PWJ: S2E13 – TGD 9 – “Meeting George”

The chapter today is really the pivot of The Great Divorce. In it, we meet George MacDonald, a writer whom Lewis had read on earth, but who is now a Bright Spirit. MacDonald explains much to Jack, particularly concerning the troubling accusations raised by the Hard-Bitten Ghost.

Since this chapter is so rich, Matt and I decided to divide it up into two episodes, so you’ll have to come back next week for the concluding part…

S2E13: “Meeting MacDonald” (Download)

If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe manually, or any place where good podcasts can be found (iTunes, Google Play, Podbean, Stitcher, TuneIn and Overcast).

Time Stamps

In case your podcast application has the ability to jump to certain time codes, here are the timestamps for the different parts of the episode.

09:17 – Chapter 150-word Summary
12:15 – Chapter Discussion
36:36 – Haikus

Show Notes

• I opened the podcast with my best Scottish accent. That’s because in this episode we meet George MacDonald. The quote-of-the-week comes from him:

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

• Matt used his dispensation for the weak week to have alcohol today. He drank Angry Orchard hard cider. I was drinking an Almond-milk Latte. I had given up alcohol for Lent, but I commented that I’d recently been to two Bachelor Parties and gave myself a brief exemption, drinking some Tequila and a pint of Guinness, respectively.

We discovered that Matt loves The Shout House and once serenaded the girl who was his girlfriend at the time with Maroon Five’s song, Sugar. Needless to say, it didn’t last…

• About a week earlier, I had sent Matt a video from The Great Divorce Project. He didn’t watch it. We found out that Matt inherited this trait from his mother. Anyone want to be my new co-host? 😉

• I announced that we now have an IGTV Channel on Instagram. I’m currently uploading our YouTube video series.

• We heard that Matt’s mother finally came across the infamous “David Copperfield Incident” from the episode on Pride (S1E21).

• Matt then offered the 150-word summary.

Lewis meets another Bright Spirit, his hero, the Scottish writer and theologian, George MacDonald. He asks him whether the ghosts can really stay. MacDonald assures him they can. He says that, for those who go back, “There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery…”. They talk about the different ways people become ensnared. At this point, they hear a Ghost complaining at enormous speed to one of the Solid People. MacDonald says the issue is “whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble”. Leaning on MacDonald’s arm, they walk away and see many different kinds of ghosts. They see one of the Solid People talking with a Ghost who was a famous artist on earth. He is horrified to discover that his art has been completely forgotten on Earth and rushes back to the Grey Town, determined to maintain his legacy.

150-word summary of Chapter 9

• After recapping the previous chapter, I explain that Lewis comes across a new Bright Spirit sitting on a rock:

“Now, when I did so, I discovered that one sees them with a kind of double vision. Here was an enthroned and shining god, whose ageless spirit weighed upon mine like a burden of solid gold: and yet, at the very same moment, here was an old weather-beaten man, one who might have been a shepherd such a man as tourists think simple because he is honest and neighbours think “deep” for the same reason. His eyes had the far-seeing look of one who has lived long in open, solitary places; and somehow I divined the network of wrinkles which must have surrounded them before re-birth had washed him in immortality”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

Matt saw in this a description of completed theosis. I referred to a Casting Crowns song about wounds in Heaven.

• Lewis discovers that this Solid Person is George MacDonald, a Christian writer. Lewis was a huge fan of his books and even put together an Anthology of his works. Lewis becomes a bit of a fan boy:

“Then you can tell me! You at least will not deceive me.” Then, supposing that these expressions of confidence needed some explanation, I tried, trembling, to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I first bought a copy of Phantasies (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the New Life.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

This is an appropriate comparison, because MacDonald is going to be a Beatrice-like figure to Lewis over the course of the rest of this book. In The Divine Comedy, Dante is guided through Hell, Heaven and Purgatory, first by Virgil (a writer whom Dante admired greatly) and then later by Beatrice a lady whom he deeply loved. MacDonald will Lewis’ guide through the rest of this heavenly journey.

• Anyway, MacDonald brings Lewis’ fanboying to an end:

He laid his hand on mine and stopped me. “Son,” he said, “your love – all love – is of inexpressible value to me. But it may save precious time” (here he suddenly looked very Scotch) “if I inform ye that I am already well acquainted with these biographical details. In fact, I have noticed that your memory misleads you in one or two particulars.” “Oh!” said I, and became still.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

Funnily enough, Lewis’ memory would eventually mislead him concerning his first reading of MacDonald. Ten years after writing these words, Lewis wrote Surprised By Joy where he describes his purchase of Phantastes and he does actually get some details wrong. Andrew Lazo is really on top of these kind of issues and he mentioned it at the conference I attended a few weeks ago.

• Anyway, MacDonald prompts Lewis to ask him the questions which had been troubling him since meeting The Hard-Bitten Ghost.

“Did ye never hear of the Refrigerium? A man with your advantages might have read of it in Prudentius, not to mention Jeremy Taylor.”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

Prudentius was a 4th/5th Century Christian poet from Rome and Jeremy Taylor was Church of England cleric from 17th Century.

If you’d like to know more about the Refrigerium, Joseph Pearce, whom I interviewed recently goes into some historical depth in his book C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church. For us, the details are unimportant since it was just the germ of an idea which Lewis used to write The Great Divorce. Fortunately, MacDonald gives us a brief explanation of what the Refrigerium is:

If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand.” (Here he smiled at me). “Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

MacDonald mentions that the Emperor Trajan made this journey to Heaven. I checked with the always knowledgeable Joy Clarkson and she confirmed my suspicion that Jack is referring to Dante’s Divine Comedy.

While some ghosts go to Heaven, others go back to earth and get up to mischief. He even says that literary Ghosts hang around libraries, seeing if anyone is still reading their books. I commented that Lewis was convinced nobody would be reading his books much after he died. Fortunately, his secretary, Walter Hooper proved him wrong (and made certain of it by keeping Jack’s books in print!).

• We found out that Matt can’t pronounce “Refrigerium”… 😉

• MacDonald then explains something quite shocking – Hell will be Purgatory for those who leave it:

“If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand.” (Here he smiled at me). “Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

I compared it to my experience of school. I hated it and it was Hell, but looking back it was Purgatory. It shaped me and prepared me for my future life…but if I had to stay there, it would have been forever Hell!

• MacDonald then teaches us something else quite shocking – Heaven and Hell are retrospective – they colour the life we precedes it:

“They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me but have this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin…

…at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

I compared it to working out at the gym (and Matt made my analogy a little more shallow…)

• Lewis asks if Heaven and Hell are both states of mind. MacDonald only partially agrees. Hell is a state of mind, but Heaven is reality itself:

“Hell is a state of mind-ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind-is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself… the opposite of a mirage”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

• Lewis tries to fit what MacDonald has said into a traditional Catholic/Protestant theology, but MacDonald dismisses this attempt:

“Do not fash yourself with such questions. Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both. And ye were not brought here to study such curiosities. What concerns you is the nature of the choice itself: and that ye can watch them making.”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

Matt suggested that, if Purgatory is outside of time, the Catholic and Protestant conception might be closer than we think.

• The conversation now turns to the choice which the ghosts are making – what is it? MacDonald answers this by quoting Milton’s Paradise Lost:

“Milton was right,” said my Teacher. “The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy – that is, to reality”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

MacDonald also compares it to a child sulking, it’s just that grown-ups have grown-up ways of describing it, such as “self-respect” and “Proper Pride”:

“Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends. Ye call it the Sulks. But in adult life it has a hundred fine names…”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

• Lewis asks about sensual sin and we’re told the same theology we encountered in Mere Christianity: the more serious sins are the sins of the spirit, not the sins of the flesh. MacDonald points out that the sensualist is seeking a real good, but in the wrong way and, as such, the pleasure will be diminished and the craving will increase. I compared this to drug addiction and the movie Beautiful Boy which I recently watched.

“…the time comes on when, though the pleasure becomes less and less and the craving fiercer and fiercer, and though he knows that joy can never come that way, yet he prefers to joy the mere fondling of unappeasable lust and would not have it taken from him. He’d fight to the death to keep it. He’d like well to be able to scratch: but even when he can scratch no more he’d rather itch than not.”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

We also compared this to technological addiction. Matt shared about his zero-tolerance policy regarding his Social Media usage. I said that in recent weeks I have put my iPhone on greyscale, completely removing all colour from the phone and this has cut my phone usage in half.

• We ended with some haikus…

Meeting George
Who is this spirit?
Perhaps a shepherd of some sort?
A guide for my path?

If you are aimless,
why not spend some time with me?
We could chat awhile…

The Retrospective nature of Heaven and Hell
The name of the town…
It may change if you leave it.
Hell or purgation…

A self-centred mind
Becomes a dungeon of Hell
Trapped there forever

Virtues and vices
can become retrospective,
colouring the past

Going back to Hell
You can choose yourself
Or you can choose to love God
You’ll get your desire!

Haikus for the first half of Chapter 9

• We’ll be finishing this chapter next week!