold a less dogmatic, more imaginative view of a realm that cannot be fully grasped by the living.