C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is both a dream-vision and a philosophical fable about eternity. The title, drawn from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, declares Lewis’s intent: to separate good from evil, Heaven from Hell, clarity from delusion. Yet this separation is not drawn across the cosmos but inside the soul. In barely 150 pages, Lewis maps a moral geography that turns Dante’s Divine Comedy upside down.
Dante’s Hell descends in great concentric circles four thousand miles deep, ordered and monumental. Lewis’s Hell is the opposite—an endless, thin “grey town” where it is always evening and always drizzling, where the damned quarrel and drift farther apart forever. For Dante, Hell has weight; for Lewis, it has almost none. Lewis's inferno is a place of shadow beings so insubstantial that a blade of heavenly grass can pierce a ghost’s foot. The geography itself expresses the moral truth: evil is not powerful but hollow, a privation rather than a rival to the good.
The book begins when the narrator, standing in that dim town, joins a line of quarrelsome spirits boarding a bus for excursion to the borders of Heaven. When he arrives in heaven the narrator's journey recalls Dante’s ascent. His guide is not Virgil, but George McDonald. They see radiant spirits who try, one by one, to persuade the visitors from Hell to remain. In Lewis’s cosmology, the doors of Hell are locked from the inside; each soul may step into Heaven if it will only let go of pride, fear, or resentment. Most cannot. They prefer the familiar fog of self-justification to the sharp light of grace. Lewis turns the grand punishments of Dante's imagination into quiet moral choices.
One of the book’s most striking scenes involves the meeting of the narrator with a heavenly procession: a radiant woman of unimaginable beauty passes by, attended by spirits and children. She is greeted as a queen of Heaven, yet she was a simple maidservant on earth—“Sarah Smith of Golders Green.” The inversion is deliberate. Where Dante populates Paradise with saints, theologians, and emperors, Lewis crowns the humble and forgotten. His Heaven has no hierarchy of intellect or fame; its citizens are those who loved purely and forgave completely. The scene redefines glory not as achievement but as transformed love. The last are truly first.
Throughout the encounters between ghosts from Hell and solid spirits from Heaven, Lewis dramatizes the clash of perceptions. The damned see Heaven as intolerably bright and hard; the saved perceive it as solid, real, and alive. The same landscape appears either radiant or painful depending on the eyes that behold it. Here, as in Till We Have Faces, perception reveals moral reality. The grey town is not far from Heaven in distance but in vision. To enter Heaven is not to travel upward but to wake up.
Lewis’s prose here is economical but vivid—half dialogue, half parable. He moves swiftly from satire to tenderness, exposing self-deception with the clarity of a moral anatomist. A bishop insists that Heaven cannot exist because it contradicts his theology; a mother’s love for her dead son curdles into idolatry; an artist refuses salvation because he would rather paint Heaven than dwell in it. Each episode reveals a truth about human attachments: love and intellect and imagination can all become traps when turned inward. In Lewis’s hands, the bus ride from Hell to Heaven becomes a psychological pilgrimage through the motives of the human heart.
The Great Divorce presents goodness as solid reality. Hell may feel vast to those inside it, but from Heaven it is a tiny crack in the ground, smaller than a pebble. Evil is not symmetrical with the good; it is parasitic on it. Lewis’s inversion of Dante is complete: the moral universe is not a balance of powers but a contrast of substance and shadow. Heaven outweighs Hell because it is real.
By the end of the vision, the narrator begins to fade, sensing that he must return to his world. The solid country dissolves into sunlight, and he wakes, aware that what he glimpsed was truth in its most condensed form. Lewis ends not with thunder or revelation but with stillness. Eternity, he suggests, is not remote or future; it is the moment when illusion falls away and we see things as they are.
The Great Divorce is luminous—a meditation on the substance of Heaven and the thinness of Hell, and on the freedom to choose eternities.
