Going "on holiday" to the High Countries, as the shades do in TGD, is an allegory perhaps of going to church or in some other way coming into contact with Christ and His truth. The High Countries are so real that "purgatory" is a land of shades and unsolid things, just like Lewis's conception would have been (was) of the eternal, the heavens as more "real" than this life on the "silent planet."
Lewis obviously talked about some sort of purgatory in a few places (Letters to Malcom being the foremost in my mind), but he seems to have thought of purgatory as more of a process (instantaneous, perhaps) than a place. All the same, with maybe three sentences in all of the Lewisian corpus that have to do with purgatory (excluding TGD, which is the work in question and which demands greater care, as an imaginative work, in pulling out the thought behind it), how does one come up with the idea that TGD has to do with purgatory in the common sense of the word?
Has anybody else been dumbfounded at reading such ideas? Or perhaps somebody here agrees that TGD is illustrative of Lewis's belief in a traditional purgatory? Very interested to know.
