CS Lewis is one of my favourite authors. I have however noted that few seem to read beyond his most famous works.
I myself love his Till we have faces, rereading it frequently.
The Great Divorce is an interesting idea and is sometimes erroneously used to suggest that Lewis was an universalist - oddly so when even Macdonald sort of repudiates it in the work.
It was not meant as a heavy work of Theology, but also not as completely a fable. The narrator is met by Macdonald who he hails as mentor which imitates Dante meeting Virgil as guide and it ends with a scene reminiscent of the end of Pilgrim's Progress.
It is Lewis' belief that when you try and grasp something then it dissipates. When you are doing a pleasurable activity and you stop to examine why it is pleasurable, it ceases to be so. This is the purpose of myth and fable, to viscerally experience truth which is what is present in the Great Divorce. It is meant as experience, not substance.
In his own words:
"Human intellect is incurably abstract. Pure mathematics is the type of successful thought. Yet the only realities we experience are concrete- this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality. When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma—either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste—or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. You cannot study pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humor while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things? "If only my toothache would stop, I could write another chapter about pain." But once it stops, what do I know about pain?
Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction. At this moment, for example, I am trying to understand something very abstract indeed-the fading, vanishing of tasted reality as we try to grasp it with the discursive reason. Probably I have made heavy weather of it. But if I remind you, instead, of Orpheus and Eurydice, how he was suffered to lead her by the hand but, when he turned round to look at her, she disappeared, what was merely a principle becomes imaginable. You may reply that you never till this moment attached that "meaning" to that myth. Of course not. You are not looking for an abstract "meaning" at all. If that was what you were doing, the myth would be for you no true myth but a mere allegory. You were not knowing, but tasting; but what you were tasting turns out to be a universal principle. The moment we state this principle, we are admittedly back in the world of abstraction. It is only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience the principle concretely. "
