Reaching back to the 1970s at Wheaton, I’ve drawn from C. S. Lewis’ little book, The Great Divorce, to help explain Plato. He’s the philosopher who gave us the cave analogy, the one where prisoners are chained together, seated with faces toward a wall upon which shadows play. The images are generated by objects carried across a bridge behind them and in front of a bonfire. Unfortunately, the prisoners think they’re seeing the real world. It’s all they know.

Fortunately, some break free, turn around, and make their way up into the sunlight. There they see real the sun, real trees, and real animals. Exhilarated by the spectacle, they return to the cave to those in chains, ready to tell them that they’re stuck in a shadow world. Trouble is, the escapees stumble about in the dark, blinded by the light they just left, so they’re not taken seriously. 

For Plato, Justice exists as a Form or Ideal whether or not there’s any justice on earth. At best, our attempts at justice are somewhat faithful copies/instantiations of the eternal concept, the real deal. But when you talk this way, you may seem stupid to the many folks who take their moral cues from polls or pragmatics.

In The Great Divorce, Lewis works with a Platonic framework. The cave is represented by a late afternoon street, with grumpy, hassled commuters boarding a bus in the murk of a sooty twilight. Then the bus, instead of making its way down the street, lifts up into the air and ultimately lands on a high plateau.

The passengers are gobsmacked by the difference between the two worlds. Back on earth, they were much impressed (or depressed) by the hurly burly of urban life, with all its power plays, tough talk, imposing edifices, and grind. But now, they find themselves as unsubstantial as smudges on glass. They disembark and one bends over to lift a leaf, only to discover it’s as heavy as a sack of coal. Another tries to pluck a flower, but it’s as hard as a diamond, and it scrapes some skin off his hand. On Lewis’s model, this is heaven, where, contrary to common pictures, the place is anything but diaphanous.

In this scene from the stage play, you see them making their way gingerly to their turned-over suitcases. The grass is hard and spikey, and they’re seeking the safety of their luggage. The scenery is glorious, but the features are a torment for those who have no heart for heaven. In his play, No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre construed hell as other people; Lewis more nearly casts it as the miserable state of one’s own soul, the result of their hardness of heart. As Lewis suggests, either we say/sing “Have Thine Own Way,” or God declares, “Then Have Thine Own [infernal] Way.” Those who think that our everyday world and the big doings of national and world affairs are momentous have it backwards; they’re merely fleeting happenstances on the stage of eternity.

This inversion came to mind when I happened the other day upon a movie on TV—

Something for Nothing: The Art of Rap. In it, Ice-T travels around the country talking to rappers about their enterprise and hearing their background stories. From the get-go, the conversation is nasty, with the opening interview averaging one obscenity a sentence, whether an F-Bomb, an MF, an S-Bomb, a GD, an infernal H, or the N-Word.* They seem to think this validates their street credentials and shows they know how to “keep it real in the ‘hood.” But Plato and Lewis would say that they have it just backwards. Such language and the surliness it serves is degenerate, far removed from the great and lasting things of God’s Kingdom and created order. It’s linguistic palsy and putrefaction, which will be swept away in the New Heavens and New Earth. And if rappers and their devotees insist on maintaining that this is substantial stuff, they’ll find the grandeur and overarching righteousness of heaven to be intolerable.  

*In tracking his interview with Lord Jamar of Brand Nubian, I noted, line by line, the incidence of noxious expressions, with slashes indicating sentences without obscenity, scatology, or blasphemy: F,S,S,S//S,S,F///F,F,F/S,S,H/N,N/GD,H//N//S/F//S,S/MF,MF,S,S//F,F,SF,F,F.