Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

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  *Love corrected; mythology redeemed*

  Lewis is retelling the Cupid/Psyche myth. Brief overview of the plot: Three daughters. Oldest one is ugly; middle one is pretty, but vapid. Youngest daughter is beautiful both in body and spirit. Takes place in pre-Christian Glome (a city somewhere close to Greece). Youngest daughter is sacrificed to the gods. She actually lives in a paradise. Oldest daughter doesn't believe; Tests her. Both fail test. Psyche is banished. Oldest daughter must ... (show more)

  *Love corrected; mythology redeemed*

  Lewis is retelling the Cupid/Psyche myth. Brief overview of the plot: Three daughters. Oldest one is ugly; middle one is pretty, but vapid. Youngest daughter is beautiful both in body and spirit. Takes place in pre-Christian Glome (a city somewhere close to Greece). Youngest daughter is sacrificed to the gods. She actually lives in a paradise. Oldest daughter doesn't believe; Tests her. Both fail test. Psyche is banished. Oldest daughter must learn what love is.

  This book explores many dimensions of the human *psyche* (pun intended). On a surface level, one sees how "love" can be destructive. Orual must learn that love is self-less and giving and even loving others, even passionately, is not necessarily redemptive.

  The book also explores the relationship between faith (the priest of Ungit) and reason (the Fox). Both are seen as inadequate, but not bad, either. Yes, the priest is crude and barbaric but he is quite often right. While the Fox (reason) seems to attack faith, one sees that when Orual tricked Psyche using reason, the Fox (reason) is outraged and said that was a most unrational thing. So one sees that Reason is not opposed to Faith.

  Most importantly, this book explores the problem of evil. Why do the gods not give us more evidence? Why do they tease us and leave us in doubt and confusion? Why can't we see the gods? We learn that we cannot see the gods until we have faces with which to see.

  In many ways that last point touches upon what the Orthodox would call deification. We are not ready to see until we have been transformed. (show less)

   

   

  by Jacob Aitken on Jul 01, 2009 at 07:06PM

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  This is the most beautiful, well-crafted and perceptive story I've ever read, maybe the first book that has ever truly changed my life. It is the story of humanity's willing self-deception; the dawning that everything we've told ourselves about the unselfish and true nature of our love for others is a lie, a cover-up for the fact that we've only ever loved ourselves; the painful realization that our love often sucks the life out of its objects, devours them, and gives nothing back; the discov... (show more)

  This is the most beautiful, well-crafted and perceptive story I've ever read, maybe the first book that has ever truly changed my life. It is the story of humanity's willing self-deception; the dawning that everything we've told ourselves about the unselfish and true nature of our love for others is a lie, a cover-up for the fact that we've only ever loved ourselves; the painful realization that our love often sucks the life out of its objects, devours them, and gives nothing back; the discovery, in hindsight, of all the destruction a soured and selfish love can wreak upon ourselves and the lives of everyone we claim to have loved; the final understanding that everything we've always blamed others for, hated others for, is in reality only a reflection of our own souls. We have no complaint, no excuse.

  During this discovery, Orual says, "It was I who was Ungit. That ruinous face was mine. I was [...] that all-devouring womblike, yet barren, thing. Glome was a web--I the swollen spider, squat at its center, gorged with men's stolen lives." And after she makes her complaint to the gods, she realizes that the complaint, in all its selfish and childish entitlement, was itself the gods' defense. She never truly loved Psyche, had in fact been willing to destroy all of Psyche's happiness in order to not lose her; she refused to see the beauty and wonder that Psyche had embraced because the happiness that it brought was from a source other than her own love; she was willing for Psyche to live content only as long as she herself was the source of that content. All her life, she had been angry at the gods for taking Psyche away from her, for causing her to be the unwitting cause of her sister's downfall. But as she makes her complaint to the gods, Orual realizes that her choice to ruin her sister's life was not an innocent one; her own selfishness had blinded her to what she could have freely seen but refused to accept; her whole life had been one angry rebuke against the gods, but verbalizing that rebuke for the first time opens her eyes to the true nature of her "love" for Psyche, and she finally realizes that her love had been nothing more than a bitter self-love and that everything she had ever claimed as truth was nothing more than self-deception; she says, "The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. [...] 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?"

  Brilliant. I actually cried. (show less)

   

   

  by Rosalind Goforth Ellis on Mar 05, 2009 at 08:41PM

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