Till We have faces

Aaron Radke — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 01:22:31 +0000

As the gods would have it, I came away aware of my own sin and depravity after reading this Lewis book ¹. I was the bitter one. I was the one with the corrupted view that needed and continue to need correction. We see ourselves clearly in the presence of God. He answers all questions and humbles all without a word.

The god comes to judge Orual...
The air was growing brighter and brighter about us; as if something had set it on fire. Each breath I drew let into me new terror, joy, overpowering sweetness. I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one. But that is little to say; rather Psyche herself was, in a manner, no one. I loved her as I would once have thought it impossible to love, would have died any death for her. And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted. Or if she counted (and oh, gloriously she did) it was for another's sake. The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming.
...
I know now , Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. ²

This is the experience of many of the characters within this book. They were locked in their own framework of thinking and could not see the profanity of their desires and rationales. They could not see, even though they longed for answers. They could not see until they felt the presence of the Divine. Then their questions were answered without a word.

This narrative causes me to be more and more aware that affections are the battlefield of life. The slightest lunge or movement can set in motion a wildly different course of action. Attention and thoughts that consume a mind is what it loves. It has given a heightened awareness that I have a great need to have God change my heart. We can question much and give all kinds of reasoning, but after God reveals himself ( gives you a face to see your sin) you can not see him. Give me a face.

Lewis's thoughts on his book

Though I had many thoughts and feelings throughout the book, I came away questioning what Lewis was trying to say. Many people conjecture, but the following are Lewis's own thoughts. It was comforting to find that the elements are intended to be straightforward.

An author doesn't necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else, so I give my account of Till we have Faces simply for what it is worth. The 'levels' I am conscious of are these:
A work of (supposed) historical imagination. A guess of what it might have been like in a little barbarous state on the borders of the Hellenistic world of Greek culture, just beginning to affect it. Hence the change from the old priest (of a very normal fertility mother-goddess) to Arnom; Stoic allegorizations of the myths standing to the original cult rather as Modernism to Christianity (but this is a parallel, not an allegory). Much that you take as allegory was intended solely as realistic detail. The wagon men are nomads from the steppes. The children made mud pies not for symbolic purposes but because children do. The Pillar Room is simply a room. The Fox is such an educated Greek slave as you might find at a barbarous courts--and so on.
Psyche is an instance of the anima naturaliter Christiana making the best of the Pagan religion she is brought up in and thus being guided (but always 'under the cloud', always in terms of her own imaginations or that of her people) towards the true God. She is in some ways like Christ because every good man or woman is like Christ. What else could they be like? But of course my interest is primarily Orual.
Orual is (not a symbol) but an instance, a 'case' of human affection in its natural condition, true, tender, suffering, but in the long run tyrannically possessive and ready to turn to hatred when the beloved ceases to be its possession. What such love particularly cannot stand is to see the beloved passing into a sphere where it cannot follow. All this I hoped would stand as a mere story in its own right. But--
Of course I had always in mind its close parallel to what is probably happening at this moment in at least five families in your home town. Someone becomes a Christian, or in a family nominally Christian already, does something like becoming a missionary or entering a religious order. The others suffer a sense of outrage. What they love is being taken from them. The boy must be mad. And the conceit of him! Or: is there something in it after all? Let's hope it is only a phase! If only he had listened to his natural advisers. Oh come back, come back, be sensible, be the dear son we used to know! Now I, as a Christian, have a good deal of sympathy with those jealous, suffering, puzzled people (for they do suffer, and out of their suffering much of the bitterness against religion arises). I believe the thing is common. There is very nearly a touch of it in Luke II. 38, 'Son, why hast thou so dealt with us?' And is the reply easy for a loving heart to bear? ³

noteworthy reviews

A Great Gulf Fixed: The Problem of Obsessive Love in C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces by Amelia F. Franz
Inspiration, publication, and insight
Wikipedia

¹ C.S. Lewis, Till we have faces: a myth retold, http://www.trentu.ca/ahc/materials/lewis-bib.html#III , Geoffrey Bless, London, 1956
² Ibid.
³ C.S. Lewis, Letters of C.S. Lewis, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1966

Life's End

Till We have faces

Till We Have Faces

Lewis's thoughts on his book

noteworthy reviews