The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis again employs his formidable talent for fable and allegory. The writer finds himself in Hell boarding a bus bound for Heaven. The amazing opportunity is that anyone who wants to stay in Heaven, can. This is a starting point for an extraordinary meditation upon good and evil, grace and judgment. Lewis’s revolutionary idea is the discovery that the gates of Hell are locked from the inside. Using his extraordinary descriptive powers, Lewis’s The Great Divorce will change the way we think about good and evil.

I think the profound effect Lewis has had on my mind is keenly comparable to the way Lewis viewed George MacDonald. I'm certain that Lewis and I exist on different wavelengths on many things, and yet each time I read one of his works I find myself moved and hoping he's right. What if Hell really is only closed from the inside? Lewis is quick to make clear that this book is one of his “supposeales,” and even clearer that he intends this book wholly as a work of fiction, not one of those “I saw heaven/hell” books; in fact, Lewis has a short but funny exchange with author George MacDonald about people who have “visions” of heaven/hell and then write books about their “experience.” So, to sum it all up, I don't really buy Lewis's viewpoint (or George MacDonald's, for that matter), but I find so much of it beautiful.

After all, as Lewis's fictional George MacDonald explains, trying to understand eternity while living within time is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

A great work of fiction that simultaneously speculates on what the eternal state will be like.

In this short work C.S. Lewis presents the reader with some problems in moral philosophy couched in a series of encounters in an afterlife. Worth a read even for agnostics such as myself.