Preface

At a glance

Scripture for reflection

“Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?”

2 Corinthians 6:14 KJV

UECF.NET summary

Lewis opens by naming the book he is answering: William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which pictures good and evil, Heaven and Hell, as complementary opposites that a sufficiently enlightened mind can eventually fuse together. Lewis states his own conviction plainly — that this is not how reality is built. Some choices are not compromises waiting to be found; they are forks in the road, and a person who takes one road has, by that very act, refused the other. That is the ‘great divorce’ of his title: not a domestic breakup, but the ultimate, uncrossable difference between the two directions a soul can travel.

He is careful, in the same breath, to fence the book off from being read as prophecy or doctrine. Nothing in the story — the grey town, the bus, the country at the edge of Heaven, even the idea that a ghost from Hell might take an excursion there — is offered as a description of what actually happens after death. Lewis calls it frankly a fantasy, in the tradition of a moral dream-vision, useful for dramatizing a choice rather than mapping eternity. He specifically raises, and sets aside without adopting, the old theological idea of the refrigerium — a temporary respite sometimes imagined for souls in Hell — to make clear that his 'bus trip' is a literary device for probing a question, not a claim about how the afterlife is arranged.

The real target of the preface, and of the book that follows, is the comfortable modern idea that every position contains a bit of truth and a bit of error, so that with enough goodwill any two opposites can be blended into a peaceable middle way. Lewis does not deny that many disagreements are like that. But he insists that at the deepest level — the level of a soul's basic orientation, toward God or away from Him — no such blending is available. Some roads, however small the first step looks, are 'a road to two very different places,' and cannot be walked at once.

Main themes

• Blake's ‘marriage’ of opposites, answered with a ‘divorce’ instead
• Fantasy as a tool for moral seriousness, not a claim about the afterlife
• Some choices are forks, not blends

Key ideas

• The title directly answers William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
• Lewis calls his own book a fantasy and disclaims any doctrinal claim about what death is actually like.
• He raises the old idea of a refrigerium (a respite for souls in Hell) only to set it aside as not his subject.
• His real concern is the belief that good and evil can always be combined into a compromise; he argues some choices cannot.

Related Bible references · NKJV

• 2 Corinthians 6:14
• Matthew 6:24

Practical application

• Notice where you may be hoping two incompatible things can quietly be blended together, rather than actually choosing between them.
• Read the rest of the book as Lewis asked — as a dramatized question about the will, not as a map of the afterlife.

Questions for study