The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
Week 9: Chapter 8 — George MacDonald Appears
Read Chapter 8 of The Great Divorce.
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The narrator's guide finally reveals himself — the great Scottish writer George MacDonald — and begins to answer the deepest and most difficult questions the narrator has been accumulating.
Discussion Questions
6 questions1.Lewis chooses George MacDonald as the narrator's Virgil-figure (in the tradition of Dante's Divine Comedy). What does Lewis's choice of MacDonald — a nineteenth-century writer known for his fantasy and his unorthodox but deeply felt Christianity — tell us about the kind of spiritual wisdom Lewis is honoring in this book?
2.The narrator has been troubled throughout by the encounters he's witnessed — the refusals seem so sad and so final. MacDonald's first task is to address this distress. He begins by explaining that the choice between Heaven and Hell is always and already being made, not suddenly revealed at death. How does this re-frame the moral urgency of ordinary life?
3.MacDonald explains that there are only two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'Thy will be done.' Lewis called this one of the most important lines in the whole book. What does it mean? How does it address the question of whether God sends people to Hell?
a.Does this framing make Hell seem more or less just to you? Why?
b.How does it connect to the nature of human freedom as Lewis understands it?
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