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The Great Divorce
Apr. 20th, 2025 12:12 pmThis is super long, so I'm putting my notes from the book behind a cut, but I did want to include my favorite bit first:
[The context is the book's narrator having a dialogue with heavenly being George McDonald about hell]
If they leave that Gray town behind it will not have been hell. To any that leaves it is purgatory. And perhaps you had never better not call this country heaven. Not deep heaven you understand. You can call it the valley of the shadow of life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been heaven from the first period and you can call those sad streets in the town Yonder the valley of the shadow of death: but to those who remain there they will have been in hell from the beginning.
That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, no future bliss can make up for it, not knowing that heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some simple pleasurable so let me but have this and I'll take the consequence, little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of heaven; The bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises there and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the blessed will say we have never lived anywhere except in heaven and the lost we were always in hell. And both will speak truly.
( Read more... )
[The context is the book's narrator having a dialogue with heavenly being George McDonald about hell]
If they leave that Gray town behind it will not have been hell. To any that leaves it is purgatory. And perhaps you had never better not call this country heaven. Not deep heaven you understand. You can call it the valley of the shadow of life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been heaven from the first period and you can call those sad streets in the town Yonder the valley of the shadow of death: but to those who remain there they will have been in hell from the beginning.
That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, no future bliss can make up for it, not knowing that heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some simple pleasurable so let me but have this and I'll take the consequence, little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of heaven; The bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises there and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the blessed will say we have never lived anywhere except in heaven and the lost we were always in hell. And both will speak truly.
( Read more... )
