This is Lewis’s vision of the afterlife, and it is definitely the best depiction I’ve come across. Hell is a town that stretches out for millions of miles, encompassing the horizon, sparsely populated because its residents want to be left alone in their loneliness. Heaven is a dreamlike world full of nature and creatures of greater reality and dimension than Hell (which is not even an atom in Heaven), so that Hell’s residents are Ghosts in Heaven, unable even to pluck a blade of grass from the fields.
Hell is not eternal torment in fire but, in Augustine’s words, the “infolding of the Self.” Hell is the inability to surrender to the greater reality beyond one’s own life and preoccupations. And, to this atheist, this vision of Hell is something that I approve of. There is a version of Christianity, removed from the attendant social institutions that make it unpalatable, that converges with the deeper secular truths about living that non-Christians (and other religions, most notably Buddhism) stumble upon: that one’s suffering is proportional to the dimensions of the Self in one’s attention. David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” speech comes plainest to describing this, and I think Lewis’s vision here in this book, while obviously a Christian take, is especially vivid. One’s life takes on a largeness and firmer reality once we have abandoned our “skull-sized kingdoms,” in Wallace’s words, and to simply pay attention and give the play of everyday life its due. It is very hard, like fish trying to remind itself that it is swimming in water:
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
I know this is isn’t Lewis’s purpose for writing The Great Divorce, that above all it is a piece of Christian apologetics, and, specifically as he describes in the preface, a justification for non-universalism. But, being not a Christian, that is not what I care about. The vision of Heaven that he presents is beautiful, and, importantly to me, attainable only by surrender of the Self.