NB: The author has kindly allowed us to publish this first draft of his work-in-progress
Both George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis have, in their explicitly theological fiction, explored the dark margins of personality, the question of what happens when a created being so thoroughly sets its will to serve no one but Self that it verges on the annihilation of its own personhood. Can a created being progress so far down this road that it becomes irrecoverable? Is there a point at which the flexibility of the will breaks down, leaving no possibility of turning back toward the light, and nothing left for God to work with in the creature? The two authors deal with this question in works of great imaginative power, Lewis in The Great Divorce, and MacDonald in Lilith. In addition to his treatment of it in Lilith, MacDonald faces and acknowledges the terrible question in many places, including his Unspoken Sermons. He paints with terrifying realism the spiral into the abyss of Non-Personality. But he is unwilling to leave any creature there, and his imagination forges a ladder out of that abyss, a pathway for God’s reclamative power that extends even into the black holes of unrepentant Self collapsed into itself. The climax of Lilith’s story is a triumph of the godly imagination: MacDonald envisions a way for God to reach and reclaim a creature that has long ago become more demonic than human. On the other hand, I cannot help but regard Lewis’s treatment of the question in The Great Divorce as a failure of the imagination. His inability to follow his acknowledged master MacDonald across the chasm is understandable, but disappointing.
There is a great reasonableness and seriousness in Lewis’s argument that there is an event horizon, or point of no return in the human personality, and his words convey a powerful warning that the crossing of this event horizon may be imperceptible to the decaying soul. It is certainly plausible that there is a point at which the human personality becomes so turned in on itself that it collapses into the moral and spiritual equivalent of a black hole, a singularity. It is reasonable that the human will, since it is finite, is only finitely flexible: that there is a thought that destroys thought, and a choice that destroys choice. The only comfort for a lover of God and of humanity who contemplates the fate of such beings must be what Lewis suggests at the conclusion of The Great Divorce: that the hell which they have chosen and from which they can no longer be reclaimed is infinitely small--not a giant stain on God’s universe, but a singularity. According to this way of thinking, the beings in such a hell cannot spoil the enjoyment of the blessed, since there is nothing human left in them that can elicit a claim to sympathy.
MacDonald faces the possibility of this irrecoverable collapse of personality. He maintains that in this case, it would be God’s responsibility to annihilate the creature--put it out of existence altogether. He cannot entertain the idea that God can allow the continued existence of irrecoverable evil. Crucially, he does not attempt logically to refute this possibility in order to strengthen his argument for universal redemption. Instead, he imagines a pathway for God to maintain his hold on the creature even at these extrema, and allows this imagination to make its own argument: surely it is not possible for a human being to imagine a greater God than the one who actually is!
Lewis writes that, in the end, God says to the soul, “Thy will be done!” In his view, God is blameless if the human soul chooses Hell over himself. MacDonald, however, sees God as saying something very different to the soul who chooses eternal death:
“If his child say, 'I will not be good; I prefer to die; let me die!' his dealing with that child will be as if he said—'No; I have the right to content you, not giving you your own will but mine, which is your one good. You shall not die; you shall live to thank me that I would not hear your prayer. You know what you ask, but not what you refuse.'” (“Light”, Unspoken Sermons, Series III)
For MacDonald, the finiteness of the human will has a redeeming consequence: we never choose evil with a full understanding of the implications of our choice. For God to allow us to experience the outer darkness of eternal separation from him is for MacDonald the last resort of his love, but it is by no means a relinquishing of his hold upon his creature. His portrayal of Lilith’s final battle against redeeming love expresses this vividly:
“Defiance reappeared on the face of the princess. She turned her back on Mara, saying, “I know what you have been tormenting me for! You have not succeeded, nor shall you succeed! You shall yet find me stronger than you think! I will yet be mistress of myself! I am still what I have always known myself—queen of Hell, and mistress of the worlds!”
Then came the most fearful thing of all. I did not know what it was; I knew myself unable to imagine it; I knew only that if it came near me I should die of terror! I now know that it was LIFE IN DEATH—life dead, yet existent; and I knew that Lilith had had glimpses, but only glimpses of it before: it had never been with her until now.
She stood as she had turned. Mara went and sat down by the fire. Fearing to stand alone with the princess, I went also and sat again by the hearth. Something began to depart from me. A sense of cold, yet not what we call cold, crept, not into, but out of my being, and pervaded it. The lamp of life and the eternal fire seemed dying together, and I about to be left with naught but the consciousness that I had been alive. Mercifully, bereavement did not go so far, and my thought went back to Lilith.
Something was taking place in her which we did not know. We knew we did not feel what she felt, but we knew we felt something of the misery it caused her. The thing itself was in her, not in us; its reflex, her misery, reached us, and was again reflected in us: she was in the outer darkness, we present with her who was in it! We were not in the outer darkness; had we been, we could not have been WITH her; we should have been timelessly, spacelessly, absolutely apart. The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also. None but God hates evil and understands it.
Something was gone from her, which then first, by its absence, she knew to have been with her every moment of her wicked years. The source of life had withdrawn itself; all that was left her of conscious being was the dregs of her dead and corrupted life.
She stood rigid. Mara buried her head in her hands. I gazed on the face of one who knew existence but not love—knew nor life, nor joy, nor good; with my eyes I saw the face of a live death! She knew life only to know that it was dead, and that, in her, death lived. It was not merely that life had ceased in her, but that she was consciously a dead thing. She had killed her life, and was dead—and knew it. She must DEATH IT for ever and ever! She had tried her hardest to unmake herself, and could not! she was a dead life! she could not cease! she must BE! In her face I saw and read beyond its misery—saw in its dismay that the dismay behind it was more than it could manifest. It sent out a livid gloom; the light that was in her was darkness, and after its kind it shone. She was what God could not have created. She had usurped beyond her share in self-creation, and her part had undone His! She saw now what she had made, and behold, it was not good! She was as a conscious corpse, whose coffin would never come to pieces, never set her free! Her bodily eyes stood wide open, as if gazing into the heart of horror essential—her own indestructible evil. Her right hand also was now clenched—upon existent Nothing—her inheritance!
But with God all things are possible: He can save even the rich!” (Lilith, Chapter 39, “That Night”)
It is true that, as Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap/ May who ne'er hung there.” But while the will may ruin the brain, the brain is mortal, while the person endures. Our inability to cease, to unmake ourselves, is our enduring possibility of redemption.
Lilith has reached the point at which she no longer has the ability to unclench her hand. MacDonald never specifically says what it is in her hand, but he makes it clear that it is something that belongs to her Maker, and is not hers to keep. She owes herself to the one who made her, and she has so long determined to keep herself for herself, that she has lost the ability to undo her choice. She has reached the point of singularity that Lewis envisions. Yet MacDonald is able to envision the one remaining option: surgery.
It is perilous to draw metaphors from a field that one does not understand well. Nevertheless, one of the most (to me, at least!) suggestive metaphors for this process comes from something I recently watched about the eventual solution of a famous mathematical problem that had remained open for nearly a hundred years: the Poincare conjecture. I am not a mathematician, only a lover of and dabbler in math, but this is what I gather from the explanations I have heard. The Poincare conjecture can be thought of as the question of whether all surfaces of a certain type in four dimensions can be molded into the four-dimensional analog of a sphere. (These surfaces are actually three-dimensional, but are embedded in four dimensions, just as the ordinary sphere of our experience is a two-dimensional surface embedded in three-dimensional space.)The problem was eventually approached, promisingly, by applying a continuous curve-smoothing process (called Ricci flow) to a surface, but it was being held up by the development in some surfaces of singularities. Singularities are points where the surface collapses into an infinite, infinitesimal abyss, just like curved spacetime does around a black hole. The mathematician who had developed this approach to the Poincare conjecture was eventually defeated by these singularities. Grigory Perelman, the eccentric Russian genius who eventually solved the Poincare conjecture, made his breakthrough by showing that a variant of this method, dubbed “Ricci flow with surgery,” could work in all cases. The “surgery” referred to removes the singularities, so that the curve smoothing process can continue. This story sparks my imagination. The redemptive process seems to me very much like a continuous “un-deforming” of the fabric of our being. And the question of whether the soul can reach a point of irrecoverability reminds me very much of the question of whether a continuous process can overcome a jagged discontinuity in this fabric of being. Maybe sometimes surgery is the only option left--but why would God stop short of this in his quest to reclaim us?
The question is whether this can be accomplished without violating our freedom, our individuality. Theologians such as Lewis seem to take this human freedom of the will as paramount. Thus God must say to the creature in the end, “Thy will be done.” MacDonald, too, regards that freedom as essential, but not without limit: God does not finally give his children the freedom to destroy themselves. It is true, however, that he will not violate their being:
“Nor will God force any door to enter in. He may send a tempest about the house; the wind of his admonishment may burst doors and windows, yea, shake the house to its foundations; but not then, not so, will he enter. The door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of Love will cross the threshold. He watches to see the door move from within.” (“The Cause of Spiritual Stupidity”, Unspoken Sermons, Series II)
Extreme duress may be necessary in the siege of love, but the cure cannot be effected without the participation of the patient. And Lilith eventually reaches this point. At first, she experiences it merely as yielding to an unconquerable force:
‘Without change of look, without sign of purpose, Lilith walked toward Mara. She felt her coming, and rose to meet her.
“I yield,” said the princess. “I cannot hold out. I am defeated.—Not the less, I cannot open my hand.”
“Have you tried?”
“I am trying now with all my might.”
“I will take you to my father. You have wronged him worst of the created, therefore he best of the created can help you.”’
Eventually, however, she is able to ask for help:
“Lilith,” said Mara, “you will not sleep, if you lie there a thousand years, until you have opened your hand, and yielded that which is not yours to give or to withhold.”
“I cannot,” she answered. “I would if I could, and gladly, for I am weary, and the shadows of death are gathering about me.”
“They will gather and gather, but they cannot infold you while yet your hand remains unopened. You may think you are dead, but it will be only a dream; you may think you have come awake, but it will still be only a dream. Open your hand, and you will sleep indeed—then wake indeed.”
“I am trying hard, but the fingers have grown together and into the palm.”
“I pray you put forth the strength of your will. For the love of life, draw together your forces and break its bonds!”
“I have struggled in vain; I can do no more. I am very weary, and sleep lies heavy upon my lids.”
“The moment you open your hand, you will sleep. Open it, and make an end.”
A tinge of colour arose in the parchment-like face; the contorted hand trembled with agonised effort. Mara took it, and sought to aid her.
“Hold, Mara!” cried her father. “There is danger!”
The princess turned her eyes upon Eve, beseechingly.
“There was a sword I once saw in your husband’s hands,” she murmured. “I fled when I saw it. I heard him who bore it say it would divide whatever was not one and indivisible!”
“I have the sword,” said Adam. “The angel gave it me when he left the gate.”
“Bring it, Adam,” pleaded Lilith, “and cut me off this hand that I may sleep.” (Lilith, Chapter 40, “The House of Death”)
This surgery is the removal of the singularity, and enables the gradual, continuous, smoothing, healing process of sleep to begin. It is not, we notice, the abrogation of a ruined will, but the withdrawal of that will--with its own sincere, if imperfect cooperation--from the seemingly unbreachable prison to which it had driven itself.
Lewis and others seem to feel that a soul that has fallen into this singularity, that has driven itself into this infinitesimal abyss of withdrawal into Self, retains no humanity by which God can maintain his hold. But MacDonald refuses to believe this. The horror of the Miserific Vision which God in his compassionate compulsion is able to force Lilith to see is finally enough to arrest her manic spiral into infinite death. In this sense, the light of God continues to operate even in the black hole of hell, even when it is not felt or perceived as light, but as gnawing fire.
This lends additional meaning to MacDonald’s commentary on Lilith’s extremity: “But with God all things are possible: he can save even the rich!” Lilith’s conversion apparently defies the laws of spiritual physics--it requires infinite energy to accelerate something beyond the speed of light; it requires infinite energy to rescue an object from a singularity, and therefore “it cannot be done.” Yet we see God able to reach into that singularity, and obtain the self-imprisoned creature’s consent for its surgical removal. And MacDonald boldly envisions that not even the devil himself will be able forever to withstand that divine fate. As he has Adam say, “When the Shadow comes here, it will be to lie down and sleep also.—His hour will come, and he knows it will.”
In their closing moments, both The Great Divorce and Lilith contain powerful scenes that imagine the eternal sunrise, the dawn of the age of the Resurrection. To my mind, however, the scene in Lilith is rendered far more poignant in that it envisions a moment when evil is not just banished, but mercifully and truly excised from creation, when the singularities created by the warped will are not merely forgotten, but filled.