A bus leaves a grey town that may be hell, and thin ghosts step onto the solid outskirts of heaven. C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is a dream-vision about the choice that divides: heaven or hell, reality or the self we refuse to surrender.

In this Mythic Mind lecture from the Fiction and Philosophy of C.S. Lewis course, Dr. Andrew Snyder (professor of philosophy and theology) walks the whole book: the grey town, the bright solid people, the Episcopal ghost, and Lewis’s hard claim that there are no private affairs before God.

Topics include hell as chosen isolation, the weight of glory made almost unbearable, and why the divorce between good and evil will not be negotiated away.