What would it be like to go on a bus trip between hell and heaven? In this episode Trent sits down with Pints with Jack co-host David Bates to talk about C.S. Lewis’s book The Great Divorce.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
And welcome back to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Today is part two of our imaginative supposings with David Bates, the cohost of the Pints with Jack podcast. Last time we spoke about imaginatively supposing what it would be like to look at the correspondence between a senior demon and a junior demon, Screwtape and Wormwood, who are trying to tempt a man to give up on God and be damned for all eternity.
And in the process we learned how to avoid those kinds of temptations and get to heaven. And getting to heaven is another thing we’re going to talk about today in our imaginative supposings about what it would be like to take a bus trip to heaven with stops at hell and purgatory along the way in very creative ways. So joining us again, Mr. David Bates. David, welcome back to the Counsel of Trent podcast.
David Bates:
It’s great to be back, and I’m glad that we’re heading to heaven this time.
Trent Horn:
Yes. We always got to start with the the dark before we can end with the light, so we’re going to go there. Before we get there though, a special reminder, be sure to check out trenthornpodcast.com, so I can continue doing the podcast and have great guests like David Bates on the show.
Also to have guests to engage me in dialogue and debate, so we’ll be doing a debate on the deuterocanonical books in Scripture coming up here in April. The debate is on why are Protestant Bibles smaller with the author of Why are Protestant Bible Smaller? You get an early access to that debate and other great sneak peeks of content like sneak peek of my new book on socialism, coauthored with Catherine Pakaluk at trenthornpodcast.com if you’re a premium subscriber. Otherwise, consider leaving a rating and review at Google Play, iTunes, something I always appreciate.
All right, so last time we talked about Screwtape Letters, authored by CS Lewis. Today we are going to talk about The Great Divorce, and I hear it’s one of your favorites.
David Bates:
It’s probably my favorite book by Lewis, but it’s also a book that a lot of people struggle with and they get confused by.
Trent Horn:
Well, why do they get confused by… Well, tell us a brief overview of The Great Divorce and what people find confusing about it.
David Bates:
As you alluded to in the introduction, it’s a bus ride. It’s a bus ride from hell, purgatory, heaven. And it’s a story about souls from hell coming to heaven. And like with a lot of Lewis’s stuff, it’s an imaginative supposal. Then the question is what if the souls from hell could visit heaven? What if they had the option to remain? Would they choose to stay?
Trent Horn:
And I think that’s an important way to look at heaven and hell because many people have a hard time with the doctrine of hell because they imagine, I think, that people in hell have been trapped there. They made one bad decision in life. And so a cruel God has basically locked them up, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and they’re trying to get out and get to heaven. And God’s like, “Sorry, you broke the rule, you got to do the time.”
And so it’s this sense that God is cruel for “sending people to hell” without thinking perhaps that’s exactly what they want. And Lewis has a great way with his imaginative supposings for us to understand how heaven and hell work outside of these kind of arbitrary confines we create for it in our minds.
David Bates:
Yes. And we do have to emphasize this is an imaginative supposal. He is not saying, “This is what the afterlife is like.” He is using these concepts of heaven, hell, and purgatory to get to a deeper spiritual truth that he wants us to think about.
Trent Horn:
Right. And I remember this one, I was part of a pro-life mission group, and so the first time I read “The Great Divorce” was we were listening to it. So this must have been, oh, gosh, it would’ve been probably about 11 years ago when I heard it as an audio book. So we were driving across country and the driver, leader of our team, played us an audio book to pass the time. And I loved it. I thought it was great.
But what’s funny is I only remember two elements of it. One is one of the stories that was heartbreaking we’ll get to later. But the other is the very end of the book where Lewis reaffirms the point this is an imaginative supposing. Don’t take from this that this is a literal description of heaven and hell. Nobody knows what that’s like. And it ends… Well, I mean, I’m not going to spoil it too much, but seeing the light of heaven hits our narrator like they’re solid gold blocks hitting him in the face. The light of heaven, the light is so bright it’s like gold blocks hitting him in the face like, “Ah.”
And then he wakes up and the blocks hitting the face are the books from his shelf hitting him, falling on his head. And I just love that. Normally I hate it was all a dream as as a reference. It ruined that one season of Dallas when it turns out Patrick Duffy was in the shower, and it’s like it was all a dream. Nobody died. That was a deep cut there for our friends in pop culture history.
But that, for people not to take it too literally. Because that was one of the complaints people had about the book, when they read it, and they’re like, “Souls in hell can’t go choose to be in heaven. It’s appointed for men to die once, and then there’s a judgment.” Lewis is saying, “That’s not the point I’m getting at here.”
David Bates:
No, he has something deeper that he wants to talk about, particularly with the relationship between virtue and vice, sin, freewill, choice, and the desire for heaven and God’s desire for us.
Trent Horn:
And so his book is sort of like, it’s in the vein of The Divine Comedy by Dante. And for most people who’ve heard, they probably haven’t heard The Divine Comedy, but when they hear Dante, they usually just talk about the Inferno, which is Dante’s imaginative supposing of what hell is like, which is very avant-garde, very new for medieval literature, to take a sort of poetic understanding of hell instead of a strict biblical interpretation. Wherein Dante’s hell, people are tortured by their own ironic punishments related to their sins. It’s sort of in that variant of genre for what Lewis is taking us on this bus trip to heaven where he talks about heaven, hell, and purgatory.
David Bates:
Yes. In Dante’s Inferno, in the Purgatorio, in the Paradiso, Divine Comedy as they’re known together, he takes a tour of those places, hell, purgatory, and heaven. And he has a guide through this tour. First of all, it’s the poet Virgil, who was an author he really, really loved. And then later it’s lady Beatrice, who was the love of his life.
So in The Great Divorce, Lewis also takes a tour of those places. And this time it’s with an author that he really admired, a guy called George MacDonald.
Trent Horn:
Right. And so taking us through all of this, what’s fascinating here is that we also talk about purgatory, and Lewis was not Catholic. Well, he was Anglican.
David Bates:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
And so he was a Protestant who believed that purgatory made sense. Maybe not the exact Catholic understanding of purgatory, but just this idea of purification.
David Bates:
A postmortem sanctification.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, postmortem sanctification of a person, which also there are other Protestants who are open to this idea. Jerry Walls, for example, is a Protestant author who’s written a book called The Logic of Purgatory. And it’s related to the idea of complete transformation of the person in Christ. And so Lewis saw that, and so hell and purgatory are tied together in this way. So let’s talk about then the book, and it begins at a bus stop.
David Bates:
This is so British, right? So there were two individuals, two chaps who were waiting for a bus. They were waiting for bus. What were they waiting for? Well, it’s not the waiting for the bus that matters, it’s the fact that they’re having this conversation.
Trent Horn:
You’re like, “Please don’t talk like that.” They’re at a bus stop.
David Bates:
I normally have to listen to Trent do his English accent while I’m listening to his podcast.
Trent Horn:
And now you have to do it live, in-person, my friend.
David Bates:
Front row seat. Anyway, yeah, the story begins at a bus stop. Lewis is our protagonist. He’s in a gray, drizzly town. And it’s in half light, so it’s early evening. And he’s in this bus stop, and there’s this line. And people are quarreling and they’re fighting with one another, trying to get to the front.
And after a little while, this magnificent bus arrives, and naturally they fight to get on it. But in the end, it turns out there’s plenty of room. And the bus actually not only leaves the town, it leaves the ground. It takes flight. And Lewis can see this great town sprawling out for miles and miles below. And he has some conversations on the bus, and he finds out that this town just keeps on growing.
And the process is that when people come to the town, they move into a house, they argue with their neighbor, they can’t stay close to them, so they move further away. So that idea of hell is other people.
Trent Horn:
Right, Sartre, “Hell is just other people.” And so they get here and then they live here, but they can’t stand being next to anybody.
David Bates:
And that’s when we find out that this gray town is hell. Although we later find out it’s purgatory if you leave. And as we’ve said, this is one of the places where people trip up over this book. It’s like is this what he really means? No, he’s making a point here.
Trent Horn:
Right. We’re very strict, especially in the Catholic theological tradition, that those who die in God’s friendship, the elect, do not go to hell in any way, shape, or form. All the catechism says about purgatory, however, is that there is a purification of those who die in God’s friendship for those who are still in a state of sin.
But the catechism, though, in paragraphs between like 1033 and 1037, you’ll find hell and purgatory, doesn’t say a lot about what the nature of purgatory is. That’s something that hasn’t really been… It’s been given to some people in private revelations, but it’s not something that the church teaches officially, “This is what purgatory is like.”
Similar to how we don’t have official teachings about the exact nature of heaven or hell. It’s something that you only find out when you get there, and I’m happy not finding that out about hell. So they go on this bus trip, and eventually though, they get to heaven.
David Bates:
Yes. They arrive in this beautiful land. And this is where Lewis, his ability to communicate an atmosphere is just wonderful. He says, “The light and coolness that drenched me were like those of a summer morning, early morning, a minute or two before sunrise. I had the sense of being in a larger space. I’d got out in some sense, which made the solar system itself seem like an indoor affair.” So whereas the gray town was heading into night, here we are just before morning and everything seems bigger and larger and more alive than anything he’s ever experienced before.
Trent Horn:
It’s so funny. So if you were to write that today, “It was like waiting for the sun to rise on a San Diego summer morning,” and then when you get to hell, it’s like, “Waiting for the sun to rise in Phoenix in July, knowing it’s 105 degrees even when it’s not shining.” I’ve done my own trip between both.
But I love the details. This was a detail I also remember sticking out to me when I first heard it as an audio book, “The grass was as hard as a diamond.” I love the imaginative supposing. It reminds me of Holly Ordway, who’s a wonderful writer, and she talks about the need for imaginative apologetics and to engage the imagination this way. “The grass is as hard as diamonds.”
David Bates:
Yeah, Lewis teaches us through the landscape. We’re going to spend some time talking about some of the characters that he meets, and they’re fascinating. But even the land itself is telling us something about heaven and hell, sin and grace, virtue and vice. As you say, “The grass is as hot as diamonds.” He tries to pick a daisy and it’s like picking up a bag of coal. Heaven is so much more real.
And the thing that shocks him is when he sees his fellow passengers in comparison to the landscape. They’re like a little smudge on some glass against this real landscape. They’re insubstantial in comparison.
Trent Horn:
Right. And this helps people to see that sometimes, once again, we think too small. And so when we talk about heaven and hell, we just think that hell is basically the end of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland, which it actually is. They don’t say it anymore. Where you’ve got little little dragons with pitchforks and it’s hot and there’s fire and it’s like, “You broke this one rule, so now you’re here.” And heaven is just another place you might end up with clouds and angels and harps and music lessons.
And so I think what’s hard is people imagine that heaven and hell are just different places, and I am just the same person in any of these things. And if I were in heaven, the experience would be like me being here on earth, but I guess obviously better or hell would be obviously worse. But not saying, no, it would be dramatically different, and you yourself now having died, the soul separated from the body, and the nature of sin, how it’s affected you, seeing it very clearly and starkly, the nature of either sin or grace will show up here. Whereas in heaven, it’s so beautiful, if you’re not prepared for it with God’s grace, how real and beautiful it is, it’s almost like a kind of overwhelming thing you can’t stand. It’s like the light is too bright essentially.
David Bates:
We think too small, we are too easily pleased. Where Lewis [inaudible 00:00:13:03], and it’s called The Weight of Glory, and he says, “It’s like we’re a child that’s messing around playing mud pies because he’s got no idea what a holiday by the sea would be like.” He says, “We’re the same with our sin and with our expectations.” We mess around with lust and other stupid things, whereas this weight of glory is awaiting us.
Trent Horn:
Right, or it’s similar to people who have only had bad food or mediocre and bad, mediocre and bad food, mediocre and bad music, or art. And then when you’re exposed to things that are objectively good and beautiful, there’s this disdain like, “I don’t like it,” and you go back to playing with the mud pies. And that’s what he says that the citizens of hell when they go on this bus tour, that’s kind of how they feel when they get to heaven. They don’t like that the grass is hard as diamonds, “Well, it hurts my feet. I don’t like it. Why is it so hard here? They need to do something about this grass.” It’s always like other people got to change. I’m not the one who has to change.
David Bates:
Absolutely. Because change is hard. It’s difficult. It painful. It causes us to die to ourselves. And that’s what they are ultimately called to do because they see these figures coming down from the mountain, and they are people that they knew on earth, but they’re now glorified there. They’re saints. Lewis calls them bright spirits and solid people because they are like the landscape, the grass actually bends for their feet. They are real and substantial and radiant. And they are coming down from the mountain and they each go to a different ghost in an attempt to help and encourage that ghost to come up back with them to the mountain.
Trent Horn:
Right. Well, that reminds me of Hebrews chapter 12, which says that those who are in heaven are the spirits of just men made perfect.
David Bates:
Perfect.
Trent Horn:
Just men made perfect. You’ve told me that Lewis wrote The Great Divorce as a response to William Blake’s poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and that there are no hellish souvenirs in heaven.
David Bates:
Absolutely.
Trent Horn:
What does that mean?
David Bates:
So Blake, his book is very confusing. If you try and read it, good luck. But he ultimately seems to communicate that you don’t ever need to come up with a hard either/or. It’s not like you ultimately have to choose God and reject sin. He sort of thought you could sort of work it out and eventually muddle your way through.
But the central point of The Great Divorce is that there can be no marriage between heaven and hell. That is why Lewis is writing of its divorce. One of his characters says, “If we insist on keeping hell, we shall not see heaven. If we accept heaven, we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of hell.”
I mean, in Revelation it says, “Nothing unclean can enter heaven.” And we know this, yet we still try and hang onto our pet sins, our favorite things, or at least the souvenirs of them because we don’t want to let go of them completely.
Trent Horn:
Right. And so that’s once again trying to get people away from their human oriented view of heaven and hell where people have this stupid idea like, “Well, I’d rather go to hell because all the fun people are going to be there. Hell will have beer.”
David Bates:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
And once, again you are chasing after things that pale in comparison to what awaits us in heaven. And that’s unfortunate, because William Blake, because actually if you are sharp, eagle eared listeners, in a previous podcast, I did one on poetry. I do enjoy the finer things in life sometimes with my little finger sandwiches and my cucumber squares, my favorite poems, and one of them is a poem by William Blake called The Tiger. And so, “Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the night. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
David Bates:
I was going to say that rhyme just doesn’t work quite right.
Trent Horn:
I know, but you have to say it so it ends up rhyming. Let’s talk then about the case study. So the rest of the book involves those who are in heaven helping the ghosts from hell/purgatory to leave hell. And then once again, it’s of their free choice that they… I’ve heard it put this other way that someone who is in hell… People think, once again, the people in hell are like people who’ve been imprisoned against their will, and we have to rescue them. But it’s been said that if you took a soul out of hell, and you dropped it in front of the gates of heaven, that this smoking soul would march right back to hell and curse God the entire way when doing it when he comes to see God. And those are some of these interactions we have with the different ghosts that are here. So one of them is the self-righteous man.
David Bates:
Yes. So he’s a ghost who thinks he can get into heaven on his own merit. He keeps going on about his rights. There’s a wonderful exchange between him and the solid person who comes to take him to the mountain. He says, “I’m not asking for anyone’s bleeding charity.” And the bright spirit says, “Do it. Do it at once.” He says, “Ask for the bleeding charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.” It’s requiring his humility.
Trent Horn:
But it’s pride, he can’t let go of his pride because it would hurt too much to say he needs other people to help him.
David Bates:
Absolutely.
Trent Horn:
I think that, and sometimes I think it this way, we think that what hell will be like for people who are there. And this is kind of more of the Eastern view of hell, especially among Eastern Orthodox theologians. And I might do some research on this to see how compatible it is or how the church defines hell in the catechism. Because the church defines hell, the catechism terms hell as the eternal separation from God. And how you cash that out, it may be possible, I’d love to incorporate Eastern insights into this… Because the traditional Eastern view of hell is that the fire of hell is God’s love itself that the sinner desperately does not want to receive. And so it causes pain and frustration for that person because they don’t want to receive it because they’ve turned against God in this way.
If you look in the Gospels, for example, Jesus says there’s going to be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Looking at that construction in the original Greek and also the idiom referring to that, what I think it probably describes is not someone who is just getting a pitchfork in their bum and they’re gnashing their teeth, but think about someone who is a total narcissist. You probably know someone who was an absolute narcissist who is just in love with themselves. But then when they’re in the presence of someone who is legitimately better than them, like at a party, and that person gets attention, it drives them crazy. And so they grit their teeth, and they hate that they’re not the center of attention. How’s that person going to handle being with God for eternity? But that’s that feeling. It’s why it reminds me of Brian Regan’s a sketch about driving on the moon. I don’t know if you ever-
David Bates:
No, I’m sorry.
Trent Horn:
He’s a comedian. He talks about there’s always that guy who tries to one up people at parties just like, “Oh, you had to wisdom teeth out. I had four wisdom teeth taken out without any kind of novocaine at all. They had to use rusty pliers.” He always has to one up people to be the most important one.
David Bates:
My mum would always say if somebody tells him that they had a black cat, he would say that he had a blacker one.
Trent Horn:
Right. There’s someone who says, “I got my new Ferrari Aston, and I drove it on the Autobahn in Germany, and we were able to do 200 kilometers an hour there.” And Regan says, “I just wish that I was an astronaut who had been on the moon, so when I hear guys do this stuff, I could just say things like, ‘Oh, yeah, I don’t get in a lot of traffic. I used to drive on the moon. When you driving on the moon around there, you don’t get to go that fast. No traffic on the moon.'” That’s also because I like Brian Regan because he’s got a funny intonation there.
But to take our detour all the way back to our bus trip, I think that when we see the self-righteous man is a perfect case study. I mean, that’s so many people who think, “Why? I don’t need God.” I get calls on the radio all the time. One of the hardest calls, David, I deal with, and so I ask, “Why aren’t you Catholic?” She’ll say, “I’m happy. What else do I need? I can do it all myself. Why would I need God?” And it’s either that apathy or that sense of I can do it on my own to break. It’s like only the Holy Spirit Can break through that.
David Bates:
Yeah. It takes humility to look up. If you’re prideful, you can only ever look down.
Trent Horn:
Right. Let’s take a look at another one here. The theologian.
David Bates:
Oh, he is my favorite worst character ever.
Trent Horn:
When I tell people, “What should I do to study my faith?” Well, if you really want to lose your faith, become an apologist, become a theologian or an apologist.” And Lewis wrote about this. He had a great poem, The Apologist’s Prayer. And I tell people, “You will be attacked spiritually, emotionally, and pridefully to think it all rests on me.” And then you think that you’ve seen the dirty insides of the barque of Peter. It was Monseigneur Knox who once said, “If you love the barque of Peter,” which is the church, a barque is a ship, “If you love the barque of Peter, stay out of the engine room.”
And then but you have. I mean, think about people like priests who fall away, theologians, apologists. A lot of people I deal with are former apologists who become apologists for like atheism. What’s up at this guy, the theologian?
David Bates:
Exactly. I mean, Screwtape has been all over this guy because what he’s done… And the idea runs through all of Lewis’s work, particularly in Screwtape and here, evil isn’t a thing. It’s a privation. It’s a twisting of something good. And here was a man who began his career as a theologian. He had questions, a thirst for knowledge. But somewhere along the way, it ended up getting twisted. He would want to continue to ask questions, but he didn’t really care about the answers anymore. It was all about the intellectual adventure. And so he wasn’t asking questions to know more about God. In fact, he’s kind of disinterested in God.
And the spirit who comes to speak to him says, “Thirst was made for water. There is a reason that you had these questions in the first place because there is an answer. There is an end.” And he’s just not really interested. All he wants to do is to be useful where he’s been placed.
Trent Horn:
I will say this discretely. We were at the Religious Education Congress in Los Angeles. It’s hosted there every year. And an individual who is, I will just say, a well-known individual in the Catholic world who is someone who has studied, one would think, a fair amount of theology. That is all we’ll say as the identity of who this individual is. One individual who I presume has studied a fair amount of theology, saw our booth said Catholic Answers. And so he saw that we were there, and they asked him, “What do you think of our booth?” And he said, “Catholic Answers, I’m more interested in Catholic questions.” And you’re like… And then he left. And I’m like, that is the theologian here. He’s more interested just in questions-
David Bates:
Intellectual ideas.
Trent Horn:
But not the answers themselves.
David Bates:
And particularly if they are provocative questions.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
David Bates:
And this theologian-
Trent Horn:
This individual likes provocative questions too. That’s all I’m going to say as to who it is.
David Bates:
Yeah. So our Episcopal ghost, as Lewis calls him, because he’s a bishop, he says, “Oh, actually, no, I can’t stay here. I can’t stay here in heaven. We have a little theological society back in hell in the town. And I’m about to present a paper, and I’m asking the question, ‘What would the mature Christ, what would his opinions become if he had had chance, if his life hadn’t been so cruelly cut short so soon?'”
Trent Horn:
Instead of being in heaven with Jesus, he would prefer to be adored in hell at a theological conference.
David Bates:
Exactly.
Trent Horn:
That’s why if you choose to study theology, apologetics, you need to have spiritual formation and fortification. Because it’s an important task, a very good task, the devil will attack you if you study this and know it well to help lead others to Him. You got to be fortified in that regard. Here’s another good one, the grumbler. The grumbler who ends up in hell.
David Bates:
So this passage in The Great Divorce is wonderful because it’s all given in one breath. You have this woman who was just complaining about everything, everything. Nothing is good. Nothing is good. And Lewis asks George MacDonald, his guide, about this. And he says, “It doesn’t seem right that this woman seems to be going back to the gray town, that she’s going back to hell for just grumbling.” And MacDonald says, “The question is whether she is a grumbler or only a grumble. Is there any of the woman left?” Because he says, “If there’s a single spark of the real woman there, we’ll blow on it, and we’ll turn her into this wonderful flame.” But he says, “We won’t keep on blowing ashes in our face if all of this woman is basically gone, if she has basically become a grumble.”
Trent Horn:
Lord, I’m thankful for everything. I didn’t mean to complain about them narrowing it down to one lane when I was trying to get here and doing unnecessary freeway construction to justify people’s jobs that don’t really need to exist. I’m sorry, I won’t grumble again.
David Bates:
Yeah, I was two junctions away from here, and somebody who was in the right hand lane. I wanted to turn right, and they weren’t turning right, and they were a big car, and they were in my way. Oh my goodness, why me? This is the worst.
Trent Horn:
Now, I think this is important. We’ve gone on our trip to heaven, and it does feel like we’re taking small mini trips back to hell when we see… We have to remember we’re here in heaven. It’s so beautiful. And the contrast of the beauty is with the ghosts who can’t appreciate it because of how the lives they lived in the flesh have prepared them. And that’s the thing I think is important for salvation. Salvation is not about accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, and then getting a certificate that says, “You’re going to heaven.” It is about accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior, but more than just a mental recognition of that, that is the beginning of a process of transformation to prepare you for life with Him.
I remember Karl Keating back in my day when I was converting myself, so this was back in 2001, 2002, I read Karl’s book, Catholicism and Fundamentalism. And he described grace in that book. I’m like, “Well, what do you mean by grace?” And he described it as scuba tanks you need, you can’t live under water without scuba tanks and you can’t be in heaven without grace, what you need to prepare you. Otherwise, you are a self-righteous, grumbling theologian essentially.
Trent Horn:
But we’ll jump ahead. There’s lots that I can jump around here for us to talk about, but one who’s good. So we have a highlight, high point here is a woman named Sarah Smith.
David Bates:
Oh, this is wonderful.
Trent Horn:
Who is Sarah Smith?
David Bates:
Sarah Smith is not anybody you would have ever have come across or really and noticed in this world. Lewis does something wonderful, and I [inaudible 00:28:12] laughed when I first read this because Lewis sees her coming, and she is surrounded by angels and small children dancing, and animals, and it’s this great procession of this great lady. Now, all of the Catholic listeners are going, “Ah, I know who that is.”
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
But it’s not the Virgin Mary.
Trent Horn:
Interesting.
David Bates:
And you might think, “Well, it should be the Virgin Mary.” But I think this actually adds to the case for Mary because here we have Sarah Smith, she was from Golders Green somewhere. Nobody here will probably have ever have heard of. And she led this quiet life of holiness. Yet in heaven, she is revered. She is honored. And in the course of the book, we’ve met other ghosts who asked about the important people, the famous people.
Fame works very differently in heaven. And in here, the person who is praised is Sarah Smith, this humble lady. And I would suggest, well, if Sarah Smith receives this kind of veneration, how much more the mother of God?
Trent Horn:
Right. And so it’s interesting, you might think when you get to heaven, you might think, “Oh my goodness, when can I meet St. Augustine? When can I meet St. Thomas Aquinas?” And the people in heaven might say, “Who? Oh, yes, yes.” Because there are other people who even surpass them in holiness that we never knew about and who are so humble, we never… Think about people sing the praises of St. Thomas Aquinas every day probably. And yet there are some who that’s a part of what makes them so special is they lived a life of holiness and virtue, nobody knows about them. No one knew about them then, no one knows about them now, but we’ll know them then.
Surely, Saint Paul says, “Now, we are looking in a mirror dimly, but when we are there in heaven, it shall be as seeing face to face.” That we’ll see all of the Sarah Smiths. And that ultimately though of course, our mother, the Blessed Virgin, even though her praises are sung precisely because she is the reason everybody can be there at all because she brought God into the world through us, but she is that model. Someone that when you look in the Magnificat, Mary says that she’s, “Blessed for the Mighty One has done great things for me. And holy is His Name. Who am I? Some lady from Nazareth. I some lady from a town that’s so small, some people today say it never existed.”
David Bates:
And all of this is really encouraging in the book because when you get these procession of ghost after ghost after ghost who are just turning back and going to hell, you might be like the person in the Gospels that, “Who then can be saved?”
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
And the answer is very simple, humility. To be able to say, “The Almighty has done great things for me, and Holy is His Name.”
Trent Horn:
And there’s someone in that list who goes back who can’t handle that, and that’s the artist.
David Bates:
The artist, yeah. Because he first of all wants to know where all of the famous artists are so he can go and hang out with them and talk shop. And then he finds out that his art isn’t popular on earth anymore, and this is unacceptable. So he decides to go back to the town so he can start a petition and a movement and reestablish his popularity.
Trent Horn:
This was the one… So I remember that there was one individual who stuck out at me when I read the audio book. So there’s the two details, one was the very end of the book about the golden blocks of light hitting you at the end, and what is this? But there was one story, one ghost, that stuck out to me above all the others, and that was the possessive mother. That was the saddest one-
David Bates:
Absolutely.
Trent Horn:
… to me easily. Tell us about the possessive mother.
David Bates:
So this is an idea that you find expressed in several of Lewis’s books, in The Four Loves and Until We Have Faces. So we meet this mother, who she loves her son, but it’s gone bad. She is obsessed with him. Her love is possessive. All other things in life are insignificant in comparison to her son, even God.
Trent Horn:
Wow.
David Bates:
And again, we have Lewis’s point of view, and he says, “Is this really fair? Remember that grumbler, what’s she doing going back to hell. What about this mother? Is she going to go back to hell for excess of love for her son?” And MacDonald gives him the answer. He says, “here was no excess. There was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more, there’d have been no difficulty.” Because they walk away from this scene, he says, “I don’t know how that will end, but it may well be that at this moment she’s demanding to have him down with her in hell.”
Trent Horn:
Wow, instead of willing what’s good for him.
David Bates:
Yeah. He says, “That kind is sometimes perfectly ready to plunge the souls they say they love in endless misery if only they can still in some fashion possess it.” And Lewis unpacks this in The Four Loves. He says, “When love becomes a god, it becomes a demon because it becomes the ultimate good. It becomes the thing by which we order everything else.” And if you read Until We Have Faces, it is the story of possessive love. “It isn’t,” as St. Thomas Aquinas says, “Seeking the good of the other as other. It is seeing the goodness in something and wanting to control it, to manipulate it.”
Trent Horn:
Well, this goes back to what we talked about in our previous episode about things not being our own, and that Screwtape temps Wormwood to say, his time, it’s not his own. No one has a right to that. And so we start to think that the things we love, our beloved, are really ours. And so they belong to us in an exclusive and absolute way, and nobody else can have them. Even God can’t have them because we love them so much.
David Bates:
And that love is used as the justification for it because what could be greater than mother love? Well, there actually are love greater than mother love. But it is a good in itself, and that’s why loves can be so dangerous because they look like agape, the love of God and the love that God pours into our hearts, which is the entire process of theosis. But Lewis says that, “Brass can be mistaken for gold more readily than clay.” It’s because it is such a good natural love, that it can be mistaken as the love of God, and therefore used to justify eventually all kinds of evils.
Trent Horn:
There’s a tangent we can draw from. It’s not a book by Lewis, but it includes Lewis, and that would be the book, A Severe Mercy.
David Bates:
By Sheldon Vanauken.
Trent Horn:
By Sheldon Vanauken. So A Severe Mercy is the story of the relationship between Sheldon Vanauken and his wife, Davy, and the love they had, and the conversion experience. They went from a very beautiful natural kind of pagan love, the idea that if you die, I will die as well. And they’re just so wrapped up in one another. And there are many good aspects of that love.
David Bates:
It was ready to sacrifice all for the beloved.
Trent Horn:
And then they undergo a conversion experience through their correspondence with CS Lewis. So this is part of the we need to make an inkling cinematic universe.
David Bates:
I am down for this. Tolkien’s had a movie, we need one with Lewis. We need one where they come together. And then we need like a Netflix series with his wife, Joy. And then we need to come together Avenger style for the end game.
Trent Horn:
And then you can be in that as David Bates putting together, “Mr. Lewis, don’t you know you are part of a larger universe?” But it is a great book, A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken because later Davy is diagnosed with an illness, and then she eventually passes away. And he writes this book about it that Vanauken comes to the conclusion that God, that it was a severe mercy for him to take Davy from him. Because if he hadn’t, he might have almost turned Davy, his wife, into kind of an idol to this love for her to like almost supplant God.
David Bates:
And to be jealous for the love that Davy had for God. He wrote to Lewis and said, “It’s almost like, I think she loves God more than she loves me.”
Trent Horn:
And he’s worried about that at first.
David Bates:
And as someone that’s recently got engaged, good. That’s what you want. You want your spouse to love God more than they love you. Because if that’s true, then they will love you better than they ever possibly could otherwise.
Trent Horn:
That’s right. Because in First Corinthians chapter seven, Saint Paul says, “Wife, can you not save your husband.” That even that not through your own merits, but united with Christ, that our spouse, we help to get one another through heaven. We got to put each other through hell a little bit to do that, and that’s important for our purification, but help to get each other through heaven. Lord knows, I put my wife through hell far too much. Sweetheart, thank you for all the wonderful gifts you’ve given us, to our marriage. It’s free advice for you, my friend, as you enter into this matrimonial journey of yours. Any other thoughts then on this book and introducing people to more of Lewis’s imaginative supposings?
David Bates:
I would just say pick a Lewis book in a genre that you like and just go for it. If you like apologetics, go read Mere Christianity. If you like fantasy like this, go read The Great Divorce. If you like thinking about love, go read The Four Loves. If you like a fairy tale, go read The Chronicles of Narnia. He has got a genre for you, whatever your preference is.
One thing I will say is this: the more of Lewis you read, the more the patterns that you start to notice when you see the dangers that we face when we struggle with sin, when we struggle with temptation, when we put other things before Christ, when we try and achieve things on our own, when we try and elevate creatures into the place of the Creator, you start noticing the themes that Lewis thought were so important, and you will encounter them everywhere.
Trent Horn:
And if you want to encounter them in bite size segments, they can also tune in to your podcast on CS Lewis. Tell us about that, where people can find it.
David Bates:
The website is pintswithjack. We’re also on Twitter and Instagram. And since you wrote What the Saints Never Said, your least popular book because nobody likes having their bubbles popped.
Trent Horn:
Indeed.
David Bates:
And well, it’s the same with Lewis. I think he is also one of the most misquoted men on the internet. Whenever I’m having a bad day, I can just go on Twitter, I search for the CS Lewis hashtag, and just go and correct people, “He didn’t say this. He didn’t say this. Nope. That quotation is incorrect.”
Trent Horn:
Have you done an episode yet, what CS Lewis never said?
David Bates:
There’s actually a really good book by William O’Flaherty. It’s called Misquoting CS Lewis.
Trent Horn:
Really? So someone does have that.
David Bates:
Someone has it. And he also has a website, which I often link people to.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
David Bates:
So the most common one, we’ve spoken a lot about humility, is, “Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking of yourself less.” Now, that’s actually Rick Warren from The Purpose Driven Life. It is very much infused with Lewis’s thought. I’m sure he would agree and raise his pint and nod sagely, but it’s not actually Lewis.
Trent Horn:
For other gems like that, though, be sure to go out, Pints with Jack with David Bates.
David Bates:
Well, if you follow us on Instagram, I put up legitimate quotations.
Trent Horn:
Good.
David Bates:
Because I’m just trying to fight back against the oncoming tide of all of the misquotation.
Trent Horn:
And also in What the Saints Never Said, that book is filled with authentic saint quotes. People think I just debunk things. I put in there, there’s a whole appendix of things the saints really did say that are better than these apocryphal quotes.
David Bates:
You just give them the bad news and then the good news.
Trent Horn:
All right. Just like what Lewis does with heaven and hell. David, thanks for stopping by the podcast today.
David Bates:
It’s been wonderful. Thank you.
Trent Horn:
And thank you all for listening. Hope you can check us out again for future episodes. You should go to trenthornpodcast.com, subscribe, leave a rating at iTunes and Google Play. Thank you all so much, and I hope you all have a very blessed day.
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