Posted on 12/31/2001 8:37:03 PM PST by Askel5
| THE GREAT DIVORCE C.S. Lewis
The reason why I asked if there were another river was this. All down one long aisle of the forest the under-sides of the leafy branches had begun to tremble with dancing light; and on earth I knew nothing so likely to produce this appearance as the reflected lights case upward by moving water. A few moments later I realized my mistake. Some kind of procession was approaching us, and the lifht came form the persons who composed it. |
More Lewis:
Part One: A Philosphy of History
Part Two: Four Stages in History
Part Three: Three Psychological Principles (and Possible Solution)
The Great Divorce is my favorite book by Lewis. It deserves to be better known.
Deus Vult! 'Pod
We cannot compromise at all w/ any area of our lives and following Him. I pray that someday the same may be said about you like Sarah, and about me. That is where the narrow road leads.
Psa 37 (all of it)
Dave
Some kind of procession was approaching us, and the lifht came form the persons who composed it.
Quenot has some memorable things to say about radiance in icons as a property of the world transfigured in the Resurrection. See pp. 85ff, and (specifically on the "uncreated light") p.148.
It's my hope as well, Sauropod.
(I believe I'll sic AKA Elena on anyone who's a problem with my including the end of Chapter Twelve ... the bit towards the end is something I've always wanted to have handy on the forum for cut and paste purposes when dueling elsewhere ... here's hoping there are no typos! =)
| … The Dwarf was now so small that I could not distinguish him from the chain to which he was clinging. And now for the first time I could not be certain whether the Lady was addressing him or the Tragedian. "Quick," she said. "There is still time. Stop it. Stop it at once." "Stop what?" "Using pity, other people's pity, in the wrong way. We have all done it a bit on earth, you know. Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity. "You see, I know now. Even as a child you did it. Instead of saying you were sorry, you went and sulked in the attic … because you knew that sooner or later one of your sisters would say, 'I can't bear to think of him sitting there alone, crying.' You used your pity to blackmail them and they gave in in the end. And afterwards, when we were married … oh, it doesn't matter, if only you will stop it." "And that," said the Tragedian, "that is all you have understood of me all these years." I don't know what had become of the Dwarf Ghost by now. Perhaps it was climbing up the chain like an insect: perhaps it was somehow absorbed into the chain. "No, Frank, not here," said the Lady. "Listen to reason. Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenceless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed? For it was real misery. I know that now. You made yourself really wretched. That you can still do. But you can no longer communicate your wretchedness. Everything becomes more and more itself. "Here is a joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. No, no, no. Come to us. We will not go to you. Can you really have thought that love and joy would be always at the mercy of frown and sighs? Did you not know they were stronger than their opposites?" "you use that sacred word?" aid the Tragedian. At the same moment he gathered up the chain which had now for some time been swinging uselessly at his side, and somehow disposed of it. Then for the first time it became clear that the Lady saw and addressed him only. "Where is Frank?" she said. "And who are you, Sir? I never knew you. Perhaps you had better leave me. Or stay, if you prefer. If it would help you and it were possible I would go down with you into Hell; but you cannot bring Hell into me." "You do not love me," said the Tragedian in a thin bat-like voice: and he was now very difficult to see. "I cannot love a lie," said the Lady, "I cannot love the thing which is not. I am in Love and out of it I will not go." There was no answer. The Tragedian had vanished. The Lady was alone in that woodland place, and a brown bird went hopping past her, bending with its light feet the grasses I could not bend. Presently the Lady got up and began to walk away. The other Bright Spirits came forward to receive her, singing as they came:
The Happy Trinity is her home; "And yet … and yet …," said I to my Teacher, when all the shapes and the singing had passed some distance away into the forest, "even now I am not quite sure. Is it really tolerable that she should be untouched by his misery, even his self-made misery?" "Would ye rather that he still had the power of tormenting her? He did it many a day and many a year in their earthly life." "Well, no. I suppose I don't want that." "What then"? "I hardly know, Sir. What some people say on earth is tht the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved." "Ye see it does not." "I feel in a way that it ought to." "That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it." "What?" "The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven." "I don't know what I want, Sir." "Son, son … it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye'll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye'll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the Universe." "But dare one say – it is horrible to say – that Pity must ever die?" "Ye must distinguish. The action of Pity will live for ever: but the passion of Pity will not. The passion of Pity, the pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth, the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity and many a statesman out of his honesty -- that will die. It was used as a weapon by bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken." "And what is the other kind – the action?" "It's a weapon on the other side. It leaps quicker than light from the highest place to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. It changes darkness into light and evil into good. But it will not, at the cunning tears of Hell, impose on good the tyranny of evil. Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world's garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses." "You say it will go down to the lowest, Sir. But she didn't go down with him to Hell … " "Where would ye have had her go? … All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. … " "It seems big enough when you're in it, Sir." "And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. …" "I see," said I at last. "She couldn't fit into Hell." He nodded, "There's not room for her," he said. "Hell could not open its mouth wide enough." "And she couldn't make herself smaller? -- like Alice, you know." "Nothing like small enough. For a damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not – in the end they cannot – open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see." "Then no one can ever reach them?" "Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend – man can sympathise with a horse but a horse cannot sympathise with a rat. Only One has descended into Hell." "And will He ever do so again?" "It was not once long ago that He did it. Time does not work that way when once ye have left the Earth. All moments that have been or shall be were, or are, present in the moment of His descending. There is not spirit in prison to whom He did not preach." "And some hear him?" "Aye." "In your own books, Sir," said I, "you were a Universalist. You talked as if all men would be saved. And St. Paul too." "Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it's ill talking of such questions." "Because they are too terrible, Sir?"
"If ye put the question from within Time and are asking about possibilities, the answer is certain. The choice of ways is before you. Neither is closed. Any man may choose eternal death. Those who choose it will have it. "But if ye are trying to see the final state of things as it will be (for so you must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. "Time is the very lens through which ye see – small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope – something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves a part of eternal reality. "But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn't is itself Freedom. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol: but it's truer than any philosophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic's vision) that claims to go behind it. "For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of time destroys your knowledge of Freedom. Witness the doctrine of Predestination which shows (truly enough) that eternal reality is not waiting for a future in which to be real; but at the price of removing Freedom which is the deeper truth of the two. And wouldn't Universalism do the same? "Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived. "The Lord said we were gods. How long could ye bear to look (without Time's lens) on the greatness of your own soul and the eternal reality of her choice?" |
Humph ... as if YOU didn't know.
Cheers, LLAN-DDEUSANT ... there are plenty more branches left on the tree for climbing ever higher. =)
God Bless America
It does deserve to be better known. I thought I'd read just about everything he wrote until this fell off the shelves at Bookstar one night (in the nick of time, as is so often the case in the stacks).
I realize I run the risk always of mixing my apples with oranges (just ask monkey), but it's this book that made Many Worlds Theory coherent for me ... even if Lewis himself is cautious about the vision of both mathematician (philosopher) and mystic alike.
(Thanks again for the physics lessons, monkey! =)
I beg your pardon, but are you spoken for, mademoiselle? ;)
I've read this in other Lewis (Screwtape, I think)--and I thought it telling that evil has no substance with which to work, only those good things which it has corrupted. I'm reading Lord of the Rings again and this comes up there too (the Orcs and Trolls being corruptions of the Elves and Ents, etc.). I've heard Lewis and Tolkien were fast friends, and I can see they had quite an impact on one another.
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