Firstly, I must acknowledge my debt to a writer whose name I have forgotten and whom I read several years ago in a highly colored American magazine of what they call “Scientifiction”.
There are only two things more to be said about this small book. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself. If we do, we are likely to embrace the false and disastrous converse and fancy that everything is good and everywhere is Heaven.īut what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. But we, at this end of the road, must not try to anticipate that retrospective vision. In that sense it will be true for those who have completed the journey (and for no others) to say that good is everything and Heaven everywhere. I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) was precisely nothing: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in “the High Countries”. If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.
The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, “with backward mutters of dissevering power” - or else not. Evil can be undone, but it cannot “develop” into good. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Even on the biological level life is not like a pool but like a tree. We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind. This belief I take to be a disastrous error. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable “either-or” that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain. But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. If I have written of their Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant.
Lewis PrefaceīLAKE WROTE the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
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