Trinity Western University

“[L]ike light and mirrors”
Hierarchy, Mimesis, and the Artist in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce

Bret van den Brink
ENGL 390
Dr. Monika B. Hilder
30 November 2022

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There are three related orders of hierarchical structure and confusion at play in the ninth
chapter of C.S. Lewis’ novel The Great Divorce, the second half of which concerns the character
of one who “had been a famous artist” (83). The novel’s most fundamental hierarchy is
metaphysical, wherein God and heaven represent the fullness of being or reality. This is the
Reality from which lesser, created realities emanate. As created spirits become less real, Lewis
portrays them as less solid, juxtaposing the bodies of heavenly spirits with the vaporous
phantoms of hell. The existence of hell loiters on the brink of nonexistence, being infinitesimal
yet infinitely diffuse. Related to the metaphysical hierarchy is an aesthetic one, though it also it
fundamentally metaphysical. All things must submit to the real and be submitted to according to
their proximity to the real. Art may surpass nature on earth because it may give glimpses of
heaven, yet art in itself is no longer useful in heaven because one already has heaven itself, with
art for art’s sake ultimately being a distraction from communion with God. Only one who first
submits to the beautiful reality of heaven is able to use art as a way to journey deeper into
heaven’s mystery. Finally, and most controversially, is the hierarchy of persons. While Lewis
positively portrays this personal hierarchy as a benevolent and fluid structure meant to conduct
people into ever-greater union with God, it is misconceived by his Artist as consisting of various
degrees of personal importance. The Artist is metaphysically confused: he subordinates his
experience of the reality of heaven to his desire to imitate it, and he subordinates his communion
with God and the Spirit of his fellow artist to his desire to express himself and achieve a worldly
kind of fame. Such worldly fame, alas, evaporates as just another vanity in this other, heavenly
world. Consequently, due to his inordinate desires, the Artist loses everything. Seeking hold of
the unreal, he grasps nothing.

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The metaphysical vision of Lewis’ novel finds succinct expression from its George
MacDonald character: “Heaven is reality itself” (70). The more heavenly something is, the more
real it is; or, likewise, the more real something is, the more heavenly it is. Lewis’ novel presents
a fluid metaphysical continuum between heaven and hell, or, perhaps more accurately, between
God and nothingness. As Margaret E. Dana recognizes, metaphysical progress and regress in the
novel are represented by the movements along two axes: the movements inwards and upwards,
deeper into heaven and eventually up its mountains, represent metaphysical progress, and is
accompanied by spirits gaining a more substantial kind of being; the movements outwards and
downwards, quarrelsomely through hell’s suburbs and downwards from heaven, represent
metaphysical regress (21). Scale is also used to represent the novel’s metaphysical hierarchy,
with largeness corresponding to realness: “All hell is” not only “smaller than one pebble” of
earth, but “smaller than one atom” of heaven” (138; Dana 22). In short, one becomes more real,
more like God, the further one advances into heaven.
Lewis’ metaphysical vision in this novel (and throughout his post-conversion works, as
Jason M. Baxter details in The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis) is grounded in the tradition of
Christian Neo-Platonism, as it developed through the Patristic and Medieval eras, and as it is
exemplified by such figures as Augustine, Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Aquinas, which
David Bentley Hart, following Erich Przywara, calls the analogia entis—the analogy of being
(241). In this tradition, God’s uncreated act of being is considered analogous to created acts of
being: created beings exist, and are similar to God’s act of being, insofar as they participate in
God’s act of being, but they differ by “an always greater unlikeness” from God’s being in that
they only exist by participation in him (243). Hence, “finite existence,” arising ex nihilo, “is a
pure gift, grounded in no original substance, wavering from nothingness into the openness of

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God’s self-outpouring infinity, persisting in a condition of absolute fragility and fortuity,
impossible in itself, and so actual beyond itself” (244). Hart, following Gregory of Nyssa, calls
the spirit’s infinite growth into God’s infinite act of being, epektasis, and in his study of C.S.
Lewis on theosis, Erik Eklund describes The Great Divorce’s “imagery of living ‘only to journey
further and further into the mountains’” as giving “corporeal and moral expression to the
‘continuous evolution in flawless happiness’ of epektasis” (Hart 243; Eklund 126). This fragile
gift of existence, and of potential greater existence, is the basis of the drama of The Great
Divorce—will the Ghosts become Spirits, growing into God’s fullness, or will they dwindle into
the privation of Hell? Evil, not participating in God’s act of being, has no existence of its own,
and so is nothing; Lewis’ infinitesimal hell is the residue of those who refuse to partake of God’s
gift of being, and so are asymptotically dwindling into nothingness.
Though this metaphysics, ordered as it is by degrees of participation in God, is
hierarchical, Hart notes that in it “the most high principle does not stand over against us (if
secretly within us) across the distance of a hierarchy of lesser metaphysical principles, but is
present within the very act of each moment of the particular” (247). Hart illustrates his point with
an allusion to a famous passage from Augustine’s Confessions: “[T]he infinite nearness of the
interior intimo meo is given precisely in the infinite transcendence of the superior summo meo
(who is non aliud)” (247). Such a metaphysics encourages one to further actualize the potential
intimacy with the divine always already implied by one’s very act of being. Hans Boersma notes
that the Neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus bequeaths two “spatial metaphors” to Christianity for
the “journey of the soul” into God: “that of upward ascent and that of a move inward” (68).
Lewis dramatizes this journey with spirits’ solidifying ascents into heaven’s mountains. In

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striving beyond the self to proceed deeper into heaven, one discovers what is deepest and most
true in one’s self.
This striving beyond the self into communion with the Real continues in the realm of
aesthetics. The novel’s aesthetics, as exposited by the Painter’s Spirit guide, like the novel’s
metaphysics, is Neo-Platonic. This Neo-Platonism comes through in the Spirit’s explanation to
the Artist how his art succeeded on earth: “When you painted on earth—at least in your earlier
days—it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of
your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too” (83). One source for such an
aesthetics, which Lewis discusses at greater length in Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century,
is Plotinus, the founder of Neo-Platonism, who defended the value of art against Plato (319-322).
Here Lewis quotes Plotinus’ fifth Ennead: “If anyone disparages the arts on the ground that they
imitate Nature, . . . we must remind him that natural objects are themselves only imitations, and
that the arts do not simply imitate what they see but re-ascend to those principles (λόγους) from
which Nature herself is derived” (320). In such a system, art may be viewed as an improvement
on nature as it is nearer to the divine. Lewis’ explication of the nature of this dualism clarifies
why this particular aesthetic theory is crucial for understanding The Great Divorce: “Nature was
not the whole. Above earth was heaven: behind the phenomenal, the metaphysical. To that
higher region the human soul belonged” (320-321). This passage reveals how closely a
hierarchical Neo-Platonic aesthetics relates to metaphysical and personal hierarchies: art, like
personal relationships, is ordered to a metaphysical end—greater communion with the divine.
In this Neo-Platonic view, the artist may, to some extent, create their art by copying the
divine Ideas rather than nature. Consequently, on earth, art has the potential to mirror divine
beauty to a greater extent than nature, and, so, by glimpsing this divine beauty through art,

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persons can more fully reflect the divine beauty themselves. But, in heaven, there is no need for
the artist to serve as an imperfect intermediary between the person and the divine, because the
person already has access to the divine itself. As Lewis’ Spirit explains, the Artist is deeply
mistaken: “There is no good telling us about this country, for we see it already. In fact we see it
better than you do” (83). One simply cannot better another person’s experience of heaven within
heaven by attempting to imitate it without first abandoning oneself to the reception of it.
In An Experiment in Criticism Lewis describes “the reception of the arts,” along with the
pursuits of love, virtue, and knowledge, as being “either as an enlargement or as a temporary
annihilation of the self,” before quoting the “old paradox” of Matthew 16.25: “[H]e that loseth
his life shall save it” (138). What is true of the human arts is more true of the divine art. The
scattered, especially privileged moments of poetic intuition on earth are gathered to a fullness in
heaven. The spirit in heaven must, first and foremost, open itself to the plenitude of God’s
creation, but this does not mean the end of its own creativity. The happy fate that Lewis’ Artist
sadly fails to attain is the perfection of the artist as “sub-creator” that J.R.R. Tolkien portrays in
his poem “Mythopoeia” (87): as the image of a creator God, artistic creation is a quintessentially
human endeavor and readily in accord with the divine will. So long as one does not dam oneself
from it, the reception and internalization of the divine creativity will overflow into one’s own
creativity, encouraging and perfecting it.
Lewis’ Artist had, at one point, been on route towards this heavenly end. If mimetic art
essentially involves the saintly practice of emptying oneself of one’s ego to attend to that which
is beyond oneself, the Artist in his youth was closer to heaven than he was by his death. The
Spirit reminds him, “Light itself was your first love; you loved paint only as a means of telling
about light” (84). The Artist’s early preoccupation with light is telling for two reasons. Firstly, in

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using paint as a means of telling about light, the Artist subordinates the means of his selfexpression to the expression of the reality that he carefully attends to. Secondly, light, according
to Pseudo-Dionysius and others, is an appropriate name for God as it signifies the selfcommunicative nature of his goodness, which “reaches from the highest and most perfect forms
of being to the very lowest” while “remain[ing] above and beyond them all” (74). The Artist
likely was not aware of this connection between light and the divine during his time on earth, but
it was likely important for the “glimpses of Heaven” that his art shared with others (83).
Unfortunately, Lewis’ Artist “becomes more and more interested in paint for its own
sake” (85). This interest in paint for paint’s sake is erroneous, if sometimes appealing, on earth—
but it is utterly grotesque in heaven. The precursor of Lewis’ Artist is John Milton’s Mammon,
the diabolical architect of Paradise Lost, who is so distracted by the material of heaven, its
“trodden gold,” that he cannot enjoy the “vision beatific” (1.682;683). Amid the gloom of hell,
Mammon believes he can “imitate” God’s “light” (2.270; 269). Lewis thus glosses Mammon’s
character in A Preface to Paradise Lost: “Everything can be imitated, and the imitation will do
just as well as the real thing,” and while such a view may seem sustainable in “human
experience,” this seeming sustainability is only possible “because the present world is temporary
and protects us for a while from spiritual reality” (107). Lewis’ Artist is just such a person no
longer protected by temporality.
Yet, according to the Spirit, artists, apart from Grace, are subject to deeper spiritual
degeneration: not only are they “drawn away from love of the thing [they] tell” to the “love of
the telling,” but they “become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their
own reputations” (85). This concern for personalities and reputations is related to a third kind of
hierarchy, the hierarchy of persons. In the hierarchy of heaven, people are differentiated by

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degrees of communion with God, which is both fluid, with people forever growing deeper or
shallower into communion with God, and unmerited—“Everything is here for the asking and
nothing can be bought” (28). As Monika B. Hilder writes, Lewis bears a great “affinity with a
Christian-inspired Medieval vision of hierarchy,” which is “a paradoxically fluid one which
recognizes order without tyranny, submission without abasement, obedience without
enslavement” (28). Hilder further writes that this “ideal of hierarchy is characterized by wise
love in the spiritual mode of submission—with the result of empowerment for all” (28). Those
who fail in this submission are ultimately rebelling against their very being and their source of
being.
The Artist’s metaphysical disempowerment is born partly from his misguided conception
of hierarchy. He reveals his misconception when he asks, “Do you mean there are no famous
men?” (86). He looks forward to meeting a certain kind of person, the kind of person who was
successful in his line of work on earth—alas, there is no guarantee that such people are in
heaven, for heaven does not value worldly success. Lewis suggests that one should be satisfied,
indeed, dazzled, to meet any one of God’s angels or saints. Were one to look with heavenly eyes,
Thomas Gray’s “mute inglorious Milton” would appear no less glorious than Milton himself
(59). Sadly, the Painter is looking upon heaven with earthly eyes, seeking out, one presumes, a
Botticelli, or a Rembrandt, or a Monet—not, in any case, Sarah Smith of Golders Green.
Trying to explain the Artist’s error, the Spirit recourses to a very old image: “But they
aren’t distinguished—no more than anyone else. Don’t you understand? The Glory flows into
everyone, and back from everyone: like light and mirrors. But the light’s the thing” (86).
Although this image may have precursors in the deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom and in the

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Platonic Allegories, its closest precedent is found in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s
delineation of the purpose of hierarchy:
The goal of hierarchy, then, is to enable beings to be as like as possible to God and to be
at one with him. A hierarchy has God as its leader of all understanding and action. It is
forever looking directly at the comeliness of God. A hierarchy bears in itself the mark of
God. Hierarchy causes its members to be images of God in all respects, to be clear and
spotless mirrors reflecting the glow of primordial light and indeed of God himself. It
ensures that when its members have received this full and divine splendor they can then
pass on this light generously and in accordance with God’s will to beings further down
the scale. (154)1
For many people, this connection may be puzzling: what Lewis uses as an image to show that
people “aren’t distinguished,” Pseudo-Dionysius uses as an image for “hierarchy,” which is now
typically understood as that which distinguishes (or, worse, divides) people (86; 154). Lewis’
clarification is crucial: “[T]he light’s the thing” (86). No one deserves to partake of God’s glory:
being creatures that arise ex nihilo, persons deserve precisely nothing, and as sinful creatures,
they perhaps deserve even less. Nonetheless, through hierarchy, people are given the gracious aid
required to partake of God’s glory.
People cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps; they need guides, mediators.
Though such mediators are imperfect on earth, they are perfect in heaven, even as earthly beauty
may but give imperfect and transitory glimpses of heavenly beauty. This glorifying function of

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Lewis will later cite this passage in The Discarded Image: “[T]he Seraphim are crying to one
another ‘Holy, Holy, Holy.’ Why to one another rather than to the Lord? Obviously because each angel is
incessantly handing on his knowledge of God to the angels next below him in rank. It is, of course, a
transforming, not a merely speculative knowledge. Each busily makes his colleagues (collegas) ‘images
of God, bright mirrors.’” (74)

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hierarchy is exemplified in Christ, who in his Incarnation descended from heaven to earth, and
from earth to hell, to preach to the spirits imprisoned there (140). This same hierarchy of love is
present in the Spirits who descend from the mountains in attempts to save the Ghosts on
Heaven’s outskirts.
This explanation does not relieve the Artist who is disgruntled at not meeting those he
hoped to, and who is despondent about not being able to claim the kind of fame he hoped to in
heaven (87). He seeks consolation in the fame that he believes himself to have secured on earth
during his life. What the Artist does not know is that more time has elapsed on earth than he
supposed, and that the Wheel of Fortune has turned, with the Neo-Regionalists overtaking his
movement’s position at the top. He and the Spirit “are already completely forgotten in earth”
(87). Though these humbling ideas are found in various sources, one of its best expositors among
the Christian Platonists is Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy:
Think, also, of how many people, famous in their own time, are altogether forgotten now.
. . [T]he writers are lost or forgotten in the shimmer of time. . . You know that you can’t
compare the finite with the infinite. And even were your fame to last that millennium we
were speaking of, that would mean nothing—not just small but absolutely nonexistent.
(54)
The merely earthly fame the Artist seeks was always going to slip through his fingers like
quicksilver, for the finitude of earthly things, unless redeemed by heavenly infinitude, is
insubstantial.
The proper response to this truth, according to both Boethius and Lewis, is humility
accompanied by a sense of humour: Boethius has Lady Philosophy illustrate the point with an
amusing anecdote (54-55), and Lewis portrays his Spirit as “shaking and shining with laughter,”

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declaring with a jolly insouciance, “We’re dead out of fashion” (87). Terry Lindvall writes, “For
Lewis, the perspective that humility offers provides the seat for humor” (135). Who cares
whether one is in fashion on earth when one is fashionable in heaven, famous in the eyes of
God? According to the Spirit, they are “known, remembered, recognized by the only Mind that
can give a perfect judgement” (86). Alas, according to Lewis, many people care more about
earthly fashions, including the Artist. He declares that he “must write an article,” complaining,
“This is beyond a joke!” (87). With that complaint, and “without listening to the Spirit’s reply,”
he vanishes (87). Though not commenting on this passage, Lindvall accurately notes that for
Lewis, “[S]elf-absorption is the opposite of humility and of humor” (135). The Artist’s vanishing
is quite literally his hellish and humorless absorption into himself.
Humourless and self-absorbed, the Artist seeks to write without listening and to paint
without seeing. He will not receive help from the Spirit, nor will he try to better himself in order
to help others. Refusing to receive the sustaining reality of heaven from beyond himself, he
vanishes. Yet, there was a better way forward. The Artist could have listened to his Spirit guide,
and he could have advanced into the mountains. There he could have gazed upon the face of God
in the Beatific Vision until he himself became a spotless mirror of the divine. Radiant in spirit,
he could have produced such art as he could never have conceived of before, and this art could
have guided others into deeper communion with God. These others, in turn, could have become
guides for other wayfarers, hierarchically perpetuating a cycle not of violence but of peace.

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Works Cited
Baxter, Jason M. The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How the Great Books Shaped a Great Mind.
InterVarsity P, 2022.
Boersma, Hans. Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition. Eerdmans, 2018.
Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by David R.
Slavitt, Harvard UP, 2008.
Dana, Margaret E. “Metaphor in The Great Divorce.” The Lamp-Post of the Southern California
C.S. Lewis Society, vol 12, Dec. 1989, pp. 21-28.
Eklund, Erik. “Confessing Our Secrets: Liturgical Theōsis in the Thought of C.S. Lewis.”
Journal of Inklings Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, Oct. 2020, pp. 115-38.
Gray, Thomas. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth
Century Verse, edited by Roger Lonsdale, Oxford UP, 2009, pp. 354-358.
Hart, David Bentley. The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Eerdmans,
2003.
Hilder, Monika B. Surprised by the Feminine: A Rereading of C.S. Lewis and Gender. Peter
Lang, 2013.
Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image. Cambridge UP, 2013.
---. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge UP, 2013.
---. The Great Divorce. HarperOne, 2001.
---. Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century. Oxford UP, 2002.
---. A Preface to Paradise Lost. Oxford UP, 1961.
Lindvall, Terry. Surprised by Laughter: The Comic World of C.S. Lewis. Thomas Nelson, 1996.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Alastair Fowler, Routledge, 1997.

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Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Complete Works. Translated by Colm Luibheid, Paulist P,
1987.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “Mythopoeia.” Tree and Leaf, HarperCollins, 85-90.