Christians Reading Classics
Christians Reading Classics
C.S. Lewis - The Great Divorce with Dr. Leslie Baynes
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Nadya Williams and Dr. Leslie Baynes explore the works of C.S. Lewis, particularly focusing on 'The Great Divorce.' They discuss the definition of a classic, the significance of free will, and the themes of choice and divine grace in Lewis's writing. The conversation also touches on Lewis's influences, his relationships with women, and the timeless messages found in his works that resonate with modern readers. Additionally, Dr. Baynes shares insights about her upcoming book on Lewis and the Bible.
Chapters
Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at http://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.
Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships
Hey, this is Ian. I'm the producer for Christians Reading Classics. Here at Mere Orthodoxy, our mission is to create thoughtful media for the renewal of the church and culture. That includes this podcast, along with other podcasts, daily articles, a print journal, an online community, and more. Mere Orthodoxy and all of our projects are supported by readers and listeners just like you. 2026 is looking like it will be the most exciting year in Mere Orthodoxy's 20-year history. But we need your help to make it happen. If you enjoy this podcast, want to see it continue, and partner with us to create even more resources like this. You can make that happen by becoming a member. Go to Mereorthodoxy.com slash member to partner with us. That's Mereorthodoxy.com slash member. Let's renew minds and restore hope for the good of the church and the culture. Go to Mereorthodoxy.com slash member today.
SPEAKER_02The year saw the appearance of That Hideous Strength, the concluding portion of his ransom trilogy. And in the same year, Lewis published a shorter, well, compared to That Hideous Strength work of fiction, The Great Divorce. While That Hideous Strength was all about marriage, The Great Divorce was, well, about divorce. We're speaking spiritually, at least in part. The premise of this book? A bus ride from hell to heaven. Here's how Lewis himself opens this book. I seemed to be standing in a busy queue by the side of a long mean street. Evening was just closing in and it was raining. I had been wandering for hours in similar mean streets, always in the rain and always in evening twilight. Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up, and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering. And just as the evening never advanced to light tonight, so my walking had never brought me to the better parts of town. However far I went, I found only dingy lodging houses, small tobacconists, hoardings from which posters hung in rags, windowless warehouses, good stations without trains, and bookshops of the sort that sell the works of Aristotle. I never met anyone. But for the little crowd at the bus stop, the whole town seemed to be empty. I think that was why I attached myself to the queue. Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mir Orthodoxy. I am Nadia Williams, books editor at Mirror Orthodoxy, and interim director of the Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Ashland University. Today I have the privilege of talking with Dr. Leslie Baines. She is Associate Professor of New Testament and Second Temple Judaism in the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Religions at Missouri State University. And she has a book on C.S. Lewis coming this fall, titled Between Interpretation and Imagination, C.S. Lewis and the Bible. It will be here from Erdman's Publishing on November 4th. So you can pre-order your own copy now or add this to your list for Santa. It is not every day that one meets someone with Dr. Bain's breadth of interest and expertise. So thank you for joining today. Thank you so much for having me. It's truly a pleasure to be here. All right, I'm going to ask you all the difficult questions because, like, you're the expert. So this season of the podcast focuses on literary classics with a significant anniversary this year. And so before we get to the Great Divorce specifically, I want to open with a more abstract question that I've been asking every guest. What is a classic? Like, is it enough that we're reading this particular book 80 years after publication? Or what other criteria would you add?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think the fact that we are reading it 80 years after publication does say something really good for it. It has stood the test of time. And that is definitely one definition of a classic. But there are other things that may be personal to me or that maybe other people have thought of too. To me, a classic is something that you can read and reread and reread over and over and over again and still get something new out of it at every rereading. This is something that I have found with all of C.S. Lewis's works. And The Great Divorce is one of my favorites of his work. I don't like the idea of favorite in general because I don't like the ranking. I like all kinds of things. But the great divorce is definitely up there. And I can give a specific example. I am teaching a course on C.S. Lewis this semester at Missouri State University, so I'm rereading again. I started reading The Great Divorce as I was thinking about this probably when I was 15 or 16, definitely before I entered college. So I have been reading this book for more years than I am going to uh divulge here on this podcast. And when I was rereading it this semester, I found still more in it. I am also teaching Lewis's stupendous essay, The Weight of Glory, which many people think should rank up with some of the greatest sermons ever preached in the history of Christianity, you know, along with John Chrysostom, Augustine, whoever else you want to add to that list. And the weight of glory talks about luminosity. It talks about glory as being fame, and it talks about glory as being luminosity or glowing, as Lewis puts it, if I remember correctly, like a light bulb, which he finds rather off-putting at first. And then he begins to think about it. And after reading The Weight of Glory with my students last week, I was rereading The Great Divorce in preparation for this podcast and in preparation to teach it to my students again. And I really noticed the language of glowing and the imagery of glowing in the Great Divorce. So all the years that I have read this book, over and over and over again, I can still make new connections and still see new things. I also teach New Testament. I teach two classes of New Testament every semester. And one of the things I've seen with my students over and over again is that when they read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Synoptic Gospels, they do not pay much attention to the transfiguration of Jesus, where Jesus appears. And Mark puts it most endearingly when he says that Jesus and Jesus' clothes glowed whiter than any fuller could leech them. And I tell my students that this is the place in the Synoptic Gospels, at least, where Jesus is the most divine, because divine creatures glow. They are full of light, they are full of radiance. And uh rereading The Great Divorce, this all clicked in for me in a new way. So this is a classic, something that you can read. I don't know if I've read The Great Divorce 10 times, 20 times. And still, as one grows and learns and burrows down deeper into the Bible and into the works of Lewis and into spirituality, new things emerge.
SPEAKER_02I love that. So we and we are different people every time we read these. We definitely are. I'm really encouraged by this, especially since um my 10-year-old just read uh The Great Divorce for the first time, and my husband was kind of skeptical. Like, what did he get out of it? Well, he'll come back to it, and he'll get more.
SPEAKER_01He will come back to it. I I think that is amazing that your 10-year-old picked that up and he read the whole thing.
SPEAKER_02But I mean, it's engaging. Like I was thinking about this as I was rereading that even if you don't get like the deep theology and all of those things, which I'm pretty confident he did not get, but the story is exciting. Here's a bus ride, here's a bunch of people fighting and having arguments, and like there's a lot going on here. All the little vignettes over and over and over. Um, did he ask you any questions about it? Not really. He was just kind of like, I liked it. And I mean he'll he will listen to this podcast. He listens to every episode.
SPEAKER_01So oh, that is amazing. Oh, maybe he'll have questions, right? Yeah. Well, I'm thinking as you speak of this, of an epistolary conversation that Lewis had with his very dear friend, Sister Penelope Lawson. Maybe I should uh explain a little bit more about Penelope Lawson for the audience. Go for it. Okay. So um Sister Penelope had read uh one of Lewis's books around 1939, 1940, and she sent him uh a letter, you know, like a fan letter, and she also sent him one of her own books that she had written. She was quite the scholar. She read Greek and Hebrew and had published several books of theology before she sent this one to Lewis in 1939, 1940. She was an Anglican nun, and it's kind of a hard thing for me to imagine Anglican nuns as opposed to Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox nuns, but there are. That was a surprise to me when I learned that long ago. And they struck up a conversation that lasted uh for decades. And Sister Penelope really, really helped Lewis as he worked through the Bible because he respected her grasp of Hebrew. He never learned Hebrew, so he would ask her questions uh uh about Hebrew words and so on. And Sister Penelope also would ask Lewis certain things. For instance, it seems like in the 1940s in England there was this rage for religious plays. Sister Penelope wrote a lot of religious dramas. So did Dorothy L. Sayers, so did T. S. Eliot, so did Charles Williams. So um uh Sister Penelope wrote Lewis a letter uh uh inquiring whether uh the symbolism that she had put in her plays was too deep, uh, if it would to move my metaphor a bit, to go over the heads of the children that were her audience. And he wrote back something like symbolism is uh important, uh and the symbolism that goes over their heads now will go into their unconscious and it will remain there until they're ready to to grab it. So when you were talking about your son, I thought of that. That symbolism that he is reading, he doesn't have enough life experience now to understand the episcopal ghost, and you know, yes, the episcopal ghost tried. He doesn't have anywhere near enough life experience to understand the mother's misplaced love for Michael, her son, you know, but he'll get there, and it Lewis is seeding that in him. So I just find that so impressive that your son would read that.
SPEAKER_02I love um, I love this, I love this story, and it's very like what we talk about classical education today, the idea that like you can throw anything at kids if they don't get it now, it's still in there, like they'll get it some at some point. So this is very much kind of they will. They will. Well, let's talk a little bit about a more background um about this stage in Lewis's life when he's writing The Great Divorce. So by 1945, he's been a Christian since 1931, so like 14 years, which is a good good number to have grown. So, what has he been doing, like thinking, writing during those 14 years? And what does uh what role does World War II play in his intellectual and spiritual life?
SPEAKER_01He has done a whole lot, yeah, both in terms of his scholarly work and his popular work. So, first of all, in the 1930s, he publishes uh one of his big books, The Allegory of Love, which many people in my reading still consider a classic. I am not a scholar of English literature. I was an undergraduate English major, but I got my PhD in religious studies, so I haven't kept up with you know the field of English literature, but according to what I've read, it's still considered a classic. Uh he published the book called The Personal Heresy with uh another man named Hilliard, if I if I have his name right. And this book is important to keep in mind. It's not one of his most famous books, it's very, very difficult. Um he is reading a lot, on, of course, in his own field, but then uh he publishes The Pilgrim's Regress, which frankly, I said I don't like the language of favorites, but I've got to put that down at the very bottom of my list. I've never been a big Pilgrim's Regress fan, and I think uh Lewis, when he revisited it, was also not very fond of it afterwards. Uh it's it's really uh uh very obscure. His allegory is very obscure, in my opinion. Uh so he's starting to publish some things that reflect his Christian life. But his big breakthrough comes with the problem of pain, which is published in 1940. And from there, uh uh someone in the BBC reads the problem of pain and invites him to give this series of radio broadcasts, broadcast talks, which will be all gathered together and published later on as Mere Christianity. And then in the early 1940s, he also publishes what is going to become the screw tape letters in a in a British church uh journal, maybe I can call it, called The Guardian. Uh, there is the Guardian newspaper today in in Britain, but it's not the same thing. Uh the this one became defunct uh decades ago, but it's published serially every week, if I'm not mistaken. And the screw tape letters just absolutely catapults him to fame. Um it was his most popular work until the Chronicles of Narnia really sank into the consciousness of people. So with the broadcast talks, uh you were asking, how does this relate to World War II? So, you know, there's no TV at the time, at least that is, you know, broadly popular is broadly there. So everyone is listening to the radio, and people are really tuning in to broadcast talks. And from what I have learned, uh towards the end of the broadcast talks, English-speaking uh soldiers, English-speaking military from the United States, from Canada, from Australia, uh, from Britain, of course, are gathering in preparation for a big assault. They're all gathering in Britain, and everyone is listening to the radio. And many, many of them are listening to Lewis' broadcast talks, and they take home knowledge of C.S. Lewis to their own countries if they survive uh in their fight. So, according to people more knowledgeable about the spread of Lewis's work than I am, uh, this is one way that Lewis's fame spread. There are so many great books on how Lewis's fame spread. I'm thinking of one by Stephanie Derrick, thinking of one by Mark Knoll, um, other people. Uh, the how Lewis got so popular. And partially it is because of everyone listening to the radio with his broadcast talks that are going to become mere Christianity. That's remarkable.
SPEAKER_02Because that's not really a medium we think about today. Like, how do we learn about books? Well, in this case, the radio. Well, and he's so and like reading him, his language is so beautiful. Like, even um, the example of the great divorce, like that opening uh passage I read at the beginning of this podcast. Like it's it really rolls off the tongue, it's really beautiful, like the way he has clearly thought about every sentence.
SPEAKER_01He was just such a natural writer. He had been writing from the time that he was a very small boy, along with his brother up in the attic room when they were making their own worlds, Lewis's world, Animal Land, and his brother's world, India. Uh, when they were up in that long attic corridor during the uh the rainy days in Ireland where they were not allowed to go outside. And yes, his his language is just so perfect most of the time. He was a poet, he loved language. And by the way, you read it so beautifully. I I really love listening to it.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. It um it is remarkable. Like I'm noticing these things now because so much of it, perhaps because of my own academic background. Like when we were in grad school, I'm guessing your professors also never said, but is it beautiful? Are you making your dissertation beautiful? It was more like, just get the words on the page, please.
SPEAKER_01That is interesting that you say that. No, in my graduate program, it was very historical critical, uh, which means that you're interested more in facts and in uh the history of interpretation and in terms of academic criticism, not criticism as judgment or not as being judgmental, definitely judgment, but you know, evaluation and analysis and so on. And uh I myself, as I said, was an English major. And as an undergraduate, my favorite period was British 19th century, both in terms of the early 19th century, going back into the late 18th century with William uh with uh Wordsworth, Wordsworth and Blake, moving then quickly into the 19th century with the Romantic poets, with Keats and Shelley, and then the Victorian novels. And I wrote poetry and I have published a poem or two in very, very small obscure places. Uh, and I loved language, and I was very, very interested in beautiful language, and I told one of my uh dissertation directors once that I wanted to write a beautiful thesis, and she just kind of stared at me like, Why? Uh so for me, it has never been enough just to get the job done. I'm hoping that it will be enjoyable to read as well.
SPEAKER_02I love that. It took me um years to get to that point because, like, again, with academic training, it's like get words on paper. And then a few years ago, I realized, you know, I want the words on paper to be beautiful, and that's kind of yes, yes. I love that. So you're a poet too.
SPEAKER_01Fun. Well, not for a very long time. I think poetry is a young person's game. Uh, that's my opinion. I'm not sure if this is correct or not, but it seems to me that most poets do their very best work when they're in their teens and twenties. Tristan, and just my own intuition is that that's when the world looks fresh, and you haven't yet gotten afraid of saying things. uh that will be criticized. You maybe this is just me projecting, but uh you you have both a freshness and a self-confidence that hasn't been affected yet by the vicissitudes of life.
SPEAKER_02I mean to think about yeah well and for C.S. Lewis perhaps that was the case because at some point I think he stopped writing poetry.
SPEAKER_01You know he there are people who know much more about Lewis's life with poetry than I do. I'm thinking for example of Malcolm Guite who is probably uh the world's authority on Lewis's poetry and then Don King who has also done a lot. Lewis kept on writing poetry to the end of his interest but he would often publish it under a pseudonym or not publish it at all.
SPEAKER_02So we were talking about how uh you mentioned he kept writing it until the end of his life but publishing it under pseudonyms and that reminded me that I did come across his Aeneid translation at least the fragments of it and that was supposed to be his retirement project but he did not live long enough to get very far. But what there is is really quite beautiful and um experimental but like in a really neat way where he was clearly um an expert in Virgil's Aeneid. So what we were what you noted earlier uh the definition of a classic a book to which we come fresh every time and like we see something new clearly Lewis knew the Aeneid really well.
SPEAKER_01I don't know when he started to read it but my guess would be fairly young because he started learning Latin very young. You do classical education so I expect you're teaching your children Latin. I started teaching my boys Latin when they were five.
SPEAKER_02That's wonderful.
SPEAKER_01And yeah they are quite able to do it. We started with roots with Latin roots and then we moved from there to Latin proper uh learning Latin sentences. I think what we used it was called Artis Latinae where uh you learn simple sentences like manus manum lavat to look at you know objective and so on and so forth.
SPEAKER_02Yeah my 10 year old right now is in second year of kind of like more formal sort of serious study and it's been a lot of uh just such joy to see him um we're going down rabbit holes and I love that but I'm gonna bring us back to the great divorce so here is Lewis a Christian for 14 years and he's writing this novel the bus ride from hell to heaven like let's get into it proper like what's going on here and what do we need to pay attention to so at the beginning in the preface to the book Lewis is referencing Blake and Blake's poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell so if Blake writes about the marriage of heaven and hell Lewis says I am writing about their divorce and it took me a long time to understand what he meant.
SPEAKER_01Blake's poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is so difficult that even Lewis says in the preface here that he does not feel at all sure that he knows what Blake meant. I have tried to read the marriage of heaven and hell over and over again and it's just fiendishly difficult. So it took me a while to figure out what was going on here that Lewis is saying you can't take the slightest bit of something that isn't worthy of heaven into heaven. You have to let go of everything and as Lewis goes on he says that people think that somehow something bad or something even evil he uses the word evil will somehow change into something good and that you can maintain it and that you can keep it but he says you can't do it. I love his use of image I think everyone loves Lewis's use of image and analogy that's what he is really really great at so he compares and contrasts the two images of radii of a circle meeting in the middle or a tree. He says some people might think that we're all going to the same place we're starting on the circumference of the circle and we're all going to end up at God but he says no reality isn't like that it's more like branches of a tree where every decision that you make branches out further and further and further and this book is about making decisions about who to be and why every single decision that one makes brings one closer to or further from God who is reality God is reality itself and every decision that you make brings you either closer towards God slash reality or further away so I brought up the weight of glory a few minutes ago and this idea that every decision one makes brings one either closer to or further away from God is really explicitly said in the weight of glory as well towards the end of that fantastic sermon. So I can't recommend weight of glory enough. In order to prepare for reading the great divorce a tip that I would give to readers is to spend some time reading the weight of glory in particular among Lewis's works because it spells out in prose uh well both the weight of glory and uh and the great divorce are prose but it it spells out in a non-fictional way uh what the great divorce is doing in a more fictional way and of course what both the essay the weight of glory and the novel can we call it uh the the the genre of the great divorce is really kind of hard to pin down uh but the great divorce also what it's talking about is theosis so yeah unpack that a little bit like for somebody um who might not have heard the term before like we can kind of tell theos god but what exactly is theosis yes theosis is a Greek term and it is a synonym for the term that uh has a Latin root deification theo being god dei also being god in Latin and this term can really scare some people because it literally means becoming a god and it is a very very ancient term uh it not the term itself but the idea of the term appears in 2 Peter and I don't have the uh exact verse in front of me right now but it says something like we will partake in the energies of God uh and the early church fathers of the second century particularly Irenaeus of Lyon at the end of the second century AD talk about the incarnation and the purpose of the incarnation of Jesus that God becomes man if I may use the sexist language so that man may become God and it doesn't mean that human beings literally become God with a capital G.
SPEAKER_02But the Eastern Orthodox Church uses the language of essence versus energy so no one can become God as God the essence of God himself but by partaking in the energies as 2 Peter says you one becomes divinized and Lewis at the end of the great divorce actually uses uh these words I am looking for this now in my book so George McDonald we could talk about George McDonald too says time itself and all acts and events that fill time are the definition and it must be lived by definition um it means eternal reality and then George McDonald says the Lord said that we were gods what George McDonald is quoting here is both Psalm 82 verse 6 I say you are gods and then Jesus in John chapter 10 verse 33 quotes this as well and these verses Psalm 826 John 10 verse 33 and the passage from 2 Peter among a few others are the biblical verses that the early church fathers who are talking about Theosis bring up you are gods he says so uh after Irenaeus brings this up Athanasius of Alexandria in the fourth century AD is the most famous on this when he uh writes his famous treatise on the incarnation which Sister Penelope translated out of the Greek and Lewis wrote the preface for so uh this book is about becoming real becoming solid becoming divine through theosis a word that Lewis never uses anywhere in any of his works as far as I am aware of uh by every single decision that one makes in one's lifetime and in this fantasy after one's lifetime so that that brings another light to those um vignettes all those people that he runs into first on the bus and then when the bus disembarks in heaven can you tell us a couple of examples like what how do we look at those and I guess I want us also to get to George Macdonald because he's in heaven I mean of course he's in heaven but what is he doing there?
SPEAKER_01Of course he is yeah but he's a virtual figure speaking of the Aeneid right so um and and of course uh Dante's divine comedy so I am thinking there there are just so many of these but um one of my favorites is the man who has the lizard on his shoulder um I I think every single one of the vignettes in this book is meaningful but I think they kind of build in power as we get to the end. And the man with the lizard is is almost the last vignette we get so he uh appears he's arguing with this lizard and the lizard is uh we find out later lust so the man is very very tired of the lizard he is sick to death of this creature controlling him but he just can't get rid of him um he is so attached to the the lizard lust that he's lost kind of uh his self-control he's lost his will and a divine creature who ends up being an archangel and again this this divine figure is glowing so that he's just radiating heat out everywhere um says that he can kill the lizard if the man allows him the man has to allow him the archangel cannot uh negate the man's own free will um the man at one point says why didn't you just kill him before I knew what you were doing and he says it doesn't work that way and you can't do it that way um and the man thinks that it will kill him the angel tells him that it won't but it will hurt a lot and so I am thinking of something that Lewis wrote in an essay that was just published uh I think it was published in 2013 so the title that was given to it by the uh by the editor because Lewis didn't give it a title because he never published it they've called it early prose joy so Lewis evidently wrote it sometime in the winter of like 1930 to 1931 something like that.
SPEAKER_02So C.S. Lewis is really emphatic on free will and that really comes through in the episode with the lizard. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's his big theological kind of emphasis.
SPEAKER_01Yes uh he is so much into free will though of course at the end of the book he talks about predestination too in one of his letters Lewis says that the whole question of predestination is ridiculous. It's not worth talking about even though he does talk about it here he knows that a lot of people are very highly invested in the idea of predestination and he doesn't want to offend them in his public work. But in his letters he can say what he really thinks. But yes most famously he believes that the door of hell is locked from the inside anybody who wants to go through it can. It is not God who is keeping people out but uh the own human being who is keeping himself locked inside of his selfishness. So in this book uh not in this particular vignette with the man with the lizard but in some other ones uh Lewis talks about how if if you can only get your attention off yourself for one moment then you might have a chance this looking inward as opposed to looking outward is something that is literally damning. So there is uh a woman who is extremely self-conscious in this book and her uh her mentor who comes to greet her tries to get her mind off herself and can't and then he finally calls a herd of unicorns to come and make her look and make her afraid to get her attention off herself so we do not know whether the woman is saved by this herd of unicorns coming towards her or not um it's it's left unsaid. But this idea for Lewis that turning out to other people as opposed to turning in on oneself is a salvific act is throughout this book and throughout his work. So yes free will yeah um very very big for Lewis another thing that's interesting I think regarding the free will is when Lewis well when the main character I I'm not sure that we can directly identify the uh first person narrator here with Lewis so why don't I just say the narrator of the book that's very although it's tempting it's so tempting here. It is I mean you know Lewis talks about having uh encountered George McDonald's books at the station uh and and reading Fantasties and how it completely transformed his life so that part at least we can identify Lewis with the narrator of the book. But at the end of the book we have Lewis specifically bring up universalism. So um the narrator says in your own book sir you were a universalist you talked as if all men would be saved and Saint Paul too uh that last line and Saint Paul too is kind of vague uh but as I was working on my own book I found by reading Lewis's letters that he thought that any kind of warrant anyone has for believing that all people will be saved comes from Saint Paul and that's very true. As a biblical scholar yes I can agree with that. So McDonald responds you can know nothing of all of these things he quotes Lady Julian uh it may be that all will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well but it's ill talking of such things and then on the next page very close to the one that I just read about theosis um I'm going to try to find a good spot here for every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of time destroys your knowledge of freedom. Witness the doctrine of predestination which shows truly enough the eternal reality is not waiting for a future in which to be real but at the price of removing freedom which is the deeper truth of the two and wouldn't universalism do the same in other words McDonald as portrayed by Lewis here thinks that both the idea of predestination and the idea of universalism wreck the idea of free will. And free will is the deeper truth of the two if you're putting predestination and free will into conversation with each other.
SPEAKER_02That's big. And it's interesting how for most of those vignettes we don't find out exactly how it ends sort of the narrator walks away and sometimes asks like well what happened to them it's like well we'll see like free will again keep it open we don't know yeah the the man with the lizard is the only one we know who actually makes the choice for joy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah that's striking so how did the readers um of this book at the time of publication take it all I know about this is what the reviews wrote um and at least in Walter Hooper's book that I have access to talking about this Walter Hooper uh discusses good reviews that everybody liked it uh other than that I just don't know interesting yeah because you kind of wonder like did people get it?
SPEAKER_02Because there are so many of those nuggets.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely you know my students I I've taught this book since 2007 uh to college students and I think it takes the students a little while uh if I don't cue them up to kind of get what's going on that the book opens in hell or as the George McDonald says if they choose joy it will be purgatory. Yes. So Lewis brings up uh some things that are controversial here between Catholics and Protestants like uh with some Protestants of course you know Protestantism is very very large and very varied but ideas of purgatory ideas of predestination versus free will and so on and so forth and he's well aware you know that that he's doing this.
SPEAKER_02Well so how do we read this kind of book in 2025? Like um what do you think C.S Lois might want to get um what might want us to get out of it today?
SPEAKER_01I think exactly what he wanted people to get out of it when it was published in 1945. The idea that every choice one makes has eternal consequences uh that we by our choices and I guess I also need to add here being open to divine grace in things that we cannot choose uh we make ourselves into creatures who are either more or less fit for reality to approach God.
SPEAKER_02That's beautiful I think I really I love that and again it gets us back to the classic like the message hasn't changed.
SPEAKER_01The message hasn't changed at all and I I don't think the book is any harder to understand in 2025 than it was in 1945. I don't think there is a lot here that has been lost through you know the the change of culture in 80 years and the culture has changed a lot in 80 years. There are some things uh when I teach these books To students. For example, uh in Scoote, I think it talks about the wireless. And my students have no idea what the wireless is, right? They don't know what an error rate is or whatever. So one thing I do need to explain to them at the very last sentence of the book, when Lewis wakes up with the books falling on his head, it says the siren howling overhead. Anyone reading this in 1945 would know what the siren was, but my students don't unless we talk about what an air-raid siren is in World War II. But that really doesn't have anything to do at all with the meaning of the book. I think the themes in here are so universal that not a lot is lost in those 80 years.
SPEAKER_02Hopefully that's an encouragement for listeners who have not read it before to pick it up. Like you are prepped.
SPEAKER_01If anyone asks me, like, which book by C.S. Lewis should I read? This is one of the ones that I recommend in terms of his uh in terms of his prose. It is beautiful and it's so short.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Well, let's talk about a book that perhaps one would not read in one sitting. This is your new book. Yes. Between interpretation and imagination, C.S. Lewis and the Bible. So tell us a little bit about it. Obviously, like you've brought up some of the research already in this conversation, but tell us more. Like what um what is this project?
SPEAKER_01Okay. Well, this project has been in the works for a very long time, and uh it comes out of my teaching. I had a student who was the president of the English Honor Society at our university, and she set up uh what she called an evening with C.S. Lewis and invited me and some other professors to speak. And I said, Well, what would you like me to speak on? And she says, Why don't you talk on Lewis in the Bible since you're a biblical scholar? And at that point, I hadn't really done any concerted work on Lewis in the Bible. I decided to focus on his so-called liar, lunatic, or lord argument. And maybe I should pause here for a moment. Um, this argument is in so many pieces of Lewis's work, but I think it's most famously in Mere Christianity, where he says that Jesus was either, when Jesus talked about himself as being God, he was either a liar, he knew he wasn't God and he lied about it, he was a lunatic, he thought he was God and he wasn't, or he was telling the truth and therefore he is God and Lord. So that is the liar lunatic or Lord argument, and he supports this with scripture. And I just wanted to look at what scripture he used in order to support this. And I gave a talk on this, and it was mildly critical of Lewis's use of scripture, which uh provoked some controversy in the audience, and that gave me some motivation to expand on it for a scholarly audience. So I gave the first expanded report of it at the annual meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association, and then that had a standing room only crowd and got even more controversy. And uh I thought, wow, people are so interested in this. I wonder if I could expand this out into a book. So um I did, and it went way beyond what I ever dreamed it would be. You have written books and you know how that works, right? Oh, yeah, rabbit holes interested in is always so much deeper than you ever imagined. So I uh I pitched a 200-page book and I ended up writing a 350-page book. So it is not anything that you can read in one sitting, uh, that is for sure. But I learned so many things that I had no idea that I would encounter. So one of the things that I learned is that I could access Lewis's own library books with his own handwritten annotations in his books. When I say library books, I don't mean books he got out from the library. I mean books from his library. Uh okay. His personal. His personal library. The Marion E. Wade Center, which is right next to Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, has Lewis's uh own personal library that kind of miraculously was preserved. They have about 2,500 volumes. And if you go there, you can actually have them bring you a copy of his book that he wrote in. And therefore, um you can not only see what he read, but you can see what he wrote while he was reading it. So you can get an insight into his own thinking process in real time. Uh and what I learned was around the late 1920s to the early 1930s, he was reading a lot of scholarly biblical studies. And he particularly read the works of a man named Charles Gore, who was very, very famous at the time. Charles Gore had been famous since around 1889. He was the Bishop of Oxford and a prolific author. And Lewis bought, read, and annotated so many of his books. So not only was Charles Gore a defining force in Anglicanism at the time that Lewis was growing up, but Lewis owned, read, and busily annotated his works. So I found that Gore was a huge influence on Lewis's own ideas about the Bible. And Gore's ideas come out everywhere in Lewis's works, including in the Chronicles of Narnia. Fascinating.
SPEAKER_02That's yeah, like the writer's bookshelves.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Now that's not the only thing I do in this book. Um, I also look at other influences. I'm especially pleased that I can really highlight Sister Penelope because a lot of people um talk about Lewis and women, and it's a huge controversy. What did Lewis think about women? How did Lewis think about women? Um I can see arguments on both sides that Lewis both engaged a lot with women and that Lewis had, as Dorothy Elsayers put it, shockingly bad views on women. I know the word bad is not correct. Shockingly is correct, and I can't remember the word that follows afterwards. Maybe she's just said shocking views of women. So someone who was a woman in Lewis's own culture thought that Lewis was not as enlightened as he should have been about women. And I think that's valuable because it's not someone of our generation looking back and judging Lewis by our own standards. A very intelligent woman of Lewis's own circle at his own time thought that his views of women were not quite right. But some people think that Lewis didn't interact with women at all, which is just ridiculous. I mean, he lived with Janie Moore, he lived with Janie Moore's daughter Maureen, um, he was very good friends with Dorothy L. Sayers, he was very good friends with Ruth Pitter, the poet. He was very good friends with Sister Penelope, and he corresponded with them and worked with them uh for decades. So I am so pleased to highlight Sister Penelope as a huge influence on his work to kind of add also to the idea of Lewis's relationships with women in his life. He respected her immensely.
SPEAKER_02And it's also nice to hear these stories of writers having friends, like friends who influence your work. Yes. I see this so much in my own life as a writer, and it's I always enjoy hearing these stories.
SPEAKER_01There's a book by Diana Glyer. Are you familiar with Diana Glyer? No. Okay. She is a wonderful scholar of C.S. Lewis, and I am looking over on my shelf here. Uh, she wrote first a book called The Company They Keep about Lewis and maybe Tolkien, uh, as a community of writers who influenced one another. And then she revised it uh for a more popular audience, and the book is called Bandersnatch.
SPEAKER_02Nice. Well, thank you. So well, yeah, that's uh humanizing Lewis. I like the work that you're doing and humanizing him because we think like, oh, this amazing writer. Well, he was a person.
SPEAKER_01He was a human being, very much so. And you can really see uh how human he is from reading his collected letters. Walter Hooper, uh, who ended up, of course, being the literary executor of his estate, did such an amazing service to studies of C.S. Lewis by gathering together these three volumes of his letters, each one of which is over a thousand pages long. And I found in working on this book that reading the letters and incorporating the letters was absolutely indispensable. Anybody who reads my book will see the numerous footnotes to the letters that just open up his life so much.
SPEAKER_02I love that. Well, I'm looking forward to reading your book. Thank you. Well, as we conclude, one final question for you. What classic book do you wish you had written? And the difficult part, why? You have to explain your answer.
SPEAKER_01Oh my goodness. I really, really, really struggle with this one because it it just seems so prideful to think even that I might read one of these classic books or I might write one of these classic books. I can't even get my mind around it. Um, so in spite of the fact that I have never written any fiction, I really love fiction so much more than nonfiction. I've tried writing fiction in my life uh when I was a kid, and I realized early on I just couldn't do it. Now in my old age, I would like to try again and maybe see if after decades and decades of life experience I might be able to. Um so I am going to bring up one little gem of a book. I have favorite works of fiction that stay with me over and over again. And I don't know why this one keeps coming to my mind over and over again, but when I think about the question, I just can't think of anything but it. And that is Ian Forster's A Room with You. Okay. It is So tell us more. What about it? It's 20th century. You know, it's not a classic in terms of being very old. Uh, but I think it's just perfect. I think it's perfect from start to finish. Uh, it is just so beautifully written, it is so humorous, uh, and I've got to say too, uh, I saw the movie before I read the book. The movie came out in the 1980s, and it's one of the best movie adaptations of uh a good book that I have ever seen. So most of the time when we see a movie first, we like the movie better than the book. If we read the book first, we like the book better than the movie. Um, that's how it works with me. So I saw the movie when it came out in the 1980s and absolutely flipped over it. Um, the the protagonist is played by Helena Bonham Carter when she was in her costume drama phase. She also played Lady Jane Gray in Lady Jane at the time, you know, before she got into Harry Potter and these kind of wild eccentric characters that she's known for now. Uh and then I read the book and I went, wow, the book is even better than the movie, which I had never experienced before in my life when I liked the book better than the movie. So it is uh it's a story about a young woman, a very young woman, who travels to Italy, and she is in the company of her chaperone, of course, uh a young British woman and an older British lady, and she is just struggling uh to find out who she is, and she meets a very eccentric young man while she's in Florence, and uh their their encounter, of course, does not run smoothly at first uh until the very end of the book, and it's just a perfect little gem of a romance set both in England and in Florence. And I when I went to Florence for the first time, all I could think of was their romance. So that would be a lovely book to have written, something that just gives pure joy and beauty to readers.
SPEAKER_02I love that. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk today.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much for inviting me. It is so wonderful to talk to you about all of these things about the Great Divorce, about Lewis, about classics. Thank you very much.