LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Great Divorce, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
According to the novel, the only way for a human being’s soul to be accepted into Heaven is for the human to love God above all other things. But why, then, must humans love God in order to be saved—and why is it often so difficult to love God?
The Great Divorce , following Christian theology, posits that true morality is only possible if it comes from God. While Lewis never explicitly states why it’s necessary to believe in and love God in order to be truly good, his argument takes two different forms. First, he suggests that to believe in God is to believe that infinite goodness is possible. A human being who believes in God, and therefore infinite goodness, will be capable of treating all other human beings with goodness—there is, in a sense, no upper limit to their capacity for goodness, kindness, and morality. Second, and more importantly, believing in God is the ultimate form of “humble love.” A Christian who loves an all-powerful being knows how to love others selflessly. By contrast, an atheist or agnostic sometimes mistakes love for desire—in particular, the desire for ownership. For instance, the Narrator encounters a woman named Pam , who’s spent the final decades of her life mourning for her dead son, Michael , to the point where she’s neglected everyone else in her life, including her friends and husband. Pam insists that she loves her son, but it quickly becomes clear that her “love” is just a form of selfishness and clinginess—precisely the opposite of the calm, selfless love that a good Christian feels. Thus, the novel shows that even love—if it’s not grounded in love for God—can be twisted into sin and become an obstacle to salvation. By the same token, the novel suggests that the only way for atheists and doubters of God’s existence to enter Heaven is to love God completely—which, in practice, means “sacrificing” their feelings for earthly things, (including money, non-Christian ideology, sex, and even other human beings) and resituating these feelings within the context of a universal love for God .
Unsurprisingly, most of the souls the Narrator meets over the course of the book find it very difficult to give up short-term, sinful pleasures for the sake of God. They’ve become so accustomed to enjoying earthly pleasures such as lust and wealth, or even more abstract “pleasures” like curiosity and art, that they’ve forgotten about loving God—in Lewis’s view, the only true source of pleasure there is. A particularly clear example of this principle is Ikey , a damned soul who endures enormous physical pain in order to steal apples to sell in the Grey Town —an apt metaphor for the way that sinners foolishly sacrifice their spiritual happiness for the sake of supposed material rewards. The Narrator encounters many other sinners who’ve turned their back on loving God. Some of these sinners are fully conscious of what they’re doing, while others have deluded themselves into believing that other pleasures are better. In either case, the novel shows that sinners have denied themselves true, eternal happiness in Heaven by declining to sacrifice their selfish love for other things.
