The Veiled Self

Giovanni Strazza’s The Veiled Virgin

Till We Have Faces is C. S. Lewis’s retelling of the classical myth, Cupid and Psyche, in which Venus, jealous of Psyche’s beauty, instructs her son Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with a hideous monster. Instead, Cupid falls in love with her himself and becomes her unseen husband, visiting her only at night. Psyche disobeys his orders not to look at him, loses him, and must undertake a series of difficult tasks set by Venus to win him back. Cupid pleads their cause to the gods and gains Psyche’s immortality when they are married in heaven.

Differences between the original myth and Till We Have Faces have the effect of revealing new dimensionality in the Christian understanding of both myth and of the human person. The pre-Christian myth, like the pre-Christian human being, is veiled in a darkness that constitutes a reduction from an ideal – a flattening of the fullness of story, or of person. Lewis retells the myth in the inescapable light of the Incarnation, and in doing so illuminates and revivifies the notion of personhood, as expressed through its characters. Look first at some of the obvious differences between the two myths, and then consider how Lewis has unveiled the human person without violation of story, or of his characters.

In the original, Psyche goes to be married, but in Till We Have Faces she goes to be eaten. Simple human consummation is transformed in the new tension between an evil that would consume humanity and a total selfdonation that would rescue it. In Till We Have Faces, as in real life, the stakes are much higher, the tension much greater, than in the numinous world of myth. The original Orual actually sees the palace where Psyche lives with Cupid, and is motivated by jealousy, whereas Lewis’s Orual only glimpses the palace. She is motivated by a longing that she can only hope conforms to its object, and must walk by faith instead of sight.

Lewis chooses the first person, subjective narrator, Orual, over the third person, detached or objective narrator. His retelling is intensely personal, as is the ‘myth’ that ended all mythology on the Cross. Cupid’s Psyche acts out of fear and delusion, but Lewis’s Psyche acts to save Orual. His characters are all more complex and fully dimensional than those in the original myth. The story of characters within time, straightforward and somewhat flat, gains depth and texture as Lewis has the original myth told within Till We Have Faces by the priest of Ungit.

Orual’s participation in Psyche’s tasks adds layers and folds to the fabric of the story. In the light of True Myth, the material of the old myth is quickened into life and fullness without at all Christianizing the pagan world in which it occurs. In the same way, elements of our pre-Christian lives take on dimension, fullness, and sacramental meaning once we enter the new life, the new world created by the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Lewis also adds to the sense of personal dimension by giving his story witnesses – entirely missing in the original: Fox (the Greek slave who tutors the girls), Redival (a third sister), Bardia (faithful steward to the King and then to Orual), Bardia’s wife. We are reminded that persons are only fully developed in the fullness of community, of a ‘cloud of witnesses’ in whom the glory of human being is borne. Without the living mirrors around us, and the Living Mirror in whom we are seen wholly, we, too, would be ‘characters’ somewhat flattened and distorted – lacking in capacity to convey any story but our own.

Beauty, for the old storyteller, was a curse – he rightly divined that, sought for its own sake, it led to death, or deformation of the soul. Lewis boldly makes beauty the goal in Till We Have Faces, rightly divining that it points to something higher, and that as such a symbol it has sacramental power in addition to its power to become an end in itself. In his Christian understanding, he places responsibility for the right use of such awesome powers as man wields squarely back upon the shoulders of man. No more would ‘the gods’ be responsible, but a free man with a free will would choose what he would and would not see when offered truth, beauty, and goodness.

The original myth conveys the false dichotomy of the pagan world. The world was reduced to more manageable size by a black-and-white sense of good vs bad. Again, Lewis’s retelling takes risks, adds dimension to story and person by returning to the world a capacity for paradox, tension between seeming opposites, the risk of truth. Dark and light, rationality and imagination, I and Thou stand no longer in opposition, but in creative tension within the Lewis version of this myth. It is tempting to read it through the lens of the old, simplistic lens of either/or. Fox could be seen as rational (i.e. Non-Christian) and therefore ‘bad’; Redival as sensual (i.e. Pagan) and therefore ‘bad’; Psyche as beautiful (shorthand for ‘good’ in easy stories); and Orual as ugly/bad, in a two-dimensional reading of Till We Have Faces.

The reader looks in vain who expects a ‘Christ character,’ for He is yet to come, and only to be found here in the preparatio evangelium of a “life lived in two halves” of Psyche and Orual, or of what Lewis called the ‘clear’ and the ‘thick’ that true religion must integrate. That integration comes through the horror of finding ugly, smelly Ungit at the core of Orual’s own being. The religious sense at the origin of human being cries out for a God, but finds only a faceless image of original sin until He reveals Himself in the flesh. We see through the veil of this story to a more complex understanding of these characters, and hence to a richer comprehension of human beings in general. Fox is a stunted rationality. Separated from his ‘Greek-ness’, he does not follow Greek thought to the antechamber of Christian faith. Reason fully developed would have led him to the ‘unknown God’, but intellect divorced from the fullness of life has left him in darkness.

Redival is a stunted pagan – all sensuality, ignorance, and vulgarity with none of the wonder, awe, and appreciation for beauty which Lewis thought brought true pagans closest to the experience of God. She has life in the created world, in the flesh, but the glory of it is wasted on her. Psyche is beautiful in the sense of the ideal, but needs the physicality, the help of Orual’s suffering to real-ize her beauty in its fullness. With goodness, with truth, her beauty becomes three-dimensional, but not by her own strength. Orual represents Lewis’s own coming-to-grips with the tension of paradox – the integration for him of rationality and imagination, mystery and enlightenment. The possibility of flawed love he had considered in The Four Loves is resolved in her as love is cleansed, darkness exposed, beauty revealed beneath a veil. As a character, she is rich and deep and human and true. Her personhood is not violated by a simplistic rendering of her struggle, but veiled in a way that speaks of the Christian understanding of human dignity. Lewis allows her to reveal herself, to be exposed only as she is ready to bear the truth about herself, and then only to the gods and by her own free will.

While she staggers under the weight of the frightening, dark aspects of herself, we realize through the story that it is her openness and love for beauty which has exposed her soul to the light. While she labors under the burdens she must bear, and sees her weaknesses exposed, we see the healing power even of her struggle. This is not a salvation by works, but integration of her being through work, writing, struggle, journey and self-sacrifice. Orual, finding no solace in the impenetrable world of Ungit, and no relief in intellectual abstraction from that world, cries out for a God who will meet her face to face, be known, and respond to her. To her, as to the world awaiting Christ, He seemed silent – impervious to her need of Him. Finally, at the end of her story, she is able to say to Him, “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer.”

In the end, Lewis has transformed the flat landscape of Cupid and Psyche into a world of texture, dimension, light and shadow, depth and height. The author’s own Christ-lit understanding of the human person gives his story its power to speak to the reality of human being. To the unlit mind, God is a dark and terrible mystery, a capricious and powerful Other. Mythology gives voice to some correspondence between God and man, but a person is still a flattened character in a divine story. Unveiled, exposed, vulnerable, he accepts the fate of his life and takes for himself what pleasure he can. In Till We Have Faces characters rise into fuller resolution – growing in dimension as they are resolved into one and move toward the light just over the horizon. In Christ, the seeker of Self and of God finds both. Person is transformed by sacrificial love into a sacrament, a vessel of glory. Veiled in dignity, exposed only by his own free will, able to exchange his suffering for the good of others, he may recover the dimension, freedom, and dominion of personhood. He becomes an actor, and acquires a ‘face’.

This article originally appeared in St. Austin Review, and informs Chapter 2 of Souls at Work