Till We Have Faces (TWHF) is C. S. Lewis’s (CSL’s) master work. The first time I read it I was already mature, a college Graduate and familiar with many of his books, but I neither understood it very well nor liked it very much. It was so … strange; strange and terrible. When I reread this Kindle version of it, I loved it. I understood it much better now that I have read and reread many more of CSL’s works since my first reading; it also helps that I have now read many of the same books that CSL was influenced by, particularly The Golden Bough. CSL was a brilliant man; a really, uncommonly, exceptionally brilliant man. When I first came to his corpus through the Chronicles of Narnia I could see only a shadow of this—he was, after all, writing for children. And in his books like The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity, he uses his vast intellect to bring difficult ideas down to the level of the general reader. After several readings of these I started to approach his works with a certain intellectual expectation. I don’t know if you’ve ever gone to pick up an empty paint can that turned out to be full, but reading TWHF can be a similar experience; if you are expecting another Screwtape Letters you’re in for a sudden shock to the senses. In TWHF CSL is writing at his best and highest level. He is writing with all that was in him and at his disposal for those of like mind and training. TWHF is Lewis at his finest. When I was a child in Lewis, it was much too fine for me. Now, with a mature pallet, I find it the most remarkable and stunning of his works. If you like CSL you should read it. If you are young in CSL, you might not like it or understand it, but you will have a baseline so that, a decade from now when you reread it, you’ll appreciate just how much you’ve grown.

You have probably figured out already that TWHF is a “retelling” of the story of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche. If you haven’t already read the myth, I actually recommend that you wait until after you’ve read TWHF to do so. CSL changes the story so much that you may come in with erroneous pre-conceived notions of what the story is going to be about if you pre-read it. CSL treats the original story with such subtlety that, when you do read it, you’ll be amazed at how closely he was able to stick to the original plot while still changing it completely.

I now offer here a few helpful guides to understanding the story. I outline the philosophy more than the plot because you’ll pick-up the surface level plot easily but might miss the point behind the plot that CSL is trying to make. For many of the ideas that CSL tries to convey in TWHF I will give cross references in his other works where the same thought can be found. The themes that seem so obvious in those books and essays are better camouflaged in TWHF—so well camouflaged that you might think CSL is saying something new and different in TWHF. He is not, it is the same CSL and he is making the same points.

First, if you are used to CSL’s other works, you will be shocked by his use of “holiness” in TWHF. You’ll quickly realize that holiness is far removed from pretty modern churches: it is dark, dirty, bloody, powerful, and cultic. This does not mean that CSL suddenly became a pagan in later life. But he does want to draw his reader’s attention to a sharp contrast. The contrast is not between Christianity and paganism but between two worldviews: the enlightenment and paganism, and the two groups that hold those views. We moderns, you and me, with our enlightened world view, our reason, skepticism and anti-supernaturalism, are represented by the Greeks in TWHF. Anytime Lewis refers to “the Greeks,” he’s talking about us modern people with our post enlightenment sensibilities. To this he is contrasting an older worldview; the world view that The Golden Bough excavates; the worldview that has been prevalent in most cultures and for most of history all over the world; the worldview of sacred “holiness.” A worldview that has a reverent, even terrified, respect for the supernatural; a worldview whose adherents have an intuitive understanding of their own guilt and the power of the spiritual. It is the worldview of Glome, the main city in TWHF, and the dark goddess Ungit whose Temple is found there. If you have read The Golden Bough (though I can’t actually recommend you do so) you’ll understand this ancient worldview and why the people of Glome behave the way they do toward Ungit, toward Psyche, toward the Priest, toward the King and why the King acts a certain way toward his daughters. The pagan worldview is represented by many in the book, probably most strongly by the first priest of Ungit; more importantly, it is also represented by Bardia, the captain of the royal guard who’s been born and bred in Glome and is a consummate believer in the dark goddess Ungit. The modernist world view is represented by The Fox, a captured Greek slave and philosopher. As CSL says in Mere Christianity and elsewhere, Satan always brings errors into the world in pairs of opposites. The Fox and Bardia represent two extreme opposite errors that can be made in worldview. The perfect Christian middle ground between these two points of view is represented by Psyche. She is the Christian, the Bride of Christ; she is Eve in the Garden of Eden, she is the church. She is all of these at the same time (see CSL’s essay Transposition in The Weight of Glory for a brilliant description of how one character can be so many things). Orual, the main character, is an archetypical modern, skeptical person. When she encounters Psyche after her “marriage” to the god (i.e., Jesus), Orual is shocked, horrified, curious and doesn’t know what to make of Psyche’s tale. Psyche tells Orual that her Groom is a magnificent God, that she lives in a beautiful palace, that she's wearing amazing clothes and attended by courteous spirits, but all Orual can see are rags and bear mountain crags. Orual seeks advice from The Fox and Bardia to help her to decide whether she believes Psyche or not (because, even though Psyche’s words sound incredible she is radiant and healthy and reasonable and looks to be in her right mind). Her two dear friends give her two wrong answers. The Fox says that Psyche is crazy and that the Groom is the wish of a fevered mind or pure insanity. Bardia says that the Groom is real—real and a terrible beast, a demon monster. And here we see the fundamental thesis of the book. It is a thesis which CSL expounds plainly in Mere Christianity and even works into The Lion the Witch and Wardrobe through the professor; it is the trilemma. That is, it plainly shows Lewis’s contention that there are exactly three different conclusions that one can come to about Jesus: that he was a liar, a lunatic or the Lord of all. The Fox, the modern skeptic says that Psyche’s Groom is either Freudian wish fulfillment (CSL goes to particular pains to refute Freud in The Pilgrim’s Regress) or insanity brought on by stress. Bardia says the groom is the monster son of Ungit, the terrible goddess who is fed with the blood of sacrifice and demanded the sacrifice of Psyche. Psyche is the Christian who can clearly see the groom is her beloved Lord, master and savior (clearly a type of Christ). [It almost seems blasphemous to represent Jesus with a pagan god (and Cupid of all gods!); but Lewis had a high respect for all myth and, in Myth Became Fact, explains how God used myth to prepare the pagans for the coming of Christ. TWHF can also be read as a case study in pagan myth prefiguring Christ.] Orual clearly hears the three opinions on the Groom from The Fox, Bardia and Psyche, the three people closest to her in the world, and must choose between them. The brilliance of Lewis is how he makes each of the three views seem so probable. It is the depiction, in a complete fiction, of the real and compelling views that people have today about Jesus. In Mere Christianity the trilemma is presented as a simple bit of irrefutable logic, and that to believe anything other than that Christ is Lord is foolhardy. But, as we all know, it isn’t that obvious in real life. In real life we can’t see the heavenly Kingdom that Christ talked about. Just as Orual couldn’t see Psyche’s King (her husband) or his castle, or anything about the life she shared with her Groom (i.e., her spiritual life). In our world too, there are no shining crowns-- only poor, humble, dirty disciples being crucified upside down. Lewis’s genius is to bring us to the point where we can clearly see how each point of view of the trilemma is defensible and yet, to see how each wrong answer could be detected as false in an unbiased observer.

Orual is a bit of a confusing character at first so I had better prepare you a little for her. Orual is initially portrayed as weak, humble, ugly and abused; our hearts go out to her—we see her as a Harry Potter type and want her to win and be successful because she’s the underdog. But, don’t be fooled, she isn’t the hero of the story—at least not at first. She too is subject to transposition: she is both Mankind, Satan, and the archetypal jealous woman CSL despised. In her pitiable role as mankind we see her suffer; first as she comes into the world, and through no fault of her own, suffers due to her father’s sin; later she does suffer for her own “sinful” choices just as all men do. Orual wears a veil for much of the story. It is the symbol of the separation of man from God, just as the veil in the temple between the Arc of God in the Holy of Holies and the Holy place of the temple symbolized the divide between God and man. Orual, like mankind, must make a decision about the trilemma. She decides badly. She decides based on her jealousy and her desire to “own” Psyche. In this way she is very reminiscent of some women in The Great Divorce and in the negative example of affection in The Four Loves. Her desire to keep Psyche to herself leads her into the metaphorical role of Satan who she represents at points throughout the rest of the story. In one chilling scene her father looks at her and says, “I know who you are!” She’s not sure what he means, and neither are we readers, but we feel in our bones the terrible truth that she is the very devil of Hell.

Using pity, Orual manipulates Psyche into betraying her Groom. It leads to the loss of Psyche’s Groom and her paradise. Orual’s temptation of Psyche is paralleled nicely in the second book of CSL’s space trilogy, Perelandra. But in that story, “Eve” successfully withstands the temptation because Ransom is there to help her. Psyche has no such help and, like mankind, is banished for her sin. Again, the whole scene is played out so brilliantly that we can completely empathize with Orual. Orual doesn’t see the gleaming golden God that Psyche says is there, or the beautiful palace, or the wine or fine food (it’s a bit like the dwarves who refuse “to be taken in” at the end of The Last Battle). And yet, Orual does get to see a vision of the truth once—she sees a glimpse of that other world, across a river, at dawn. CSL’s works are full of that glimpse into something beyond, something piercing and sweet, evocative and intensely private, something he called “joy.” He discusses this explicitly in Surprised by Joy but uses it throughout his works. It is a recurrent theme in The Pilgrim’s Regress, indeed it is the Pilgrim’s chief reason for traveling: to find the city that he glimpsed or to recapture the feeling it gave him. In Narnia the best expression of it is at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Repicheep, paddling his coracle, is about to pass through the standing wave at the end of the world that separates Narnia from Aslan’s country. The wave breaks for a moment and Lucy, Edmund and Peter all get the same kind of piercing glimpse beyond into Aslan’s country that the Pilgrim got in The Pilgrim’s Regress. It’s one of my favorite parts in all Lewis’s works, here's teh quote, "It lasted only a second or so, but what it brought in that second none of those children will ever forget. It brought both a smell and a sound, a musical sound. Edmund and Eustace would never talk about it afterwards. Lucy could only say, “It would break your heart.” “Why,” said I, “was it so sad?” “Sad! No,” said Lucy."

It is important to remember that TWHF is written by Orual as a protest and a formal complaint against the gods who she claims have been exceedingly cruel to her. The one glimpse Orual has of Psyche’s true paradise is her chief piece of evidence. She says it proves how the gods gave her just a tiny taste of that other world—just enough to make her doubt and debate its existence. She claims the gods could have made things very plain and clear to her, but didn’t. She complains how they left her with doubt, enough doubt to do terrible, terrible things to Psyche. Again, CSL brilliantly paints this picture so that we, the readers, also understand how maddening this is for Orual; we kind of agree with Orual too. Who hasn’t wished for God to perform an irrefutable miracle in front of an unbelieving friend or family member so that they would have to believe? After the loss of Psyche, Orual goes on to tell us about the rest of her life and her great deeds so we continue to believe that she is the hero of the story (if we haven’t figured out the truth) and we root for her. It is only in Part II, when Orual gets a vision of who she really is, and how she has really acted, that we realize what a self-centered megalomaniac Orual really is. But we sympathize with her at the same time; because we see in her what we know is in ourselves. It is one of those powerful literary revelations where, as the character comes to understand her sin we understand our own sin too; it’s similar to how in The Great Divorce, as we see the various “ghosts” play out their scenes we gasp and think, “Oh no … that’s not like me, is it?”

The meaning of the ending is still a little confusing to me. Orual, in a vision, is allowed to make her complaint to the Gods. And through this we realize that her best arguments are just an incessant, petty, narcissistic whine. It is the whine that her life has been; she’s been living the same petty whine over and over again. She finally realizes this and at the same time she realizes that the gods cannot give her an answer to her complaint which is the book. There is so very little of her there to even talk to. She hasn’t yet got a "face” to debate the gods with because she is still so tiny and petty and immature. She realizes that before she comes back and demands a response from them that she needs to become a person, she can’t debate with the God’s till she has a “face”.

After this point in the story I start to lose my grip on CSL’s metaphors. In the very last parts of the story there seems to be a conflation between Orual and Psyche—that perhaps the two are one and that the pains that Orual has suffered have been to the advantage of Psyche. It makes me wonder if, in the final analysis, CSL envisioned them as one person with two parallel lives being lived simultaneously, a spiritual and a physical. If that was his intent, it is hardly clear. Perhaps after 10 more years I’ll be able to explain even the very ending to you. For now, you should read it for yourself and see what you think it means.

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Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold