"The Great Divorce" and the Dream Vision

            Yet again, the material we’ve learned in this class has overlapped with that of CS Lewis. We were assigned Lewis’s The Great Divorce, which is a fantasy novella of sorts in which Lewis attempts to depict what heaven and hell are like (I highly suggest giving this a read – the literary features alone are enough of a reason without regard to the text’s embedded theology). A narrator – whom we can assume to be Lewis – is taken on a bus from “hell” to “heaven”, where he then witnesses multiple accounts of angels trying to convince the hell-folk to leave their world behind and join the heavenly host. At the end of the work, when it seems that a grand judgment is taking place, the narrator is awakened; the entirety of his experience had been a dream.

            As a Professor/Don of English at Oxford, and later the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, it is not at all a jump to assume that Lewis was well aware and well learned in the “dream vision”. We saw examples of the “dream vision” in “The Dream of the Rood” and Piers Plowman. Just as a refresher, many authors writing on the subject of Christianity would guise their personal interpretations, disagreements, or commentary under a “dream vision” in order to avoid persecution; a character falls asleep and receives visions or revelations that are clearly of the author’s own making rather than the character’s. However, if an author was met with persecution, he would be defended by the fact that his arguments are not actually his own, but his dreaming character.

I wonder why Lewis wrote The Great Divorce in this manner. What is it that Lewis is ‘protecting’ himself from by using the “dream vision”? Perhaps he is trying to reinforce the fact (as he asserts multiple times in other works) that he is only a layman offering his own opinion on divine matters. And this would eliminate the possibility for the ‘wrath’ of other Christians for holding opposing theological views, as well as the wrath of God for spreading falsity/error. He is, in essence, covering all his bases by using the “dream vision”; he is trying to reveal to the reader that his idea of heaven and hell is not the ultimate truth, thus preventing persecution from possible errors he made in the text.