LEWIS MEETS THILE: IMAGINING SALVATION THROUGH ART
Public domain.
Though there’s no single Christian doctrine of salvation, but among the various options on offer we tend to find a recurring thought like this: how you live on this mortal coil impacts what follows once you’ve shuffled it off. However, reflecting on the long run impacts of our day-to-day lives can be difficult because of our inherently limited perspective. You may have heard of the so-called “butterfly effect,” and I think its metaphor of a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a tornado hundreds of miles away gets at this issue. We often have a hard time escaping our own personal points of view to reflect on how our actions really impact us and those around us in a broad sense. Artistic works can help here because they assist us in broadening our horizons beyond what we might otherwise be able to imagine.
There are some media in which this point is pretty obvious. For example, NBC’s The Good Place invites us to imagine salvation. Similarly, C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is quite explicit in depicting itself as a work of soteriological (1) fiction. But I think that even works which don’t necessarily intend to treat salvation-related subject matter can be helpful too. To offer an example of this, I invite us to take a look at progressive bluegrass band Nickel Creek’s 2005 song “When in Rome.” More particularly, I think we should do this by bringing the track alongside The Great Divorce to compare the two.
You might already be familiar with this book, and if you are then I invite you to skip down a bit if you’d like. For those of us less familiar with The Great Divorce (or who’d like something of a refresher), it starts by depicting a dreary, rainy, London-esque town in which the residents appear to live rather miserably with one another. (2) We soon find out that this town is, in fact, hell! Moreover, in hell there’s a bus which its denizens can hop aboard and ride to a lush region of plains and woods at the feet of an endless, extravagantly beautiful mountain range; which turns out to be heaven. (3) Anyone can grab the bus from hell to heaven’s outskirts, and anyone can jump off said bus and head straight into the mountains if they want. Sometimes people even come down from the mountains to meet friends and loved ones so they can return to heaven together. (4)
If you’re like I was when I first read The Great Divorce, you might be wondering, “who in the world wouldn’t just leave hell then? Why is there anyone still there?” What we come to find is that there are, strangely (and sadly), a number of reasons why people might not only refrain from taking the bus at all but even go back to hell. Typically, the reason is there is something people idolize or cling to over and above their Creator. From the bishop who – when asked if he thinks God really exists – says, “Exists? What does Existence mean? You will keep on implying some sort of static, ready-made reality which is, so to speak, ‘there,’ and to which our minds have simply to conform,” (5) to a woman who has so exalted her son that she can think of nothing greater than her own “Mother-love” (6) and seems content with the idea that her son might leave heaven and come with her to hell, Lewis shows us various ways people reject their own salvation.
In the book (and here I invite back those of us who elected to skip ahead previously), Lewis construes salvation as a matter of loving God and surrendering oneself to God’s perfect, gentle will so they can be further drawn into that love. Elsewhere, I’ve similarly claimed that being saved is fundamentally about experiencing a richness of loving, intimate fellowship with God that persists and grows evermore. (7) So, I’ll here be thinking of salvation in this broad manner: salvation is experiencing a fullness of God’s love and living into a saintly community which flourishes together through that same love. To be saved is to will desires for the good of and union with both God and neighbor. (8) I think we clearly see Lewis depicting something like this (and the ways it can go awry) in The Great Divorce, but what about “When in Rome?”
Well, let’s look at the song. If you’ve not yet given it a listen, do that now (I’ll wait!). It’s a somewhat mysterious track, no? Three short verses and a single bridge comprise it, each verse presenting a scenario that defies our expectations. Physicians don’t treat the sick and would-be pupils use their books for decoration or kindling; what a world. But some people recognize this isn’t right. A “brother” and “sister” (be they proverbial or literal) send up smoke signals calling for aid while also tending to each other. For my part, I interpret these two as verse one’s sick man and verse two’s teacher respectively. They’ve both been astonished by the world they find themselves in and seek out help in resisting it. And that’s not all, for that final verse – with its bare minimum instrumentation ushering Thile’s crooning voice back into the mix – asks “where can a dead man go? A question with an answer only dead men know. But I’m gonna bet they never really feel at home if they spent a lifetime learning how to live in Rome.”
I suggest we can read this song, particularly in light of that last verse, as a kind of soteriological allegory. It paints a picture not unlike The Great Divorce’s wherein we see how and why people might reject divine love. God calls us to love Creator and neighbor, but The Great Divorce shows us how easy it is to build cages for ourselves which we somehow grow to love instead. Likewise, “When in Rome” shows us how living a life of self-absorption and reckless conformity can lead us to live in contradiction to both the good of others and ourselves. If Rome is our present habitation, then we must spend our lives in it learning how to live in salvific love rather than merely looking around and shrugging, “when in Rome.” A further, more miserable Rome is our end when we live so callously.
Now, I can’t say whether a reading anything like this was intended by Thile as he wrote the song. However, I don’t think that matters much for what I mean to convey here. Namely, “When in Rome” is far from the only bit of contemporary media which might be mined for theological significance, and I encourage you to think theologically when you listen to, watch, and read whatever engages you. As I mentioned earlier, it can often be hard for us to conceptualize such weighty things as our salvation and how the sometimes seemingly innocuous ways we live presently impact our soteriological futures. My point here has been to say that there may be more ways to broaden our horizons than we’d first think.
We don’t need to limit ourselves to media which explicitly reflect on such topics. As thoughtful Christians, we can find resources all around us! When Lewis meets Thile we can find a new avenue for imagining how to live as Christ followers. For example, when we have opportunities to grow in faith through learning – perhaps even from unexpected teachers – will we be ones who embrace this education or ones who say “this’ll burn warm in the fireplace, teacher; when in Rome.” Such artistic reflection isn’t a panacea by any means, but it can play an important role in helping us to self-narrate our journeys in love with God. I’m not alone in thinking this sort of thing either; Fortress Academic has a whole Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture series on such topics (just to name one other outlet supporting this sort of reflection). So, with one option I’ve noticed helps me imagine salvation noted, I wonder what might help you do the same? Is it something of the printed word, of musical quality, or perhaps a work of dance or printmaking? Whatever it is, I hope I’ve given you license to imagine boldly.
That is, pertaining to the doctrine of salvation.
C.S. Lewis “The Great Divorce” in The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2002),
Ibid, 476-478.
E.g., Ibid, 479-482.
Ibid, 488.
Ibid, 519.
See my: “Compassionate Exclusivism: Relational Atonement and Post-Mortem Salvation,” Journal of Analytic Theology 9 (Summer 2021): 158-179; “‘Draw Me After You’: Toward an Erotic Theosis,” Scottish Journal of Theology 76, no. 2 (May 2023): 139-152.
I here draw from Eleonore Stump’s extensive work on love. See, for example: Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), Ch. 5.
