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- [00:01]
A
Hey everybody, I wanted to give you a quick heads up in case you wanted to participate because friend of the podcast, Kristen Tiedman and I are doing a four part series where we are reading and responding to the C.S. lewis classic the Great Divorce. This is his allegorical take on the afterlife and although we find a lot of things to disagree with with, especially theologically, there's a lot of really interesting psychological insight in the book and theological insight for that matter. There's a lot to talk about. CS Lewis was extremely formative in the type of evangelicalism that I was raised in. Kristen as well. And so we wanted to give you a little time to get a copy of the book if you want to read along. You don't have to read along, but it's a short book. It's like probably two and a half hour read unless you are going slow and taking a lot of notes. So if you wanted to grab a used copy or fish out your copy from among your documents, which is what both Kristen and I did, we found our old copies. Feel free to do that. We're going to be responding, as I said, over four parts. So two weeks from today on Monday, that'll be the 26th, I think the first episode will drop, that's going to be on the main feed, going to be responding to chapters one through four and then the next three will be appearing on Thursdays, a little bit of that on the main feed. But the whole episode will be for patrons only. So if you want to get ahead of that and sign up for the Patreon, you can do that. Patreon.com Dan Koch that link is always in the show notes and of course it includes at least two, usually three exclusive episodes per month membership in the patron only Facebook group if you and ad free episodes of all the main feed ones as well. You get your own special patron feed for your podcast player. But you know, of course the main thing is you get to financially support this show, which I appreciate so, so much. All right, let's get to my conversation today with Bonnie Christian, which was so good as always. Welcome back everybo to a very special part one of a little ongoing series here on Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist and I am joined by great dear longtime friend of the pod multi time guest Kristen Tiedman. Kristen, welcome back.
- [02:43]
B
Thank you, thank you.
- [02:44]
A
Kristen and I, as you may have heard on a recent episode, we've been trying to figure out like more stuff to do together and this is one of the things that we have come upon. We are going to do a little it's probably going to be four part series, one episode per week responding to the C.S. lewis masterpiece of short religious fiction, the Great Divorce. Now to be clear, we are going to find a lot of things we disagree with. I just want to say this very early on. You don't have to like agree with CS Lewis or find his views in the Great Divorce to be accurate. What Kristen and I both know and what most listeners I think will know is it's been a very influential work and personally I'll say it's probably like the like among my favorite CS Lewis works. And yet, as we will find out, there's a lot that rubs me the wrong way. And we're going to we're just going to engage with it, broadly speaking, but it's not going to be CS Lewis apologetics.
- [03:48]
B
Don't tell my 20 year old self that though.
- [03:54]
A
So today we're going to talk. We're going to do a full feed main feed episode and we're going to be going through chapters one through four, I believe we might not get to four. And then parts two, three, four are going to be the first part will be on the main feed, but they're going to be for patrons. So if you want to hear the full version or if you're coming to this later and you want to hear all four parts, patreon.com Dan Koch that link is always in the show Notes briefly. Other Perks There are additional exclusive episodes all the main feed episodes without ads and membership in the Patron only Facebook group. You do not need to read the Great Divorce. You don't need to read it to listen to us talk about it. Especially if you've read it before. You probably don't need to. That said, it's a very quick read. It's like 125 very uncrowded, like fucking Tuesdays with Maury type pages. You know, Oprah's Book Club, little hardback style. Like it's very short. You could probably read it in two, two and a half hours, front to back. Even reading it pretty carefully. Our plan is to be discussing it from psychological, theological, maybe philosophical. I mean your training, Kristin, is technically a Master's of philosophy, right?
- [05:12]
B
I mean if you want to get so specific interdisciplinary humanities masters with an emphasis in philosophy or focus on philosophy. But let's say yes.
- [05:21]
A
So yeah, so philosophy, humanities as well as of course the usual psychology and theology that we do here. But really whatever Kristen and I are finding most relevant and interesting. So let's get into it. Let me start before I have you kind of set up the book. Well, let's have you set up the book first, Kristen, and then I'll ask you why you wanted to talk about it, and then I'll answer why I wanted to talk about it. So set this up. Where does this sit in CS Lewis's sort of career and writings?
- [05:52]
B
Yeah. Yeah. So for those who really only know Lewis from the Chronicles of Narnia, this is before the Chronicles of Narnia and is one of his, I'm gonna. Relatively speaking, I'll say earlier fiction, ish, but Christian, you know, religious fiction books. He has written the Screwtape letters already, which is the other really notable one. If you're kind of in the. If you're not the deepest reader, mid level Lewis reader, you probably already know.
- [06:18]
A
Narnia, Mere Christianity, maybe Screwtape letters. Those are kind of the top three. Probably. Yeah.
- [06:24]
B
Yes. But this is published in 1945, so set the scene. This is the end of the war, World War II, where C.S. lewis has also done those radio programs which will turn into Mere Christianity. The book, which is. Yeah, maybe one of his. I would say, probably. If Christians have read nonfiction of his, that might be the first one. So it's in this kind of landscape of he's worked through those ideas. I think there's a lot of overlap. I think Lewis, you kind of see how he thinks about things, what he values. You can definitely tell. And we'll get into this. I'm sure that's kind of the moral perspective he has throughout. But what's interesting is, yeah, I was thinking about this reading. I'm like, man, what did the war. What kind of influence did that have on his mind? Mild spoiler. That doesn't. I mean, it's just about the end of the book, he wakes up and it's like a blitz happening, like bombing happening, which is what happened quite a bit in England. And then there's components of. Of course, for those who know Narnia, where the war is at play. That's why the kids have to go away to house in the first place and everything. But yeah, Lewis has. We'll just remember he grew up somewhat, you know, vaguely religious. Gave up. Gave up all forms of religion for atheism in his mid teens, came back to it in his early 30s. So this is, you know, after he. He said he was kicking and screaming, going back to Christianity, which I think is funny because, you know, he really doesn't. He seems very happy with it. And Seems like it's the right way to go. And it's funny when he will talk about choice. But anyway, that's a little bit of the overall. The overall.
- [08:06]
A
And for me, I was just gonna say, so C.S. lewis, yeah, he's this Anglican British thinker and writer, but growing up American evangelical in the 90s. The joke that best sort of places Lewis in my upbringing. I'll actually be curious to hear if this is different from yours. But the joke was. Now, my friend Jamie, he was my Bible study leader at the time. He's a few years older. He said his joke was always, yeah, did you hear they're thinking of canonizing C.S. lewis? That was always the bit like, C.S. lewis gets quoted from the pulpit so often that he may as well have been one of the disciples is basically the joke. And that is, I would say, pretty accurate. Like in my Christian, in my evangelical high school, for instance, when we did apologetics type stuff, or we did sort of bringing the mind into our Christian life, which they didn't do until like junior and senior year. But there was a lot of CS Lewis. Once we were ready for that, he was like the entryway. And I'm sure one of my church Bible studies or something, we read Mere Christianity, or maybe that was college in Campus Crusade. But you get the point. Lewis is like, extremely central. Despite not being evangelical, he's extremely central to American evangelical thought life. And I think sermon illustrations, you know, there's Narnia illustrations all the time across sermons. Like, is this. Was this your experience? Is this, you know, basically America wide?
- [09:44]
B
I would say yes, very much a shared experience. Now, I think there are people who are like, not the readers, the intellectuals within evangelicalism. But this would be, if you're trying to lean that way, the sort of intellectual Christian reader 101 is that you're gonna read.
- [10:02]
A
101 is exactly right. That's exactly right, yes. 102 is GK Chesterton Orthodoxy or 201. Right.
- [10:09]
B
Well, but a lot of people don't get there.
- [10:11]
A
A lot of people.
- [10:11]
B
I mean, I was gonna say I never finished a Chesterton book. I remember reading Starting Over Again, the Everlasting man and being like, okay, I like it, but I don't know, never finishing it anyway. Yes, I would agree. And I mean, but for me personally, I'll add Narnia, which is, you know, heavy dose of theology slipped in there, as we all know, was, I mean, permeated my youth. I had the books on tape that they had done at one point, and I can't even remember how. I mean, I think my mom read them to us first, but then we would listen to them going to bed, like all the time. And you know, that's. That was like, there was questions that came up because obviously I'm like, why is this lion so unsafe? But that's another that might come up as we discuss some of this in here. So, yeah, definitely a huge, huge player.
- [11:02]
A
So what made you interested in the Great Divorce in particular? I mean, to talk about it with me now, not back then.
- [11:11]
B
Yeah, to talk now. I mean, I think this, this focus on the either or, which he kind of puts into the preface is something I like. I. I know we're talking about now, but in the past I had to be like an apologist for hell. Almost no one wants. I mean, I would hope no one wants hell to exist in the way of, like, it's not fun. No one would wish that for someone, you know, but it's something that I felt was so important to have. And you can see Lewis thinks that too. As we'll get into today, I don't think that anymore. And I think it's something where there's deep. Yeah, we'll see. The theological or philosophical, but also psychological richness of this, of this work of looking into people and saying, why are they like that? Why are they making this choice? Or why are they doing that? And it's really compelling. But at the same time I'm like, are these characters so easy, too easy to kind of knock down or fit into this narrative? And that's something I've never thought about while reading this before. I've kind of always been willing to accept it, swallow it whole. Not so much.
- [12:26]
A
This time I first read it, I'm almost positive I was like 19. I know exactly where I was. It was the Barnes and Noble near my parents house where we lived in high school and then the first two years of college. So I. I have a real nice physical bracketing and I. And I sat down and read like the first third of it in the book, in the, in the store before I bought it. And at that time I think it was really helpful. It was just like all positive. It gave me a more expansive view of the world. It gave me, yeah. A much more palatable way to think about hell. Even heaven. I would say, like, and who goes to heaven and why and what do we. Yeah, like. Like you saying you felt like you had to be an apologist for hell. I would say that was forced upon me conversationally in a very organic way if I was talking to, you know, I was a philosophy major. So but even, even if it wasn't with my fellow, you know, like pseudo intellectual college friends, it would even just be any non Christians that I was friends with. They would be like, well, what's this thing about everybody going to hell? And then you sort of felt like you had to have an answer for it because, because frankly, it's a pretty fucking good question. And you know, I could admit, I could acknowledge that I needed an answer before I could admit that it was a really good. Almost like a fatal kind of a question for that particular theology that I had at the time. The other reason that I wanted to talk about it now is that I think it is very clearly among the most psychologically rich of Lewis's works. I mean, certainly at least in a. Straightforwardly, it is straightforwardly psychological. It is basically a psychological tale. You know, he's, he's kind of. We'll talk a little bit about at one point like distinguishing this with Dante's Inferno or Milton's, you know, Paradise Lost trilogy or whatever, like these kind of medieval examples of like describing the afterlife. And Lewis is specifically like, you know, saying, I'm not doing what Dante's I'm not telling you what it's going to look like. He frames it as a dream. Right? It is a, it's a big allegory, but the whole allegory is essentially a psychological allegory. So now with the psych degree and doing this work, you know, religious change work with clients and, and all of that stuff, I'm like, oh, it seems like a good time to re. Approach a text like the Great Divorce. Also, it's short, so we can do it in a pretty manageable way.
- [14:59]
B
I mean, it's really like the DSM 6, the abridged version. It's like, there we go, Louis, come on.
- [15:06]
A
So what we're gon do is we're going to go chapter by chapter and I'll give a brief, just like a brief narrative summary of the chapter. And then for each of those chapters, I've got at least one idea to kick around, you know, that, that comes up in that chapter and then I imagine you've got some as well. So we'll just sort of, we'll hit those as we go. And yeah, we're going to try and get through the fourth chapter in today's episode, but we might only get through the third. And I'll just, I'll just. A little heads up, chapter five fucked me up like Actually kind of put my life on pause for a couple days. So that's gonna get. That's gonna get its own episode, if not most of an episode. So we can. Oh, I can't wait. There's a lot to get into there. But let's start with chapter one. So we have a nameless narrator. He finds himself in a dreary, rain soaked city that is called the Grey Town. Capital G, capital T. Everything is shabby, colorless, just kind of blah. It seems like it's crowded, but it's only really crowded around this bus station. And as sort of the narrator zooms out, we actually find out that people are constantly moving further and further apart. If they get into arguments, if they're irritated by each other, anybody in this gray town can get away from anybody else by simply wishing it to happen. They can sort of wish their own mansion into existence and basically their own ranch, or they can have the Yellowstone, Dutton Ranch, just with a flick of the mind. And the narrator observes that people are constantly quarreling. They are fighting about religion, politics, petty slights of each other, and they just keep moving away. Nobody ever seems to reconcile. And so the town, which really a town's a bad word for it, it stretches infinitely. At one point, somebody says that they took 15 years to walk and find a guy's house because this is an afterlife allegory. And so everyone keeps moving. And eventually the narrator realizes, oh, this is. This is hell. It's not fiery and torturous. It's not the lake of fire, but in some ways this is hell. It's just this empty, gray, isolating thing. And I think it's in chapter one, towards the end, where you get this little hint that everybody is also aware that this state of affairs is not eternal, that eventually something else is gonna happen. And it's only very dimly kind of referred to. And I'll also, I'll say this while we're here, I'm reading as we go. So we are going to record. I didn't read the whole thing again. I'm going to read the chapters as we go. So I'm a little bit like a reader. Stand in and doing that on purpose. Okay, so that's chapter one. Did I miss anything there, Kristen?
- [18:07]
B
No. And you may have even gone slightly beyond chapter two.
- [18:10]
A
Okay. Yeah.
- [18:12]
B
Well, they're so quick.
- [18:13]
A
Yeah, they're really short. So I've got an idea we can start with. And it's this concept that hell in the Great Divorce is a. It's just this. It makes possible a Continual disassociation from others. It's just like increased isolation, constantly cutting everybody out of your life. And now we're getting into, okay, allegory for this life. We're starting to sort of place those. It's easier to move away than to reconcile. And I'm wondering, like, I've got a few kind of ideas here that this connects to you. The first one is like, is there something to be said here about political polarization?
- [18:56]
B
Whoa.
- [18:57]
A
Yeah, I didn't. I didn't give you. Yeah. I didn't give you any heads up about that. I'm just throwing that bomb at you.
- [19:03]
B
Yeah, well, all right. Catch the bomb.
- [19:07]
A
So.
- [19:08]
B
So I. I think you have a lot there. Excuse me. What I wrote in relation to this point is like a note on Sartre's hell is other people.
- [19:20]
A
Yeah.
- [19:20]
B
Which I think there's different ways to look at that. Let's come back to that in a second. But about political issues, I do think a trend I've noticed since even college for me, which, for those who don't know, I graduated in 2014. Just to orient us where it's not like you can just disagree with someone and live in harmony. It's like, oh, we disagree. And now you are my enemy. You are on the other side. There's a dehumanizing component to that. There's obviously an othering. It's like we're not able to see each other as equally valid humans. Because your perspective is so egregious to me, that's what I see. So in this slide of the. Moving further away, I feel like it's less. It's less, maybe justice based. It seems like a lot of the quarrels are petty. And there's something. The one person that you said traveled, like, 15 years, or they traveled 15 years to see Napoleon's house.
- [20:17]
A
That's right.
- [20:18]
B
Yeah. Which is. And Napoleon, they say they watched him for a whole year, and he was walking up and down saying, it's this person's fault, it's Josephine's fault. And that was all he could think about. So it's kind of what you see. And this comes up again and again, these characters is this fixation, obsessiveness about what they. You know, what they think. An inability on many of the counts to see outside of it. And I think that's what you see even in this, you know, in this queue for the. For the bus where the narrator's waiting. There's just all these. All this bickering. And it's, like, so easy to get in a fight. And I think that's maybe what we see in politics is Maybe it's more. Maybe it's more. It feels grounded because this, of course, is a fiction, and we could talk about that. But that readiness to fight, that eagerness to quarrel, that eagerness. And of course, fueled now by algorithms, that, of course it's. There's an advantage to fight, it's gonna get more views or whatever, but I think that that's something that you can tell Lewis disdains. It's like Quaralline is almost the heart of Greytown. It's just like. It's the. Where everything goes wrong. And I'm like, that's something I didn't notice, maybe previously reading. But now I'm like, oh, what is. Yeah, what is it about? What is it about quarreling? And would that actually be that inevitable? So. Yeah, well, you tossed the bomb, but I wanted to know what. Yeah, your thoughts, too.
- [21:42]
A
Well, I'll just speak very personally and say that where. Where I connected this to political polarization was in my moments of greatest exasperation with the right around Trump, for instance. Or like evangelical adults who I wish would be mature enough to recognize what was going on there, like I do, I will reach a point at sort of peak anger or peak frustration where it feels to me like the only solution is to just live apart from each other. And that those are the moments where a part of me wishes for a kind of. Not a civil war, but a kind of, you know, like, break into two countries. You know, let's just fucking be done with this. You guys go have your regressive bullshit, and we'll be over here. And, like, if I go down that road, I recognize that that's not. That will not improve my life. It won't improve my children's lives. It won't probably improve anybody's life in America, really, except for maybe people who are sort of actively under attack. But for the rest of us, it's. It's. It isn't really the preferred solution, I don't think, to just separate and isolate. But, yeah, it's like, I think you're right to bring in algorithms and stuff, because in a lot of ways, Western capitalism is built on autonomy. Like, we want to turn every person, as many people in the population as possible. We want. As potential customers, right? So we want children's advertisements that will turn the children into a vector for the parents, money. But it's not that the parents love Paw Patrol, it's that the kid loves Paw Patrol. And the kid's love of paw patrol will separate the parent from their money, as has just happened in our own household over Christmas. You know, and so there is this kind of like. Yeah. And so I'm not being very clear about this, but there's a way in which you can kind of look at that as a single fabric where there's a lot of forces are pushing toward isolation, greater autonomy, including capitalist forces. And then it's like, well, what's the. You know, we have sort of a lack of forces bringing us back together in. You know, it feels like in today's times.
- [24:08]
B
Yeah. Well. And I know this comes up later where one of the characters on the bus, Maybe it's the next chapter. Is talking about what will happen. Kind of centralized. People stop them from moving out. And I guess this is where. Yeah. I'm curious. Maybe even from a psychological perspective, I get that impulse, too, Dan. When I'm so mad at someone. It's not like I have to fight to figure out how to get along. It's like, I just don't want to deal. I want to run away from it. But where there's also the most richness in my life, there are other people. Like, when I. And I don't like being alone. Like.
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A
Yeah.
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B
It's like social.
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A
I'm conversational. Yeah. Yeah.
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B
So it's like. I guess maybe there's a question there, like, do I only want to have people in my life on my own terms? Like. And are we all. You know, we all make allowances for things that at least annoy us? So I guess, in a sense, do you feel like there's some sort of power in Greytown or something with the people, where it makes them, like, actually distorts? Cause in life, you know, they're kind of caricatures of, like, one type of person.
- [25:21]
A
Yeah. And you talked about this earlier. Yeah. These are not really fleshed out people. The characters, the ghosts, as they will be revealed to be essentially in Greytown, are not, you know, a screenwriter, a screenwriting teacher would be like, you need to, like, sketch these people more. Like, they're way too flat there.
- [25:42]
B
They're flat. Yeah. They're paper thin.
- [25:44]
A
They're paper thin and insubstantial. And so I think that it only works as allegory. And if you start to. So that's kind of why I'm saying, like, well, there are moments of my life where I relate to these characters. But I don't know a single person who's totally like one of these characters. Cause the characters are just too flimsy in that respect.
- [26:05]
B
But it's tricky because even though it's an allegory, it's kind of. It props up the entire argument, you.
- [26:12]
A
Know, in a way, if the argument. Yeah. So this is where we kind of gotta talk about theology. Right? Where. And let's see. I think we can maybe get to. We'll get later this idea. We'll get to it in chapter three. That theologically, for Lewis, Hel. Is, like, actively chosen. And that this is a kind of continuation of your lifetime choices. And what you're saying is, isn't there a kind of power at work here? Because the people in Greytown, the characters, the ghosts in Greytown, they don't actually read like people who have simply continued on their old ways. Like, nobody is this. Well, certainly half the world or whatever is not like, this maniacally selfish. Like, there. There is obviously something that's happened where. Yeah. Like, if you want to talk about sort of the metaphysics of the afterlife in the Great Divorce, like, if we're going to posit it as a kind of a place, then it does appear that if you die and wake up in Greytown, you're actually sapped of most of whatever you had in life that you could have drawn on. Energy, love commitments, good memories, the kinds of things that we do in our real lives draw upon for strength, you know, like, in tough moments to try and overcome them and do something better. It does appear like the characters in Greytown have severely restricted access to whatever that is. And I think the theological argument for that from Lewis's perspective, which we will definitely talk about, is, like, good as real and bad and evil as basically just like nothingness, like a privation, a lack of goodness. And that's, I think, a very Aquinas y kind of a view, as I understand it, that, like, sin and evil is actually just the lack of goodness. So that's why the ghosts are insubstantial. And the heavenly spirits, the people who have made it to heaven, are, like, extremely real. Right. So I think that's the way he's trying to sort of, in the story, logic, make sense of that. That, like, you become so insubstantial that you don't even really have those things to draw on to sort of pull yourself back up. Right.
- [28:31]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, I see what you're. I mean, I see what you're saying. And, you know, obviously a couple chapters on. There's that discussion of, like, hell being also so small, so nothing. Like, even though it's so expansive. It's millions of years, maybe even light years apart. When they go up to visit heaven, it's nothing. But. Yeah, I guess it's curious because, I mean, you're saying metaphysical. There's something that seems like the essence of these people is also gone. And I'm sure, yeah, Lewis is also kind of implying when you're cut off from God and that whole, like, you reflect what you. I mean, listen, evangelicalism, you reflect what you worship. You're only what you know, what you get, what you look at. Or you could even do the inverse of that. You know, maybe if you stare into the abyss, it stares into you or whatever. But I feel like there's something lost in that. That, for me is. I don't know. It's tough to conceive of. But I do want to ask, too, mental illness and certain components of that also. I think people kind of get lost at times in their own mental illness. I mean, a simple example of this, because I'm not trying to have any sort of moral flavor to that. It's just like you think dementia or Alzheimer's. There's nothing. The person doesn't become, you know, necessarily more quarrelsome, maybe because they're frustrated. But the things that you would say make them. You make them. Them or the ways you've known them might not show up in the same way, but it's also. That's. That's not their fault. So we talk about this. We talk about this choosing. We'll get back to this more. But it's like there are forces acting upon them that are beyond their control. Is that Greytown?
- [30:31]
A
I don't know. I think the only way I know how to answer that is to talk about a passage from Mere Christianity where Lewis is answering Lewis with Lewis to give him a little. To cut him a little slack here, you know, he talks about. He contrasts these two characters. I forget what names he gives them. But one is this amiable man who everybody finds to be quite pleasant. And, you know, he never ruffles any feathers and just is polite to everyone. And he contrasts this with a crotchety older woman who's, you know, who's got a real sarcastic bite to her and whatever. And he says, here's the thing that we don't know. We don't have access to the inner world of either of these people. So we assume that the old woman is morally worse than the man. But suppose, for instance, that the man has simply figured out that this is the way to keep everybody off his fucking back. And so he just does the minimum that is required so that he can be left to his own devices and, you know, whatever. And suppose that the woman has like a abusive upbringing, she's survived sexual assault, she, you know, she lived in deep poverty. And maybe she's got like, I would, I would add in here, like from Louis, like, maybe a modern Lewis would say, like, yeah, maybe she's got mental illness. Maybe she's got a genetic disposition to borderline personality disorder or something. And she's actually put tremendous effort in to get to like, be the kind of sometimes sarcastic but sometimes warm version of herself that we see today. Which of them, like, is God more approving of? God's more approving of the second person, but we're more approving of the first person because of the, you know, because all we get is the exterior. So I do think he, he had a place for the difficulties and the vagaries of the internal life, which are not visible to everybody else. So I want to give him credit for that. That said, he was a mid, mid 20th century writer and just didn't understand what we now understand about DNA. He didn't know anything about DNA. He didn't know about which mental illnesses were more genetically tied than others. He didn't know about the way that borderline personality disorder manifests as just an extremely strong felt sense of emotional distress that is well beyond what the average person ever experiences, except in very rare circumstances. So we just have, we have other things we can put in that he couldn't. Which is really why I think it only works as a kind of a poetic allegory dream thing. It doesn't work if we really try and make individual people out of each of these ghosts because they're just too, I mean, pun intended, they're too thinly drawn.
- [33:33]
B
Well, no, I think I see what you're saying. I think it's still tricky for me.
- [33:40]
A
What's tricky about it for you? I'm curious.
- [33:42]
B
Well, honestly, this is one of the. This is part of the crux of why I think hell being chosen is untenable in my point of view. And there's actually a paper I read. I wish I could remember who wrote it. This was in grad school. But it went back to this point of view. You know, do you have to have enough intellectual ability to reasonably weigh through the, you know, the potential of heaven and God and hell and what your choices mean? Because, yeah, you say back to borderline. Someone's so emotional that it's over, almost overwhelming to them. They're going to do things that I would say are wrong. There are things they shouldn't do.
- [34:25]
A
Maybe they're going to know that they will do them. Put it that way. That's clean.
- [34:29]
B
Clean they will regret. Yeah. I mean, again, you know, can't.
- [34:33]
A
Very, very likely.
- [34:36]
B
We're. But. But, you know, do we fault. Do we fault them for that? And I think in many instances, I mean, there's even, you know, people who have, of course, the famous psychological. Actually, I've never asked you about this. The guy who got the pole through his brain, Phineas Gage, and started acting differently. The Phineas Gage, you know, do we fault poor Phineas for the pole?
- [35:00]
A
Yeah. This is a guy who, in a bizarre, like, construction accident, got, like, basically a piece of rebar stuck through his skull. It, like, stayed there for a while, and they obviously thought he would die. He did not die, but his personality changed dramatically. And if, you know people who have gone through severe dementia, moderate to severe strokes, traumatic brain injuries of other types. Right. That's the Phineas Gage thing. You know, car accidents can do this. Multiple concussions will do this. Cte, you know, which has been in the news around football, you and I are both big NFL fans, like cte, which appears to be the result of multiple concussions in, you know, contact sports or other. Or other means of getting concussions. Like, it genuinely changes people's personalities. It changes what we perceive to be the moral actions and the moral decision making of individuals by changing the underlying brain structures. And this is a real problem for. Yeah, so if we're talking. Cause Lewis does, I think, theologically, what Lewis is doing with the allegory, what he's able to say, actually theologically, is, hell is not like, back to what we were saying earlier. What do we do with this pesky idea of hell? How can we become apologists for this and still have a good, loving God? What C.S. lewis wants to say is, look, hell is. Well, first of all, he denies eternal conscious torment. So he's already doing a good job, I think.
- [36:38]
B
Thank you, Louis.
- [36:39]
A
Thank you. That's the most common view in more conservative, traditional circles, at least in Protestantism, that unbelievers are consciously tormented for eternity, minute after minute, unendingly by Satan or I guess by God in hell forever because they didn't accept Christ. So he's saying, look, we're not even gonna touch that. We're gonna talk about, basically, purgatorial annihilationism is how I would understand this view. So annihilationism means that if you are not saved, you just cease to exist. Also known as conditional immortality. The saved go on to heaven, the unsaved just cease to exist. And Lewis throws in this purgatorial element where you have some time, where you have a chance, like a post mortem opportunity to accept Christ and to accept God's love. In chapter four, five, four and five, we'll start to get an idea of that, of how that shows up in the story. But so what he wants to say is it isn't apologetic for hell insofar as it's like, well, earth exists as a place for us to refine our choice making and we have the option with God's help to like become closer to angels as opposed to becoming closer to demonstration. And then God gives us this purgatorial period in which we get to sort of keep going roughly on the path we were on, but in a spiritual realm. And all I will say is I just, I get it, I get that that's helpful, that makes it more palatable, but I don't find it to be convincing because everything that we all are, metaphors, analogies, all our ways of understanding human moral choice while we are alive on earth are inextricably linked to our brains and our hormones and the way that we experience emotions. And some of that is the cumulative result of our free choices. I totally believe that. So there's an aspect of what Lewis is doing, like the reason that I talked about political polarization. There is something psychologically rich here. It's just in my opinion, not as theologically rich. It doesn't. It's actually, it's got more to tell us about human psychology than it does about the afterlife is maybe the pithy way of saying it.
- [39:11]
B
Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Greenlight. Get this. Adults with financial literacy skills have 82% more wealth than those who don't. From swimming lessons to piano classes, us parents invent in so many things to enrich our kids lives. But are we investing in their future financial success? With Greenlight you can teach your kids financial literacy skills like earning, saving and investing. And this investment costs less than that. After school treat start prioritizing their financial education and future today with a risk free trial at greenlight.com Spotify greenlight.com Spotify. Is now the appropriate time to refresh your journey on your view of hells or view of views.
- [39:59]
A
Let's get. So let's get through chapter three at least and do that. So I'll read the narration for chapters two and three and then I've got another idea too, that I'd like to get to. So 2. The narrator arrives at a bus stop. The strange bus appears, driven by this rough, no nonsense, heavenly driver. Small group gets on, each for their own reasons. Some are curious, some are resentful, some seem opportunistic. And the driver says they're heading to a place called the Mountains. Sounds better than the Grey Town. Everybody boards kind of reluctantly or skeptically. They're complaining, you know, it's this real, you know, morass of humanity. Yeah, hell is other people, Hell is yourself kind of a thing. But then the bus, once inside, we start to notice these changes. It starts to grow impossibly large, and it fits way more people than it looked like it could have fit. So this is kind of letting us know, if we didn't already know that there's like an allegorical dream logic to this story. Chapter three. The bus keeps going up. Greytown gets smaller and smaller, and almost like you just can't even really see it anymore. And not just from distance, but almost like you see through it. And the passengers are still being their shitty selves. They're worrying about it being pointless, or maybe they're trying to deceive us. It's just a lot of, like, grumbling folks. Eventually it gets through the clouds and it. And we're in this brilliant, solid world of light, color and sharp reality. And so we're starting to glimpse this idea that heaven for Lewis in this world is, like, much more real, much more substantial than the Grey Town and hell. And, you know, let's just do the chapter four. There's not a lot of narrative here, so I can just do that and then we can go through all these ideas. So it lands, and the grass, water, trees and mountains are dazzlingly bright. And as they get off the bus, the ghosts realize that this place is, like, painfully solid compared to them. Like the. The grass cuts their feet like knives. Water feels heavy. And they realize that they are ghost. Like, they are semi transparent. They are weak. They are unable to interact comfortably with this environment. And in the distance, they start to see these huge people approaching them. And they can just already tell that they. These. It's sort of like giants versus men, you know, it's like they are big, substantial. Some of them are naked, some of them are clothed. They don't seem to care. And they're walking naked, but not afraid. And they're walking up. Okay, so that's. That puts us narratively through chapter four. All right, so what was the one that you wanted to start with. We're going to kick around a bunch of ideas here.
- [43:04]
B
Oh man. Well, chapter two, we have a mini interaction with the ghost. So as the. As you know, we're starting to get into it. So there's kind of the ghosts and then these big giants are really. They're like the spirits coming from heaven. So everyone was. They were all people.
- [43:19]
A
They're all people on earth.
- [43:20]
B
On earth. And now they're in this world. I mean the real. Realist real world. And they're kind of discussing life previously and how they got here. But on the bus. Lest we forget, the narrator has a very interesting. A couple of conversations as they're going there. So I do want to talk about the tousle haired poet. Great name for tossled hair.
- [43:42]
A
And also very 2025 with the cauliflower. Like a Gen Z cauliflower haircut. Is that tousled or no?
- [43:49]
B
Oh my gosh. Yes. I'd say it's tousled.
- [43:51]
A
I'm gonna google this. Tousled hair.
- [43:53]
B
Yeah, I.
- [43:53]
A
Okay. Yeah. All right. Maybe not quite. Yeah.
- [43:56]
B
He's. Well. And he's also anti capitalist, which is very gen Z and 21st century until he realizes it's all a rude.
- [44:06]
A
He's anti capitalist with a blowout.
- [44:09]
B
Yes. Perfect.
- [44:13]
A
They were more affordable back then. Okay. That's the cultural context.
- [44:16]
B
It was actually just natural. It came out of his sense of. His hair did itself.
- [44:20]
A
His fingers did the tousling as he tried to find the right words for each poem.
- [44:26]
B
Oh my God.
- [44:27]
A
It was a physical consequence.
- [44:29]
B
That's the way to. That's how poetry should be written. You can feel the hair in the poetry. Yeah. And Lewis let's. I mean we said it's a short book. It's very readable. But he is such a good writer.
- [44:41]
A
Fun writer.
- [44:42]
B
Really. Oh, it's. Oh my goodness. Like you're just like in the seat. There's one part. I must call this out. It was so good. The one he calls him like the intelligent ghost is talking about Greytown and they're kind of alluding to the fact that at one point night will come. It's been this kind of eternal time.
- [45:00]
A
This is the thing I was talking about that. Yeah. There's this kind of scary future horizon event.
- [45:06]
B
Yeah. And it's like. And it's. But he's so hush hush about it. And. And the narrator is kind of like what? Like what are you saying? And at one point, even the way he just like it. You can just picture this sort of interaction the way they're talking to each other. But the narrator's like, I couldn't hear. I couldn't hear what he was saying. And I. And I was like, too loud. And then I was saying, what? But basically, the intelligent man has to, like, secretly mouth something to him about how they are coming. And the narrator's like, who are they? But it's the way this conversation is written. I don't think you find writing much like this anymore where it's like, you're really. That's how conversations go. Where you can't, like, hear things, or you're kind of like, why are you being this way anyway? Beautiful, Lewis. Beautiful work. But also it creates that sense of danger around what is going to happen. And this. And it's funny. And of course, then. So you have the three characters.
- [45:58]
A
Hold on. I have an idea. I have something specifically for that.
- [46:01]
B
Please.
- [46:02]
A
Okay, so there. I have an existential therapy idea for that one. So please. He's like. He's trying to talk really quietly about this. The guy on the bus, where he's like, he had to put my ear right up to his ear to hear him, or put my ear right up to his mouth to hear him, rather than. And then he's like, well, nobody wants to be out of doors when that happens. And his reply was, so why? His reply was so furtive. I had to ask him several times to repeat it. And he's like, who are they? What are you worried about? But basically, this idea is that what we get in that moment is, I think, very similar to what an existential psychologist would say about the human experience of knowing that death is coming. That psychologically, the way these characters are talking about, you know, basically like, the end night coming, while they're in this long, purgatorial world existence where they're kind of half living and they're sort of just kind of following their kind of basic instincts, and they are really settling for a pretty shitty life. And they do all of that continually under the threat of thinking quite straightforwardly and honestly about the fact that also night is coming, that also there's something really bad coming and they're just avoiding it. And in a sense, we could ask, like, if we want to turn this into a real life allegory, we could ask, why is somebody so willing to put up with such a shitty life? And an existential life? Psychologists would say, because it's better for them in the moment than the alternative of the terrifying facing of reality. And the psychologist would go further and say, their life would be much better if they would just look at that and acknowledge it and come to accept the risk and the uncertainty and nonetheless choose their life. That's the flip side of it. But this is a pretty cool metaphor for this way of sort of like, well, hush, hush, like we. I don't think about that and I don't think about not existing anymore. I don't think about these kinds of things. Nobody really likes to talk about that. You know, it's impolite to talk about it. Right. If a kid says, when are you gonna die? We go, oh, honey, shush. Shh, shh. We don't ask people that. Right?
- [48:27]
B
Yeah.
- [48:28]
A
You know?
- [48:29]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and what this brings to mind for me, and I'm intrigued about how this might relate more to existential psychology. I actually listened to a sermon by John Mark Comer back when I was a huge John Mark Comer fan back in the day.
- [48:48]
A
Yeah, he's a Portland pastor. He's kind of trying to do. He's sort of trying to fill the CS Lewis lane, I guess, where he's like, you know, kind of NT Wright CS Lewis, like orthodox enough for the kind of mainstream Christian world, Protestant and Catholic, to take them seriously. And he's not ruffling any feathers by being like gay affirming or anything like that. But he's also trying to be kind of like really engaging with the world, trying to be curious, trying to be intellectually honest. He's also got a nice, like Dallas Willard, like simplicity of life, spiritual disciplines streak to him. But yeah, then I would also be like, yeah, and also queer people aren't really welcome at your church. That's a problem. That's John Mark Comer.
- [49:34]
B
Yeah, I mean, yeah, so, yeah, exactly as you said, a little bit of a C.S. lewis of the day flavor and quite popular. But I remember a number of years back listening to some either sermon or mini podcast series he was doing with another pastor and they were talking about how in the present day it's kind of like you can't kill the vibe you have to the new God is like vacation. Like you have to talk about your trips you're taking and the shows you're watching and these things that that's what we do. Because if you're not doing that, you're not subscribing to the in vogue religion. You're actually being archaic and talking about like morality or talking about, you know, death. You're saying, I mean, exactly. I'm echoing your thought. But it's like, well, why would we do that when that's not what we worship, that's not what we are after. And it made a big impression. Because if you think about it, I don't know about your circles, Dan, but it is the thing people talk about is like, well, what trips are you going on? It's like, that is such a big thing in this day and age, to the point even. And. And maybe, you know, we're talking about the tousel haired poet, the guy who talks about the night coming as the intellectual man and even the man. There's a man sitting in front of them as they're talking about it, who turns around, he'll come back. He's the Episcopalian of chapter five.
- [50:59]
A
He's the one who fucked me up.
- [51:00]
B
He's like, he's a major player in this book. But they're kind of. They're all talking about ideas and all these things. But even now, I don't know if you've been seeing this sort of discourse online. Reading is just tanking. Reading is not. I mean, there's graphs about how, you know, the number of young people who used to read for fun after school vastly outnumbered people who barely read at all. And now the inverse is true. And as we know, to the point where college students aren't even able to read books, partially because they're not able to trace the entire plot line with like mini plots happening throughout or like the little conversations and they get lost. So I say all this because I think there's a dual aspect to this. It's, first of all, it's not in vogue, it's not favorable, it's not fun, which is like. I think there's a lot to be said of that.
- [51:53]
A
You're saying talking about death and more.
- [51:56]
B
Talking about mortality and the weightier issues.
- [51:59]
A
An existential psychological approach would say it's never in vogue because it always hits on that fundamental human anxiety that is true of humans in every time and place.
- [52:10]
B
Yeah, well, but there might be a different way in.
- [52:14]
A
There might be specific ways in which it is not in vogue in different times and places or other things that are in vogue instead of it. But like, other than basically like you mentioned Sartre earlier, you know, other than being a French cafe existentialist or a punk rocker or something, the only like really youth, like sort of youth culture and kind of like fuck you type culture can incorporate death. You know, heavy metal can incorporate death imagery. There are some ways nowadays where it does. It almost can be fetishized in certain subcultures. But I think the basic point would more be like, to really think I'm going to die. What do I want my life to look like? And to look at that, honestly, is never in vogue. Like, that's always a narrow road taken is sort of the idea.
- [53:07]
B
And I would say, yeah, from my. Obviously, I don't know all of history, but I would say to an extent, I agree. But also, I am curious, are we losing even a capacity to have the language for that and the spaces for that? And that's. I mean, that encompasses lack of third spaces. But then, of course, this lack of literacy. I mean, I don't know if I mentioned this to you. I looked up, like, at one point, I was with Beau. We were like, you know, something came up about literacy. And I was like, oh, well, how many people are actually illiterate in Philadelphia? I'm thinking, you know, it's probably gonna be like 10%. Like something really bad. It was like 50%.
- [53:45]
A
No.
- [53:46]
B
Are not considered 50%.
- [53:48]
A
That's not true. There's no way. What percentage graduate, high school. It's gotta be 80%, 70% right now, maybe if you're counting children or something, you're gonna have to.
- [54:00]
B
There's, in a way, 52%.
- [54:03]
A
Okay, well, what counts as illiterate then? Because that's obviously not functional literacy.
- [54:10]
B
Adults struggling with everyday reading.
- [54:12]
A
Struggling with. Okay, but like, they can read road signs. They can read the sign in the post office that tells them where to stand.
- [54:20]
B
Yeah, but. But they're not gonna be reading even a short book like the Great Divorce. That would be beyond that.
- [54:25]
A
They will not be able to join us on this unless they're audiobooking it.
- [54:29]
B
Anyway, I just want. I guess so. I wonder. I'm now going out in a little field, but I guess so. Yeah, it's not. So in terms of that, you know, you've got all these people engaging in these conversations, but this ongoing denial we see. But I think people who also don't have an interest in reading or discussing these things would show likely a defensiveness around that as well, wouldn't you think? Like, why do I need to. Yeah, like, not even. Like, I. Not. Not that I don't want to. It's just like, this isn't. I've got this.
- [55:03]
A
There's a very interesting question. There's a very interesting question here, which is like, please, you know, after true secularization of, let's say, a European culture, a particular European country, like a Denmark or Sweden or something, are people gonna grow up that actually just don't even have the same capacities for spirituality, transcendence or whatever. That's a really interesting open empirical question. As far as I'm concerned. There's some evidence that that is the case. Like I've seen some studies where, you know, they, they look at a particular population of, you know, children who were raised in non religious state orphanages, you know, in Romania or something like that, with an official communist, like anti religious, you know, state or something. And you do find it's sort of like redu. It appears to be like a reduced capacity for, for certain concepts feeling like they even make sense to a person. And you know, I would say.
- [56:16]
B
A.
- [56:16]
A
Theoretical explanation for that that I would buy would be something like that human psychology is extremely adaptive that if you think about the day to day life of a person today and you contrast it with the day to day life of a person in 150,000 BC, there's some similarities. We eat, we take a shit, we have sex, we, you know, we find some food, we, you know, we sleep. But if you think about like so many of the details or what we expect to happen each day and what would frustrate us if it didn't happen and like, you know, like there's, it's just a totally different world. And even you can apply the same thing to like growing up eastern and growing up Western, which maybe now the Internet is collapsing that distinction quite a bit, but was really there for millennia, you know, of like you can just create entire different cultural norms that then are totally normal to everybody who grows up in them and are in some ways opposite of people who grew up in other ones. So there is, there's some stuff that stays the same, that it's sort of universal and then there's a lot of flexibility and so. Yeah, but then what, but then what you might see like if you zoom out in time is if there's a big culture where a whole generation of parents, let's say just like doesn't even think about these things and doesn't think they're relevant, well then you're gonna have a revival among their kids probably. Cause because of that we're gonna, we snap back, we bounce around, we try different things. Yeah, I don't know if that's. Am I answering your question?
- [57:55]
B
Yeah, no, I think so. I mean, and I don't wanna get too hung up on this. Cause I could go back to this. Well then they don't, you know, people don't want this sort of thing. Then it's. And the capacity question. I don' view Anyone as lesser than. I think there's priority shifts culturally and what's rewarded, of course, and of course technology. But I would say maybe going back to the existential psychologist's perspective and from maybe what, you know, it has to kind of. And this goes back to the choosing a little bit, there's got to be like that seed of hunger. And this will play out in these conversations. Where, where does that. How can that start? Where does that start? And is that something that, I mean, you're reading about existential psychology. Is that something that's kind of on the upswing, where they're seeing more people with this hunger? Or is this some. A field where it's just, you know, the people who are there are there. There's not really data on who or how many people are coming or the demand.
- [58:53]
A
Well, existentialist psychologists don't do a lot of quantitative research.
- [58:59]
B
On their demo. The demographics of the people coming and their amount.
- [59:06]
A
No, it's. So what I would say is, in a lot of ways their view is gonna fit pretty well with Lewis. Not in all the particulars, but like. So I've actually been thinking about this. This is something that we don't have a lot of time to get into here, but maybe we will as we go. I also kinda wanna talk about it with Daryl Van Tongren on a future episode that, like, I think that I am drawn to existential therapy and psychology for similar reasons that I was drawn to evangelicalism, or maybe I'm drawn to it because it activates similar parts of me or something. You know, there's a narrow road and a wide road. Like there's a. There's sort of an explanation given for why most people don't sort of reach their full potential and why the world kind of sucks in a lot of ways. And there are competing reasons given, but there's some overlap. Like, for instance, like Emmy Van Dersen, who's the specific psychologist that I've been reading recently, she talks about how what an existential therapist does via principles of existentialism and existential psychology, is you help your client understand a way of being in their way of being in the world. So you help your client map themselves. And in even making that map, it is requiring radical honesty. And you are beginning to work on acceptance of things that you wish weren't true. But in order to make the map, you have to figure out the truth, right? If you don't, if you are deceiving yourself, then your map is going to be wrong. And that's where it really overlaps for me with the Great Divorce. These caricatures are in constant states of self deception. And that's really what we're going to be talking about next episode with chapter five is that, you know, the Episcopal ghost is described as being very self deceptive. And so, you know, from an existential psychology perspective, they would say something like, yeah, most people don't really do this. And that's also what an evangelical would say. Most people don't really do this. They don't really take life by the horns. And they mean different things by what that is. Right. Yeah, but they both contain an element of like getting honest, you know, like getting honest and truthful. Taking responsibility is in both of them. Right. These ghosts do not take responsibility for fuck all. I mean, they're not responsible for shit. Everybody else is. The Napoleon example you gave is a great example of that. Right. It was Josephine's fault. It was the British. It was the. Whatever it was a lack of morale with my troops or whatever. It isn't that at Waterloo I was outsmarted. He doesn't say that it wasn't his fault. So.
- [62:18]
B
Yeah, well, I. Okay. It's so. I'm recognizing in myself there's such a struggle with this because I think, as you do, it's so important. It's so. And yes, even personally challenging to be that honest. But once you start to make it a practice, I'm sure you've seen this in your own life. You see its rewards and you're like, you know, it hurts to say I was wrong. It hurts to realize how messed up I was in this. I mean, there's times, even professionally, I'm like, man, I thought I did so well. And looking back, I can see where I could have done better. And it's hard. You want to be good at what you're doing. You want to be respected. So I see that. But then you see this, and I wonder why it's such a struggle for me that I know that there are a number of people, many of my own friends, who wouldn't want to go through this process. And it's kind of a. I don't know. It's so odd, Dan. It's like I really would want that for them. And also I don't. I feel this urge not to judge them for not wanting it. Does that make sense?
- [63:24]
A
Well, I think that is. I think that's the standard to aim for. And I think that. I mean, I think that's what Jesus was probably like, right? Sort of.
- [63:35]
B
Are you saying I'm Christmasing him.
- [63:39]
A
Definitely not. What I'm saying is that what you are, but what you're pointing to as kind of an aspirational synthesis of that is a Christ like synthesis. I think Jesus saw, and I'm speaking here very loosely, I don't want people to think that I.
- [63:58]
B
You're not gonna speak for Christ?
- [63:59]
A
I'm not gonna speak for Christ. I have, I have, you know, low context of what Jesus was actually like. You know, I have a lot of questions about this, but in terms of what I.
- [64:10]
B
So did the Episcopal priest.
- [64:11]
A
No shit. Next episode we're really gonna roll up our sleeves. Yes, yes, I'm gonna lay down on the couch is actually what's gonna happen. But I think Jesus saw, I think as far as we can tell, like Jesus did seem to combine these two elements of a clear diagnostic picture of the world. Right? Like Jesus had ideas about what was not working and had, you know, at a bare minimum, Jesus had significant reforms in mind for Judaism. Like even if you don't think he, even if you reject Christian ideas that he saw himself as divine, whatever. Like he, he, he had a diagnosis of what was going wrong and he had a, and he had a solution. You know, it was the kingdom of God that he preached, the kingdom of heaven that he preached. And, and he described it as a narrow road, you know, like, he described it as like, most people who are fat and comfortable are not going to find a need for this. And that's kind of like, I mean, that's kind. There's a lot of similarity there with the existential approach. Like, yeah, a lot of people are going to just choose comfort and they will. And like you have no control over that. That's part of what you have to accept about the world is that people that you love are gonna choose a less substantial life for themselves than they might otherwise choose.
- [65:34]
B
Mm, this is getting more personal than I already thought it would, Dan. But I'm sure we'll come back to this. I want to though, before. I know we have to.
- [65:44]
A
We have about 10 minutes before we're in this one.
- [65:47]
B
Okay, well, the two characters that are shown in chapters between two, three and four, we have the tassel haired poet we could say just a little bit more about. But then the big ghost is in chapter four and both of these characters, so tousle haired very quick, that's just a conversation on a bus. But what we see with him is that he is textbook like victim mentality. Everything in life was against him. His schools didn't accommodate his talents and his temperament. His parents didn't give him enough money. He was hanging out with a girl and even she started to show. She was kind of bougie bourgeoisie sentiments is what he was talking about.
- [66:25]
A
So she's gotta go.
- [66:26]
B
Mean with money. She's gotta go. And then he commits suicide at the end. And he feels, you can see still that he was wronged the whole time. Have you known people like this, Stan?
- [66:38]
A
I'll say all therapists know clients like this. And I would say this is, if not the hardest client to work with among the. Among the top three hardest type of clients. That probably depends on your area of therapy or whatever. But. But I think you talk to a therapist in any subfield and say sometimes we will call them help rejecting clients or. Yeah, victimhood, mindset. That term, I think is a bit dated. Maybe there's an updated stuff, but there's a Victims no longer is a book you'll find on a lot of bookshelves that's I think from the 2000s or 90s or something. But. So I'll answer it from, from the existential perspective is that that would be viewed as something like a refusal to take responsibility. And that responsibility, from an existential perspective is viewed as. When we really reckon with our responsibility, it is viewed about as terrifying as the fact of our death. So, you know, most existential psychologists would put those roughly on par with each other. So. And actually that's something that I'm grateful to my Christian upbringing for, is that it normalized responsibility and actually framed it positively. I am not overwhelmed by having moral responsibility. I am overwhelmed by the thought of non existence. So for me, those aren't equal. And there's. I'm sure there's individual differences anyway just on all those things. But. But yeah, the. The crushing responsibility of free will and the fact that our choices have real world effects that harm people, you know, that is seen as tantamount to recognizing, I will die, I will stop existing someday. So that would be, I mean, just to kind of keep it in line with our current conversations. That's how it would connect.
- [68:44]
B
Mm. Mm. Well, and I think, you know, it's funny because we're talking about maybe the reluctance to talk about morality, but yeah, maybe it is. And in Christianity, maybe it's much more important that we are talking about the things that impact our lives and in existential psychology as well, like these. I don't know. I mean, yeah, I see the resistance in myself again. I see it in other people that I know. Why won't they take responsibility, Dan?
- [69:10]
A
Well, and here's an interesting, here's an interesting fork in the road I think you'll appreciate because there are sort of Christian and more religion friendly, even if they are not religious existential therapists. And then there are more atheistic ones. And most good therapists will find a way to work with a client's spirituality and not pathologize it. That's bad practice and I think that's not overtly done very often, but it can be implicitly done. So you could either say, like an atheist existentialist would say, yes, Kristen, in a sense it's good that you're all talking about it, but your religion has given you facile, childlike answers to these big adult questions that actually keeps you from looking at it. That would be one perspective. Wow. Another perspective would say, no, that is a faith claim that you are baking atheist that, you know, like Sartre says. Sartre says, I just knew there was no God when I was like 18 or whatever. And I read that and I go, yeah, sounds like a fucking 18 year old. I wish you'd reconsidered that when you got older. You know, like, you don't know there's no God. Fuck you. How do you know that? I also don't know that there is a God. Like, those are both silly statements in my view. So I have more this Christian existentialist view, which is like, well, actually I think there is value in the way that, that religious people are willing to look at these questions and that the religion gives them a structure for it. However, you know, if cards on the table, like, ultimately what I'd want for a client is that they would also have an ability to sit with the ambiguity of wondering if their church is wrong about some of those things. You know, if you just stop at, well, yeah, I have all the answers to these questions. We've totally answered them. Then that's when I start to think that the more atheist critiques is more applicable. But there are still limits to that. Like, I don't know what is good for people, all people. And I don't want to, like, I don't want to go over my skis and make claims I can't back up about. Well, everybody needs to take the existential path, you know, like, well, no, probably not. And it's a difficult discernment question as to who doesn't, you know.
- [71:27]
B
Yeah, yeah, well. And then honestly, this kind of, you're saying, discernment of who needs what. This actually brings me perfectly to the big ghost, the big man who. His whole thing is, he's done right his whole life. He's done right by other people. He doesn't ask for much. He's not necessarily religious, but he didn't do anything really. He, in his estimation, the wrong way. He's lived kind of straight. Now, it's funny because. And this will kind of come back in chapter five, but there's a little bit of a. I guess. How would I say it? There's a component of. You have to trust the spirits that they're just right in this. In this allegory, you know, like, you. You're not like, oh, who's. Is this a true story?
- [72:11]
A
No. Oh, no, no. I actually think that you're encouraged to see them all as unreliable narrators. That's how I. That's how I. All the ghosts. That's how I'm reading it.
- [72:22]
B
Oh, sorry.
- [72:23]
A
The spirits, you have to treat as. Sorry, I misheard you. Spirits, you have to treat as they are. I mean, he says in chapter five, the one spirit says, now I know all of it. So when we were little kids, we'd be like, when I get to heaven, I'm gonna ask God how many types of dinosaur were there? Like, this is kind of that view that, like, once you are dead and in heaven, you basically have perfect knowledge of everything or something like that.
- [72:48]
B
Yeah. And I do feel. And Lewis, I think, does this well, like the way he tries to get at it while also acknowledging him. His finite ability to describe anything, I do think is quite well done. He's a great writer. But with this. So we're trusting that the heavenly spirit is honest in telling this big ghost. Well, did you really do right your whole life? And this heavenly spirit, who's actually given a name, Len, killed someone in his life, is a murderer. And so you're really. I mean, and this is actually the first real conversation between a heavenly spirit and a hellish ghost that you get into. And it kind of shocks you because you're like, oh, the heavenly spirit murdered someone and he got to heaven. He's a murderer. And so the big ghost, I guess. Yeah. Is then so indignant and even says, like, well, personally, I think I thought it'd be the other way around. Dan, what were your thoughts in this part? What stuck out to you about this big ghost, besides his is obviously denial to take accountability.
- [73:51]
A
Yeah. I mean, what stuck out was a basic Christian salvation understanding, which is that salvation is not the result of works. It's not. You don't get to Heaven, it's rejecting the old Egyptian idea that your deeds are weighed at the end of all of your life. And, you know, enough good deeds, heaven, enough bad deeds, hell. You know, Lewis is going with a standard Christian view here, which is like, it's about accepting the free gift of salvation that is offered to you in Christ. And so the murderer accepted it later, you know, and the other guy who didn't murder anybody, never accepted it. And so, I mean, that's how I read the kind of basic facts of it. And then. But. And so I thought, okay, interesting. And that's a bit old hat for me at this point in my life, but the refusal to take responsibility and the pointing to other people as worse than me, which gives me a feeling of superiority. I think there's. That's a recognizable kind of psychological phenomena, you know, I think the Christian tradition and maybe even some of the, like, more broad virtue tradition would probably call that pride. That it is a. It's a closing off. It's a shutting down of a certain kind of conversation. You know, it's like, well, we don't talk about that. And I know that that door can remain closed. And here are the reasons why that door gets to remain closed. That's kind of where I went with it.
- [75:34]
B
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, something I've been thinking about. I mean, I'm looking at this one part where the big ghost says, I don't want charity. I'm a decent man. If I had my rights, I'd be here long ago. And you can tell them I said so.
- [75:46]
A
Yeah, there's a lot of entitlement among the ghosts.
- [75:51]
B
Yes. Which is funny, but also not that far from real life. I mean, you go back to being an American citizen even. I feel like there's a lot of. Of just inherent entitlement and being like, we deserve these sort of things. But then it's kind of funny, I guess something that stood out to me a little bit here is almost like a libertarian attitude of like, okay, well, I did what I needed to do. And like, I guess, you know, there's something to be said of. You wish it was still an allegory, but you wish you knew what it meant where, you know, the ghost kind of is like saying he did his best and all this. And spirit, the heavenly being is like, you weren't a decent man and you didn't do your best. We. None of us were. None of us did. Lord bless you. It doesn't matter. There is no need to go into it all now. And I'm Like, I wanna know, you know, like, how is he fooling himself? How is he fooling himself?
- [76:45]
A
Well, in a sense, yeah. I mean, in a sense, the theological here undercuts the psychological because in the world of the story, the facts on the ground of who actually did what, they don't matter. Because from the theological perspective of the book, all of that is immaterial, pun intended, to the question. The question here is, will you accept freely God's gift and will you submit to it as, like, someone who is in need of such a gift? Basically? And so he's saying all the rest of that is secondary to that question. Right. And in the context of a binary heaven and hell, that's true. What's so interesting about working with so many of my clients is that I. And they have moved beyond such a binary, and so now we actually have to ask these questions, in a sense. Does that make sense?
- [77:49]
B
Yeah, well. But it's funny, there's an irony. Did you read the preface?
- [77:52]
A
I actually forgot to read the preface. I wanted to drive straight into the book and then I forgot to go back and read the preface.
- [77:58]
B
Well, it's funny because the preface, actually, there were parts of it that I was like, oh, I didn't. I wouldn't have thought this was in the preface because it was parts I remembered or I've looked up in years past. But there's this. I'm gonna. I'm gonna read this one point because.
- [78:09]
A
I think it's relevant, and then we'll wrap up for today.
- [78:12]
B
But he says, I do not think this is Lewis, of course, I do not think that all who choose the wrong roads perish, but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. Some can be put right only by going back till you find the, er. Working on it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot develop into good. And I guess that really, to me speaks more to the existential psychology perspective of. It's not just saying, kind of in the theological perspective, as you're saying, ah, forget about it, forget about it. Just accept and move on. But it's funny. It's like he seems to have this urge to say, you need to take this accountability, take this like. And that's what I mean, it seemed. And that's. How could you not do that in existence? You're saying this. This profound honesty with yourself to go and write the equation. I think that's beautiful. And I think back to. Yeah, my. I think back to math or even it was funny. And an easier picture for me is, like, if you ever do a Sudoku, and then you're on the New York Times app and you're doing, oh, yeah, it's okay.
- [79:20]
A
Go on Sudoku.
- [79:22]
B
Sorry, I'm not Japanese. I said sudoku. Sudoku.
- [79:29]
A
Huge apologies to all our Japanese listeners.
- [79:33]
B
Apologies.
- [79:34]
A
There are zero, I'm sure. Maybe Japanese American.
- [79:37]
B
Well, my partner is partially Japanese American. I'm gonna get slammed. My daughter's.
- [79:44]
A
Partially.
- [79:44]
B
Anyway, I'm sorry, Juni. I'm sorry, but. Okay, you go. And if you're wrong, you. You can't. Yeah, you definitely can't keep going because the numbers are just wrong. And I was like, I mean, yeah, math equation. But for those of us who haven't done algebra since high school.
- [80:00]
A
Well, it makes me think of 12 step. Right.
- [80:01]
B
You.
- [80:02]
A
The. The step of making amends. I would. From. From this perspective, psychologically, it's like, that is a way of taking an honest accounting of your life and reality, including the past. And, you know, there's questions about when do you need to make amends? And within that. Within 12 step, there's like, discernment process about when it would only harm someone to try and make amends to them. You don't do it. And, you know, things like that. But, yeah, it's like. It's like, if you have to. If you have betrayed somebody in some way, you don't. You can't move forward relationally until you apologize for the betrayal. Like, acknowledge it.
- [80:46]
B
Although, don't people believe. Just put it under the rug.
- [80:51]
A
It doesn't work. Right. Yeah. Like, it festers and it doesn't get processed, and it comes out in other ways. Yeah.
- [80:57]
B
All right, man.
- [80:58]
A
Okay. Well, speaking of things festering, we'll bid adieu until next episode, where we are gonna talk about only Chapter 5 and the Episcopal ghost that knocked me off my game for the better part of a week. And I'll get personal. Maybe we'll both get personal.
- [81:17]
B
Incredible.
- [81:18]
A
So thank you so much. This is really fun. Kristen. So people, come back. I think what's gonna happen is this will be out on a Monday, and then this coming Thursday will be part two, and the rest of them will be on Thursdays. So we will see you Thursday. Dear listener, for part two, chapter five of the Great Divorce, Sam.