Posted by jane on February 19, 19101 at 15:35:22:
Hello all,
If anyone has a comment, criticism on the following, please send it my way!
I'm interested in the similarities of Dante and Lewis' portrayals of the afterlife, in the sense that life after death is a much more REAL existence.
Some thoughts: On earth, man is unable to participate in the fullness of life because of his fall from grace. When man made the decision to turn away from God and make himself "like gods" (Gen. 3:5), all of nature fell with him. He chose to reject the grace of God, and in turn, each of us is born without the fullness of this grace. We are separated from God, who is the source of life, and therefore, the earth we know is not as REAL as it was created to be. Man forfeited this existence when he took creation and knowledge into his own hands.
In The Great Divorce, the narrator first umes that he and the other travelers are ghosts— "man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air" —but he soon comes to another conclusion. "The men were as they had always been… It was the light, the gr, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison." (28-9) All existence is sharper, more solid than anything he has ever known. Unaccustomed to this reality, the narrator even bruises his feet on the gr. Dante the Poet addresses this same idea in the Divine Comedy, where existence after death reaches a higher level of reality than what is known on earth. The shades in Inferno exist as the personification of their sin on earth (that sin has become as REAL as can be)...
anyway. if you have any feedback, let me know!