The Great Divorce

Through Frank and Sarah, Lewis communicates a doctrinal message that many people find difficult to accept: Some people will simply not choose Heaven, and those who do will enjoy Heaven without them. To many, this idea seems wrong and even cruel. How could anyone enjoy Heaven if even one of their loved ones were suffering in Hell?

To answer this question, Lewis uses an exemplary figure: Sarah, a woman who demonstrated God’s love constantly during her lifetime. The song that her procession sings, phrased in couplets of verse, recalls biblical songs sung by or about godly women, such as the Magnificat, Mary’s prayer in Luke 1:46-55, or the hymn in praise of a hypothetical godly woman in Proverbs 31. The use of a similar kind of song for Sarah’s processional underscores that Sarah is an exalted person in Heaven, and her acceptance of Frank’s decision therefore means that no Heavenly Spirits are at fault in their happiness, no matter their loved one’s choices. In Heaven, no one experiences a lack of love that needs to be filled; therefore, the love they show is of a different, purer kind than earthly love. Ultimately, Lewis proposes, humans may not be able to imagine an emotional plane on which being separated from a loved one would not feel devastating, but they can trust that Heaven is a place of pure joy where no one experiences unmet emotional needs.

Just as Lewis explores the incomprehensibility of Heaven’s altered emotional plane, so also does he attempt to address the conflict between free will and God’s total control of the universe. For millennia, those interested in religion have attempted to reconcile the seemingly mutually exclusive ideas that humans have free will to accept or reject God’s salvation and that God exercises total control of the universe. While different religions and different sects within Christianity approach this problem differently, Lewis chooses to half-answer it. He has MacDonald show the narrator the chessboard—a symbol that illustrates how free will and God’s total control might coexist—but he also has MacDonald indicate that the narrator cannot fully understand the answer (or possibly the question), as he perceives reality through a lens of time rather than eternity.

When the narrator awakes in his own house, he can hear the wail of a siren at three o’clock —a nod to the constant danger Britain endured during World War II. This closing allusion to the war reminds readers of the great, impassable gulf between the fallen world the narrator inhabits in his waking life and the peace of the land he visited in his dream. It acts as a final reminder of the book’s thesis that humans will always make an incontrovertible mess of things when left to their own devices and enthralled by their own sinful natures. At the same time, it is a reminder that moral truths do exist; Lewis used the rhetoric of good and evil to describe the fight against fascism in (among other places) a series of wartime radio broadcasts to the British public.