I think often about this line from *The Great Divorce*: "if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you’ll never learn to see the country."

I don't doubt this particular ghost needs to hear this word in this moment. But I am not exactly happy with what it suggests about artistic representation.

"Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him."

Again, I agree this artist is lost. And without doubt theologians can make an idol of their "telling," like artists can make an idol of their "painting." Still, there's something in what the spirit says that seems not quite right to me.

And I suspect that this "something" is what makes it so Lewis must say that in the end God loses.

I think Lewis is working with a dualism that forces him say everything ends in divorce. He divides hell from heaven, of course, but also the telling from what is told and painting from what is seen. But creation ends in marriage: reconciliation, not estrangement.

Even if the painter did love only his painting, he would come to vision eventually, b/c representation, if it's true, necessarily participates in "the real." And even if the theologian did love only the telling, the telling would tell her the truth, b/c telling itself is true.

I've leave it at this, for now. But ISTM Lewis sees human freedom as a limit on God's, and precisely so imagines that some of us may in the end wrest some of creation away from God and keep it to ourselves. God has the truth, but we have our words. He has beauty, we have our art.

But (wonderfully!) this is wrong. God is "all in all"—no less in the painting than in the seeing, no less in the telling than in the truth told. As Lewis' own guide, George MacDonald knew: love is deepest, and so our loves, however warped, cannot not in the end lead us home.