And it gets more challenging yet; in my opinion the following snippet isn’t just for any casual adult reading. It is a description which, once deeply contemplated by any mind that has even just a passing acquaintence with the hell of loneliness, is recognized as a description of something that makes the dreaded torture of hellfire a mere child’s play - even a banquet feast in comparison. Traditional proponents of hellfire and brimstone have nothing on this; or rather - it is put forward on the strongest possible urgency that hellfire or annihilation either one, is a mercy if it becomes a road away from an eternity with the following fate, though I start the excerpt below well before the ghastly descriptions that Lewis picked up.
(116) The Prison
If the man acknowledge, and would pay if he could but cannot, the universe will be taxed to help him rather than he should continue unable. If the man accepts the will of God, he is the child of the Father, the whole power and wealth of the Father is for him, and the uttermost farthing will easily be paid. If the man denies the debt, or acknowledging does nothing towards paying it, then–at last–the prison! God in the dark can make a man thirst for the light, who never in the light sought but the dark. The cells of the prison may differ in degree of darkness; but they are all alike in this, that not a door opens but to payment. There is no day but the will of God, and he who is of the night cannot be for ever allowed to roam the day; unfelt, unprized, the light must be taken from him, that he may know what the darkness is. When the darkness is perfect, when he is totally without the light he has spent the light in slaying, then will he know darkness.
I think I have seen from afar something of the final prison of all, the innermost cell of the debtor of the universe; I will endeavour to convey what I think it may be.
It is the vast outside; the ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city of which God is the light–where the evil dogs go ranging, silent as the dark, for there is no sound any more than sight. The time of signs is over. Every sense has its signs, and they were all misused: there is no sense, no sign more–nothing now by means of which to believe. The man wakes from the final struggle of death, in absolute loneliness-- such a loneliness as in the most miserable moment of deserted childhood he never knew. Not a hint, not a shadow of anything outside his consciousness reaches him. All is dark, dark and dumb; no motion–not the breath of a wind! never a dream of change! not a scent from far-off field! nothing to suggest being or thing besides the man himself, no sign of God anywhere. God has so far withdrawn from the man, that he is conscious only of that from which he has withdrawn. In the midst of the live world he cared for nothing but himself; now in the dead world he is in God’s prison, his own separated self. He would not believe in God because he never saw God; now he doubts if there be such a thing as the face of a man–doubts if he ever really saw one, ever anything more than dreamed of such a thing:–he never came near enough to human being, to know what human being really was–so may well doubt if human beings ever were, if ever he was one of them.
Next after doubt comes reasoning on the doubt: ‘The only one must be God! I know no one but myself: I must myself be God–none else!’ Poor helpless dumb devil!–his own glorious lord god! Yea, he will imagine himself that same resistless force which, without his will, without his knowledge, is the law by which the sun burns, and the stars keep their courses, the strength that drives all the engines of the world. His fancy will give birth to a thousand fancies, which will run riot like the mice in a house but just deserted: he will call it creation, and his. Having no reality to set them beside, nothing to correct them by; the measured order, harmonious relations, and sweet graces of God’s world nowhere for him; what he thinks, will be, for lack of what God thinks, the man’s realities: what others can he have! Soon, misery will beget on imagination a thousand shapes of woe, which he will not be able to rule, direct, or even distinguish from real presences–a whole world of miserable contradictions and cold-fever-dreams.
But no liveliest human imagination could supply adequate representation of what it would be to be left without a shadow of the presence of God. If God gave it, man could not understand it: he knows neither God nor himself in the way of the understanding. For not he who cares least about God was in this world ever left as God could leave him. I doubt if any man could continue following his wickedness from whom God had withdrawn.
The most frightful idea of what could, to his own consciousness, befall a man, is that he should have to lead an existence with which God had nothing to do. The thing could not be; for being that is caused, the causation ceasing, must of necessity cease. It is always in, and never out of God, that we can live and do.
And I think to just ‘rip off the bandage’ in one swoop, I’ll post the next too, to pass beyond as quickly as possible.
(117) Not Good to Be Alone
But I suppose the man so left that he seems to himself utterly alone, yet, alas! with himself–smallest interchange of thought, feeblest contact of existence, dullest reflection from other being, impossible: in such evil case I believe the man would be glad to come in contact with the worst-loathed insect: it would be a shape of life, something beyond and besides his own huge, void, formless being! I imagine some such feeling in the prayer of the devils for leave to go into the swine. His worst enemy, could he but be aware of him, he would be ready to worship. For the misery would be not merely the absence of all being other than his own self, but the fearful, endless, unavoidable presence of that self. Without the correction, the reflection, the support of other presences, being is not merely unsafe, it is a horror–for anyone but God, who is his own being. For him whose idea is God’s, and the image of God, his own being is far too fragmentary and imperfect to be anything like good company. It is the lovely creatures God has made all around us, in them giving us himself, that, until we know him, save us from the frenzy of aloneness–for that aloneness is Self, Self, Self.
As found in MacDonald’s sermon: “The Last Farthing”
Thanks for the thoughts