This week I read through a wonderful little book by C.S. Lewis called "The Great Divorce". If you have not read it, you need to. It is hard to adequately describe how much I loved reading it, or how much I gained, and am still gaining, from having read it. Lewis has the uncanny gift for expressing spiritual truths profoundly and plainly, either through fiction or allegory or arguments.
The book deals with the nature of good and evil, and especially Heaven and Hell. Lewis propagates, through a story, that those who end up in Hell in fact choose it. God gives them what they want. And likewise, those that want Himself, He gives them Heaven. He explores several major ways and reasons people reject Heaven for Hell.
In Chapter 4 he addresses something I have often wondered about - what about those people who sincerely seek the truth, but simply end up at the wrong conclusion? What is to become of those who reject the Christian faith out of an honest and critical investigation of the facts and arguments?
Says a man in Heaven to a man from Hell:
"Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for the moment) he actually believes that another glass will do him no harm. The beliefs are sincere in the sense that they do occur as psychological events in the man's mind. If that's what you mean by sincerity they are sincere, and so were ours. But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent."
I love the part where the ghost describes the feel of the blades of grass cutting his feet and his terror of the rain... Great images.
ReplyDeleteYeah, there is so much great stuff in that book.
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