But C. S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, offers a different view on the theological significance of scarcity, in the context of an imaginative depiction of Hell. Hell, in this story, is not fire and brimstone, nor weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Instead, it is a huge grey town that goes on indefinitely, wrapped in a dismal, drizzly twilight. The narrator learns a bit about the town by chatting with a fellow passenger on a bus.
"It seems the deuce of a town," I volunteered, "and that's what I can't understand. The parts of it that I saw were so empty. Was there once a much larger population?"
"Not at all," said my neighbor. "The trouble is that they're so quarrelsome. As soon as somebody arrives he settles in some street. Before he's been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbor. Before the week is over he's quarreled so badly that he decides to move. Very likely he finds the next street empty because all the people there have quarreled with their neighbors—and moved. If so he settles in. If by any chance the street is full he goes further. But even if he stays, he makes no odds. He's sure to have another quarrel pretty soon and then he'll move on again. Finally he'll move right out to the edge of the town and build a new house. You see, it's easy here. You only have to think a house and there it is. That's how the town keeps growing."
By this process, the older residents have spread out "astronomical distances," light-years. The interlocutor regrets the situation and offers his diagnosis:
"What's the trouble about this place? Not that people are quarrelsome—that's just human nature and was always the same even on earth. The trouble is, they have no Needs. You get everything you want (not very good quality of course) by just imagining it. That's why it never costs any trouble to move to another street or build another house. In other words, there's no proper economic basis for any community life. If they needed real shops, chaps would have to stay near where the real shops were. If they needed real houses, they'd have to live near where the builders were. It's scarcity that enables a society to exist.
By this account, scarcity is beneficial because it provides the "economic basis for… community life."
What was wrong with eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, other than that God said not to? Genesis does not say. Augustine insisted that the sin of Adam and Eve was pride, which is good theology, but not very good exegesis. Taking the text at face value, the sin was to claim the right to know, or perhaps to judge for ourselves, good and evil—tendentiously, we might even call this "freedom." In C. S. Lewis's Hell, these converge. Hell's residents insist on judging good and evil for themselves, which leads them to blame everyone else. They never admit faults, jealously guarding their own
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