C. S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce" (Part 2) (#377)

Summary

Religion on the Mind

C.S. Lewis’s "The Great Divorce" (Part 2) – Episode #377

Hosts: Dr. Dan Koch (A), Kristen Tiedman (B)
Air Date: February 5, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this Patron-exclusive episode, Dan Koch and Kristen Tiedman continue their deep-dive into C.S. Lewis’s allegory The Great Divorce, focusing exclusively on Chapter 5. They explore Lewis’s depiction of the afterlife and examine the psychological, theological, and existential questions raised—especially as they intersect with themes of personal limits, responsibility, self-deception, and the risks and realities of liberal versus conservative faith. Dan shares personal vulnerability about how closely the chapter’s themes hit home, particularly concerning the possibility of self-deception in his own spiritual journey and work.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Limits, Meaning, and Existential Psychology

(03:55 – 11:39)

• Allegorical Landscape: The episode opens with Dan and Kristen recapping Lewis’s “Gray Town”—a symbolic, purgatorial “hell” where isolation rules and meaning wanes in infinite possibility.
• Limits as Meaning: Dan brings in existential psychology (notably Emmy van Deurzen), arguing that limits (saying "yes" to one thing, "no" to others) give life meaning.
  • “If something is infinite, it’s kind of meaningless. ... Real meaning comes from the sort of yeses that imply other no’s.” – Dan [04:15]
  • Example: The limits and discipline of parenthood, and how boundaries enrich life.
• Boundaries as Discipline: Kristen connects the discussion to Christian notions of discipline and boundaries, noting how saying “no” can serve to both protect the self and “protect the world from you.” [08:33]
• Therapeutic Practice: Dan observes that clients (and he himself) often find clarity and relief when confronted with honest assessments of limitations.
  • “People find it extremely refreshing to be told some cold truth in a kind way, to get a dose of reality as medicine.” – Dan [12:07]

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2. Chapter Five: The Episcopal Ghost & The Nature of Belief

(14:21 – 34:13)

• Plot Setup: In chapter five, “Solid People” (inhabitants of heaven) meet “ghosts” (souls from Gray Town). Each ghost is invited to remain in heaven—but only if willing to let go (of pride, resentment, identity, etc.). The focus is on the “Episcopal Ghost,” a former bishop who treats faith symbolically and avoids commitment to any objective truth.
  • Dan shares how the chapter caught him off guard and provoked deep introspection:

  “Probably the simplest way to say it is, there [are] like six or seven disparate items here, but a couple that were particularly painful for me and a little bit destabilizing. Ultimately, I think in a good way.” – Dan [16:51]

• Self-Deception and Responsibility: Both hosts grapple with the charge that openness, doubt, or non-literal approaches to Christianity could be rationalization or self-deception—dodges that let one evade the difficult realities/limits Lewis asks readers to confront.
  • Kristen: “I have been—there have been people I’m like, I should not tell them what I think... running the risk of being wrong, and how heavy that is.” [21:03]
• ‘Apostate’ Anxiety: Dan acknowledges the emotional punch of being painted—by Lewis and by more conservative readers—as an apostate misleading others, which challenges his sense of integrity around his podcast and worldview evolution:

  “The implication is that I have been perverting my talents, going the wrong direction, and taking a bunch of people with me. That is the kind of, like, scariest idea in here.” – Dan [19:08]

• Literal vs. Allegorical Truth: They critique the neatness of Lewis’s metaphysical bifurcations. The story’s “heaven and hell” are not literal in traditional Christian dogma, making the narrative itself an allegorical construct—but one that, ironically, is suspicious of allegorization.

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3. Memorable Quotes & Notable Moments

On Limits and Meaning

• “[Limits] also protect the world from you...” – Kristen [09:20]
• “In order to be happy [with limitless resources], [billionaires] have to actually find limits within their lives and go, ‘nope, this is what I’m about.’” – Dan [06:36]

On Intellectual Sincerity and Psychological Insight

• On Liberal Christianity:

  “I remain, you know, like, still much more convinced by those liberal Christian ideas than the conservative Christian ideas. But the implication is that I have been perverting my talents, going the wrong direction, and taking a bunch of people with me.” – Dan [19:08]

• Self-Deception Insight:

  “These beliefs are sincere in the sense that they do [occur] as psychological events in the man's mind. ... But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent.” – Episcopal Spirit (quoted by Kristen) [37:26]

• Direct Address:

  "[W]hen in your whole life did you honestly face in solitude the one question on which it all turned? Whether after all the supernatural might not in fact occur.” – Lewis (as the Spirit) [34:41]

On Allegory and Theological Gaslighting

• On biblical literalism and skepticism:

  “I live in 2025. Am I to believe that the only reason, or the main reason that somebody would disbelieve those facts today ... is because we’re trying to get away from our own responsibility to accept Christ and live a good life? I doubt those things, I think, because they seem fucking doubtful.” – Dan [32:49]

• Reaction to Theological Arguments:

  “It feels like gaslighting to call that a lack of faith ... a lack of commitment.” – Dan [36:24]

On The Painful Relevance

• “There are people in my life who love me, who think that this is what has happened to me ... because I have let every half conscious solicitation from my desires affect my ability to think clearly. And that’s really the ultimate argument against liberal Christianity ...” – Dan [38:52]

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• 03:55–11:39: Limits, boundaries, and why “infinite possibility” is allegorical hell
• 14:21–17:58: “Solid People” meet the ghosts: letting go as the key to entering heaven
• 17:58–22:00: Dan’s personal reckoning with Lewis’s challenge to liberal Christianity
• 23:27–24:08: Metaphysical reality of heaven and hell: literal vs. hopeful agnostic takes
• 29:57–34:13: Apostates, self-deception, and the challenge to modern/liberal Christians
• 34:13–41:00: Gaslighting, biblical literalism, and genuine psychological self-deception

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Flow & Tone Notes

• Dan and Kristen's approach is self-aware, often vulnerable, and candidly existential.
• Their analysis is intellectually honest, refusing to simply “debunk” or dismiss Lewis, but openly wrestling with the ways his insights both illuminate and critique their own spiritual journeys.
• Conversational, sometimes irreverent—Dan’s occasional swearing and the friendly “inside baseball” tone add authenticity.
• The discussion seamlessly ties in therapeutic frameworks and lived experience, grounding abstract theology in everyday reality and self-inquiry.

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Useful for Listeners Who Haven’t Read or Heard

• Explains the literary and psychological devices at work in The Great Divorce.
• Illuminates the emotional and existential “sting” for modern Christians—especially those in deconstructing or liberal contexts.
• Supplies direct textual analysis and quotes, bringing the source text alive.
• Surfaces the paradox of faith journeys: balancing humility, integrity, and the ever-present possibility of self-deception.

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Final Note

For listeners navigating the boundaries of belief, tradition, and personal conscience, this episode brings C. S. Lewis’s allegory squarely into the 21st-century lived experience—raising vital questions about the costs and consequences of honesty, change, and faith.

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To hear the remainder of this candid conversation (including answers to “What do we do with all this?”), join the Religion on the Mind Patreon.

Transcript

[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 Patron special episode and a great divorce series special episode of Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist, again joined by Kristen Tiedman. My would you say you're my fellow bus passenger on this great divorce journey?

[B]

All aboard the bus.

[A]

All aboard. All aboard the cosmic heaven bus. So just a brief reminder, we are hopefully in four parts covering C.S. lewis's great divorce. This is a book that we have both realized we're quite interested in and pretty important in our own lives. A lot to really love about it. Also some stuff to push back on. You don't have to love the book yourself to enjoy these conversations. You don't necessarily have to read it, but it is a short read. It's about a two hour read and there's probably even a free version you can find online or at least very cheap versions if you want to read along with us. But today we are talking just about chapter five, because chapter five kind of threw a stick into the spokes of my life, I would say, and I'm planning to get fairly honest about that today, but also curious what it will have brought up for you. Kristen there's one idea that we didn't get to last time from chapters one through four that I thought was just an interesting element that we can also connect to chapter five. So let's talk about that first before we get into the plot. But A brief recap. C.S. lewis's narrator wakes up in this place called the Gray Town, which is sort of a purgatorial pre hell in this allegory that Lewis is writing. And again, it's not really like Dante's Inferno where he sort of here's what it's like, but it's, it's more poetic, allegorical, you know, it's like more real and more what he thinks than like probably Narnia is. But it's, but it's somewhere in between those. And so the narrator wakes up in this place. It's like this purgatorial hell is infinitely spacious. Everybody moves apart from each other, they avoid each other, they are isolated, they're all grumbling victims. And then they this bus periodically takes people up to heaven and gives them the chance to sort of decide to turn their lives around and accept God's grace and salvation. Right. So one of the ideas that I wanted to talk about that we didn't get to is this doesn't work as well for heaven, but it works really well for hell. So I want to talk about it early hell as essentially infinitely spacious and limitless. That's the way that Lewis describes this purgatorial hell. And Emmy van der Zen, the existential psychologist who I'm reading right now, she brings up this concept, which is very common in existential psychology and also a lot of other therapists who don't label as existentialist would share this, that limits are actually what gives things meaning for human beings. If something is infinite, it's kind of meaningless. If you just say yes to everything. Then you might find meaning in some of it. You certainly might find enjoyment. But real meaning comes from the sort of yeses that imply other no's. So a lifelong relationship with your children, for instance, is a big yes. That includes a bunch of no's. You're basically like, look, I am saying yes to a huge chunk of my time and energy for the rest of my life being dedicated to you and the stuff that's going on with you. And that is a real limit on other things. You know, you asked me, we didn't get to this last time. You asked me if all my friends are talking about the trips that they're going on, all their travel. And what I was gonna say was, oh, yeah, you just had your first kid. You haven't. So, like, you haven't transitioned to the era where everyone's just talking about their kids all the time, because that's what's top of mind. Because when you have young kids, that's just where your brain goes. Right. But, like, the idea of, yeah, you have kids, you stop taking so many trips. You're choosing one thing over the other. And so there's something really psychologically rich about this allegorical idea that a lack of limits has a kind of a sheen to it. Indefinite funds to buy whatever you want. But what do we know about people who end up with indefinite funds? Do they become happy? No, that's like a. It's not even a character. It's not even like. That's not like a common wives tale. Like, no, no, no. These billionaires are not happy. Like, they have to. In order to be happy, they have to actually find limits within their lives and go, nope, this is what I'm about. I'm gonna do this. And so that's an idea that I was sad we didn't get to. And I thought that will eventually kind of tie in with the Episcopal ghost here, but wanted to get your take on that.

[B]

Yeah, well, there's something. I mean, I feel like this has gone somewhat hand in hand with my Christian upbringing as well, in the concept of discipline and knowing. Yeah. That you say. I mean, I was in many ways good at saying no as a little bit of a goody two shoes. And I mean, there's. First of all, there's some safety to be found in that, to be sure. And if you're trying, you know, if you're trying to follow the straight and narrow, as we kind of discussed, you also find it rewarding. But in my newer understanding, I think I still value discipline. I'm not seeing it for necessarily rewards that are heavenly as much as more immediate, of course, for this worldly.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I really liked what you said, you know, in the last time we talked in talking about chapters one through four about that narrow road. I really am like, you know, it's kind of been a while since I've even talked about that. A lot of times I think about the Robert Frost, like the two roads diverge in a wooden. But I'm like, oh, yeah, this is a biblical concept, too. But something I've heard, and I think that plays into this is it's not just a limit on what you have in terms of being like. We talk about boundaries and boundaries. A lot of times you say it protects you from things outside. But something I heard recently that I think fits more in the concept of discipline is it also protects the world from you. And I think that's something we kind of see more here is if you say, I don't engage in conversations like this, well, then you're less likely to blow up, you know, or I don't. I don't do it this way. And I found that kind of novel, but very fitting in the context of the Great Divorce. It's like these people want it their way. It's very Frank Sinatra. I did it my way I did it my way no matter what anyone else said, the pride component is huge. And you can tell that Lewis has a lot of. Not animosity, he's just not pride. He sees this major downfall. I mean, I was even reading. There's another book. Have you ever read the book he wrote called Christian Behavior?

[A]

No, I never even heard of it.

[B]

I don't think I hadn't either. And I was just kind of looking through stuff.

[A]

Not a major work of C.S. lewis.

[B]

No, it's not in the. It's not in the 101 or the. It's the Deep Cuts, I'd say. But it seems.

[A]

Silmarillion of Lewis. Yeah.

[B]

Yes, exactly. That's so funny. Beau just read the Hobbit and then he was talking about the Silmarillion. But, yeah, I. Otherwise I wouldn't have caught that reference, but I was he. It kind of seems to talk more straightforwardly. Less, of course, allegorically about virtues and things like that and Lewis's hatred of pride. But, yeah, I guess I would say. Is that hard to swallow when you're talking to clients? The kind of. I feel like now we. I mean, it's.

[A]

What? Hard to swallow.

[B]

The limit. Sorry. The Limits, like discussing limits and taking them on, because there's a responsibility in that, too. Or is that something that people who are eager for change seem willing to try?

[A]

I would say so. I'm pretty early on in applying that specific language in client situations. Been a recent thing that, because I'm reading about it, it comes up and I will sometimes, even if appropriate, be like, you're a little guinea pig on this. Are you okay with this? And, like, I kind of want to bring. I'm thinking of bringing this in. Or I'll just say I'm thinking of bringing in this concept that I've been working with with some other clients. I'll briefly explain it, and then I'll ask them, like, what do you think? Do you think that feels applicable? And I'm like, 10 for 10. I mean, it's like when I explain the basic idea of, like, what I'd like to do here with you is to kind of help you map out the actual limitations of your life and the world as are related to the stuff that we're working on, whether that's relational or career or sex life or whatever. The thing is anxiety, you know, it can apply all over the place. People are like, so far, it's anecdotal, but my client experience is like, hell, yeah, bring it on. Like, people find it. And van der Zen says this too, in her book. She says, we may have a little bit of. I'm paraphrasing. We may have a little fear of sort of speaking so starkly to our clients. And part of us is trained to just be empathic and come alongside them. And that is a part of it. She's like, but honestly, people find it extremely refreshing to be told some cold truth in a kind way to get a dose of reality as medicine, basically. And I would say thus far, that's my experience. There's probably a type of client who's maybe more acuity, sort of less of their life is sorted out where that's not the right approach or something. But generally, I've been pleasantly surprised. And I'll say internally, I find it when I apply it to myself, as I've been trying to do, it's bracing and harsh, but immediately seems to show the benefits. Like, as soon as you're really honest about something, it was painful for a second, and then you're like, fuck, why didn't I say that years ago? Why couldn't I have acknowledged that years ago? Yeah, that's the truth of it. And so I do think it kind of kind of argues for itself in practice. That's my thumbnail sketch.

[C]

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[B]

Experian. Well, I have thoughts about this related to chapter five, but.

[A]

Well, okay, yeah, let's bring them in. Okay.

[B]

Tee it up, Dan.

[A]

Yeah, tee it up. All right, so basically the Solid People in chapter five, the inhabitants of Heaven are now meeting the ghosts. They appear to have known each other in life and they are having these conversations sort of post mortem. And each ghost is sort of invited to stay by a particular spirit. That's the Solid People. But for each of them it would require some change. It's usually some sort of letting go. Resentment, pride, identity, self justification, self deception. The Solid People are like kind and patient, but they're firm, like this is actually what it would require. And the ghosts react in different ways. Defensiveness, mockery, intellectualization, suspicion. But mostly it's a conversation in this chapter between this Episcopal ghost and his buddy. And he's he is this former bishop who speaks warmly about Christianity but treats it entirely as symbolic, provisional, endlessly discussable rather than like objectively true in any way. He loves theological conversation. He prizes open mindedness and he reframes God, Christ and Heaven as like ideas or myths that express human values. But he refuses to embrace the realness of these claims to a really significant degree of self deception and therefore is unable to enter heaven. And I'll just start by saying this chapter hit me like a gut punch. I had to stop reading at one point, kind of sit with it for a while. I had a couple conversations with my wife and trusted friends and what I tried to do over that few day period where I was really sitting with it was like, slow down, get curious. I reread it a second and third time and I'll probably be reading a lot more from the text today than in general because there are particular quotes and stuff. There were a lot of things in here. Probably the simplest way to say it is there like six or seven disparate items here, but a couple that were particularly painful for me and a little bit destabilizing. Ultimately, I think in a good way. It's in the spirit of what we've been talking about, of trying to look at things honestly and take stock, that it is good for me to work through this. In effect, a lot of my clients have to work through something very similar to what I'm working through with this chapter, which maybe we can. I'll make some of those connections as we go. But, yeah, I sort of texted you this, but I haven't given you.

[B]

You haven't told me. I know. I'm so curious.

[A]

So what are you most curious about or where do you want to start? I've been talking a lot.

[B]

I can imagine. I think that I have currently, personally, a bit of somehow emotional distance enough so that it didn't impact me in a way that I think at points in my life, it could have hit me. It sounds like a similar way. Like, I imagine I know some of the points where it hit you, but I. And in the future, it could hit me again and maybe, who knows, maybe it'll happen in the course of this conversation. But I want to know what specific points hit you and why and what did that feel like?

[A]

Okay, I'll start zoomed out and then we can zoom in. So zoomed out. The implication that hit me hardest was read a certain way. This is saying that as a liberal Christian who has found liberal forms and understandings of Christianity to be both more plausible and more real, like more realistic, more plausible, and also more convincing to me that who then. And this is where it gets harder, decided to start a podcast and, like, broadcast conversations about this to other people in a way that I understood to be helping them the way that these ideas had helped me. This is before therapy. So this is before I'm, you know, I'm not. I don't have that kind of clinical helper profession going. This is. I'm doing it as an intellectual and communication exercise. And I genuinely believe that to have been good and helpful work. Many people have told me how helpful it was.

[B]

But now, you know, you're going to hell.

[A]

I remain, you know, like, still much more convinced by those liberal Christian ideas than the conservative Christian ideas. But the implication is that I have been perverting my talents, going the wrong direction, and taking a bunch of people with me. That is the kind of, like, scariest idea in here. And I said earlier, this is related to client work. This is directly related to client work. Even though most of my clients are not themselves Podcasters or authors or whatever, it's the same, well, what's true and what can I trust? And should I stick with the worldview I was given, which greatly resembles the worldview of the great Divorce, or should I trust myself? And what I'm noticing about, like, I need to move beyond this. The fruit of this tree is bad, I think. And to complicate it, there are passages in here where he describes self deception that I think are psychologically very astute. So the question, though, the larger question is I have deceived myself. When I read the parts, we'll get to them about self deception, I can point to areas of my life where that's true, but the most disturbing implication is that that's true about this whole project. Does that make sense?

[B]

Absolutely. And I think, Dan, first of all, I feel for you, because I would feel exactly the same way if I had my own podcast with.

[A]

If you were as famous as me.

[B]

Thousands and thousands of listeners.

[A]

Let's not a couple thousand maybe, where we're at these days. Let's be realistic.

[B]

But I mean, even at a lower level, I have been. There have been people that I'm like, I should not tell them what I think, who are still more like, evangelically orthodox, where I should be like, oh, I shouldn't tell them because I might convince them. And so. And I just, you know, like, for. Yeah, in one hand, I don't want to destabilize their life because they're probably happy, but another one is, like, running the risk of being wrong and how heavy that is. And I mean, Jesus. Well, in the New Testament, I don't know if it was Jesus, but there are heavy words. I think it was Paul, actually, for people who were teaching things that were false. And that is scary. But at the same time, this whole component of trusting yourself, it's what I mean, this is where it's. Well, there's. There's a couple parts. I do. I do want to actually read that.

[A]

Why don't we go. Why don't we. Look, I've given you. That's the headline. Let's go through it.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Kind of.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Through the text and, you know, go with the ideas that we like. The first thing I have written down is literal heaven and hell. I don't know if you want to start there. That's on the second page.

[B]

Well, yes. And so, I mean. Well, that's. So we have the Episcopalian priest who says he's talking to the real spirit, the heavenly person, the giant, if you will. Why my Dear boy, you were coming to believe in a literal heaven and hell. And then he responds, but wasn't I right? Oh, in a spiritual sense, to be sure. I still believe in them in that way. I am still, my dear boy, looking for the kingdom, but nothing superstitious or mythological. And so, I mean, and then the guy's like, well, where do you think you've been? But I. I mean, this is something we're wrestling with in this whole thing. Like, this is an allegory. Which is kind of funny because even there's a component of Lewis saying, well, this might not be how it is, and there's an intellect. I mean, listen, you know about intellectual humility more than most, dare I say. But you also. It's what you're legitimately. Well, it's what you're convinced. You're convinced you can't say. Like, again, it's this. You're not going to take this dogmatic approach. You're not against heaven and hell, or at least the conditional immortality, I would say.

[A]

I think that I don't have a moral problem with conditional immortality, annihilationism, if that's God's, what God chooses to do. Because I don't think that human. Most humans do not deserve an afterlife. So it's not unjust for us to not get one. I think there are a subset of. Of human lives that are so bad that they do kind of deserve something like an afterlife, but it's not a very. I wouldn't assume it's a very big percentage. It's certainly not true of my life. I don't deserve an afterlife. You know, I don't. Nothing like that. So, yeah, that. That's not so much. That's not so much the rub for me.

[B]

So with this, I mean. But you. But you also. Okay, I had asked this last episode. I don't know if this has changed since episodes I've heard in the past, but, like, metaphysically reality. You don't find yourself super convinced of heaven and hell?

[A]

No, I really hope for it. So, okay, let's get into this first idea. So, yeah, the idea is this unfashionableness of belief in a literal heaven and hell, which is what the Episcopal ghost is expressing, if you put it in Paul Tillich's language or something, who is the type of theologian that this Episcopal ghost would have been, you know, reading or into or whatever. And maybe some atillic stuff would have come out after this. But, you know, roughly, in this world of thought, you know, Tilich's trying To, like, save Christianity from, like, too much mythology. Like, he thinks it will sort of die if we can't. He wanted to rescue it from that. Now, you know, that may have been right or wrong, but there's a little bit of a gaslighting tone.

[B]

I was going to say gaslighting.

[A]

All right, so I don't wanna pile on. I'm trying to do a difficult thing here, which is to acknowledge that I do have stuff to look at. Obviously, I don't wanna just come away from this conversation being like, see, CS Lewis is wrong and I'm right. That would be. I think that would be incurious and probably insufficiently intellectually humble. But I think there's a little sleight of hand here. No regularly trained Christian in 1945 would have recognized the Grey Town as a literal hell. Right. Like, there's no. It's not. It's nothing like the Inferno, Dante's Inferno, which is full of people in constant pain and suffering. People were aware of Dante's Inferno at this time. It's hard to imagine the Episcopal ghost showing up in Dante's Inferno and describing it as containing, quote, a continual hope of mourning. M O R N I N G. Right. Like, he's in a weird purgatorial place. So it is now, maybe the ghost should know that where his buddy is living is literal heaven. But he hasn't seen that yet either. He's in this forest, which is a long travel away from heaven, actual, like, you know, the new heavens and the new earth or whatever. So there's a little bit of like, the spirit is saying, well, aren't you experiencing it right now, a literal heaven and hell? And I'm kind of like, well, would he have recognized it as that? Like, it's actually like the whole point of the Great Divorce. What makes it interesting is that it is not a literal heaven in hell. In the same way, maybe heaven's literal, but hell's not literal in the same way that we would have thought about it, that people in Lewis's time would have thought about it. So that's one thing.

[B]

This is something. I'm going to have trouble articulating this, so maybe you'll be able to clarify. But this is something that stood out to me in a new way reading this time around, is that there's simultaneously an extreme emphasis on God and Jesus being the answer and just accepting. And also them completely not showing up as characters, nor any discussing, like, of really the Bible, even itself, which is kind of funny.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it's Very abstracted from the experience of, like, I almost want to say, being an evangelical and, like, sermons and Bible studies and, like, praying. It's just like a very. It's a vague acceptance of this better world that is just guaranteed to be better. And you have to take, like, the spirits as reliable narrators, you know, and like that in this. In the context of the story. Yeah, but then it is. It is the kind of thing where it's like, you know, and you're taking Lewis as, like, you know, by default, then as like, he's, you know, trying to be as reliable as possible. Obviously, he think he intentionally keeps heaven at a distance because it can't be described. And he even says in the previous chapter, and I don't think I'm gonna be able to capture the quality of it. Like, he kind of gives himself any out he would need in that regard. He doesn't actually deal with that tough material. So that's. It's really hard because you have to just accept the. That they are trying their best, that they're actually right again, in the allegorical sense, because it's. I mean. But also the other thing we should remember is CS Lewis was a layperson, a theological layperson, not a theologian. He taught literature. And that is something, for being almost canon, as you said last episode within evangelicalism. He was not trained in the same way, which I'm not 100%. I'm not against him doing theology. I'm not saying that. That, you know, but it's also. It comes with certain ramifications, I would say, and this is one of them where it's actually really, really soft theology. It's kind of acceptance is the only thing, and the pride is the only thing in the way, or the lack of ability to. Or lack of desire to take accountability. So I. So I felt that gaslighting side. But you kind of have to ignore that. The insinuation is that the Spirit, the heavenly Spirit, is just saying the truth, you know, like, there's two things you can look at here. It's like, okay, we can look at the psychological position of the apostate.

[A]

Gosh, that word. That word hit me. That was tough.

[B]

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's. Well, yeah, the word in the chapter, you're an apostate. But then you. You kind of have to.

[A]

Which also I believe is not. Is not. I guess there's a way, like, I think that the apostate thing, I can get my head around. And ultimately I could get my head around what Lewis is saying here. Like, ultimately, you know, to sort of take a little bit of the sting out here before we go to the patron. Only part of the episode, like what he's ultimately saying that this Episcopal ghost has done is he's used the fashionable language and sort of allegoricizing. What is the phrase for that? How's it.

[B]

What's the verb?

[A]

Turning Christianity into an allegory?

[B]

Is it an allegory?

[A]

Yeah, turning Christianity into an allegory. He's used that as a way to sort of postpone making real choices and like, actually looking at himself. Like, he has chosen to use this as a way to postpone an honest look at his own self and the world. Right. So in that sense, I'm fine with that. But yeah, I think people do need to. We talked about that last time. Owning up to reality, making a map of your actual self and life. That's great. So that part is okay. But. But it's the. It's the middle meat of the sandwich. It's the way he does it that was so tough for me. Like, like, I want to talk about this, this, this phrase, this phrase. Nothing superstitious or mythological quote. And this also feels a little gaslighting to me. Gaslighting esque to me because. Okay, here, here's a way to frame it. The authors of the Bible believed the following things, okay? They believed that the universe was a three tiered system of earth on the bottom or, sorry, earth in the middle, some stuff below, and then above, like maybe hell or Hades or Sheol or something is down below. And then up above is the firmament and the heavens. And like, so everything up is godly and good. Like that's where God literally is. And down is bad. Okay? They believed that. They believed that if sin was committed, that the God of the creator, God of the universe required animal blood to be shed in order to be appeased. Okay? Other things they believed. Israelites believed that Yahweh specifically wanted their enemies to be destroyed and for them to do well, including, when necessary, the death of women and children, even who had done nothing wrong up to the third or fourth generation, okay? Of people who didn't do anything. The people, like the people of the New Testament believed that, like, nobody who wrote the Bible actually saw slavery as like, something that they needed to outright condemn. Okay? So these are things that they believe. They believed that the universe was 6,000 years old. They believed that people in olden times lived to be a thousand years old before the flood. These are just facts, okay? And I live in 2025. Am I to believe that the only reason, or the main reason that somebody would disbelieve those facts today and would consider those to be something like superstitious or mythological, that the only reason that we would believe that is because we're trying to get away from our own responsibility to accept Christ and live a good life? I doubt those things, I think because they seem fucking doubtful. The ascension of Jesus up like a rocket ship to disappear into the clouds makes sense on a three tiered cosmology. It doesn't make sense in the solar system. Like it doesn't. So you can say it's poetic or allegorical and then once you say that, oh, you mean like mythological. So fuck you.

[B]

But Dan, let's be frank. Your opinion was not honestly come by. You simply found yourself in contrast with certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At college, you know, you just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When in your whole life did you honestly face in solitude the one question on which it all turned? Whether after all the supernatural might not in fact occur.

[A]

Yeah, this idea of whether like he, he is pinning it on the fact of miracles and the supernatural kind of a thing. And that hurts because I don't disbelieve in miracles because, you know, I don't know, like I lack, I don't think it's because I lack faith or, or whatever. I look at the way the world actually goes and I think, well, if there are miracles, they are so, so oddly distributed as to be kind of like you can't make sense of it. If God, you know, if there's like a, if God has the ability to just sort of do whatever God wants, breaking the laws of physics, like putting thoughts in people's heads, whatever, then there's like a whole lot of times where like tons of suffering, needless suffering could be averted if God just told put a little thought in 5,000 farmers heads before a giant tsunami was going to come kill them, their families, wipe away all their possessions. Hey, maybe go visit your uncle this weekend. You know, like it wouldn't take much, you know what I mean? That doesn't happen. Does not appear to be the world we live in. And if we need some sort of psychological explanation for why someone might say something is a miracle, like we have a lot of options to choose from. Like it's not hard to come up with how we might get there. It's like, and so it feels like Gaslighting. To call that a lack of faith or something, or a lack of commitment.

[B]

Well, and also to say it wasn't intellectually honest. I think that was the part that was hard for me, is that I. Now I'm gonna read one other little part, obviously, for those who didn't know I was obviously reading. But putting it in second person to Dan. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, you did?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He's actually saying we in.

[B]

Yeah, he's saying we because they were comrades, friends in the. Whatever, Episcopalian or just, I don't know, intellectual buddies. But there's a section kind of right after that where like. Cause the one guy's like, well, these were my honest opinions, sincerely expressed. And the heavenly spirit says, of course, having allowed oneself to drift unresistingly, unprayingly accepting every half conscious. This is the pastation, okay? Every half consciousness. From our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the 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. These beliefs are sincere in the sense that they do not occur as psychological events in the man's mind.

[A]

They do occur as psychological events in the man's mind. So they're sincere. They are real thoughts that the person's having.

[B]

Yeah, it's what you mean by. Since if that's what you mean by sincerity, they are sincere and so are ours. But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent.

[A]

Yeah, this is. This is why the chapter was hard, because there is some deep psychological insight in this paragraph. When he talks about, like. This is basically. I see it as a. It's a passage about self deception. Self deception. We've been talking about existential therapy. Let's talk about cognitive therapy for a second. Let's talk about cognitive psychology. The power of our minds to interpret the data of our senses and our life in ways that distort reality is immense. Cognitive therapy works only on cognition because that's how fucking powerful cognition is. And by cognition, I mean interpretation. So we really can live in mental prisons of our own making. We can tell ourselves totally untrue stories that put ourselves at the center. I mean, this is a part of the victimhood mindset we were talking about in part one. Our minds really can do this. Louis is right about that. So I think it's actually like smuggling in this deep psychological truth around a bunch of, like, kind of theological fluffy shit that makes it so painful. But also, it's like, I know that there are people in my life who love me, who think that this is what has happened to me. And they think that this is why I am a liberal Christian, barely hanging on to Christianity is because I have, I have let every half conscious solicitation from my desires affect my ability to think clearly. And that's really the ultimate, that's the ultimate argument against liberal Christianity from conservative Christianity is you just want to go the way of the world. You want to justify your sinful desires, so you accept a God that demands less of you. That's the argument.

[B]

Well, what do we do with this, Dan?

[A]

I mean, I'm curious what you think. I have an answer.

[B]

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