Gotfried Lessing talked of an "ugly ditch" between those things that we could be certain of and religious truth. C.S. Lewis' Great Divorce suggests that, for each one of us, their is an ugly ditch that must be crossed, but it is not at all the ditch Lessing describes. What kind of "ditches" does Lewis think we have to overcome before finding religious truth? Would the average reader recognize themselves in any of the figures depicted here?
The ditch is a divide not only between the truths of reason and the truths of faith, it is divide between what we can know and what we can’t.
ReplyDeleteWe can make assumptions about the afterlife based on what the scriptures say but they remain just that, assumptions. The only way to know the truth is to die – and that is also the only way across the ditch.
Our reality, our experiences are the only things that we can base our assumptions on so heaven is imagined as the best life we can think of, things that we think is important, so we wind up with heaven having streets of gold and everyone is living in mansions. I don’t think so, but that is just the thing nobody can know, well not until we get there.
Imagine having a unique experience no one has ever done until you, how would you describe it so someone else could understand it? You would need a common reference to at least begin describing your unique experience, then you could expand the description. What about if the experience was so unique that there is not common reference, how do you explain without it sounding impossible? Or a miracle? Truth of faith?
Like C.S. Lewis we all have images of what heaven and hell might be like, but those images are usually based on a frame of reference we have obtained from others either through hearing or reading. I am sure Lewis used people he had met in his life to model the ghosts for his story The Great Divorce where he tries to describe what he thinks of heaven and hell. However he had no true way to know what the experience of heaven will be like.
Jerry Taylor
I like the idea of the ditch, but each of us has a different approach. Some might need to build a bridge, others might try to leap it, but even if it's filled with filth I don't mind wading through it.
ReplyDeleteLewis has a man going through transit, but he doesn't really know where he's been, where he is or where he's going. All his ideas are based on what he has seen, what he sees and what he thinks he is going to see in the end: the darkness, the grey, the great light. Hard to figure where all our human progress has taken us in a few thousand years. Are we knocking at the gate or are we already inside? One thing for certain, or I will say in good faith, is that we are closer now than we were before because we have built and built upon the ideas that came before us. Our knowledge is expanding and maybe that just means the ditch is getting bigger, but then there is more room to roam. You find truth by being in the ditch, not by ignoring it's existence.
I think Lewis is also working with the problem: how do we get to heaven. The short answer is we don't. Heaven is to be in God's presence, the Lord's day. I think Lewis is pointing out that if Hell exists, that's where we were and if purgatory exists then that's where we are. Heaven is going to be the same place, with the same people, but the truth of it all will be known. For the meantime life is vague and droll.
True logic is in many ways an almost binary system that uses only what is known to arrive at a conclusion grounded in reality. Conversely, faith, at some point in its justification, inevitably incorporates the unknown. From what I can tell, the Ugly Ditch is, at its essence, the irreconcilable differences between logic and faith.
ReplyDeleteI'm not even sure how to describe what Lewis does in The Great Divorce with regard to the ditch. I can't help but interpret the heart of his apologetic as being that faith cannot be achieved without embracing irrationality—something that I've known for a long time. I'm confused that he would believe such an apologetic convincing, but I've never seen the logic in religion anyway.
I took the “ditches” in The Great Divorce to be the jump we must make from being our sinful selves to being redeemed and worthy of Heaven. The man with the lizard on his shoulder was willing to cross his ditch and leave behind his old ways, so that he could leave the Grey Town and go into the Mountains. In order to find religious truth, we need to be willing to leave behind the ways of the world. There’s the Kierekgaard quote, “We [Christians] pretend to be unable to understand it [the Bible] because we know very well the minute that we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.” Life is different for a Christian, and while everyone’s ditch looks different, we must all cross ours to get to the truth. It reminds me of Augustine’s Confessions. I think most people could find themselves in Lewis’ story if they were honest with themselves…that’s always hard for us to do, though.
ReplyDeleteIn this novel, C.S. Lewis is quite delicate; I sometimes feel he is trying to pull on the inner weakness of the reader in a prominent but non-harmful way. He hides sins in various characters and from many different perspectives as well. These all point to a similar narrative of how sin often went unseen in an individual's life. From love to pity and grudges held and many more, C.S. Lewis extracts the hidden obsessions these sins can have in an individual's life.
ReplyDeleteThe best analogy to what C.S. Lewis tried to pull out was how sin goes unnoticed, a ditch beside the road. You see a ditch as you drive, past it rarely ever gets any genuine attention as you drive past it. That is the analogy present in this story's theme as a whole. The things that went most unnoticed were those that were the most neglected. In the end, though, those were the sins that were the most detrimental to the individuals upon their "death". After a life lived by overlooking the same thing, just as the ditch beside the road, the ditch, so to say, grew uglier and uglier as they traveled the road of life. Upon their arrival, the thing that they ignored their entire journey was the hardest thing to get across. Just as when driving, there are points where ditches are less dangerous to get across due to their depth. The same can be said about sin; when you get rid of sin early on, it is easier to remove it. However, The longer it goes, the less likely it becomes to be removed or, in the analogy to the ditch, cross.
Tanner Simon
As some of the statements above me, I also do not see where the "ditch" is within the book, but based on the title of the book, I get a little bit of an idea though. Maybe the title indicates that there is a lapse in logic when it comes to the "ditch" and Christianity.
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