Feature
Choosing Our Own Destiny
George MacDonald & C. S. Lewis on Rights, Duties, Heaven
& Hell
In January of 1939 C. S. Lewis wrote to a friend that he had just finished one of George MacDonald’s later novels, What’s Mine’s Mine, first published in 1886, and called it the fourth greatest book he had ever read. Lewis asserted in several places in his writings that MacDonald was his literary master, and after reading this comment, I was struck with the similarity of the title to what I believed to be the theme of Lewis’s The Great Divorce, written just five years after he read MacDonald’s novel: giving up all of one’s rights and thereby saying to God, “Thy will be done,” as the only way to obtain Heaven.
The word “rights” appears at least twenty-five times in The Great Divorce and at least fifty times in What’s Mine’s Mine. Could there be a link between these two works?
There are several striking resemblances. For example, in both books it is through dreams that the main characters learn spiritual truths. In both, the characters must learn that becoming like Christ is painful. And in both, some characters show that pride, intellect, physical beauty, gossip, and even motherly love can and often do usurp God’s place in our lives. And, as readers of The Great Divorce will remember, the most important words in that book are given by George MacDonald. Here I will concentrate on one similarity between these two books: their view of individual or personal rights and their effect on our relation to God.
Briefly put, The Great Divorce uses the idea of the Refrigerium, offered by the Church Father Prudentius: the speculation that the damned are given holidays or excursions. The souls in Hell—described as a dreary, rainy, depressed gray town—have a choice either to go back to earth to play tricks on “poor daft women ye call mediums” (and most do indeed choose earth as their destination) or to take a bus to what we might call Heaven’s depot or outpost—which is not deep Heaven itself, however.
Lewis was, by the way, careful in the preface to the book to beg readers to remember that the story is “a fantasy” and the picture of Heaven and Hell “solely an imaginative supposal” that did not say anything about the details of the next life. As the book’s guide tells the narrator: “Do not fash yourself with such questions. Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both. And ye were not brought here to study such curiosities. What concerns you is the nature of the choice itself.”
The Ghosts’ Choice
The soul who chooses to come to Heaven’s depot is met by the “Bright Spirit” of someone he or she had known on earth, someone whose abode is deep Heaven, one who is “in” love, one who lives in the presence of God. Sent as Godbearers to the damned, these Bright Spirits confront the ghosts with the choice to keep their pet sin and return to Hell or to reject it and stay in Heaven. In contrast to the insubstantial ghosts who find it extremely painful to walk on Heaven’s soft grass, the Bright Spirits shake the very earth upon which they walk.
One such meeting occurs between a “Big Ghost” and a Bright Spirit named Len. Len had worked in the Big Ghost’s factory and murdered a fellow employee named Jack. He has now been sent from deep Heaven to assist the Big Ghost on his journey to joy, if the ghost will only accept such aid.
Throughout the conversation, the Big Ghost keeps repeating the word rights. After all, he declares, he was a good man: “I always done my best and I never done nothing wrong. And what I don’t see is why I should be put below a bloody murderer like you, Len.” He declares that he deserves to be in a better place than the gray town, for he was a decent man, one who never took any charity and always worked for what he got.
Over and over the ghost demands his rights, constantly refusing Len’s plea that he accept what he calls “the Bleeding Charity.” The Big Ghost ends the conversation shouting, “I came here to get my rights, see? Not to go sniveling along on charity tied onto your apron strings. If they’re too fine to have me without you, I’ll go home.” And he does.
Charles E. Bressler is a professor of English at Houghton College and has written several books, including Literary Criticism: Introduction to Theory and Practice (Pearson Education) and a forthcoming book entitled Of Welcome and Wonder, on the literary and spiritual influences of George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton on C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other Oxford Christians.
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