Till We Have Faces

C. S. Lewis’s late novel Till We Have Faces is unlike his other and generally more famous novels. He wrote it while married to Joy Davidman and her constant feedback was part of his writing process. It is neither about explicitly Christian people as in the Space Trilogy nor does it contain direct Christian parallels as in the Chronicles of Narnia. It is a story of ancient pagans, drawing on the Greek myth of Psyche but told from the perspective of Psyche’s possessive sister Orual, who does not like the way the gods deal with human beings. Her own distrust infects Psyche and leads to Psyche’s exile from the god’s home. The story is altogether a tonic and not a little terrifying vision of divinity. Aslan’s furry goldenness tempers the fact that he is not a tame lion, but there are no comforts of the incarnation here. The first comparison between this book and Luther’s writings would not be with the “Freedom of a Christian” but rather with “The Bondage of the Will”: this is Lewis’s depiction of the God Who works life and death and all in all, Whose ways are not our ways, against Whom we rage and protest and in the end will never overcome.

In this story where Christ is still a prophecy, far off from the competing forces of superstition and philosophy, the joyful exchange is not a christological gift but a penitential one. Orual knows not what she does when she persuades Psyche to betray the god who is her lover and husband; she surely does not intend the suffering that her action brings down on Psyche’s head. As her sister departs the valley weeping and alone, a voice comes to Orual and tells her: “You also shall be Psyche.” She doesn’t know what this means, but in the years to come, in visions that blend with dreams and illness, Orual separates out piles of mixed seeds, collects golden fleece from deadly rams, and carries a bowl of living water through a desert without spilling a drop. Only at the end of the story, when she has been given a courtroom appearance to voice her lifelong grievance against the gods, does she understand the meaning of these mysterious tasks. Her old mentor the Fox explains it to her:

“Another bore nearly all the anguish.”

“I? Is it possible?”

“That was one of the true things I used to say to you. Don’t you remember? We’re all limbs and parts of one Whole. Hence, of each other. Men, and gods, flow in and out and mingle.”

“Oh, I give thanks. I bless the gods. Then it was really I—”

“Who bore the anguish. But she achieved the tasks. Would you rather have had justice?”

No. Orual, at the end, much prefers the mercy of the exchange to justice, however much she railed against injustice in times past.

Descent into Hell

Charles Williams, a friend of C. S. Lewis’s and one of the Inklings, wrote a series of bizarre theological thrillers criss-crossing the boundaries of this world and the next. In Descent into Hell, a young woman named Pauline Anstruther is constantly burdened by the fear of the reappearance of her Doppelgänger, which has presented itself to her over the course of her life and lately with increasing frequency. Every other aspect of her life is on hold, frozen, because of this terrible fear. Eventually a poet named Peter Stanhope asks her to say what is bothering her; she confesses, expecting his scorn; but he reacts with some perplexity: “You have friends; haven’t you asked one of them to carry your fear?” Pauline is baffled and wonders how such a thing can be done, but Peter assures her that carrying her fear is as easy for him as carrying a package. “Listen,” he says, “when you go from here, when you’re alone, when you think you’ll be afraid, let me put myself in your place, and be afraid instead of you… It’s so easy… easy for both of us. It needs only the act. For what can be simpler than for you to think to yourself that since I am there to be troubled instead of you, therefore you needn’t be troubled? And what can be easier than for me to carry a little while a burden that isn’t mine?” Pauline’s initial reaction is something like shame. She thinks it can’t possibly be right to shove her burden off onto someone else. But Peter points out that this is “pride and division and anger.” “You must give your burden up to someone else, and you must carry someone else’s burden… not to give up your parcel is as much to rebel as not to carry another’s.”

After Pauline leaves, Peter devotes himself to bearing her fear. He opens himself up to it. “The body of his flesh received her alien terror, his mind carried the burden of her world. The burden was inevitably lighter for him than for her, for the rage of a personal resentment was lacking. He endured her sensitiveness, but not her sin; the substitution there, if indeed there is a substitution, is hidden in the central mystery of Christendom which Christendom itself has never understood, nor can.” After some time he is interrupted, and “he would return to his task when opportunity next offered; afterwards, when they had all gone away, and he was alone. But that was rather for the sake of his own integrity of spirit than that more was needed. The act of substitution was fully made; and if it had been necessarily delayed for years (could that have been), but not by his fault, still its result would have preceded it. In the place of the Omnipotence there is neither before nor after; there is only act.”

Peter’s act of substitution succeeds. Pauline is freed of her fear. And to follow on the remarkable irrelevance of time within Omnipotence that Williams proposes in the passage just cited, Pauline is herself able to perform an act of substitution for a long-dead ancestor facing his martyrdom. She takes his fear and so he is able to face his death valiantly and faithfully. No barrier of time or space can stand in the way of the “central mystery of Christendom.” After her grandmother's death, Pauline ponders all these things. "[A]nother stranger imagination struck her heart: 'Why are they then baptized for the dead?' There, rooted in the heart of the Church at its freshest, was the same strong thrust of interchange. Bear for others; be baptized for others; and, rising as her new vision of the world had done once and again, an even more fiery mystery of exchange rolled through her horizons, turning and glancing on her like the eyed and winged wheels of the prophet. The central mystery of Christendom, the terrible fundamental substitution on which so much learning had been spent and about which so much blood had been shed, showed not as a miraculous exception, but as the root of a universal rule... 'behold, I shew you a mystery,' as supernatural as that Sacrifice, as natural as carrying a bag."

Tender Is the Night

It matters to St. Paul that “fairness” govern the exchanges between human beings (II Corinthians 8); it matters to Luther that Christ’s full divinity distinguishes the kind of exchanges we have with him from those we have with one another. We can indeed provide for our neighbors’ needs, but only to a point. We cannot save them the way Christ can. To attempt to do so would be idolatry under the cover of piety.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last novel Tender is the Night tells the story of an unjoyful exchange between Dick and Nicole Diver, a wealthy couple toodling around Europe. Dick is a promising young psychoanalyst and Nicole one of his former patients. In the aftermath of her mother’s death, she and her father had become sexually intimate, and the incest destroyed her personhood, causing the mental illness that landed her in Diver’s clinic. Dick was drawn into her world during her treatment. He became concerned for her wholeness in a way that transgressed all requirements of “fairness” and put himself in the wrong kind of Christlike position. The novel traces out the unraveling of their life together, their mutual temptation to adultery and eventual succumbing to it. Nicole’s betrayal of Dick in this fashion is what makes her “whole” again; she regains her sense of self and becomes a person once more as she leaves Dick for Tommy Barban. But the cost is enormous—Dick’s personhood is lost just as Nicole’s is regained. He relinquishes her without a fight, slinks back to America, and vanishes from the scene he once dominated. He becomes a nothing, because everything he had went into curing her. But who will cure him? No one. He is left as a withered imitation of his former self.

The outcome of laying down one’s life for one’s friends should be to have life and have it abundantly. There are some salvations that only Christ can procure.