Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: What Lewis says about till we have faces, which I think is the key that unlocks it. He's trying to see faith from the perspective of the non believer. And how does that look? So it looks like madness. If you have belief and other person doesn't. The faith itself puts up the barrier. And I think that's what he's getting at his psychologically, you know, how does the non believer cope with religious belief?
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I'm your host, Michael Dolphine, and today I am joined by Joseph Pierce, who is an author and speaker and also a visiting professor of literature at Avimur University this past year or two, where he comes and has been teaching intensive courses on Chesterton, Lewis and Tolkien. So welcome to the show, Joseph.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: It's good to be back. Thanks for having me, Michael.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Great. Thank you. And I'm sure our listeners are used to Joseph's now. I think a regular guest on the have. One of the things that we've found out about each other is we both have a great love of C. S. Lewis's book, till we have faces. It's always been a book that has ever since the first time I read it, I fell in love with it. And over the years, it's only become more meaningful in, I think, the depth of insight. And so when we discovered that we had a common love of it, we thought, well, we have to talk about it on the show. So love to have you on the show to talk about till we have faces today.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Well, it's good to be back. And obviously, CS Lewis is always somebody good to talk about and to share our mutual love for the great writer. So I'm looking forward to this.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: So I think maybe just to know, could you talk a little bit about till we have faces? Just know, when did Lewis write it?
What did Lewis think about the book?
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Yeah, so basically, it was his last work of fiction, and according to Lewis's own judgment, his best.
He thought it was his best, it was his favorite, and it was his final. So from Lewis's own, shall we say, subjective, autobiographical way of seeing things that he finished on a high, he finished with the best that he could do literarily. And I think the reason for that the reason he liked it was the fact that he succeeded here in the art of mythopoia, that storytelling, without being too didactic or preachy, all of his other works of literature, I mean, unlike Tolkien, his great friend Tolkien, Lewis was always a know in all of his works, there's a lesson, right? And here there are profound lessons to be learned, but it's sort of interwoven within the narrative rather than floating on the surface as a point we're meant to take. So I think the fact that he succeeded literarily in subsuming it, the message within the work, within the fabric of the work itself, I think, is the reason he thought it was his greatest work as literature. And I must confess, wasn't always. First time I read it, I was a bit puzzled, I must confess, many, many years ago, puzzled by it. And I wasn't sure I agreed with him because I love that hideous strength and some of his other so good. But now, as it's grown on me, and I think I'm now very happy to agree with C. S. Lewis that this is his finest work of literature.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: Yes. And he wrote, after writing this, he wrote the four loves.
And in many ways he says, these are kind of parallel books. The four loves talk about the love of affection or familial love, Eros, friendship and then charity. And in many ways in this book, he talks about how he writes in one letter, where he says that oral, the main character is basically simply someone in whom kind of the natural loves have gone astray, they've overgrown, which I think is a really powerful theme, because it's not as though she doesn't love enough.
It's in a strange way, she loves too much, but she loves in a way that is distorted and strangling. It somehow destroys her and destroys this, which I think shows just the deep complexity of human love. And I think Lewis's ability to kind of put his finger on that, even the way the story begins, is just. I am old now. I have not much to fear from the anger of the gods. I have no husband, so therefore no romantic love, no child, therefore no affectionate love, nor hardly a friend. Right. Therefore no love of friendship. And he's kind of working through these deep elements, which for me, I think, is just partly the idea that the book is just so psychological, it's so psychologically rich. It's like this is a whole understanding of the human person and theology, and that we're often very confused and kind of confused about who we are and our own intentions and our own loves. And I think this whole sense of the way the main character here falls into kind of self delusion, creating a mask about herself, even wearing a veil. And then eventually, by the end of the story, becoming unveiled by the gods.
I don't know how to describe how just I think Richard is. And I think in this strange way, I think it's Lewis's answer to the great 19th and 20th century kind of unmaskers. Whether or not that was Freud trying to say we're all kind of animal libido or something, or nietzsche, it's all power, or Marx, it's all economics. He's saying, actually, no, you guys haven't even scratched the surface of how kind of deeply we can fall into self delusions. And almost the fact that we will on our own, the only way out of self delusion is somehow through the help of.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: Absolutely. And you're right. I think one of the great conundrums that's presented to us by Lewis in this is, what is love? Because I think there are. I, obviously, Lewis will ask about the four loves, and I don't necessarily, I'm not going to argue with him about this, but there's love, pure love, the love that's from God, which is self giving, always self sacrificial. And then there's the love which, if you like, is poisoned or polluted or distorted or contorted by our own fallen, broken humanity. Lewis talks about this as being, need, love. It's a love that we need. And therefore, because we need it, our appetite for it can very easily become disordered. And I think what we see with oral, she has this need, love. She needs to be loved, which is very different from giving yourself to another. And so this great appetite for being loved is not being satisfied because she's not giving herself in love, and therefore she's not able to receive in love. And there's a whole point that ultimately, what is the face we have to be trying to achieve? And obviously, we can get to this later. But I think ultimately, the masks, the veils that have to be moved are all concerned with the self. In other words, they're all aspects and facets of pride, and we can't see the gods until we have removed ourselves from the picture. We have to become selfless.
So basically, this various facets of her selfishness are the various masks or veils that she's wearing, and they have to be stripped away until she's just bare and naked in the presence of the gods. And then that's only then is she truly who she is. So the irony and paradox is the self, as you've used the word self delusion, right?
The self is self delusional unless you get out of the way somehow other, you have to get beyond the self in order to be the self. That's the paradox, right?
[00:08:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And in part that even gets to Jesus'whole idea that if you try to gain your world, you lose yourself. But if you try to lose yourself, you find yourself. And we find that here that we do have a true self, but the true self is somehow that which is oriented to God and not oriented to the self. So we live, in a way, in the world of false selves.
And I think that just element that this is the great gift of in a way Christianity is that God reveals himself to us and therefore heals us of ourselves. And I think one of the things that Lewis also wrestles with this is the idea is that know our own efforts are never going to be enough, that this is one of the problems, because the ego is the problem. It edges God out of the picture.
Then the ego can't solve the problem of the ego. How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you solve a problem like the ego? Well, the problem is the ego can't solve the problem of the ego. So we are in a desperate need. And the interesting thing here is, Lewis kind of just in this tale that is somewhat pre Christian or doesn't explicitly make reference to Christ, he kind of just shows you how that the ego's own attempt to solve the problem of the ego will never work.
And I think that kind of just sets you up for then deceiving in a way the wonder and the beauty that God has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves. And so I think that's a really just kind of powerful characteristic of the work.
Now, maybe just again, for I think till we have faces is probably one of the lesser read books by Lewis. Could you offer kind of a quick summary, just a very quick walkthrough, just so people have a sense for what's the narrative plot and structure of the work?
[00:10:23] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. I want to begin, however, if I can. Absolutely. With an analogy which also serves as a metaphor for till we have faces. So it's set the picture. I see that what's happening to orwal in till we have faces is actually parallel to what's happening to the character of Dante in the divine Comedy, particularly the Inferno and the purgatorio. Because what happens there is Dante begins in the dark wood of sin, lost through his own egocentric selfishness, trapped by his own sins he can't escape. And then he has to have those masks, the seven veils of the seven deadly sins, right? First he has to know what they are. He goes into the Inferno to discover these veils. These seven veils, the seven deadly sins, are ugly and they conceal the reality of the self from the self. And then having seen that in the Inferno, he then ascends out purgatory by the grace of God and has those veils removed one by one. And where does he end up? He ends up in the garden, basically analogous to the Garden of Eden, back to that primal innocence from whence we can then see God face to face. And that's exactly what happens until we have faces with Orwell, that she has to have the veils removed. Well, first of all, she has to discover what they are and then she has to have them removed by the help of the gods. And it's only when she is herself. Now, Dante's not himself until he gets to the top of Mount Purgatory. Oro is not herself till she gets to the end of the story where she has seen the gods face to face in the beauty. Because the whole thing about her being ugly in the beauty of her nakedness.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great way of looking at it. And I think it's one of the things that's also interesting that Lewis does in the story is Orwell, who's the main character. It's told in a know, really kind of, she's the protagonist, so we kind of see the whole story through her eyes. So even though sometimes what she does occasionally repulses us or we're like, oh, why is she doing this? Somehow we identify with her. And I think this is Lewis's subtle way, again, without kind of being didactic. But somehow when you read the story, you sympathize and identify with this young woman, right, who has a tyrannical king as a father, who's abusive and everything. And yet somehow she's kind of, it's a coming of age story and you begin to identify with her and then all of a sudden you begin to recognize that, wait a second, I'm almost rooting for the bad character because somehow I'm a bad character. It's kind of an interesting way that, and I think in the same way in some ways, like in Dante too, it's like as Dante invites you to become Dante the pilgrim.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: Yeah, basically Dante in some sense, Dante the character, as distinct from Dante the author, of course, Dante, the character in the divine comedy, is in some sense an everyman figure. And I think Omarwal also in some ways is an everyman figure. And what Lewis says about till we have faces, which I think is the key that unlocks it, he's trying to see faith, religious faith, from the perspective of the non believer. And how does that look? So it looks like madness.
So when Psyche has a conversion and she's happy to basically lay down her life to the gods, it seems like madness to horrible. And all of us, all of us, many of us have had conversion experiences or know people who are converts and how that can cause estrangement in relationships and families. Because now, of course, there's a barrier. That barrier is belief, because if you have belief, another person doesn't. The faith itself puts up the barrier. And I think that's what he's getting at his psychologically, how does the non believer cope with religious belief? And he does it very brilliantly, psychologically, the four loves, there are very, very few better psychologists than C. S. Lewis.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Okay, so walk us a little bit through the story.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: Well, the key thing is, I always just say it's a tyrannical father who's abusive, particularly of her. He doesn't like her, so she's an abused child. So we do have sympathy with her because, oh, she might be a mess, but there are reasons she's a mess, right. And then you have Psyche, who she loves, and then redivolve, the sort of the other sister who's shallow, very shallow and facile. But even at towards the end of the story, we realize that that's because she was really also neglected and left her own devices, and she's also seeking Love in the wrong places, exactly as horrible was. So there's a parallel there. And the other thing I love about it is the conflict between reason and religion. Now, we need to remember, of course, this is set in a pagan. So the religion in it is a pagan religion, so it's complex and complicated. I'm reminded of the words of C. S. Lewis. I think this is important with this particular work. He talks about the difference between the pre christian pagans and the post. Well, the neo pagans, right. Of our own time. And he said the pre christian pagans are like a virgin awaiting the coming of the bridegroom, whereas the neo pagans are divorces who've walked away from the marriage. And that's important because we have to see the religion of unget as something which is almost primitive. Yes, but looking in the right direction, not walking away from Christ, but in some ways looking for him, even if it's in the darkness, because he hasn't been revealed at this point. And then you have this conflict between a religion which has not been fully revealed. So non christian religion and greek reason, and this conflict between the two. And Lewis obviously has a great respect for both faith and reason, but there is a conflict here. And how far can reason take?
And yes, the fox, the character fox, is virtuous. He has a natural virtue, a lot of it rooted in his philosophy, but it only takes him so far. And there's a skepticism there that prevents him from penetrating deeper into the mystery of life. Whereas the priest, very significantly, is blind. He's this whole tradition in literature of the blind seer. Obviously, we have Oedipus and we have Taurusius in greek literature. But we have the earl of Gloucester in King Lear, who says, I stumbled when I saw. In other words, when he had eyes, he couldn't see. And only by having his eyes plucked out, he comes to realize deeper metaphysical realities. So again, this difference between that which is pretty physical, which is surface, which is mask, and that which is beyond the mask, that which is beyond the physics, that which is metaphysics. So, again, when reason takes you to metaphysics, it comes to a war, which is mystery. What does it do with that mystery? And it's this conflict between the mystery, the religion of Angit, and the priests of angit and reason, which can't get there because it refuses to accept anything which is mysterious.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And I remember, actually, I've taught this book many times, but I remember there was a student who really kind of was frustrated about the presentation of the religion of Ungit, and specifically because he says something like he describes as holy places are dark places.
And then the student was kind of just wrestling with that.
And yes, there is a way that Christ is the light, but there's also a way that the light of Christ is manifested on the cross. The cross is a dark place.
The cross is also a place of light. Right. But at least kind of, especially until you've seen Christ risen and you're kind of somewhat groping. There is something holy. Places are dark places. They can't be penetrated fully by human reasoning. There is a kind of surrender. We have to, at some point, throw up our hands and be like, these mysteries are above us, they are beyond us, they are before us. And the way he kind of pulls those together. And again, it's like he's not against the fact that ultimately faith and reason go hand in hand. But ultimately human reason has to surrender and submit to divine action in the sense of the mystery. But I love that holy places are dark places.
It's a little bit of humbling. And eventually, yes, when we go through that, we can begin to see light. But I think there's definitely a critique of rationalism here. But at the same time, the sense that this dark places of this pagan religion, which, as he puts it one time gives life sacrifices, give life also, though on its own, apart from both Christ and apart from reason, though, actually ends up engaging in human sacrifice. So Lewis is not romanticizing romanticism, he's also saying romanticism on its own and its willingness to sacrifice and to be dark will at times go into very dark places.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Yeah. And what we have, of course, we do have to realize the whole point about this is set outside of a christian understanding because it's set historically before Christ reveals himself. So you have a faith which has a tendency towards becoming rationalism because there's no divine revelation to help it. So it becomes something which it thinks is self sustaining and self sufficient, which it is not. So we see the inadequacies of it. And then on the other side you have the darkness of the religion because yes, there is human sacrifice. And the brilliance of Lewis is at first we're repelled by it. It's a dark place, there's lots of blood, animal sacrifice, it smells the priestess of ungit, they all look ugly and in rags and probably like looking like tramps and what have you. So we're repelled at first. But then as the story goes on, you begin to realize that, yeah, that the rationalism of fox is safe and neat and tidy, but it's also inadequate and insufficient. And there's something that religions offering that reason unassisted by faith cannot deliver. And you do realize that when the priest of Angit, who seriously, obviously, genuinely believes he's not a hypocrite, he does have access to some power. And of course the power is real, right? Because Psyche does have the marriage to the God, right? The relationship with the God. So there is something true to the supernatural, but he leads us to it from the position of, oh, I don't think I like that at first. And then bit by bit, he's sort of bringing us saying, well, we have to embrace this darkness because that's where mystery is. And we have to embrace the existence of mystery because reason by itself can't get us there.
[00:21:32] Speaker B: It is. And the way he kind of shows all this, just again, he shows it to us. He doesn't tell it to us, which is really powerful in this story. And so what happens then is Psyche is actually offered by the priest of Ungat to the gods on the mountainside. She actually encounters the God, truthfully, the God of Cupid. But oral goes to look for her, finds her, sees slightly, can't see, has a glimpse of the palace or not, but doesn't trust it, but eventually basically wants psyche back for herself, and eventually gets psyche to try to look at the God at night, because the God only comes to her at night as she's looking at her with the lamp. And oral even goes to the point of threatening to kill herself, stabs her arm with a dagger. Right. This is kind of the fierceness that Lewis sees, that love will not only give oneself, but love will also take another. It will manipulate. So eventually, Psyche then gets banished by the gods, Psyche gets put into exile, and then there's this prophetic thing that says, you also will be Psyche to Orwell. Right.
Where does then the story go on?
[00:22:50] Speaker A: Yeah. So the key thing I think there is when she first travels to the mountains in search of Psyche, Psyche says, can you not see it? And Psyche, obviously Psyche is in some beautiful palace, right? That's what Psyche sees. But all that oral sees is just hills. And so this appears to be madness. You're obviously believing in something which is not there. But from Psyche's perspective, if you can't see it, it's because you're blind. Right. So who's right? So the person with faith, the person without faith. But then, as you say, that oral is actually granted a glimpse, so the gods reveal themselves to her. She does see the palace really instantaneously, and she has to sort of decide she doesn't want to. Right. I don't want to see it. It's probably just a figment of my imagination, and then it disappears. And that confirms the fact it was just a figment of her imagination, but she was given the vision, and she chooses to reject it. That's the point. And then she's now cast back into the darkness because she refuses the light.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit more about that, but let's take a break, and then we'll come back in a moment.
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[00:24:43] Speaker B: Welcome back to the catholic theology show. I'm your host, Michael Doffonay. And today we are speaking with Joseph Pierce about C. S. Lewis's till we have faces. And by the way, people who are interested in learning more about Joseph Pierce and the variety know teachings and writings and different things that he offers can go to Jperce Co. Is that correct?
[00:25:04] Speaker A: Correct. Yes.
[00:25:05] Speaker B: Excellent. To find his webpage. So we're talking about the story then of oral she has this vision, her youngest sister, who's almost like a goddess. Lewis describes her once as this kind of natural Christian to a certain extent, almost like Dante's Matilda in Eden. Somehow this vision. But it's like if we had a vision of goodness, we would actually not like it. It would make us unhappy, actually. Jordan Peterson has an interesting thing where he talks about how Cain and Abel are kind of like, Cain will always kill Abel. We don't like the really good person. We don't even like the good person inside of us. So often the bad person in us when we get a glimpse of it, right? And so we have this kind of weird back and forth in the story.
But then eventually what happens is that oral decides to write the book which we have.
Part one is her complaint against the gods. And so when I teach this, I try to focus on, you have the complaint that she gives, which is the complaint that she thinks she's making. And then eventually, by the end of the story, you have her real complaint.
But this is, I think the complaint that she makes is genuine. But it's also the complaint, in a way, of modernity, which is something along the lines of God doesn't speak clearly to us. If God only spoke more clearly to us, then we would follow him. Belief is irrational because it asks too much of us.
She even says this, right? I wrote my book. Why? They gave me nothing in the world to love but psyche. And then they took her from me, right? But that was not enough. They brought me to her at such a place, when I had to make a decision whether or not she would continue in bliss or be cast out in misery. They would not tell me whether she was the bride of a God or mad, or the brute or villain spoil. They would give me no clear sign, though I begged for it. I had to guess right. And what's worse, they not only punished me, they punished her. Eventually she goes on to say, right, what is all this cat and mouse play? Blind man's buff, mere jugglery. Why must holy places be dark places? I say, therefore, there is no creature, toad, scorpion or serpent, so noxious to man as the gods. Let them answer my charge if they can. Right. But will all the world then know, and the gods will know it knows that this is because they have no answer. So this is her complaint against the gods, which is part one of the book, but really is the know. Probably four fifths of the think is a. What is Lewis trying to kind of get us to see in this complaint? Oral's complaint against the gods.
[00:28:02] Speaker A: Yeah, insofar as our loves, and I think it's important for us to put the loves in inverted commas here in quotation marks, is if our love is egocentric, we need the other person to love us, right? And if they don't love us, then we get angry. And if they don't love us because of God or the gods, right, then we get angry with God or the gods, and it's the fault of religion. So then we take our anger out on God, and so that's exactly what happens. We see it happening again. We've seen people in our own lives, right, that their lives are a mess, and their lives are a mess because they're wearing too many masks, too many veils. They're not prepared to make themselves vulnerable to faith, to opening themselves up. So therefore, they close themselves in with mask after mask after mask, preventing with this artificial buffer zone, self created buffer zone between them and the real. So accretion after accretion after accretion of masks, false faces. And from that perspective, the people that should love them and maybe once did love them, no longer love them. It's their fault, and you don't want them to be happy. And, of course, the philosophical definition of love is to will the good of the other. So you're not loving the other person. So in the end, we see Orville basically blackmails psyche, and psyche really embraces crucifixion, because she knows what this is going to cost her. But if the alternative is to allow oral to commit suicide, then she has to do what oral wants her to do, which is to betray her beloved. Right? Betray Cupid. But who's loving whom here, right? Oral was demanding, blackmailing, dragging psyche from a position of happiness to misery, purely because oral loves her, right? And so we see this in the great divorce and other places that this sort of need love, this selfish love, actually destroys the beloved.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Lewis writes in the four loves. He says, I think love, having become a God, becomes a demon, right? And this is that strange element that when we elevate the natural loves and we turn them into gods because they're still human, which means they're still oriented to the creature, created to the creatures, and therefore can only be ordered by being subordinate to the love of the creator. So when we turn them to gods, they become demons. And in the second part, she'll eventually describe it as that kind of love was like a spider gorged on the blood of other people's lives. It was a love, you're right, that was needing to be needed. It was craving the affection and love of others, and therefore was actually kind of. And he says, like that kind of love, it can be nine tenths hatred.
So there's something on our own. And this is, I think, where Lewis is so just powerful and insightful, right, that in a way, the modern world doesn't believe in sin. It kind of has this od idea that everything is awful and, like, society is awful and corrupt and human beings are naturally good. If we only gave them a better chance, they'd be fine. And Lewis kind of just says, wait a second. Actually, if I had everything I want, I would probably not be a very good world because my wants are disordered, right? My loves and my needs to be loves are disordered. And one thing, just to make sure that we get in the story that maybe listeners haven't picked up on yet.
So oral is famously ugly. Psyche, of course, is famously beauty, beautiful. And by the way, we'll see. That becomes also like a metaphor of the soul, right?
The external ugliness is real in the story, but it's also the soul is ugly.
So she eventually becomes queen after her father dies. And she actually has hand to hand combat, which is, again, kind of a thrilling little part of the story where she actually defeats another prince in hand to hand combat with swords. And she wins. She's victorious, she becomes queen, and she veils herself in the battle and then veils herself afterwards. And therefore she hides her ugliness. And she's able to kind of manipulate the world outside of her through power and through intelligence, through cunning. Again, almost kind of a metaphor of the modern age. It veils itself to its own ugliness, it veils itself to Christianity, but nonetheless, through its technological intelligence and mastery, actually kind of seems to make good. And so then that's what's happening with these veils as she hides behind things. But it's interesting at the heart of the veil is this complaint against God.
[00:33:19] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And the consequence, of course, of this selfish love is that she sucks everybody she loves dry like a vampire. One of my favorite parts of the book is when she meets Bardia's wife.
And basically Bardia, he's a vision of a true man, courageous man, chivalrous man, who will lay down his life for his wife, but also for his queen. Right. But because the queen is like a blood sucker that she wants him around her all the time, the wife never sees him. And when he does come home, he's so exhausted, he just collapses into bed and then gets up again and what have you. That basically oral has taken the man from his own family for her own self gratification. So this whole idea of the spider or the tick that's bloated with the blood of others, this is the consequence of a love which is ultimately rooted in need and selfishness. Yeah.
[00:34:22] Speaker B: And again, because Orwell is an everyman character and we know identify with her, Lewis also, at some point wants us to recognize. Wait a.
That's. That's. That's who I am left to my own devices, either with my angers or my, my loves go bad.
And I think he wants us to do this. And so one of the thing, I think it's kind of fascinating. Then eventually, on the other side, her mask is removed, her veil is torn off, and she's somehow thrust before the gods. She gets to make her complaint to the gods. And I actually have a friend of mine who loves this book, and she described it as, we all have this very long story we tell about ourselves, right? And we either tell it to ourselves in our head, or we tell it to friends. But one way or another, it's this long story about how we've been wronged by others, we've been wronged by bosses or teachers or parents or children, whatever it is, that somehow there's a sense that if only other people, and we have this long story we tell, and of course, this long story is actually in this book, I think is, what, 250 pages or something. The long complaint, the story resolved. But then at the very end, when she's before all the gods in judgment, and she's actually reading her own complaint. Her own complaint is about two pages long. It's very short. Her true complaint, as she puts it, is simply right.
The real complaint is you leave us nothing. Nothing that's worth keeping, or you're taking those we love best. Those are the ones you pick.
The son turning back on his mother, the bride on a groom stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling of the gods, taken where we can't follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We'd rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.
Right. There's no room for you and us in the same world. You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive. We want to be on our own eventually. It says, right, she was mine. Mine. Do you know what that word means? Mine.
This sense that that's her real complaint is that she didn't get what she wanted.
[00:36:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:56] Speaker B: She wanted other people to be hers. And this sense that the beautiful thing about love is it brings us into communion with others. The dangerous things about love is it can treat others as our possessions.
[00:37:10] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: There's a beautiful prayer that I've learned about your children, where it's like, God, before they were mine, they were yours, and I put them back in your hands. And even the way we talk about my children, my spouse, I'm not saying we can't use that terminology, but it's like we have to recognize, we have to be cautious in using it, because I have a tendency to treat others as mine. But this beautiful way that, again, we have our long story, which is actually a false story of complaint, but the real story is that we just don't get what we want. We want our will, our ego to be satisfied, and we're kind of angry with others that it's not.
[00:37:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I couldn't help when you read that. Mine, mine. It came to my mind.
Lewis's great friend Tolkien. Gollum, my precious. We become possessed by our possessions. So that which is good, right. Psyche, who's in herself good and should be loved for who she is, not for who we need her to be, which is not the same thing. Then basically, we are possessed by this false vision of her. Right. The psyche that I want is my psyche. Not the psyche. Not the objective reality. The other person. It's what I need you to be for me. And you become possessed by that possession so that the false psyche becomes demonic. Not the real psyche, but the psyche you're now worshipping, as you said, that it becomes a demon. So I see that my precious Tolkien, psychologically, Lewis and Tolkien, so much work dovetail. Each know that we do become possessed by those things we become possessive of.
[00:38:52] Speaker B: Yeah. And in a way, loved ones are, in some ways, are the most beautiful thing. Right. When we think about idols, we often think about, like, oh, worshipping a golden calf or those sorts of different things. But what are idols? Well, those were somewhat. They were real in the ancient world, but they were, I mean, or at least real idols that were there, but they were kind of symbolic of fertility, family, money, assets. Right. You know what I mean? Same things we worship today. And other people are either, in a way, idols. When we turn them into the false things that we possess, we try to manipulate and control. Or icons. They can either be icons of God's presence where we see them as they are, which is created in the image and likeness of God.
And the irony is we can actually step into the role of wanting to be God for the other person. So when we turn another person into an idol, ironically, we're not turning them into a God. We're turning ourselves into the God, because we are the ones then can be kind of the savior. Right. The rescuer, or in any different ways that we can do that. And so it is a deeply insightful way that Lewis puts this before us. Yeah.
[00:40:04] Speaker A: And again, it's in christian terms.
I see PsYChE is willing to take up her cross and be crucified. PsyChe is willing to be sacrificed to the gods. Right?
So she sacrifices herself. She might be being sacrificed by others, but she willingly sacrifice herself. She is willing to be crucified, whereas Orwell, with her false Love of Psyche, crucifies PsyChe.
So Orwell becomes the Crucifier, not the Crucified, because of this demonic, idolatrous love that she has for PsyChe.
[00:40:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
As the story comes to an end, and it is interesting, you have the second part, which is probably about, like 20% long. It's probably about, like 50, 60 pages. It actually is a deep conversion story. Right. And it's this beautiful thing. So we both see conversion from the outside in the devolution of Oral. But then eventually her turning around, and there's this beautiful moment where at one point she says, I am ungit. I am the evil goddess or the evil kind of demon that I've hated my whole life. And when she can begin to see that, it's like, in a way, when we can begin to discover we're a sinner for the first time, she begins to become beautiful. And at the very end, she actually comes back going through a bunch of trials where she actually goes through suffering for the sake of Psyche.
She is, in this final time, where she actually, the gods come. And these, of course, are kind of images of Christ coming. But at the very end, she talks about this sense in which I was being unmade, I was no one. But that's little to say. Psyche herself was, in a manner no one.
We lose, in a way, the false self, the ego. I loved her as I once would have thought it impossible to love, would have died any death for her. And yet it was not. Well, not now. She that counted, or if she counted, and, oh, gloriously she did, it was for another's sake. The earth, the stars, the sun, all that was or will be existed for his sake. And he was coming eventually. When she gets this right, she casts down her eyes and she sees two figures reflected in the water. But who were they? Two psyches. One clothed, the other naked. Yes, both psyches, both beautiful. And she hears from the gods, you also are Psyche, right? That when she admits her ugliness and begins to look at the gods, begins to admit the truth about herselves, that all she was was this mine, mine possessiveness. That that is actually when she becomes beautiful.
[00:42:56] Speaker A: Yeah, again, that is itself beautiful. And again, we had the analogy earlier, but the second part of the book, which says much shorter, is the purgatory. The first part, when she's making her complaint, she's just digging herself deeper and deeper into the pit of hell, the hell she's made for herself. And then the last book is the purgatory part, where she has to be stripped of her mask, of her false faces. So she has her true face, and her true face is beautiful, right? Because she's made in the image of God. And that's what she. That the true person, the true oral, was always beautiful and it was the false faces that were the ugly part of her.
[00:43:37] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's know, Augustine has some beautiful, I guess, some sermons, but also some commentary on the psalms where he actually describes. He says when the soul admits its ugliness and looks to Christ, who is most beautiful, but who takes away our ugliness and makes us beautiful. And I think Augustine, I mean, Lewis, I'm sure, is very familiar, this is a neoplatonic theme as well. But the way he takes this know idea is beautiful. And it's interesting too, because he begins to see that this is a great line where he begins to see, wait a second. Simply to complain about ourselves to God is the answer.
To say the truth about ourselves, to have heard myself making it was to be answered. He goes on a little farther. I say, well, why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer till that word can be dug out of us. Right? The word, in a way, of our true self unveiled why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
[00:44:48] Speaker A: And again, to me, what is the perfect human person in whose image we are made? It's Jesus Christ. Obviously, Jesus is divine as well, and we're not. But the human aspect of Christ, the more holy we become, the more christlike become, the more beautiful we become, right?
Becoming more like Christ. So what prevents us from that? By worshipping false selves. And so we wear these masks, we put these false faces on.
It's not because God is not speaking to us. It's because we won't listen. We can't see him. We got things in front of our eyes prevent us from seeing him. We got things over our ears, pronounced from hearing. When we talk, we're talking nonsense because we're not seeing the reality in order to be able to talk about it. So how can God communicate with us when we don't have eyes because they're covered with masks. We can't have ears because they're covered. And when we do talk, because we can't see and we're blind and we're dumb.
Anything we say is just nonsense. So how can there be an engagement until we are actually able to see him face to face? We only see him face to face by removing the false faces. And I think that's exactly what C. S. Lewis is getting at here.
[00:46:01] Speaker B: And I think there's a deep sense of kind of love and compassion that I think comes through this as well. Like we do have that. John 316 right for God so loved the world that he sent his son, right, that all who should believe in him should not perish but have eternal life. So God so loved the world. We're supposed to see ourselves. And Orwell with compassion in the story. Yes, she does things that are despicable. And yet, on the other hand, in a way, she's doing the best she can with the skills and knowledge she has. We just don't have enough skills and knowledge on our.
And there's also a way that I think one of the things that Lewis does, which is really interesting, is by presenting her within a corrupt kingdom, within somewhat, even a corrupt religion and corrupt philosophy, even though they have aspects of truth in them. He doesn't want to destroy them all, but they're incomplete. So when you're in a world like that, you can't be totally authentic and vulnerable. You have to, in a way, when you enter society, is one of the reasons why we love being around children. Children are just open and honest. But you know that by the time, I don't know if the three year old or the two year old remained that sense when they were twelve, they would be eaten alive, right? And so as you enter into this fallen world, Augustine talks about this a lot in the confessions. When we enter into this fallen world, it's almost like it's a survival mechanism that we have to then put up these things so we can be compassionate with ourselves and with others, and God is merciful and patient with us.
But that doesn't mean that they're any less damaging and destroying. We have to find a way. If we only become those masks and we don't have that inner intimacy with God and perhaps that inner intimacy with a handful of human beings with whom we can have honest and authentic relationships, right, we will die. It's understandable that we would hold to those fake things, but they are no less lethal.
[00:48:08] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely.
The thing that when you were talking about children, the innocence of children, and then we grow up and we put away childish things.
This is, I think, playing upon this till we have faces theme.
How do we remain childlike as we must if we're going to enter the kingdom of heaven while ceasing to be childish, right? And that's the paradox, because we do have to grow in wisdom. We do have to know that there are dragons, real dragons, out, that it will devour us and devour and deflower and what have you. So we have to be worldly wise like serpents. But at the same time, we do have to have that innocent openness to love, that children have. So the real test is that via media, that tightrope, we can only walk, only keep our balance through grace. We're having a life of the sacraments, for instance.
That's the test. And I think that's what's going on in this book, really, is that every false face we put on is childishness, right? It's basically we become like a spoilt mean. I think that's what the metaphor would be like, an adolescent.
In the last battle, we're told that Susan couldn't wait to get to basically be a teenager. The silliest age that we are, when we go through all the hormonal stuff, we don't know whether grown ups or kids, and we don't know who we are, where we're going. We don't have any final way of seeing things. We're a mess. But in the modern culture, many of us, that's as far as we get, right? You're 18, and you want to be 18 when you're 80. Right. The silliest time of the life is the idolized one. And that's childishness, where we put one mask on after another because we don't want to retain that childlikeness which is necessary to reach the kingdom of heaven, which is that nudity, that nakedness before the face of God.
[00:50:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think Lewis also has that line from screw tape letters where he talks about, really, he says, we actually don't like prayer as much as we think because prayer is genuinely the nakedness of the soul before God.
And I think he wrote that early on in screw tape letters because he knew it. But then 20 years later, basically, or 15 years later, he writes till we have faces and he shows just how hard it is to strip ourselves before God. And I think there's also maybe a path of hope is that we don't try to figure out this balance on our own. If we go back to the gospel of John, in the first chapter, he says, all those who believed in him, he gave power to become children of God. So there is a way the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have beheld his glory. So the way to get out of this childishness, adultness, growing up, but staying young paradox is actually through the power to do that is not something we can navigate on our own. The power to do that is really by believing in the one who is, again, the way, the truth and the life. So is there any final word, maybe for people who might be inclined to pick up the book till we have faces?
[00:51:22] Speaker A: Well, I think, first of all, I would immediately say, I think this is a great underrated classic. This is one of the great works of world literature ever, certainly 20th century literature. And anybody who wants to be well read needs to read this book. And it really is christian literature at its finest by arguable, certainly one of the greatest christian authors of all time. So if you haven't read it, you need to read it, basically.
[00:51:45] Speaker B: Wow. Thank you so much, Joseph Pierce, for being on the show. For people who are interested in learning more about your work, Jperce Co. Is your website, and people who are interested in C. S. Lewis. We have a number of other podcast episodes, both with Joseph, about C. S. Lewis and Narnia, and C. S. Lewis and the great divorce, and a number of other books as well, and number of other podcast episodes on Lewis's Narnia and other episodes. So again, thank you so much, Joseph, for being on the show. Thank you for listening today to the catholic theology show.
[00:52:24] Speaker C: Thank you so much for joining us for this podcast. If you like this episode, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast app to help others find the show. And if you want to take the next step, please consider joining our Annunciation circle so we can continue to bring you more free content.
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