FINDING GOD IN THE GREAT DIVORCE: FICTION AS A SPRINGBOARD FOR THEOLOGY
Last fall, I organized a small reading group at my parish. I was fresh out of grad school, settling into a new city, and looking to recreate some of the heady debates I’d had when studying philosophy. I tossed the idea around, but not many people seemed interested in books I wanted to read, like the first volume of Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology or Tanner’s Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity. So, following some suggestions from our rector, I settled on The Great Divorce. And once I started mentioning that book at church, I had a stream of people coming to me to express interest. I had found a book people wanted to read.
I’ve been a part of many reading groups. I ran a few in graduate school, and I’ve coordinated a few online. Because of my academic background, I’m used to particular kind of reading: critical, analytic, speculative. And usually my fellow readers have been academics, or at the very least highly-motivated non-specialists. This meant that I found myself running a group that I didn’t know much about, with people I was just getting to know.
One blessing of church groups is that they afford us an opportunity to build relationships beyond our usual divides. In its truest form, the Church is diverse along a variety of dimensions. A good church group can thus facilitate building relationships across normal social divides such as class or age — divides which The Episcopal Church has, admittedly, had trouble bridging. But like many blessings, there are challenges at first. Many of us aren’t used to building these sorts of relationships. We have not memorized the social scripts that facilitate these sorts of conversations. The first steps can be painful; they can all feel too real, like heaven’s grass against the foot of a person fresh off the bus from purgatory.
The Great Divorce is often cited as a source for purgatorial speculation, though in the preface to the novel Lewis disclaims the proposition that he is offering an account of the afterlife. And, for the most part, our group didn’t talk much about purgatory. (This may be because the group was composed of former Baptists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans.) Instead we focused on the fact that The Great Divorce is, to use a phrase that came up several times in our discussions, a catalogue of ordinary sinners. Time after time a character is presented to the reader, and while from the reader’s perspective it is so obvious that they ought to choose heaven, from the character’s perspective it is so clear that they have to remain in hell. Every participant in our little group could, at some point, see how someone could make the terrible choice to reject God — the characters’ weaknesses were our weaknesses too.
When we started to approach the book in these terms — reading ourselves and our experiences into the text, in a way that I had always been told not to by teachers and professors — our group discussions became significantly deeper. And to my surprise, they became increasingly theological. By being open about ourselves and our faults with a group of people we were coming to trust, we also let ourselves talk more freely about and probe more deeply into the mysteries of God.
At least in my experience — and it is admittedly limited — we tend to group discussions about faith into the formal and informal, the serious and unserious. Those formal conversations are when we can talk about the sacraments, or the Trinity, or any of the other mysteries of our faith; they are often paired with texts like the Bible or academic writing (or, at least, popular writings by academics) and take place in designated ‘teaching times’: formation classes, Bible studies, etc. The informal discussions are about applications, about our lives and our responses to God; when a text is involved, they are lighter works and serve as a springboard. The latter conversations rarely ‘stick to the text’ and, while they have value, they don’t seem to probe as deeply into the Christian truths that have drawn me deeper into my faith.
But being part of a reading group centered around The Great Divorce challenged this distinction. Perhaps it is because of Lewis’ plain, conversational style, or perhaps it is because the characters in The Great Divorce are having explicitly theological conversations, but as we read we couldn’t stop ourselves from having theological conversations. As I said above, Lewis’ novel is like a catalogue of ordinary sinners, and once you start seeing yourself in those pages you start to think about how you would respond to the probing questions offered up by those trying to get you to go to Heaven. And when you start to think about how you would respond, you have started to do theology.
Quite a lot— perhaps too much — has been written on the themes of The Great Divorce, and it would be tedious to try and find something new to say about any particular chapter or character. Less attention is paid to the genre and style of Lewis’ novel. Lewis is often criticized for being a bit too straightforward — Aslan is Jesus, Screwtape simply lays out the demonic plans for Wormwood, Oyéresu are angels — but sometimes being straightforward is just what is needed. And the conversations that make up the bulk of The Great Divorce are straightforward conversations about God — they are unabashedly theological conversations.
Once we start to think about The Great Divorce’s form, we see a model of engaging in theological conversation — a model we Episcopalians, who can be a bit reticent to start talking about Jesus too loudly, can follow. The model is simple enough. This kind of theological dialogue begins with questions: Who are you? What brought you here? What is holding you back? But importantly, while it begins with personal questions about people’s responses to God, it quickly transitions to be about God Himself. A conversation with a painter may start about his love of paint, but you move on to a question about light, and from there you move to the one who said, ‘Let there be light.’ If someone else wants to talk about their sins or shortcomings, we can talk about the grace that God offers. When someone offers thanks for some blessing, we can talk about the God from whom all blessings flow. Each conversation in The Great Divorce has the same point — the point is God and the grace He offers.
God doesn’t make an appearance in The Great Divorce, but is still present. God is present in the offer that the visitors from purgatory are made, when they are asked to simply acknowledge their own limits and turn to the good. God is on the top of mountain, and the mountain is within sight; all you need to do is start walking. So while nobody ever sees God, they can’t help but talk about God. In much the same way, reading through The Great Divorce focused our group on God even if we weren’t obviously or consciously doing theology. By reading about how others reconciled themselves to God — or chose not to do so — we had to think and talk about what it means to be reconciled. By talking about the grace extended to the various visitors from purgatory, we had to think to think about the grace extended to each of us, and in order to think through that we needed to think about grace itself.
When we had finished the novel and started to plan for our next book, I took some time to reflect on our progress. After just a few weeks, I knew so much about the members of the group, including their shortcomings. I had grown to love them; I counted them as friends. I do not know if we could have had this experience if we had read — as I originally hoped — a work of academic theology. By reading a work of fiction, we were able to let go of the usual anxieties that can accompany discussions of sin, grace, and God. We felt free use the novel as a screen, projecting our own thoughts onto it for the rest of the group to see. By reading a book about ordinary sinners being confronted with God’s simple, overwhelming love, our group had to wrestle with the big questions of theology.
