Till We Have Faces: Why Religions are like Soups

C. S. Lewis on why the world is both thick and thin

Till We Have Faces is C. S. Lewis’s best novel. I know it, he knew it, Joy Davidman knew it, Tolkien knew it. Among his fiction books, it presents his ideas about religion and human nature, if not more thoroughly, more deeply. Deeply, because here the characters — who grapple, often unwilling and painfully, with these ideas — feel like real people, not types or springboards for the author to preach, a problem even the best lewisian fiction struggles with.

Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, by Antonio Canova

In a way, Till We Have Faces affirms Lewis’s Christian worldview precisely because it is the book with the least Christian setting. Glome is a pagan kingdom with a pagan queen. The only alternative to the bloody mysteries of the goddess Ungit is the rationalist (but no less pagan) philosophy imported from Greece. Here we find no Aslan, no Oyarsa, no wise old man who is the undisputed dispenser of wisdom. We do get a wise old man, but his views, we soon learn, are only a small piece of the puzzle. This is (as people often say nowadays as praise) a book with no clear good guys and bad guys, a world in which truth appears to be muddy.

However, while most works that go this route leave us with a sense of cynicism, at worse, or hopeful existentialist humanism, at best, Lewis master stroke in Till We Have Faces is that he presents this gray world, with all the complexity of our real one, while still conveying that there is an ultimate reality, and this reality is good. One could debate whether the God of the Mountain is meant to be, or to represent, the True God Lewis believed in; but certainly Lewis’s ideas on the nature of the divine were put in the gods of Glome, however many and whomever they may be. This allows our pagan cast to struggle with the wonder, horror, mystery, beauty, and final consolation of the true Divine. And we, the readers, understand the struggle. We take part in it. The beauty of the final chapter exists not despite the suffering of the previous twenty-four, but grows from it. Till We Have Faces is a book which appears to be cynical, but in its deeper working — without denying the pain that feeds the cynic — it is idealistic.

Just like the real world.

The Fox and the Priest

Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the story of Eros and Psyche. It is narrated by Psyche’s older sister Orual, an elderly queen when the story opens, and is divided in two parts of unequal length. The first part is written as an accusation against the gods: Orual talks about her childhood, her love for Psyche, and how her sister was taken from her by the God of the Mountain. The second part, much shorter, is written in an increasing frenzy, as a series of events leads Orual to rethink her entire life’s stance on the divine. She has accused the Gods; They have answered.

The opening chapters show that Orual’s childhood was full of suffering. Her father, the King, is alternately negligent and abusive. Her mother died when she was of young age. And — the two facts that will follow Orual her entire life — she was born a woman, so that her only job is to marry to form political alliances, and she was born ugly, so that not even that can she do. The Gods made her broken.

A glimmer of light appears in Orual’s life when the Fox, a Greek slave which is to be her tutor, is bought into the court. The Fox is a post-Socratic philosopher, probably a stoic, the representative for a worldview that is rational, harmonious, and clear. The stories about the Gods, says he, are just lies from poets; all that exists is the great Whole of nature, and the only god we should obey is the god within each of us.

Modern readers will likely find in the Fox an antidote for the pagan superstition of Glome (finally, a reasonable voice amidst these superstician barbarians!), and thus assume he is our designated Wise Old Man, dispenser of wisdom and quotable lines. That, however, is not true. We shall see that the Fox, wise as he may be, has just part of the puzzle figured out.

Before we get there, however, the true happy days in Orual’s life begin, with the birth of her half-sister Psyche, loveliest of all creatures:

As the Fox delighted to say, she was "according to nature"; what every woman, or even every thing, ought to have been and meant to be, but had missed by some trip of chance. Indeed, when you looked at her you believed, for a moment, that they had not missed it. She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad— she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes — the toad became beautiful.

So lovely is Psyche, in fact, that it is not long before people start adoring her as a goddess — as Ungit herself in human form. An attention which does not come without perils.

When a series of disasters threaten Glome with hunger, plague, and war, the Priest of Ungit is quick to find a culprit: for taking the place of the Gods, Psyche must be sacrificed to the Shadow Brute ("for the Brute is, in a mystery, Ungit herself or Ungit's son, the god of the Mountain; or both"). Only then will the Gods be satisfied, and the land be prosperous again.

What follows, in one of the most interesting scenes in the book, is a kind of debate between the Fox and the Priest, each representing their respective brand of wisdom. The Fox brings the wisdom of the Greeks: the clear, well-proportioned wisdom of an ordered life, a rational understanding of the world. The Priest carried the wisdom of Glome:

"We are hearing much Greek wisdom this morning, King," said the Priest. "And I have heard most of it before. I did not need a slave to teach it to me. It is very subtle. But it brings no rain and grows no corn; sacrifice does both. […] Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood."

The reader, as said above, is likely to side with the Fox in a first reading. But this simplistic idea, that the Fox is the voice of reason and the Priest is either a charlatan or a lunatic, is quickly swept from under our feet.

For all its subtlety and clear answers, the philosophy of the Fox failed him more than once. The very reason he is a slave is that he has cowardly let himself be captured in battle, instead of facing death. In another point in the book, when the King orders him to be killed, the Fox is once again scared and trembling, despite his own teachings that death should be feared no more than birth.

In contrast, we learn that, cruel as he may be, the Priest of Ungit is no hypocrite. The King, suspecting a coup, takes a dager and presses it against his ribcage:

I have never (to speak of things merely mortal) seen anything more wonderful than the Priest's stillness. Hardly any man can be quite still when a finger, much less a dagger, is thrust into the place between two ribs. The Priest was. Even his hands did not tighten on the arms of the chair. Never moving his head or changing his voice, he said,

"Drive it in, King, swift or slow, if it pleases you. It will make no difference. Be sure the Great Offering will be made whether I am dead or living. I am here in the strength of Ungit. While I have breath I am Ungit's voice. Perhaps longer. A priest does not wholly die. I may visit your palace more often, both by day and night, if you kill me. The others will not see me. I think you will."

Unlike the Greek wisdom, the mysteries of Ungit do seem to give a man courage. Not knowledge, but life and strength.

One should not, obviously, suppose that this means the book (or Lewis) is thus saying that the wisdom of the Priest is the true one, while the Fox’s is false. The religion of Glome is every bit as brutal as it seems. But it does tap into a truth and a vitality that mere philosophy lacks.

Thick and Thin

Lewis has presented the non-fictional version of this argument in a few places, most notably Surprised by Joy and God in the Dock. Religions, Lewis argues in a hilariously mundane metaphor, are like soups. Some are thin and clear; some are thick and dark.

The thin religions offer us a rational macrostructure of the cosmos and of how we should act on it, they are “philosophical, ethical, and universalizing”¹. Like looking at a Greek temple, our spirits as well as our minds can rest comforted. Buddhism and ancient Stoicism are both thin religions. The thick religions are those of the mysteries, the sacrifices, the orgiastic, the ritualistic.

Now, if there is a true God, He must be both sides of the coin: he must be both thick and thin. Lewis argues only two religions can possibly fulfill this: Christianity and Hinduism.

But Hinduism fulfills it imperfectly. The clear religion of the Brahman hermit in the jungle and the thick religion of the neighboring temple go on side by side. The Brahman hermit doesn't bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshiper in the temple about the hermit's metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from Central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be clear: I have to be thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.

The necessity for both thick and thin — or rather, the realness both thick and thin possess — is hinted at by Psyche the night before her sacrifice.

[The Fox] calls the whole world a city. But what's a city built on? There's earth beneath. And outside the wall? Doesn't all the food come from there as well as all the dangers? . . . things growing and rotting, strengthening and poisoning, things shining wet . . . in one way (I don't know which way) more like, yes, even more like the House of — "

"Yes, of Ungit," said I.

However, even Psyche does not fully understand by this point (she is yet to meet her Husband), and Orual is left even more confused. Orual, of course, already knew something the Fox did not: that the Gods are real, that they are passionate, and that blood has power. But in her mind and in her soul, she was yet to unify these two apparently contradictory beliefs — her knowledge of the Gods and the teachings of her master. She won’t do it until near her death.

Orual’s Conversion

In the second part of the book, after her accusation against the God of the Mountain is laid fully, a series of events force an elderly Orual to reconsider her whole view on the divine:

• The revelation that her middle sister Redival, who so far in the book had been shown as nothing but foolish and mean, loved Orual in their childhood, and missed her when Orual's affection was divided between the Fox and Psyche;

• The death of Bardia, the captain of the guards, whom Orual loved;

• The rite of the Year’s birth, in which the Priest of Ungit pretends to fight his way out of the temple, symbolizing the struggle of the birth of the new year;

• Orual’s dream, or vision, in which her deceased father takes her down the earth and shows Orual her own reflection, and the reflection is the face of Ungit;

• Orual’s second, much longer dream, in which she is finally taken before the Gods, and reads her accusation to them.

The news about Redival and Bardia concern more Orual’s character and psychology than (directly) her relationship with the Gods; the last dream is way too dense and deserves an article of its own. I would, however, like to talk about the rite of the Year’s birth, as well as Orual’s reaction to the first dream.

During her years as queen, Orual had a new statue of Ungit erected at the temple, a Greek statue of Aphrodite, next to the faceless rock that is Ungit. There is no better simple in the book of the division between thick and thin; and also no better example of its shortcomings.

The new Priest of Ungit — the old one, who had debated the Fox and had a dagger put between his ribs, is long dead by this point — has a thin, philosophy-like view of the gods. When Orual asks him what is Ungit, he answers:

"I think, Queen," said he (his voice strange out of the mask), "she signifies the earth, which is the womb and mother of all living things." This was the new way of talking about the gods which Arnom, and others, had learned from the Fox.

"If she is the mother of all things," said I, "in what way more is she the mother of the god of the Mountain?"

"He is the air and the sky, for we see the clouds coming up from the earth in mists and exhalations."

"Then why do the stories sometimes say he's her husband, too?"

"That means that the sky by its showers makes the earth fruitful."

"If that's all they mean, why do they wrap it up in so strange a fashion?"

"Doubtless," said Arnom (and I could tell that he was yawning inside the mask, being worn out with his vigil), "doubtless to hide it from the vulgar."

I would torment him no more, but I said to myself, "It's very strange that our fathers should first think it worth telling us that rain falls out of the sky, and then, for fear such a notable secret should get out (why not hold their tongues?) wrap it up in a filthy tale so that no one could understand the telling."

Soon after, Orual sees a crying woman offer a dove to Ungit — not the Greek statue, but the rock. When the offering is made, it is like the woman has been cleaned up. Ungit has comforted her. Orual asks the woman if she always prays to the old Ungit, rather than the new one. The woman answers that the Greek Ungit is only for nobles and learned men, but there's no comfort in her.

When the rite is complete and the Priest emerges from the temple, Orual for the first time pays attention to how the people rejoice at such an apparently absurd tradition. How they sing and clap and cry, and even farmers who were sworn enemies every other day of the year now looked like brothers, all because a man dressed like a bird pretended to fight his way out of an unlocked door with a wooden sword.

Orual, the Stoic

Later in the same chapter comes Orual’s first dream, when the ghost of her father takes her down the earth and shows her reflection, and what Orual sees is the face of Ungit.

Once more Orual brings the Fox’s wisdom to her aid. She interprets the dream as meaning that her soul is as ugly as Ungit. But she needs not be. She shall be wise like the Fox, like Socrates. She shall change her ugly soul for a beautiful one. In a passage that could be taken from Marcus Aurelius, Orual decides to “set out boldly each morning to be just and calm and wise in all my thoughts and acts”… only to notice she had failed in this task not an hour into the day. The only way she could succeed was if the Gods themselves helped her. And why would (why should) they?

Orual, of course, shall find her answer at the end of this chapter and in the following one, the last two of Till We Have Faces. But as said, these are far too dense for me to cover in one post. I would just end this discussion by noticing how Lewis description of Orual is close to his own conversion:

Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side. You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to “know of the doctrine”. All my acts, desires, and thoughts were to be brought into harmony with universal Spirit. For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a hareem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.

Of course I could do nothing—I could not last out one hour— without continual conscious recourse to what I called Spirit. But the fine, philosophical distinction between this and what ordinary people call “prayer to God” breaks down as soon as you start doing it in earnest. Idealism can be talked, and even felt; it cannot be lived. It became patently absurd to go on thinking of “Spirit” as either ignorant of, or passive to, my approaches. Even if my own philosophy were true, how could the initiative lie on my side?

“Surprised by Joy”

Like Lewis, Orual has been playing a game of chess for way too long with the Divine. Now it is time to finally lift off the veil, and meet the Gods face to face.

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1. “God in the Dock”, C. S. Lewis