The Place of the Self in C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce: A Marriage of the "Two Lewises"

I propose in this article to explore C. S. Lewis's notion of the self as represented in The Great Divorce.¹ In particular, I wish to address the question of Lewis's rhetorical strategy, his use of the tropes of allegory and symbol, as a way of representing the Christian understanding of sin and redemption against the backdrop of modernity's view of human nature. In key respects, The Great Divorce can be seen as a modernized version of Dante's Divine Comedy. The parallel between the two can be seen in the attempt to depict the choices of souls and their divergent destinations in either heaven or hell, as seen after death. This is the drama that undergirds the entire narrative in The Great Divorce, with the title of the work indicating the fundamental disjunction between choosing heaven or hell, a choice offered to each soul in a holiday from hell. The parallel to this in The Divine Comedy is seen most clearly in Dante's depiction of the confluence of human freedom and divine justice, presented in canto II of the Inferno in the image of lost souls who, upon entering Charon's boat to be carried across the River Acheron, are said by Virgil to choose to enter Hell:

     all those who perish in the wrath of God     assemble here from all parts of the earth;

they want to cross the river, they are eager;     it is Divine Justice that spurs them on,     turning the fear they have into desire.²

Lewis's general depiction of the possibilities open to the human soul, which find their trajectories in two diametrically opposed destinations, is in agreement with Dante's representation of heaven and hell as the final end of the opposite and ultimately irreconcilable desires of love and hatred for self, nature, and God.

However, this parallel, which indicates that Dante and Lewis share a common worldview rooted in an orthodox Christian anthropology and metaphysics, points to a fundamental distinction in their respective modes of representation of the economy of salvation and damnation. For in the Divine Comedy, as seen most clearly in the Inferno, the body is employed as a figure of sinful desire with corporeal and spatial images representative of sin itself. The very opacity of bodies indicates a resistance to the divine will, and the narrowing of the concentric circles of Hell symbolize the narrowing of desire in the direction of self and away from God. The body itself comes to symbolize the sin of which the soul is guilty as the contrapasso in turn fits the sin. For example, in canto XIII of the Inferno, the final end for suicides is to be severed from their own bodies, which will hang from trees, a punishment that mirrors the suicides' act of severing themselves from their earthly lives (see Inferno, canto XII, 103–8). Similarly, in canto XXVIII, Mahomet himself articulates the reason for his particular punishment, which has been incurred through the sin of schism: "'Because I cut the bonds of those so joined, / I bear my head cut off from its life source, / which is back there, alas, with its trunk'" (Inferno, canto XXVIII, 139–41). The point is that justice is done according to the overriding desire of the particular soul, which is confirmed by a comment Virgil makes in canto XIV of the Inferno to Capaneus, whose sin is blasphemy:

     O Capaneus, since your blustering pride

will not be stilled, you are made to suffer more:     no torment other than your rage itself     could punish your gnawing pride more perfectly.

(Inferno, canto XIV, 63–66)

In contrast to this, The Great Divorce represents Hell as a place of wide open spaces, indicating the alienation and distance sin creates between souls. This is most clearly represented in the figure of Napoleon, whose palace was visited by two Ghosts after a journey that took "about fifteen thousand years." The house remains with "nothing near it for millions of miles."³ The ephemeral nature of...