Till we have faces

It is such a profound book. I get something out of it every time I read it. "How can we see the gods face to face, till we have faces?" Wow.
 
It is such a profound book. I get something out of it every time I read it. "How can we see the gods face to face, till we have faces?" Wow.
I know. "Wow!" And I agree, every time I read it, I find something new. The first time I read it, I totally identified with Orual, when she recognized herself as the cruel, bloated spider living on everyone else's blood ... The next time, of course, I identified with Psyche with her joy in the "invisible" world of her marriage ... This time, I think, I felt for both of them, and saw them both in myself. Which I think is where the story leaves you, because they are the same, both Psyche. One is Psyche from the beginning, beautiful and by nature able to receive the god when he comes for her, while Orual grew into her being Psyche through the "death" of her old self, through the many long years of half-life ...

That's another profundity in the story, that Orual hears the directon to "die before she dies," and in fact this happens to her: the old Orual, the grasping, selfish, longing one, does die, when she's brought into the light, when Orual accepts her reality and lets her die.
 
Thanks Ink and PotW. Does anyone know if my timeline of the publication of TWHF and Lewis' relationship with Joy is right? I know the book was written and published before Lewis' religious marriage with Joy and thus likely before before he had any idea she had cancer. I tried looking it up but I couldn't find the date of publication of TWHF other than 1956. I got the impression it was published in the 1st quarter of 1956 and being a complicated book probably wasn't a fast writing. It is said it was written during a writer's block and it took his early friendship with Joy to encourage him to go back to a subject he had in his mind since his pre-Christian years. So that would place the actual writing late in 1955. So this seem to put everything about the book before even his civil marriage with Joy in April 1956. I recently heard a lecture on TWHF where the professor thought Lewis the wrote the book after He fell in love with Joy and found out she had cancer and thus the depressing theme of the book, but according to my timeline that is impossible. Now Surprise by Joy (some would say the Joy in the title didn't have to do with his conversion story but subconsciously of Joy his friend) was also published in 1955 and I think in many ways TWHF was a novelization of his autobiography. But it is said that Lewis based Orual on Joy and not on himself. You also must realize that Lewis and Joy were corresponding and friends for about 4 years before even their civil marriage. It is hard to say when they fell in love. Some biographers say before their civil marriage and others not till after Joy came down with cancer. Both had put a large investment in each others life when the civil marriage had occurred, but as PotW implies and I would agree, love is not just an investment. All this comes down to, though this is usually considered a late book in Lewis' life it mostly deals with subjects of his early life, and only by Joy's friendship and intellectual stimulus was the book written and not directly to do with his later love with Joy as some think. It can be said that both SOJ and TWHF would not have been written except by the encouragement of Joy and maybe love.
 
I'll be frank: I consider most of that speculation and second-guessing to be a bunch of hooey, armchair-psychoanalyzing of the towering intellect and imagination that was Lewis. It's particularly noxious because, like true post-modern post-romantics, everyone seems to be stuck on the idea that THE vital turning point in Lewis' life and emotional growth was his marriage to Joy Davidman. This even comes out in the movie Shadowlands, though more the American production with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger than the BBC production. There Lewis is portrayed as this Stoic, ivory-tower intellectual who doesn't understand about pain and love until Joy introduces him to it.

This is straight-up hogwash. Lewis knew about pain and love by brutal personal experience from his earliest days. He lost his mother as a child, and was sent away from his family to a boarding school where, lonely and homesick, he was subjected to bullying. He served in WWI, where he lost many of his friends to those brutal battles. He knew about love and the cost of love. One major factor which these pop-psych scholars walk right past is Mrs. Moore, the mother of his Army buddy Paddy Moore, whom Lewis promised to care for if Paddy was killed (which he was). By all accounts Mrs. Moore was petty, demanding, and generally abrasive to all around her. But Lewis served her humbly, which I think helped the Lord form his character.

Lewis considered Faces to be his best spiritual autobiography. He wrote a narrative autobiography earlier in his life (Surprise by Joy) and an allegorical one (Pilgrim's Regress), but both were a the superficial level, merely recounting externals. In Faces, we see the true story of a soul, the very heart writings of a man who laboured his entire life to find, at the end, that he had no face - he had to accept the one that was given.

These "scholars" who pretend to know things they couldn't possibly know, and waste their time speculating about the internal effects of external events that might possibly have had upon the work, are completely missing the value of Faces. Certainly everything that happened to Lewis in his life contributed to the insights expressed therein, but this of all his works is not something that can be appreciated from a distance, analyzed discursively. It must be entered into. You must walk with Orual, understand her heart, recognize where it resonates with yours. That's the value of Faces, in my eyes.
 
Those are good points, PoTW -- but I do keep seeing on the internet (and maybe all the sources are quoting one another) that CSL said Joy had a big impact on TWHF; he dedicated the book to her, and I read a couple places that he (privately) referred to her as the co-author!

No one can gainsay that Lewis was a towering intellect and gifted writer -- nor that he had experienced much life had to offer -- before he met Joy. But what he had not experienced (that anyone could tell) was romantic love and a love-match marriage, which he seems to have experienced, however briefly, with her. And I think there's no way such an intense experience could not have influenced everything about him, including his writing. I know I am not the same woman I would have been had I never married, not in any area, not in my writing. Why should it be different for him?

If Timmy's sources are right, at the very least Joy interested CSL in writing the Psyche/Cupid book he had been kicking around previously. And I think that of all the women he writes about in other novels, Orual seems the most "real," or authentic. I do love Jane and Mother Dimble from The Space Trilogy, but they aren't, to me, as grittily realistic as Orual.

Jane I understand, but Lewis presents her at times as little more than a spoiled child demanding her own way. Mother Dimble, also a fantastic character, seems too good to be true. The Grandma everyone wishes they had, sort of thing. Of course the Pevensies are children, and the other female characters in The Space Trilogy aren't featured players -- Maggs, Hardcastle, Mrs Deniston (whose first name I forget).

Maybe it is because the book resonates so deeply with me, but Orual, and in her way Psyche, seem to me to be the deepest and most authentic women in his writing -- and I wouldn't hesitate to believe his relationship with joy enhanced this. Mrs Moore he had known and loved as best he could for many years, but by all reports she was a mean old thing, and the relationship was never as personal one that brought him joy or exposed him to the reality of a woman-partner the way Joy did.

I don't think we can say she had very little to do with the finished product of TWHF, or perhaps we can say if she had little to do with it, that "little" was what he needed to create authentic women characters who made his message that much more engaging. From my perspective. As a woman.
 
Well I agree with much you say PotW. Many sources influenced Lewis' writings. In the early days it was Inklings that stimulated much of his writings. It was his colleagues which he used to develop his ideas. But it is pretty clear that after the early 1950's Joy was a major stimulus for his writings. This can be shown by Tolkien's relationship and influence over Lewis turning sour. But one of the things that influenced Lewis more than some believe is his debate with Elizabeth Anscombe (1948). I don't know whether he actually lost the debate but it did effect him. It appears to have lead him to move away his focus on Christian apologist and to focus on spiritual romantic aspects of Christianity.

But all this is probably outside this thread. I am about finished with TWHF. It is a great book like the others say. It covers some wonderful subjects, but like I said earlier it is not a fun book to read. It is not a page turner. It is something you read a bit at a time and spend the rest of the day thinking about. I can see why I couldn't really get a hold of when I first read it in the 1980's. It is like a brand new Christian trying to read the book of Job.
 
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Yeah, I've heard that business about the debate with Anscombe being some sort of big turning point in Lewis' thought. That's also hogwash. Anscombe herself dismissed that hypothesis as a sterling example of the psychological phenomenon of projection. Those advancing it presumed that Lewis responded as they would have responded, and wrote the incident up like that. In fact, Lewis sat down with Anscombe and, in a very cordial and cooperative way, made the suggested changes to the text of Miracles based on her observations.

I'm sure there were a lot of influences on Lewis' thought, just as there are a lot of influences on my thought and your thought. I think our big modern mistake is assuming we know enough from observing externals to be able to accurately judge what they are. When I find myself coming to understand, after years of work by the Holy Spirit, that certain things I've experienced have influenced my thinking and assumptions all my life, then I have to presume that my quick glances at the things other people are going through are woefully insufficient to provide me with any kind of perspective on what's really going on. I used Mrs. Moore as an example, because her presence is just the sort of thing a biographer might dismiss with "Mrs. Moore also lived at the Kilns, and was petty and abrasive." In my experience, dealing with such people can be a major tool in the Lord's hands to form and refine our characters.
 
I can't add much to this, except to say that even slight acquaintances and brief observations can give material to a novelist. The character of Orual is obsessed with justifying herself and controlling others.... and frankly, you could meet five or six persons like her in any random city on a given day. Maybe Mister Lewis had encountered LOTS of pushy, obsessive people.
 
I hope all this hogwash from you (PotW) wasn't directed at me just for bringing up these subjects. I first brought it up because of a series of lectures I caught on-line by a Prof. Ted Sherman of Middle Tennessee State University. He seemed to be an expert of English Literature. He seemed to take the view that TWHF was written because of finding out his new wife had cancer, yet I have shown that that wasn't possible by the timeline I developed. He also bought up the debate with Anscombe. I kind of agreed with him, not because I felt Lewis had failed so much in the debate, but that Lewis had come to a point in his life that he lost interest in always defending the logic of his faith and was going into a more existential path of his faith. He was following his mentor George MacDonald more. Following the poet and the mystic in himself. In TWHF you see that in the end Urual saw how little the Fox (the logical side of Lewis) had to offer in understanding Gods and how much more the common person or the priest had to offer. Joy Davidman also was an existential poet, it was no wonder that Lewis and her hit it off so well. We all, when we are young in our faith, want to defend our faith to others with logic and the like so that they will think well of our decisions to follow our new faith. Yet latter in our walk we come to an inner faith that doesn't need to be defended, we follow the Christian mystic more than the Christian apologist. It is clear that Lewis' work does change latter in his life. I don't even feel he would have written all the CON if not for that change.

I hope you all don't feel I didn't get much rereading TWHF after all these years. I will say I didn't get much out of it the first time I read it as a young Christian. I knew it was one of Lewis' great works. But to force myself to dive back into it was difficult. I am glad I got a audio recording of the book to listen along as I read it to force my self thru it. Like I said it isn't a page turner. It is like Lewis' description of pulling a scab. A difficult task but you feel better at the end. Even better like going to a surgeon to work on an infected wound. A lot of pain, put to get that pus out makes all to be well.
 
Timmy of Oz said:
He also bought up the debate with Anscombe. I kind of agreed with him, not because I felt Lewis had failed so much in the debate, but that Lewis had come to a point in his life that he lost interest in always defending the logic of his faith and was going into a more existential path of his faith. He was following his mentor George MacDonald more. Following the poet and the mystic in himself. In TWHF you see that in the end Urual saw how little the Fox (the logical side of Lewis) had to offer in understanding Gods and how much more the common person or the priest had to offer. Joy Davidman also was an existential poet, it was no wonder that Lewis and her hit it off so well. We all, when we are young in our faith, want to defend our faith to others with logic and the like so that they will think well of our decisions to follow our new faith. Yet latter in our walk we come to an inner faith that doesn't need to be defended, we follow the Christian mystic more than the Christian apologist. It is clear that Lewis' work does change latter in his life. I don't even feel he would have written all the CON if not for that change.
Good points Timmy. I hadn't thought of it that way.
CF said:
I can't add much to this, except to say that even slight acquaintances and brief observations can give material to a novelist. The character of Orual is obsessed with justifying herself and controlling others.... and frankly, you could meet five or six persons like her in any random city on a given day. Maybe Mister Lewis had encountered LOTS of pushy, obsessive people.
CSL said that TWHF was his "spiritual autobiography," so I don't think we need to look far for the inspiration for Orual. One the the beauties of the book is, I think, that at different times in your life and spiritual walks, it is easy to identify with the various characters. The first time I read it, I couldn't look at Orual and say, "What a selfish, grasping witch!" because I understood and empathized with her. Je sui Orual! If, like Lewis, I wanted to write a "spiritual autobiography," of course it would start out with a self-justifying, covetous old sinner ... I wouldn't have to look for another model for that...
 
No, no, Timmy, not at you at all. It occurred to me after I posted it that I should have been more clear that my frustration was with the after-the-fact analysts who posit such inside knowledge of others based on such little evidence! And I speak as one who is prone to such tendencies myself, and much trial has my presumption earned me over the years.

The older I get, the more I learn (though not quickly enough) that a lot of what we think we know about others amount to snap judgments based on very little evidence. As Peter Kreeft puts it, "We don't even understand cows - how can we presume to understand ourselves!" I've read a lot of the sources that this professor was probably drawing from, and even thought that by doing so I was learning a lot about the lives of men like Lewis and Tolkien (for instance, I carefully read Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings, and many others.) But the more I read from a variety of sources, the more I saw that much of this "knowledge" was sheer speculation that was perhaps 5% reality and 95% fanciful thinking. Even during Tolkien & Lewis' lives, there were people spinning all sorts of imaginings about what they thought and what had influenced them, and in their letters they scornfully dismiss these as poppycock. The Anscombe incident in particular has grown into almost a myth, but Anscombe herself (who died in 2001) testified that most of the assumptions are wrong.

So no, Timmy, it wasn't you I was addressing, but a particular aspect of the modern intellectual climate (which I guiltily admit buying into to some degree): that of presuming to know that which we cannot. I agree with you that as we mature, our focus changes, and different things become important. For me, hopefully, that will mean speaking less, listening more, and not presuming to know things I don't know.
 
Ah ... I was hoping to find this thread.

Till We Have Faces is my favorite book in the world!! Not just among Lewis' work. It is my favorite book of all time. I think it is the greatest work of literature of the 20th Century. It pains me that it is so little read.

The first time I read it, the experience was so intense I said, "I can't read that again for a while". (Perelandra was the same way.) Perhaps that is why it is not read more. I think it is too much for some people. It is over their heads. They can't handle it. And certainly, there are elements of it that are over the heads of many readers.

For a long time, I could not decide which I like better, "Perelandra" or "Till We Have Faces". I finally settled on "Till We Have Faces" because it stands on it's own, while "Perelandra" really needs to be read after "Out of The Silent Planet".

There's some awfully deep discussion in this thread and I'm not even going to TRY to respond to any of it right now. Maybe later.
 
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