C.S. Lewis: Why People Choose Hell

A bus from hell to heaven

In 1946, C.S. Lewis wrote a strange book. It's about a bus that goes from Hell...to Heaven. The tickets are free. Anyone in Hell can board. And you’re even allowed to stay in Heaven. But what happens seems unthinkable… until you grasp the message of his book.

Hell--in this book--isn't fire. It's a grey town where it's always raining and always almost evening. Stick with us--because Lewis has a major disclaimer that his book is not at all a detailed theology of Hell, but rather a fictional work—a "fantasy" as he puts it. What's captured readers for decades though is how his imagery causes us to rethink God, happiness, and our eternal fate. Back to his book—People aren't screaming in it, they're bickering — standing in a bus queue, actually giving up on the line one by one over petty slights.

Lewis writes in a first person view:

"My fellow passengers fought like hens to get on board the bus though there was plenty of room for us all."

As you'll see, that line might be the whole book in a sentence. Here's one of the all-time great lines from this book.

"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.'

This idea... is why the book is called.. The Great Divorce. In this story, no one is dragged to Hell. Nobody is held there or kept from Heaven via force or barriers. Every person who ends up back in the grey town is clutching something — and they’d rather keep clutching that thing.. than be happy.

C.S. Lewis was an Oxford literature professor and most consider him the most influential Christian writer of the twentieth century — writing Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, Narnia and much more. One of the things he was once-in-a-generation at is turning theology into pictures you can't unsee. His vision is about 3 and a half hours long, and some of you should definitely go read it after this. People today often have long want-to-read lists or they find books intimidating, so we make these to serve all sorts of people—readers and not. This won’t be a summary or a book review—it's a spotlight and a preview slash review.

The Grey Town

A hell that empties itself

So: the grey town. It stretches for millions of miles...and it's nearly empty.

What?

That doesn't sound like the picture of Hell we've inherited from medieval folks like Dante or the movies. This vast emptiness isn't because there aren't people. It's because nobody can stand anybody. In this depiction of Hell, you can build a house just by imagining it. So every time you quarrel with a neighbor — which is all the time — you simply move further out.

Here’s an example:

Blame without end

We see two travelers who have journeyed for fifteen thousand years to find the infamous French General: Napoleon Bonaparte. They find him in a huge, empty house, pacing back and forth, muttering the same words on an endless loop: "It was Soult's fault. It was Ney's fault. It was Josephine's fault." It's blame.. running on forever. He's become sort of soul-less pacing machine.

A country more real

Then we see bus passengers rise up to the outskirts of Heaven ...And they discover they're transparent. Lewis calls them Ghosts — quote "man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air."

Here’s the picture that won’t leave you:

The grass in Heaven doesn't bend under their feet. It actually hurts them. Because everything in this country is more solid than they are as ghosts.

"The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron…but like diamond."

This is one of the central images of the book, and it totally flips what most of us picture. We imagine heaven as spiritual and therefore misty, floaty, and ethereal — basically anti-physical. In one sense less real than this life. Lewis paints a Heaven that is more real. More tangible.. So real in fact, that it's painful to people who have spent a lifetime becoming thin.

The Ghosts are invited to stay in Heaven, to walk to the mountains, and to become solid. In fact, bright people they’re called— people they knew on earth — come and try to help them do exactly that. This tension sets up a series of conversations. And a series of refusals.

What each Ghost cannot release

The man who wants his rights

The first Ghost we follow is a big, blustering man. He's scandalized by who's been sent to meet him: Len — a man who once worked under him...and who murdered someone. Len is now solid and shining. The bigger Ghost can't process it. He tells himself that he was a decent man. He always kept his nose clean. He just. wants. his. rights. Len answers:

"I haven't got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either.. You'll get something far better."

The big Ghost keeps insisting he's only asking for what he's earned. And Len keeps saying the one thing the Ghost can't seem to hear no matter how many times its repeated:

"Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought."

This conversation ends with the Big Ghost declaring he'd rather be damned than go along with a murderer — He shuffles back to the bus, clutching his decency to his chest like a stone. Notice Lewis isn't giving easy answers to evil or the requirement of justice—the point here is that Heaven doesn't run on merit, rights, or deserving—it runs on a gift. And gifts have to be received.

The bishop who prefers inquiry

The second conversation is with a bishop — an actual pastor man. His old colleague--who is now solid--begs him to come to the mountains, where every question he ever asked will finally get its answer. The bishop is charmed, but he can't do it. He prefers his open-mindedness and sophisticated questions. His permanent way of life is this free inquiry.

His friend pushes back:

"Thirst was made for water; inquiry.. for truth."

Questions are good the way thirst is good — they're meant to arrive somewhere. But for this religious leader and thinker, arriving would end his performance. So he refuses the mountains. He has to get back to his work, you see...which is presenting to a theological society.. in Hell. This picture isn't an attack on honest doubt or the hardest questions of life--it's about surrendering to the ultimate truth when it touches you. For some of you watching this today, this could be you.

When love becomes possession

The third conversation, Lewis handles with tenderness — and we'll do our best to do the same. A mother named Pam has come down demanding to see her son Michael, who died young. And her fury gets an answer of: not yet. --Not because God is withholding her son Michael — but because right now she wants Michael instead of.. everything, and in this country, love only survives when something bigger than possession is holding it up.

Her brother, a solid person, shares the rule:

"Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried."

Let's be careful here, because Lewis is. This is not a diagnosis of grieving people. The claim is severe but not heartless: even the most beautiful love we know can curdle into clutching, clawing ownership when it becomes ultimate. When its held onto outside of the source of love itself. What's offered to Pam isn't less love. It's a death of dark possessiveness and self-sufficiency accompanied by a glorious resurrection and life. Elsewhere Lewis develops that you can either have Heaven which will rewrite the story on even the worst pains of this life...or Hell will poison even the best delights of this life.

Desire remade

In the next picture we see a very different outcome than the last three. A Ghost appears with a red lizard sitting on his shoulder, whispering in his ear. The lizard represents lust.

There's a burning Angel and it asks: "May I kill it?" The Ghost says yes... sort of. Then backpedals.. Some other day. It's asleep right now. Surely something gradual would work better. Think of every excuse you've ever made for the sin we hold onto. Only a few hundred years after Jesus walked the earth, Augustine wrote that in his battle with lust, he realized he'd been praying to God "Give me purity and self control...but not yet." He'd been half-hearted in his longing for holiness, holding on to the pleasures and deceitfulness of sin. Now that's a word for today.

This Angel just keeps asking if it can kill the red lizzard because the angel can't do the act against the Ghost's will. Finally, in agony, the man in his weakness barely chokes out: "God help me. God help me." The Angel grips the lizard... and breaks its back.

What happens next is quite a sight.. The lizard doesn't just die.. it transforms — into a huge stallion with a golden mane. And the man, who is now solid, swings up onto its back and rides into the mountains like a shooting star. Watch what Lewis is doing. Unlike some spiritual systems, he's not saying desire is the enemy. In his words:

"Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed."

Surrender, we then see, is never just losing the thing--though it does take losing it. There's only one way to truly have it — and this time when God gives it back it's bigger, freer, more alive than it ever was when it ruled on your shoulder.

Joy cannot be blackmailed

Final scene. A procession comes down from the mountains — music, scattered flowers, dancing Spirits.

The woman whose joy cannot be controlled

At the center walks a woman so radiant the narrator assumes she must be someone very famous. And she's also literally giant-like in physical size. The narrator thinks she might be Mary or something like that. His guide corrects him: that is Sarah Smith. From Golders Green — an ordinary London suburb. Nobody on earth ever heard of her. But everyone she met — every child, every neighbor, even the animals — walked away more alive, more themselves.

Fame in the Eternal State and fame in this present darkness are totally different currencies. And this Sarah holds one of the book's hardest questions. Her husband Frank arrives from the grey town. He's a Ghost who spent his entire life using misery as leverage. He sulks to be noticed. He suffers at people, to control them.

He tries it one more time, on her.. And it doesn't work. Not because she's grown cold — but because her joy is finally complete, and total joy can't be blackmailed. She tells him:

"I cannot love a lie. I cannot love the thing which is not. I am in Love, and out of it I will not go."

Frank shrinks — literally — until there is nothing even left to talk to. And the narrator asks his guide the tough question we're all asking: how can she be happy while he's out there?

Isn't her joy heartless?

The guide's answer is that the alternative is to let the self-imprisoned blackmail the universe —the alternative is to hand misery a veto over every joy that ever exists.

It's a challenging word, but notice what Lewis is doing:

He's raising a major objection against the long held Christian view that not everyone enters Jesus' glorious future and he's answering that Hell has no veto power over Heaven. Near the end, the narrator sees the real scale of it all. The entire grey town — all those millions of empty miles — turn out to fit inside a tiny crack in the soil of the real country. It's entirely unmissable if you walked past.

"For a damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself."

And then the whole vision collapses.

The question Lewis leaves us

The narrator wakes up on the floor of his office in wartime England with books scattered around and an air-raid siren wails overhead. Lewis isn't handing you a map of the afterlife. He's handing you a mirror. The question the book leaves you with isn't what happens after I die? It's: what am I becoming... and what am I clutching instead of God the source of all joy.. and Jesus, the truth who made the way for us? Each Ghost had a bus ticket. But their grievances, their reputation, their control, their lust...each of these become impassable barriers that keep them forever stuck in the grey town.

"There is always something they prefer to joy — that is, to reality."

We read hundreds of books at Kainos, and this one is definitely an editor's choice. If you'd like to buy the Great Divorce while also contributing about 45 cents to our work, you can use the link in the description. The book is published by HarperOne. This video is not sponsored.