The Great Divorce

Lewis chooses a logical starting point for the conversations between Ghosts and Spirits: a man who thinks his good works should gain him entrance to Heaven. Christian doctrine teaches that no amount of good behavior can save a person’s soul—only God’s grace, or mercy, can—but the idea that “good people” go to Heaven is extremely common across many societies. Even many people who profess to believe in Christian doctrine use descriptions like “good person” or “bad person,” as if a person’s good and bad deeds can be weighed against each other to earn them membership in one column or the other.

The Spirit that interacts with the first Ghost tries to explain that this way of thinking is mistaken in two regards. First, Heaven is a place that cannot hold any sin, and since even “good” people who have done many good deeds have sinned, they cannot enter Heaven on their own merits. Second, most “good” people are not as good as they suspect they are.

The second conversation the narrator witnesses, between the apostate and Dick, is one of the longer Ghost-Spirit interactions in the novel, which makes sense given Lewis’s background. The apostate strayed from the Christian faith when he encountered the popular secularism of his postsecondary education. His intellectual peers considered Christianity a relic of the past that modern science and philosophy had rendered misguided. As a longtime member of the academic community himself, Lewis likely writes from his own experiences with attitudes toward religion within the academy. Lewis also returned to Christianity as an adult after several years of nonbelief; at some point, he probably made (or at least accepted) arguments similar to the apostate’s.

The Ghost’s discussion with Dick offers the first glimpse of a theme that dominates the novel: the idea of Christian faith as the difficult choice, not the easy one. Many people conceptualize religion in general and Christianity in particular as a crutch—a support system for the weak who can only survive by imagining an idyllic afterlife with a benevolent God. However, this conceptualization leaves out the idea that in Christian doctrine, entrance to Heaven is conditional upon great sacrifice: the laying down of one’s own selfish desires and priorities to accept God’s grace. A person cannot experience the riches of God’s mercy and keep their sins in their pocket all the while. Laying down that innate sinful nature is the hardest thing a human can do, Lewis posits.