Doug Van Pelt

To Barbara Wall Best and most long-suffering of scribes

This is the dedication of the CS Lewis book, The Great Divorce.

If you'd like to participate in a virtual book club, get ahold of this book. Lord willing, I'll start chapter one tomorrow. This has the reputation of a classic book. I'm believing for great things going in. Like I mentioned in my blog the other day, I've been meaning to read this book for years.

PREFACE

Blake wrote the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant...

This is how Lewis introduces this work. He apparently is going to dissect and describe the problem with sin and its far-reaching ramifications.

Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' -- or else not.

It's interesting how this philosophy flies in the face of much of popular social pop-philosophy today. Is man basically good? Or is there a sinful nature that makes him inherently bad? Is evil a minor flaw in the attempt to be good? Or is it a power and bent that taken to its extreme is all evil?

Lewis acknowledges his debt to a great inspiration for this book to a writer whose name he has forgotten. He read something in an American magazine of what they call "Christian hard music." It was one of the earliest incarnations of HM Magazine, when we were covering the exploding Jazz scene in Chicago and New Orleans. Lewis was hip to what these musicians were up to...

Okay, I digressed into fiction there. The magazine had something to do with 'Scientifiction.' The hero in this writing traveled into the past, but raindrops would pierce him like bullets and sandwiches could not be bitten -- for the past was un-alterable. Interesting.

The second thing Lewis wanted to end his preface with was this:

I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course -- or I intended it to have -- a moral. But the transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us. The last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity about the details of the after-world.

Ah, I learned something about this book I've been longing to read: it's more like The Screwtape Letters than Mere Christianity. This is not what I expected, but it makes perfect sense.

Posted by Doug Van Pelt at March 27, 2007 10:07 AM