In this lecture by Dr. David Baggett at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln on March 30, 2022, he discusses C. S. Lewis' novel "Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold." Dr. Baggett explores the theme of shame in this story through the character of Oural and relates how shame affects our relationship with the world and those around us.
In Till We Have Faces (henceforth TWHF), C. S. Lewis combines his passion for pagan mythology with his knack for communicating Christian truths via story. Lewis often stresses in his various works his belief that pagan mythology, while not reflecting the complete truth about God, contains various nuggets of the ultimate truth that is found in Christianity. Christianity, he says, is the “true myth” that melds the human need for believing what is true about the world as it actually is with our need for imagination and wonder and delight.[1] It is thus not surprising that, in TWHF, Lewis powerfully illustrates a number of theological and moral positions that are prominent in many of his other writings by retelling the story of the myth of Psyche and Cupid.
This article is the first of a two-part series. The series will examine two major themes in TWHF that are also emphasized heavily within Lewis’s prose: the theme of faith and doubt (Part 1) and the theme of pride and dying to one’s self (Part 2). This series is a greatly condensed version of an article that is to appear later this year in the journal Perichoresis. It reveals how Lewis masterfully paints a picture via the characters and the story of TWHF that exemplifies religious and ethical insights within these two themes.
Lewis has much to say about faith and doubt in his prose; indeed, two chapters of Mere Christianity are fully devoted to the subject. Let us consider two aspects of faith that Lewis emphasizes in his writings and exemplifies in TWHF, beginning with our need to realize that we fall short of the mark morally and then to strive to be good while at the same time recognizing that we must seek God’s help in order to make this moral improvement.[2] Lewis says that the first step to developing this aspect of faith is to try hard to be good for even “six weeks,” as nobody realizes “how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” Doing this convinces us that we lack the resources apart from God to live up to the demands of morality.[3] This is seen in TWHF, as Orual realizes in the end that she is “ugly in soul” and desires to change her “ugly soul into a fair one.” She realizes that she needs the gods’ help to do this, but she sets out to try to be good and take the first step. She finds that she could not be good for even a half hour and was concerned that the gods would not help her.[4] So as soon as she tries hard to be good, she realizes how much divine help is needed. Yet as the novel unfolds, she finds that the gods actually are helping her to grow morally. They are doing their “surgery” on her by revealing things to her about herself using events in her life (e.g., the process of writing her book) and interactions with other people (e.g., Ansit and Tarin).[5] As Lewis stresses in Mere Christianity, God helps us to grow via many means. He uses nature, books, experiences, and other people—even when we do not realize they are being used.[6]
A second aspect of faith addressed by Lewis involves believing that God is good in the midst of suffering and incomplete information. Lewis knew well the reality of this faith struggle, as he wrestled with doubting God’s goodness after his wife died. Like Orual, who never seriously doubted the existence of the gods but had serious doubts about their goodness, when Lewis lost his wife he reports struggling with thinking “dreadful things” about God. The conclusion he fears most “is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like.’”[7]
As Psyche was preparing to be offered to the god, she talks with Orual about how to interpret the gods’ actions in such a way that they are considered good. Psyche suggests that even if the gods seem to humans to be doing evil, we may simply not know enough to realize that the gods are actually doing what is good; in addition, she suggests that it is possible that the gods are not the cause of the evils we attribute to them. Orual, on the other hand, spends much of the novel seeing no other way to interpret the gods demanding Psyche as an offering than to declare that it is clearly evil.[8] Like Orual, when Lewis was in the early stages of his grief after his wife died, he was tempted to wonder how the word “good” can be applied to God “by any standard we can conceive.” He suspected that it could only be by “our own desperate wishes” that we can think of God as good.[9] Yet he quickly realized that it is “too anthropomorphic” to think of God as an evil Being; moreover, there seems to be too much good in the world. An evil Being is not likely to include “love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset” as traps or baits in a ploy to harm us. In response, however, to the question raised by Psyche as to whether we are able to evaluate God’s goodness, Lewis rejects the idea that anything God does must be considered good because we are too limited or fallen to pass judgment on God’s morality. He denies that “we are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing” and that the goodness of God is beyond our ability to assess. If that were true, Lewis says, we would then lack any reason to obey God or to call God “good,” for that term as it applies to God would be meaningless.[10] Lewis, however, does hold that God’s ways and His knowledge are beyond us so that we do not fully understand His reasons for allowing things[11]—a truth borne out in TWHF.
1. C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 58-60.
2. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity: A Revised and Amplified Edition, with a New Introduction, of the Three Books Broadcast Talks, Christian Behaviour, and Beyond Personality (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 141-9.
3. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 141-2.
4. C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1956), 281-2.
5. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 253-67.
6. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 190.
7. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 658.
8. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 71-2.
9. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 668.
10. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 669.
11. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 568.
Sometimes in life tragic news shatters our plans, alters the direction of our lives, leaves us with a string of unanswered questions, and causes us to lose hope for a period of time. News such as this oftentimes comes in the form of a text message, phone call, letter, social media post, medical prognosis—or in my own case, when my wife and I recently heard these seven words in an ultrasound room:
“I’m so sorry. There is no heartbeat.”
You see, my wife and I found out around the time of my birthday in late August that we were expecting our fourth child, only to realize a few weeks later in an ultrasound room that we were actually expecting our fourth and fifth children. We were going to be the parents of twins! I remember feeling a profound sense of excitement (and if I am honest, I also felt a bit overwhelmed).
About a month after our first ultrasound appointment, preparing to enter the ultrasound room for the second time, we were thrilled to see our twins and also hear their little hearts beat. The appointment began with a quick scan of the first baby, allowing us the opportunity to see how much our first baby had grown. We were also able to hear our first baby’s heartbeat. Everything appeared fine until the ultrasound technician shifted her attention to the second baby, where we soon realized that something was wrong. After a few moments of attempting to detect a heartbeat, the ultrasound technician broke the news to us that our second baby did not have a heartbeat. Following a few moments of unbelief (and perhaps even denial), my wife and I locked eyes as tears began rolling down each of our faces. We were devastated.
In the days since receiving this news, we have cried together, prayed together, and reflected upon God’s truths together. Although there are many truths that I could share in light of losing one of our twins, four thoughts have consumed my mind.
First, God empathizes with us in our pain. Hebrews 4:15 says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses…” Jesus Christ, our high priest, not only shows compassion to those of us who are hurting, he takes to himself a joint feeling of our weaknesses—because he himself endured suffering, loss, mockery, abandonment, and temptation. Jesus experienced not only physical suffering, but also spiritual, emotional, and relational hardship, among other things.
Have you been rejected by friends before? So has Jesus. Have you been made fun of before? So has Jesus. Have you been ridiculed for your beliefs? So has Jesus. Have you lost someone you loved? So has Jesus. Have you experienced physical, emotional, or relational pain? So has Jesus. And here is the one that has been most comforting for us recently: Have you lost a child? So has God the Father. Although there are many other ways in which God can empathize with us in our specific instances of pain and suffering, here is the bottom line: God knows what it is like to be in our shoes; he took on human flesh, becoming one of us and walking in our shoes, experiencing many of the difficulties that we face today. This enables him to empathize with us, proclaiming, “I understand what you are going through. It’s tough. I’ve been there before.”
Second, we can trust God in our “why” moments. There are times in life when we wonder why something (usually something bad) has happened. In our “why” moments, and in all other moments, we can trust God because of who he is. The character of God is the foundation of our faith in him. Of course, the same is true with a close friend or a spouse—we trust the character of these individuals when we do not know why they are asking us to do certain things, and again, it’s because of who they are. However, unlike our human acquaintances, God is entirely holy (Is. 6:3), good (Ps. 136:1), loving (1 Jn. 4:8), just (Is. 61:8), sovereign (Acts 4:24), omnipresent (Ps. 139:7), omnipotent (Jer. 32:27), gracious (Ex. 34:6-7), merciful (Ex. 34:6-7), unchanging (Mal. 3:6), personal (Gen. 3:8), and so on.
God is also omniscient, which means that he knows all things, including the answers to all of our “whys.” Although we may not know “why” something has happened, such as the loss of a child, we can still trust God who knows why. As we understand who God is on a deeper level, we come to realize that because of his character, we are able to trust him in those things that we do not know or understand. Why? Because of who he is; he is trustworthy.
Third, God gives us what we need most: himself. Having gone through several tragedies in my lifetime, I am not convinced that we would be entirely satisfied even if God revealed to us his reasons for allowing something to happen. With our “answer” in hand, we would still be missing what we need most: God himself.
The day that my wife and I received the news about our twin’s passing, I read Job 38-42 and reflected on these words from C. S. Lewis, found in Lewis’s Till We Have Faces: “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?”[1] This Lewis quote is very similar to what Job realizes about God in the last five chapters of the book of Job. Job does not get an answer; rather, he realizes that God is the Answer. What we need most in the face of tragedy is not an answer to a question; we need God, who is himself the Answer. God is not only what we need most, he is also what, or more correctly who, is best for us. Simply put, a mere answer in the form of a statement will not truly satisfy; we need something far greater: the Answer himself.
Fourth, God gives us others to help us through our pain. Oddly enough, in the week following the difficult news about our twin, I came across several newspaper clippings pertaining to my father’s sudden death in 1994. Despite reading each article carefully, one of the articles deeply moved me. The article, focusing on how the community where we lived in North Carolina at the time rallied around us, begins this way: “Sometimes the pain from a sudden tragedy can be made less hurtful by the love and acts of kindness which result.”
As human beings, we were never meant to go through life alone. God has given us others to help us through our pain, to meet the needs that we have, pray for us, encourage us, and so on. The pain that we experience as a result of something difficult in our lives is oftentimes either lessened or at least becomes more bearable when we allow others to minister to us amidst our pain. In the days since October 22, numerous family members, friends, coworkers, and students have come alongside us in order to weep with us, pray with us, encourage us, and bless us in so many other ways (meals, cards, etc.).
There is certainly a lot more that I could say, and I pray that God gives me opportunities to say more in the future—particularly to those who find themselves experiencing loss as we have experienced loss. For now, it is enough to remember that (1) God empathizes with us in our pain, (2) that we can trust God in our “why” moments, (3) that God gives us himself, and (4) that God provides others to help us through our pain. These four truths continue to assist us as we navigate the difficult season through which we are walking, and I am confident that these four truths will get us through whatever else may come our way in the future.
*Elyse Faith, our sweet girl who we never actually “met,” we love you and we cannot wait until the day we see you in heaven. Until then, we’ll cling to what your name means: faith in the promises of God.
Stephen S. Jordan currently serves as a high school Bible teacher at Liberty Christian Academy, a Bible teacher and curriculum developer/editor at Liberty University Online Academy, and he oversees the curriculum development arm of The Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. He possesses four graduate degrees and is presently a PhD candidate at the Liberty University Rawlings School of Divinity, where he is writing his dissertation on the moral argument. He and his wife, along with their three children, reside in Goode, Virginia.
[1] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2017), 351.
Photo by Igor Goryachev on Unsplash
Let us turn now to a second major theme in TWHF: pride and corrupted love. There are a number of insights concerning this theme that Lewis offers in his prose that are illustrated well in TWHF. Consider first the nature of pride and the fact that it blocks the knowledge of God. Lewis says that pride is the key sin that is central in Christian ethics. People recognize pride in others but often fail to see it in themselves.[1] Lewis says that pride is what often makes it difficult to convince unbelievers of their sin problem. It leads them to overlook their own sins yet feel that they can judge God for allowing the evils in the world; in short, it leads humans to think we are “on the bench and God in the Dock.”[2] Pride is the pathway to all other vices. It is the “complete anti-God state of mind” and is by nature competitive. We are not proud merely because we are smart or attractive but because we are smarter or more attractive than others.[3] Pride seeks power and puts one’s self forward. It always causes conflict with others and with God.[4] Lewis says, “The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first—wanting to be the centre—wanting to be God, in fact.”[5] Since God is “immeasurably superior” to all people, Lewis stresses that pride prevents one from knowing God. Pride involves “looking down,” but God can only be known by looking up. Prideful people may say they know God, but they cannot.[6] Those who truly know God will have their focus on God and not themselves. We cannot relate to God properly unless we humbly recognize Him as God.[7]
In TWHF, Orual fails to recognize her pride for most of the novel, and this prevents her from knowing the gods and discovering truth. So long as she was elevating herself and only looking down, she could not realize that the gods were above her. She could not know herself or the gods because she was a prisoner of her pride. As the novel opens, she seeks to put the gods in the judgment seat (i.e., in “the dock”) and is angry that they will not answer her.[8] By the end, however, she discovers that the accusations she had wanted to make against the gods for most of her life were indefensible. She realizes that this is why the gods “do not speak to us openly” about our concerns. It is because we do not know as much as we think we do and our pride blinds us to the truth. The gods cannot “meet us face to face till we have faces.”[9] This also illustrates why Lewis says that prayer would be far too dangerous for us if God answered every prayer.[10] Orual had prayed for the gods to reveal things to her, but they were silent. In the end, she knew it was good that they had remained silent and not answered her prayer.
A second insight within this theme is that pride corrupts love into a jealous hate that devours others. In The Four Loves, Lewis says that prideful self-centeredness and jealousy can creep into “every kind of love.” This may involve not wanting the one we love to “become brighter or more beautiful” or not wanting “the old ways to be changed even for the better.”[11] He gives the example of two siblings who share everything and are extremely close throughout life, but one of them experiences a change—a new interest that the other cannot share. Perhaps, he says, the change is that one “undergoes a religious conversion.” The one who did not change is liable to feel that she is losing the bond with the other. She is likely to mock the new love of the changed sibling and call it “nonsense.”[12] This is exactly what Orual experienced when Psyche found a new love that Orual did not share and did not want intruding into her love for Psyche. Orual admits that her hatred of the gods and her true motivation to separate Psyche from them were rooted in her belief that the gods stole Psyche’s love from her. Orual would rather Psyche be killed than have another come between her and Psyche. “Psyche was mine,” she says.[13]
Lewis also notes in The Four Loves that there is sometimes a need to be needed by the one we love, and this can be twisted into something like hate. Lewis gives the example of one who has the need to care for another person in a motherly way such that the other person is smothered by these efforts and does not desire them.[14] Love should express itself in wanting the other person to be self-sufficient and not require one’s support;[15] when it does not, this twisted sort of love “contains a good deal of hatred” and becomes “a god” in one’s life—an idol that “becomes a demon.”[16] This is reflected in The Great Divorce by the female ghost who, even in the afterlife, is obsessed with controlling her husband and desires to continue to rule over him and “make something of him”—a goal she believes she never fully completed in her earthly life.[17] She goes on and on describing how she met all of his needs and how he would be lost without her even though it was evident that he did not desire (or, in her mind, “appreciate”) her efforts. Her preoccupation with her husband needing her prevented her from knowing God and from seeing the destruction that her “love” produced in her own life and in the earthly life of her husband. In the end, this continual need to be needed sucked up her very existence.[18] This type of twisted love is clearly exemplified in Orual’s desire to control and rule over Psyche. Although Psyche assures Orual that her god husband must now be the one to guide her, Orual insists, “You cannot go your own way. You will let me rule and guide you.”[19] Although Psyche neither needed nor desired Orual to rule her, Orual had a need to be needed. She was so desperate to keep Psyche under her “loving” rule that she coerced her by threats. Mirroring what Lewis says in The Four Loves, Psyche tells Orual, “I am not sure I like your kind [of love] better than hatred.”[20] Orual, in revealing her true thoughts at the end of the novel, says she was not jealous of Psyche until the gods started to elevate Psyche and make her the “next thing to a goddess.” Orual wanted the gods to elevate her instead and show her the truth so that she could in turn teach Psyche.[21] She was bent on Psyche needing her as a ruler and teacher. Although Psyche was happy with the gods, Orual took no comfort in this. Her pride and twisted love led her to insist that she must be the only one to give Psyche happiness.[22] The Fox described this attitude as “one part love in your heart, and five parts anger, and seven parts pride.”[23]
Lewis declares that the worst sort of pride involves looking down on others “so much that you do not care what they think of you.”[24] Although Orual no doubt would have preferred for Psyche to think well of her, there is a real sense in which she exemplifies the sort of pride Lewis is describing. Orual wanted to have Psyche’s companionship and love, and she did not care if Psyche knew she was coercing her so long as it meant keeping Psyche in her life and under her control. She was willing to threaten to kill Psyche and herself to keep Psyche under her rule and did not back down when Psyche accused her of using Psyche’s love for her as a weapon.[25] Orual devoured others with her twisted love and was “a craver” even if they thought less of her for it.[26]
Another insight of Lewis concerning pride and love is that one should never be less drawn to God than one is to another human and should never love God less than another human. Lewis says that we cannot love another human too much. We can only love God too little so that our love for that human person is placed higher than our love for God.[27] Lewis also thinks it is not a sin to be proud of another human—so long as that pride is mere admiration and that admiration is less than what one has for God. It is never acceptable to “love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.”[28] Lewis portrays this concept well in The Great Divorce through the character Pam. Pam wants to see her son Michael, who is in heaven, but she needs to desire God to do so. She says she will love God if that is the only way to see her son, but she is told that one must not love God as a means to being united with what ought to be a lesser love. She is “treating God only as a means to Michael.”[29] Indeed, Lewis wrestled with this temptation himself after his wife died. As he was struggling to maintain his trust in God’s goodness, he considered that he may simply be “sidling back to God” because he knew that doing so is the only possible road to seeing his wife again. But he realized that God “can’t be used as a road.” Lewis says, “If you’re approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you’re not really approaching Him at all.”[30] So love for God must exceed one’s love for any human; however, throughout nearly all of TWHF, Orual’s relationship with Psyche was clearly far more important to her than Psyche’s relationship with the gods or her own relationship with the gods.[31] Orual was more drawn to Psyche than she was to the gods and desired a love relationship with Psyche that she did not desire to have with the gods. This made Psyche an idol in Orual’s life that led her astray greatly.
Finally, a crucial insight of Lewis related to pride is that one must die to oneself in order to know God and love others properly. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, “Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.” He says that if you “look for yourself,” then “you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” We must submit to the death of our “ambitions and favourite wishes every day” if we are to be remade.[32] This dying to self is powerfully illustrated in TWHF, as Orual is told by the gods to “die before you die.”[33] Orual had to be “unmade” and die to herself and her prideful ambitions in order to become her perfected self.[34] In Mere Christianity, Lewis uses a fleet of ships to illustrate how moral growth needs to occur within a human, between humans, and in the interaction between each human and God. To function properly, each ship in the fleet must be seaworthy, each ship must not collide with or damage other ships, and all the ships must be collectively headed toward the proper destination (i.e., God).[35] In TWHF, Orual must die to herself in order to grow morally as an individual. Doing this allowed her to relate better to others and understand the root of pride that infected her relationship with and knowledge of other humans and the gods.
Lewis illustrates powerfully many insights from his prose in TWHF. Concerning faith, he portrays emotional doubt in the lives of Orual and Psyche and the need to use reason to trump such doubt. He reveals through Orual how moral growth requires personal effort as well as drawing upon God’s help. He also reveals much of what he learned in his own struggle with doubting God’s goodness through Orual’s process of discovery. Concerning pride, he shows through Orual’s self-discovery how pride prevents one from knowing God by blocking one from knowing oneself and one’s flaws. He also illustrates in Orual many of his insights concerning the way pride and jealousy can corrupt love into a devouring hate and how one’s love of self and others can wrongly exceed one’s love of God. Finally, Lewis shows in TWHF how dying to oneself is a true prerequisite to overcoming pride and finding one’s true self so that one can relate properly to God and others. Thus TWHF is a masterpiece in which Lewis—via the medium of retelling a myth—portrays many of his theological and moral insights
Notes
37. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 121.
38. C. S. Lewis, “God in the Dock” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 268.
39. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 122.
40. Ibid., 123-4.
41. Ibid., 49.
42. Ibid., 124.
43. Ibid., 127.
44. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 3.
45. Ibid., 294.
46. C. S. Lewis, “Work and Prayer” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 107.
47. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1960), 45.
48. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 46.
49. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 290-1. This is much like what Lee Strobel experienced prior to his conversion to Christianity. When his wife became a Christian, he at first resented her love for God out of his own “self-interest.” He worried that he was losing her because her belief that she now had a relationship with God was coming between them. See Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 16.
50. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 48-50.
51. Ibid., 50.
52. Ibid., 56.
53. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 516.
54. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 513-6.
55. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 159.
56. Ibid., 165.
57. Ibid., 291.
58. Ibid., 292.
59. Ibid., 148.
60. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 126.
61. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 165. Orual also used her position as Queen to keep Bardia with her needlessly and selfishly and did not encourage the Fox to leave her and go home to Greece as she knew he wished to do.
62. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 305.
63. Lewis, The Four Loves, 122-3.
64. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 127.
65. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 518.
66. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 685.
67. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 72-6.
68. Ibid., 226-7.
69. Ibid., 279.
70. Ibid., 307-8.
71. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 71-2.
Photo by João Silas on Unsplash
In Till We Have Faces (henceforth TWHF), C. S. Lewis combines his passion for pagan mythology with his knack for communicating Christian truths via story. Lewis often stresses in his various works his belief that pagan mythology, while not reflecting the complete truth about God, contains various nuggets of the ultimate truth that is found in Christianity. Christianity, he says, is the “true myth” that melds the human need for believing what is true about the world as it actually is with our need for imagination and wonder and delight.[1] It is thus not surprising that, in TWHF, Lewis powerfully illustrates a number of theological and moral positions that are prominent in many of his other writings by retelling the story of the myth of Psyche and Cupid.
This paper will examine two major themes in TWHF that are also emphasized heavily within Lewis’s prose: the theme of faith and doubt and the theme of pride and corrupted love. With regard to the first major theme of faith and doubt, we will examine three key aspects of faith that Lewis stresses throughout his writings that are beautifully illustrated in TWHF. The first aspect of faith involves holding onto what one believes with good reason to be true about God in the face of various emotionally-driven, non-evidential temptations to abandon one’s faith. The second aspect of faith involves humbly drawing upon God’s help as we strive to follow Him and be molded into a person of greater character. The third aspect of faith deals with believing that God is good in the midst of pain and suffering and incomplete information.
The paper will then examine the second major theme of pride and corrupted love. This will begin by examining how Lewis considers pride to be the antithesis of God’s mindset and how it prevents one from knowing God. This truth is at the heart of TWHF. Next, we will consider what Lewis has to say about how pride corrupts love into a sort of jealous hate that devours others and how this is exemplified in the life of Orual in TWHF. We will also see how Lewis’s warning against loving God less than we love others is illustrated in the novel. Finally, we will examine how Lewis’s repeated exhortation to engage in the biblical principle of dying to oneself in order to combat pride and relate properly to God and others is portrayed clearly in TWHF.
Lewis has much to say about faith and doubt in his prose; indeed, two chapters of Mere Christianity are fully devoted to the subject. Let us consider three aspects of faith that Lewis emphasizes in his writings and exemplifies in TWHF, beginning with his recognition that faith requires us to hold onto what reason tells us is true about God and not allow our commitment to God to waver when we are tempted to doubt for various emotionally-driven reasons that are not rooted in evidence or reason. Lewis recognizes that human minds are not “completely ruled by reason.” Despite having good reason to trust one’s surgeon, for example, Lewis himself experienced emotional doubt and anxiety when he had surgery; he allowed his “emotion and imagination” to overrule his reason.[2] A Christian with reasonable faith still experiences times when “his emotions rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief.” Also, in some situations there are moral reasons that it is not “convenient” to think that Christianity is true (e.g., when one is tempted to sin). Faith involves maintaining commitment to what one knows is true about Christianity despite one’s changing moods and circumstances.[3] It is a virtue to “teach your moods where they get off” and control them when they challenge one’s reason. This involves recognizing one’s moods and using reason to remind oneself that one’s faith in Christ is true by engaging in the spiritual disciplines of prayer, Bible reading, and church attendance.[4]
This sort of emotional doubt is seen in both Psyche and Orual in TWHF. Psyche rationally believes—on the basis of her longing for the gods, her recognition of their beauty, and her religious experience—that the “god of the Mountain” is the source of all beauty and has been “wooing” her to come to him.[5] Lewis considers the human longing for God and for that which is beyond this world to be a rational reason to believe in God.[6] Yet, despite having good reason to be confident in the gods, Psyche has moments when her emotions—fear in particular—rise up and cause her to doubt. A fear arises in the back of her mind that the god of the Mountain does not exist and that she will slowly die tied to a tree instead of being united with the god. The thought made her cry, but she quickly began reminding herself of the confidence that she has that the Fox’s skepticism about the gods is wrong and that her sense that the gods exist is correct.[7] As Lewis says in A Grief Observed, “You never know how much you really believe in anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”[8] At such times, it is easier for emotions to get the better of one’s faith, but Psyche reasoned herself away from this doubt in exactly the way Lewis says one should respond to such emotional blitzes.[9]
Orual also experiences emotionally-driven doubts. Unlike Psyche, Orual has no longing for the gods—especially after they take Psyche away. She has hate for them and admits her repulsion to believing that Psyche is living with a god husband in a palace, exclaiming in an angry outburst, “I don’t want [to believe] it!”[10] Although she clearly realizes that the evidence for Psyche’s account of her god husband is enough to believe it is true,[11] she allows her emotions to overrule her reason. Indeed, immediately after realizing that she believes it is true, emotional doubt occurs—what reason told her is true is wiped out by an emotional blitz of “blinding waves of sorrow”.[12] Because she lacks the longing for the gods that Psyche has, Orual does not invoke reason to try to talk herself out of her emotional rejection of the truth. Instead, she convinces herself that she is justified in accepting what is not true despite the fact that factual doubt (i.e., doubt rooted in a lack of evidence) was never the problem.[13] Unless one is determined to rule one’s moods by reason, Lewis says one will remain merely “a creature dithering to and fro” with one’s beliefs “dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.”[14] That is exactly what happens with Orual. Because she is so influenced by her moods and emotions rather than grounding herself in reason, her beliefs seem to swing wildly back and forth. She goes from nearly a “full belief”[15] that the unseen palace exists to moments later “fluttering to and fro between two opinions” and finding it “unbelievable” that Psyche’s palace and god “could be anything but madness.”[16] Then, shortly thereafter, she briefly sees the palace and is so sure that Psyche is married to a god that she plans to go and ask Psyche and the god to forgive her of her doubts, but when the palace disappears she immediately tries to tell herself it may not have been a veridical experience.[17] Then, after hearing Bardia’s opinion and reflecting again on the evidence, she considers it “plain” truth that Psyche was given to the god.[18] In the end, it is made clear that Orual did know that the palace was real all along and that her emotions—especially her jealousy—were the culprits in her convincing herself that the evidence is unclear.[19] Her emotions carried out a blitz on her beliefs. Like Orual, Lewis experienced the temptation to think negatively about God out of anger rather than what he knew to be true. He calls it “hitting back” at God. But Lewis stresses that “the mood is no evidence.”[20] He illustrates this well in Orual.
Consider now a second aspect of faith stressed by Lewis: realizing that one falls short of the mark morally and striving to be good while at the same time recognizing that one must seek God’s help to make this improvement.[21] Lewis says that the first step to developing this aspect of faith is to try hard to be good for even “six weeks,” as nobody realizes “how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” Doing this convinces us that we lack the resources apart from God to live up to the demands of morality.[22] This is seen in TWHF, as Orual realizes in the end that she is “ugly in soul” and desires to change her “ugly soul into a fair one.” She realizes that she needs the gods’ help to do this, but she sets out to try to be good and take the first step. She finds that she could not be good for even a half hour and was concerned that the gods would not help her.[23] So as soon as she tries hard to be good, she realizes how much divine help is needed. Yet as the novel unfolds, she finds that the gods are helping her to grow morally. They are doing their “surgery” on her by revealing things to her about herself using events in her life (e.g., the process of writing her book) and interactions with other people (e.g., Ansit and Tarin).[24] As Lewis stresses in Mere Christianity, God helps us to grow via many means. He uses nature, books, experiences, and other people—even when we do not realize they are being used.[25]
A third aspect of faith addressed by Lewis involves believing that God is good in the midst of suffering and incomplete information. Lewis knew well the reality of this faith struggle, as he wrestled with doubting God’s goodness after his wife died. Like Orual, who never seriously doubted the existence of the gods but had serious doubts about their goodness, when Lewis lost his wife he reports struggling with thinking “dreadful things” about God. The conclusion he fears most “is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like.’”[26]
As Psyche was preparing to be offered to the god, she talks with Orual about how to interpret the gods’ actions in such a way that they are considered good. Psyche suggests that even if the gods seem to humans to be doing evil, we may simply not know enough to realize that the gods are actually doing what is good; in addition, she suggests that it is possible that the gods are not the cause of the evils we attribute to them. Orual, on the other hand, sees no other way to interpret the gods demanding Psyche as an offering than to declare that it is clearly evil.[27] Like Orual, when Lewis was in the early stages of his grief after his wife died he was tempted to think, “What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’?”[28] Yet he quickly realized that it is “too anthropomorphic” to think of God as an evil Being; moreover, there seems to be too much good in the world. An evil Being is not likely to include “love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset” as traps or baits in a ploy to harm us. In response, however, to the question raised by Psyche as to whether we are able to evaluate God’s goodness, Lewis rejects the idea that anything God does must be considered good because we are too limited or fallen to pass judgment on God’s morality. He denies that “we are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing” and that the goodness of God is beyond our ability to assess. If that were true, Lewis says, we would then lack any reason to obey God or to call God “good,” for that term as it applies to God would be meaningless.[29] Lewis, however, does hold that God’s ways and His knowledge are beyond us so that we do not fully understand God’s reasons for allowing things[30]—a truth borne out in TWHF.
Orual also thinks for most of the novel that the gods are toying with us in “cat-and-mouse play” by giving us something good in our life just to take it away and make things worse.[31] In the same way, Lewis for a time wondered if God was like that when his wife died. His concern was that there is a God who is playing with us like we are “rats in a laboratory.” It seemed to Lewis that “time after time, when [God] seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture.”[32] Yet Lewis came to realize that this thought was an emotional “yell rather than a thought” rooted in reason and evidence.[33] Orual, too, comes to see that the gods have not been mistreating her; rather they have been preparing her for moral surgery.[34]
It is also interesting that, when his wife dies, Lewis wonders on what basis he had begun having doubts about God’s goodness. He knew about evil and the fact that spouses die before his own wife died, and it never bothered him before; however, it began to bother him and challenge his confidence in God’s goodness once the suffering happened to him personally.[35] In the same way, Orual says she “never really began to hate” the gods and hold the strong feeling that they are cruel until they affected her personally by taking Psyche away.[36] It is only when suffering impacts our lives personally that this aspect of faith in God’s goodness tends to be doubted.
(Part 2 coming next week)
Notes:
1. C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 58-60.
2. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity: A Revised and Amplified Edition, with a New Introduction, of the Three Books Broadcast Talks, Christian Behaviour, and Beyond Personality (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 139.
3. Ibid., 140.
4. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 141.
5. C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1956), 74-6.
6. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 135-7.
7. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 70-1.
8. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 665.
9. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 140-1. See also Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 108-9. Psyche’s doubts began to return as she was left at the tree. She felt that her old longings were gone and she could no longer believe in the god and the palace. Yet in her doubt she prayed to the gods. Emotional doubt returned when faced with stress and the possibility that her faith is misplaced, but she turned to the spiritual disciplines in the midst of it.
10. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 124.
11. Ibid., 120, 123-4.
12. Ibid., 121.
13. Ibid., 290-1.
14. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 141.
15. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 120.
16. Ibid., 126.
17. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 133. See also C. S. Lewis, “Is Theism Important?,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 191. Related to the brief vision of the palace, Lewis says that religious experience often “comes and goes: especially goes.” Faith involves retaining “what is irresistible and obvious during the moments of special grace. By faith we believe always what we hope hereafter to see always and perfectly and have already seen imperfectly and by flashes.”
18. Ibid., 137.
19. Ibid., 290-1.
20. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 673.
21. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 141-9.
22. Ibid., 141-2.
23. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 281-2.
24. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 253-67.
25. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 190.
26. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 658.
27. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 71-2.
28. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 668.
29. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 669.
30. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 568.
31. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 249.
32. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 668-9.
33. Ibid., 669.
34. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 253-67.
35. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 671-2.
36. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 290.
One important way that C. S. Lewis went about irrigating deserts and planting gardens was to be honest that the tide had turned against many of his most cherished convictions, and since he was convinced that the new direction was mistaken, he would often point backwards. To the charge that this was retrograde, he famously said, “We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
After accepting his new post at Cambridge, Lewis—on his 56th birthday—gave his inaugural address in 1954 called De Descriptione Temporum, a description of the times, in which he aimed to identify the central turning point in western civilization. “[S]omewhere between us and the Waverley Novels, somewhere between us and Persuasion, the chasm runs.” To make the case for his proposal, Lewis adduced germane examples from the realms of politics, the arts, religion, and technology. With respect to religion, what Lewis primarily had in mind was the un-christening of culture. Exceptions abound, but the “presumption has changed,” adding
It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are ‘relapsing into Paganism’. It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity ‘by the same back door as in she went’ and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.
In 1935 Cambridge philosopher William Sorley expressed misgivings about this demotion of morality that’s bound to result in an artificially truncated worldview in which moral ideas are paid short shrift. “If we take experience as a whole,” Sorley wrote, “and do not arbitrarily restrict ourselves to that portion of it with which the physical and natural sciences have to do, then our interpretation of it must have ethical data at its basis and ethical laws in its structure.” Perhaps it’s not surprising that Sorley is a luminary in the field of moral apologetics, as the later Cambridge professor Lewis would be as well. For at the heart of moral arguments is the abiding conviction that morality can provide a vital window of insight into reality. Hermann Lotze, a 19th century German philosopher, in fact once wrote that “the true beginning of metaphysics lies in ethics,” a sentiment with which both Sorley and Lewis resonated.
Recall Lewis’s words from Mere Christianity to this effect:
These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.
This paper is about perhaps the greatest example he provided of this: his novel Till We Have Faces (subsequently TWHF), which harmoniously weaves together and integrates numerous of Lewis’s philosophical, theological, and ethical emphases. It contains, in fictional form, what Lewis thought about the import of myth and beauty, of joy and desire, of reason and imagination. This essay will cover an aspect of the novel that arguably resides at the thematic heart of the story and at the intersection of ethics and epistemology.
Lewis’s story refashions the myth of Cupid and Psyche. It is set in Glome, a barbarian kingdom on the edge of the Hellenistic world, and is told by the main character, Orual, the eldest daughter of Rom, King of Glome, step-sister of Psyche, and sister of Redival. The main story is about Orual’s indictment of the gods for failing to make their ways plain. Ostensibly the worry is wholly epistemic. The indictment comes in the form of an account of the major portion of her life, presented with the request that the reader judge her case against the gods. Her intended audience is “wise Greeks,” who, because of their philosophical education, will readily see in the events she reports puzzling epistemological problems and, therefore, will more likely see the truth of her charge.
The events in question pertain to Orual’s central passion: her love of Psyche. The two people who give her happiness are Fox, a Greek slave her father secured as tutor for his daughters, and Psyche, who is not only uncommonly beautiful but virtuous as well. After Psyche’s mother dies at childbirth, it is Orual who brings Psyche up as her own child. What generates conflict with the gods is the demand, presented by the Priest of Ungit—Glome’s version of the fertility goddess—that Psyche be sacrificed on the Grey Mountain to her son, the Shadowbrute, supposed god of the Mountain. The sacrifice is to remove a curse that has befallen the kingdom.
After the sacrifice, Orual makes a trek to bury Psyche’s remains but discovers Psyche alive and well, radiant in fact, claiming to be living with her husband/god in a beautiful palace. Orual, though, is unable to see the palace, so she is left to figure out the truth. Skeptical the gods are good, she devises a plan to liberate Psyche, but it goes horribly wrong, sending Psyche into exile. Orual returns home to reign as Queen of Glome and tries to forget her past.
As for aspects of the novel that pertain to the question of epistemology, particularly religious epistemology, first one should note that the era and context of the story is distinctly premodern. The default position is decidedly not atheism, agnosticism, or skepticism, but one of robust religious conviction and theological interpretation of the events in question. Following Robert Holyer, we can immediately identify two major epistemological issues: whether the gods are just inventions of the priest and pandering to popular superstition, or rather that the gods are real. The Fox is of the former opinion, but Orual and Psyche of the latter. The second major epistemological question is this: If the request for Psyche’s sacrifice is genuinely Divine, how is it to be understood? Is it a malevolent request born of jealousy and intended to bring suffering not only to Psyche but also those who love her, particularly Orual? Or is there some paradoxical way in which the deed might result in Psyche’s well-being and therefore be consistent with the affirmation that the gods are good? Orual inclines to the former, always casting the holy places as dark places; Psyche, to the latter.
So a central problem of the novel is to read the signs of the Divine correctly and to find in them reasonable assurance sufficient to live faithfully in the face of the irresolvable mystery and ambiguity featured heavily in the book. Evidence is not undeniable or incorrigible, and questions remain unanswered. A related concern of the book involves Lewis’s most important innovation: Orual’s inability to see the palace of the gods. In Lewis’s key adaptation, Psyche saw it and claimed to live in it, but Orual couldn’t see it at all, except once and only briefly.
Among the various signs and signals of divine reality and goodness, perhaps the most important is the experience of the Holy. Rudolf Otto, author of The Idea of the Holy, claimed that experiences of the Holy are one of the basic sources of religious belief throughout the centuries. He distinguished and described several constituent elements of the experience of the Holy, two of which are these (both found in TWHF): (1) tremendum, a kind of dread or fear unlike our other fears—as Orual rightly describes it, a fear “quite different from the fear of my father,” and (2) fascinans, a consuming attraction or rapturous longing. Psyche is poignantly aware of both, Orual mainly only of the former. Fascinans, or “Joy,” to use another Lewisian term, is associated with the objects of the imagination, with beauty, with poetry, and above all with the Mountain—all common motifs in Lewis’s fiction.
A second sign is empirical evidence, which is ambiguous. A third sign is finding Psyche alive and well days after her sacrifice, which raises the question of how reliable her testimony is. The story Psyche recounts is remarkable, but Orual has to admit that Psyche had always been trustworthy. The final and most difficult piece of evidence is experience of divine realities—like Orual’s glimpse of the palace and Psyche’s more continuous experience of the gods.
The epistemological task in the novel is to determine the nature of ultimate reality—whether it is jealous and cruel, or mysterious and marvelous. Reason plays an important role—drawing conclusions from premises taken from a broad array of experience, but much of the reasoning that Lewis thought is called for is implicit and intuitive, requiring an equal mixture of philosophy and vision, a reconciliation of reason and imagination. Orual has to choose between rival explanations in the face of real ambiguity and mystery, a measure of hiddenness that perhaps ensures that her inquiry reveals her real motivations more than just her cognitive prowess.
Lewis suggests looking within, as part of an epistemic quest predicated on the traditional idea that at the foundation of all knowledge is self-knowledge. Thales thought the hardest thing to do is “to know thyself,” employing a phrase that invokes the specter of what would be on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Plato would write that the essence of knowledge is self-knowledge. Centuries before Plato, the Hindu Upanishads confirmed, “Enquiry into the truth of the Self is knowledge.”
In the Apology, Socrates, at the precipice of his own death, asked, “Are you not ashamed to spend so much trouble upon trouble heaping up riches and honor and reputation, while you care nothing for wisdom and truth and the perfection of your soul?” Socrates did not claim to have attained to great wisdom, but the most important knowledge of all, he thought, is self-knowledge. Other speculative matters of alleged knowledge aren’t likely to conduce to greater perfection of the soul than authentic knowledge of the self. And perfection of soul far exceeds in importance anything else, which is why this ancient approach to epistemology, focused on self-knowledge with the goal of moral maturation, resides at the intersection of epistemology and ethics.
TWHF assumes that who we are shapes what we see, but rather than culminating in a radical subjectivism, for Lewis it leads to something like a virtue epistemology, according to which there’s a reality to be seen. Admittedly it’s seen through a glass darkly, but how much of it we can genuinely grasp remains a function of who we are. Understanding who and what we are, then, is foundational to knowledge. For Lewis, poetry—and art more generally—though vitally important, was penultimate, hardly anything like a compensation for lost faith.
In Part II of TWHF, Orual augments her original book—her original complaint against the gods—by writing that “I know so much more than I did about the woman who wrote it.” Interestingly, she says that what began the change was “the very writing itself.” The writing itself—the art—enables the growth in self-knowledge, but this is only the beginning: to prepare her for “the gods’ surgery.” “They used my own pen to probe my wound.” Lewis didn’t think that the epistemic quest was over once we looked within, practiced art, or saw the world under some fresh aspect, but that by growing in self-knowledge we can begin to see the world more accurately, we can apprehend more of reality, and the world will begin to look quite different from how it did before.
Orual had written her complaint against the gods. Ostensibly her complaint is epistemic, but when she adds to the book later, she admits things aren’t as they seem. How does her writing probe her wound and reveal to her the truth about herself? Primarily by a close and brutally honest examination of her various relationships—and the past she has tried so hard to veil. For example, she has had no pity in her heart for her sister Redival, but, after writing her original complaint, she encounters a former servant of her father’s named Tarin, who says, of Redival, “She was lonely.” This catches Orual by surprise, the “first snowflake of the winter I was entering.” She comes to admit as a certainty that she had not thought at all how it had been for Redival when she, Orual, first turned to Fox, then to Psyche, because “it had been somehow settled in my mind from the very beginning that I was the pitiable and ill-used one. She had her gold curls, hadn’t she?”
Next comes insight concerning her treatment of Bardia, her servant whom she loves. He is married, though, and always out of reach. After she finishes her book, she hears he is sick, and within a few days, he dies. She goes to visit Ansit, his widow, but Ansit is bitter toward the Queen, accusing her of working Bardia to death. “After weeks and months at the wars—you and he night and day together, sharing the councils, the dangers, the victories, the soldiers’ bread, the very jokes. . . .” And “I do not believe, I know, that your queenship drank up his blood year by year and ate out his life.”
The Queen replies with incredulity that Ansit should have spoken up, but Ansit says she never would have deprived her husband of his work and “all his glory and his great deeds.” Should she make a child and dotard of him? “I was his wife, not his doxy. He was my husband, not my house-dog. He was to live the life he thought best and fittest for a great man—not that which would most pleasure me.”
Ansit is suggesting that her love for Bardia means she had to give up some of her own desires, not make it all about herself, which begins to prick the Queen’s conscience because this very pattern has always been her own modus operandi. This raises a most important thematic element in the book: a recurring question of what real love means and looks like. Lewis was of the view that we can convince ourselves that our motivation is one of the purest love, when it might be far from it. The point here is that, sometimes when we think we are at our moral best, we may well be at our worst.[su_pullquote align="right"]Lewis, like Kant, saw such moral darkness as powerfully suggestive that it’s altogether rational to believe there are resources beyond our own to close this moral gap. [/su_pullquote]Orual long thought of the gods as indulgent and selfish, and is now accused by Ansit of being “gorged with other men’s lives, women’s too: Bardia’s, mine, the Fox’s, your sister’s—both your sisters.” Now, Orual writes, “the divine Surgeons had me tied down and were at work.” At first she is angry, but then Orual admits to herself that it is all terribly true, more than Ansit could even know. And she confesses her horrific treatment of Bardia, finally concluding, “Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.” She adds, “I had been dragged up and out into such heights and precipices of truth, that I came into an air where [her love for Bardia] could not live. It stank; a gnawing greed for one to whom I could give nothing, of whom I craved all.”
Next, she has to reexamine her relationship with Batta, who had been a servant Orual had executed. Now she remembers that Batta had her loving moments. Yes, she was a busybody and tattletale and rumormonger, but now she recalls Batta’s warmth and humanity. Orual is inexorably forced to face the truth of who she was and is and of what she’d done—none of which she wanted to hear, all of which she needed to hear.
Having long thought of the gods as ugly in character, Orual now sees this as projection; now she comes to think that she herself is like Ungit: ugly in soul. In despair, she plans to kill herself before she’s stopped by the voice of a god: “You cannot escape Ungit by going to the deadlands, for she is there also. Die before you die. There is no chance after.” Earlier Lewis availed himself of the Socratic dictum “Know Thyself,” and now Lewis makes reference to the Socratic notion that true wisdom is the skill and practice of death. Reflecting on Socrates, the Queen writes, “I supposed he meant the death of our passions and desires and vain opinions.”
Philosophy, properly understood, trains us how to die, and not just physically. That part of us that most needs to die is our vainglory, our self-aggrandizement, our pride, our inordinate passions. She then reasons, “[I]f I practiced true philosophy, as Socrates meant it, I should change my ugly soul into a fair one. And this, the gods helping me, I would do. I would set about it at once.” The Queen resolves to be “just and calm and wise in all my thoughts and acts; but before they had finished dressing me I would find that I was back (and know not how long I had been back) in some old rage, resentment, gnawing fantasy, or sullen bitterness. I could not hold out half an hour.” She writes, “I could mend my soul no more than my face. Unless the gods helped. And why did the gods not help?”
In her angst and emotional tumult the Queen comforts herself with her complaint against the gods, and with obstinate tenacity holds on to one last consolation. Namely, at least she had cared for Psyche, taught her, and tried to save her, even wounded herself for her. And then comes a vision. In the vision she has a chance to read her indictment against the gods. The book/indictment/complaint has, however, now become much shorter. She is reluctant to read it, but she does, and in fact, without realizing it, reads it over and over again. We can identify three closely related salient highlights.
First, on the evidential score, she admits that she had been shown a real god and the house of a real god and should have believed; the real issue isn’t that. She admits she could have endured belief in the gods if they were like Ungit and the Shadowbrute. In truth she resents their meddling, their wooing of Psyche, their failure to follow through and devour Psyche as promised. “I’d have wept for her and buried what was left and built her a tomb. . . . But to steal her love from me!” The beauty of the gods—the fascinans she’d heretofore resisted and rejected—didn’t make things better, but worse. For it enables the gods to lure and entice, leaving Orual nothing. Second, she’d have rather Psyche remain hers and dead than the gods’ and made immortal. She has prided herself for her profound love of Psyche, but now the truth is revealed: it isn’t Psyche’s well-being she wanted to secure, but her own comfort. Psyche was hers.
Third, Orual insists that had she been the one to whom the gods had made themselves known, she would have been able to convince Psyche of their reality and goodness. Instead it was Psyche made privy, and Orual resented it. “But to hear a chit of a girl who had (or ought to have had) no thought in her head that I’d not put there, setting up for a seer and a prophetess and next thing to a goddess . . . how could anyone endure it?” Orual only wanted Psyche to be happy on terms she dictated. “What should I care for some horrible, new happiness which I hadn’t given her and which separated her from me? Do you think I wanted her to be happy, that way? It would have been better if I’d seen the Brute tear her in pieces before my eyes,” and “Did you ever remember whose the girl was? She was mine. Mine. Do you not know what the word means? Mine!” The sober truth about who Orual is has now been revealed, its dregs poured out. The complaint is the answer. She now has knowledge of herself, and what it reveals is a horrible malady, a problem in need of a solution.
Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
The death of most importance in TWHF is not Orual’s physical death in the final chapter, but rather the death to which she’s called after coming into a deep knowledge of herself and her moral malady. When Orual faces who she is, her initial response is one of despair, and rightly so when she sees the distance between where she morally is and where she thought she was, when she sees that at her best she is actually at her worst, when she sees that what she thinks is her love is actually mainly hate. Lewis, like Kant, saw such moral darkness as powerfully suggestive that it’s altogether rational to believe there are resources beyond our own to close this moral gap.
The solution called for in TWHF, however, is radical. What’s needed is nothing less than death—not physical death, though. What philosophy, rightly understood, can teach us is how to die—to experience the death of our moral malady, our self-righteousness, our pride, our predatory natures, our possessiveness, our self-consumption. What such moral desperation reveals is the need for radical transformation—far beyond what we can do on the strength of our own meager moral resources alone. And if we “die before we die,” before it’s too late, as Orual is told to do, then perhaps the sting of death can be removed, its inevitability not entail fatalism, and its aftermath be full of hope. For the longest time Orual had hardened her heart and resisted intimations of something more, whereas for Psyche such a longing constituted the “inconsolable secret” of her heart. Psyche’s longing for the Mountain and the imaginary gold-and-amber castle of her youth, rather than a groundless hope or vacuous wishful thought, was the “sweetest thing” in her whole life.
Introduction
If asked what morality looks like, many would say it’s listening to one’s conscience or, particularly if speaking to a Christian, following the instructions laid out in the Bible. However, C. S. Lewis describes a process of total moral transformation which is significantly more involved, including divine intervention in addition to personal choice and rule-following, and which bears a striking resemblance to plot elements found in standard fictional plot structure. Where the avoidance of evil and the effort to make good choices serves as the whole of the moral question for some, Lewis describes four separate, if sometimes overlapping, stages—self-deception, honest assessment, serious moral effort, and finally redeemed morality—that can be compared to the exposition, crisis, try-fail cycle, and climax of a story’s plot. This succession of stages can most clearly be seen in Lewis’s retelling of the myth of Psyche, his novel Till We Have Faces.
Exposition: Self-Justification and Self-Deception
In our flawed moral state, we naturally find ways of justifying or even completely ignoring our moral failings. Here we find the tin soldier in one of Lewis’s analogies: in the attempt to turn him into a real man he does not want to be made real, mistakenly thinks that he is being killed, and fights as hard as he possibly can to remain in his current state.[1] “Before we can be cured we must want to be cured.”[2] The preference to try and cure ourselves, or worse, the temptation to believe that there is nothing of which to be cured, keeps us in a scenario in which we are attempting to be good (or think we are) but are in fact seeking happiness as our ultimate goal, an impossible situation since, while holiness can produce happiness, the pursuit of happiness cannot produce morality.[3]
Orual spends the greater portion of Till We Have Faces in this stage of the plot. She continually justifies her own selfish actions or overlooks them completely, avidly accuses the gods of punishing her without valid cause, and both actively and passively harms those around her throughout the process, all while thinking of herself as a martyr and demanding that everything happen on her own terms. “It had been somehow settled in [her] mind from the very beginning that [she] was the pitiable and ill-used one.”[4] Even when shown the truth of situations, Orual refuses to acknowledge it for what it is, doggedly insisting that she is in the right and has been treated unfairly, even when threatening violence and blatantly manipulating or mistreating the people around her. Orual sees a glimpse of Psyche’s palace, claims the gods are mocking her, and eagerly accepts the faulty theories of Bardia and the Fox to make herself feel better, to justify her desire to control Psyche and ruin her happiness because Orual had not been the one to provide it for her.[5] She even goes so far as to suggest, when the god appeared to her, that he changed the past to make her appear guilty: “He made it to be as if, from the beginning, I had known that Psyche’s lover was a god, and as if all my doubtings, fears, guessings, debatings, questionings of Bardia, questionings of the Fox, all the rummage and business of it, had been trumped-up foolery, dust blown in my own eyes by myself.”[6] She is shown truth at this moment (and at other moments throughout the story) and dares to accuse the gods of wrongdoing rather than acknowledging her own sin. This is an excellent example of the lengths to which someone will go to avoid the realization of their own moral failure. Lewis’s description is unique but its silhouette is readily recognizable at the center of human nature. Every person contains this exposition in his own story though the specific details will obviously vary. It is where we all start in terms of morality.
Crisis: Honest Assessment
In the midst of all the denial and justification comes a point (or points) at which an honest voice is heard speaking the truth of our failures, sometimes a slap to the face and sometimes a gentle nudge to direct our focus. We have the choice to suppress the warning or heed it. When we choose the first option, we revert to the previous stage to begin again. This is seen in Orual’s dismissal of her glimpse of the palace, her suppression of her brief desire to let Psyche be happy, her refusal to hear that Psyche’s husband could be anything other than a villain, insisting that the gods hate her, etc. When we choose the second option, though, we turn a corner. This is the point at which Orual says that she must edit her book because
I know so much more than I did about the woman who wrote it. What began the change was the very writing itself…. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant. I found I must set down (for I was speaking as before judges and must not lie) passions and thoughts of my own which I had clean forgotten. The past which I wrote down was not the past that I thought I had (all these years) been remembering. I did not, even when I had finished the book, see clearly many things that I see now. The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning—only to prepare me for the gods’ surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.[7]
She begins to see the reality of her situation when she makes a legitimate effort to be honest about her story, and this attempt at sincere honesty provides clarity. “Virtue—even attempted virtue—brings light; indulgence brings fog.”[8] When our focus shifts from ourselves and our natural motives to virtue and the sincere desire to be good (and not primarily happy), we begin to make real progress and see ourselves more and more clearly. “When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him.… You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.”[9] In the minds of many this stage of honest self-assessment and desire to be good, to make better choices, amounts to the peak of one’s personal moral journey. They would say that the only thing left is to follow through with those better choices and to continue being honest with oneself. For Lewis, though, this stage is more akin to the crisis point in a story’s plot; this is where the protagonist realizes the problem and attempts to effect change. Pride is identified and begins to be rejected.[su_pullquote align="right"]Once we are in right relation to God, he will make us more like himself as well as most fully ourselves.[/su_pullquote]
The Try-Fail Cycle: Moral Effort and Repeated Failure
It is at this point that sincere moral effort begins. Lewis’s recommendation at this point is to “make some serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues.… Try six weeks. By that time, having, as far as one can see, fallen back completely or even fallen lower than the point one began from, one will have discovered some truths about oneself. No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”[10]
This stage can be seen in a handful of moments in Orual’s journey. She comments directly on it at one point: “I could not hold out half an hour…. I could mend my soul no more than my face.”[11] She gives the Fox his freedom, sets out to improve conditions for the workers in Glome’s mines, gives Redival the husband she wants, and takes other steps to help the people in her kingdom.[12] On the other hand, some of these actions are more selfless than others and for every success there seems to be a corresponding moral failure—her bitterness that the Fox might choose his home and family over her, her hostility toward Redival, the execution of Batta, her possessive love of Bardia, to name a few.[13] The attempt to be virtuous is admirable in that it allows us to strengthen the desire to reach that goal and in a practical sense does improve our character. Certainly, we will make better choices when the desire to do good is present rather than only the desire for happiness, but for Lewis its primary purpose is to convince us that we need divine assistance.
Now we cannot…discover our failure to keep God’s law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, “You must do this. I can’t.”[14]
According to Lewis, under the right circumstances and with a decent natural temperament, we can appear to be exceptionally moral people but even at our natural best we are caught in this try-fail cycle precisely because our focus is centered on our actions and motives while God is looking for something related but different. “[W]hat God cares about is not exactly our actions. What he cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind or quality—the kind of creature He intended us to be—creatures related to Himself in a certain way [and therefore related to others in a certain way].”[15] For that to happen, we must reach a point, through the try-fail cycle, at which we recognize our inadequacy and seek God himself rather than seeking only moral actions.
Climax: Redeemed Morality
The climax of moral transformation (on Earth) is reached at the point when failure is recognized and the need for divine assistance is accepted and pursued. The climax is humility before God. Moral effort is still required but now Jesus is providing what is needed to succeed. “It is a living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as he was when he created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has. At first, only for moments. Then for longer periods. Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into a new little Christ, a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God.”[16]
Something resembling the try-fail cycle will still occur but with more and more success and less and less failure, really more analogous to the falling action of the story. “For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying to catch the good infection from a Person…. The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself…beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part of you that is still tin.”[17] The solution draws near and things are being put right. Now when we fail, it is not in vain. God is producing perseverance and dependence in us, moving us toward virtue with each choice and making us more into the creatures he means us to be.[18]
The final stretch of Till We Have Faces shows us this stage in Orual’s story and it occurs in a relatively brief amount of time. Once she accepts that the last virtue she thought she possessed—her love for Psyche—was not the selfless love she imagined it to be, when she sees herself and the gods accurately, acknowledges that they had been right all along and that she had no excuse for her actions, she is finally able to change in a much more significant way than her previous efforts had allowed. Once Orual accepts her own failings and the illegitimacy of her accusations against the gods, accepts their judgment and the fact that she cannot fix herself, she receives more clarity. Shown Psyche’s suffering, her response is no longer justifications and denials. Instead she asks the Fox, “Did we really do these things to her? ... And we said we loved her.”[19] And when Psyche returns from her task, Orual falls at her feet and begs forgiveness, showing the new understanding she has gained in the process: “I never wished you well, never had one selfless thought of you. I was a craver.”[20]
Having tried her best to be good and failing and having recognized her actions for what they were, she finally reaches the climax: her moral redemption. When the god comes to her, she sees her reflection alongside Psyche’s. “Two figures, reflections, their feet to Psyche’s feet and mine, stood head downward in the water. But whose were they? Two Psyches, the one clothed, the other naked? Yes, both Psyches, both beautiful (if that mattered now) beyond all imagining, yet not exactly the same.”[21] This harks back to Lewis’s assertion that, once we are in right relation to God, he will make us more like himself as well as most fully ourselves.[22] Having moved through the previous stages and embraced God, Orual undergoes a radical change, not only in her actions but at her core. This is the climax of moral transformation.
Conclusion
For C. S. Lewis, moral transformation is a dynamic process and dramatic event with a very specific end result. It begins in a dark place and requires sincere effort, recognition of incompetence, and a turn to God—the exposition, crisis, try-fail cycle, and climax of one’s moral story. The process in reality is perhaps a bit messier than a typical plot structure but the categories fit well. Lewis assures us that the process a realistic one, that we possess the ability to become a Psyche with God’s assistance and will be if we allow God to have his way and embrace the process.
The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were “gods” and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.[23]
Lewis’s simple explanation of this moral transformation can be found in the instruction to Orual: “Die before you die.”[24] Socrates said philosophy trains us how to die—and perhaps this is what’s most true about his dictum: we need to die to our vainglory, our self-aggrandizement, all the various maladies within that only God’s grace can excise and heal.
Bibliography
Lewis, C. S. The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956.
[1] C. S. Lewis, The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 97.
[2] Ibid., 59.
[3] Lewis, The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, 105.
[4] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956), 256.
[5] Ibid., 132-133, 137-138, 144.
[6] Ibid., 173
[7] Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 253-254.
[8] Lewis, The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, 60
[9] Ibid, 56.
[10] Ibid., 78
[11] Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 282.
[12] Ibid., 207, 212, 231-236.
[13] Ibid., 207, 212, 230, 233.
[14] Lewis, The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, 81.
[15] Ibid., 80.
[16] Lewis, The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, 103.
[17] Ibid., 102.
[18] Ibid., 60.
[19] Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 304.
[20] Ibid., 305.
[21] Ibid., 307-308.
[22] Lewis, The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, 118.
[23] Lewis, The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, 109.
[24] Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 279.
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“The message of the gospel—God’s act of forgiveness and salvation in Jesus—is rooted in hesed. Hesed describes the disposition of God’s heart not only toward His people but to all humanity. The love of God extends far beyond duty or expectation. His forgiveness of sin fulfills a need that is basic to all other needs in the relationship between human beings and God—the restoration and continuation of fellowship with God in Jesus Christ. God’s hesed manifested in forgiveness makes a relationship with Him possible. That forgiveness comes to us freely as a gift from God based on the sacrificial act of Christ.”
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