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Honestly, if anyone else had written Till We Have Faces, this post would just be, "I love this book, it's so good, I wish that more fantasy writers would explore relationships with divinities to this depth!!!"
But this book was written by C.S. Lewis, so I have ~thoughts~ buckle up.
I read the book for the first time in my early teen years and didn't really ~get it~. When I tried it again several years later, I loved it. And this is my first time rereading it since at least my early 20s. I had forgotten a lot of stuff that happens! It was a joy to revisit!
For those of you who don't know, it's a retelling of the Eros and Psyche myth from the pov of one of the sisters, but it's really a deep dive into how possessiveness rots love and also the human relationship to the divine. It's got a very, very unreliable narrator, some interesting worldbuilding, and good prose. I love it lots.
But dude, it was written by C.S. Lewis, so I can't just judge it by what's on the page!
It is hard to overstate the stature of Lewis in American Protestant circles. He is widely beloved by both the high church Mainline types and the more intellectually-inclined evangelicals. The evangelicals use him as a kind of trump card: yes, Mark Noll, the scandal of the evangelical mind might be that there's not much of an evangelical mind, but we've got C.S. Lewis. So there!
This despite the fact that I am confident that Lewis would utterly reject most things about white American evangelicalism. He was, after all, a Victorian-born Anglican academic. He was conservative, yes, and in some ways that really piss me off. But he wasn't the white American evangelical brand of conservative. (Thank God.)
So I've never really been able to understand why white American evangelicals claim him. But whatever: they do. They really do. Those on the less fundamentalist side of things read Narnia to their kids. (The fundamentalists hate fantasy and probably hate Lewis, but I didn't hang out with them so I don't know.) Mere Christianity is widely, widely recommended (though I think less frequently read outside of those Fred Clark calls the "faculty lounge evangelicals.") The Screwtape Letters is proof that conservative Christians can do satire, yes we can!
And if you're a precocious evangelical child who asks questions (ahem), people will tell you, "Just go read C.S. Lewis!" a lot.
Lewis was very much the product of his time and the fact that he was a white Anglo-Irish dude born in the Victorian era shaped by Oxbridge in every conceivable way. As such, he held, as I mentioned before, a lot of Bad Views. There's plenty to criticize him for. But I do think he was a talented writer and at least trying to be a good person, and let me tell you: he was a lifeline to a lot of us precocious evangelical kids/teenagers who desperately wanted intellectual engagement and weren't finding it anywhere else. (Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle's nonfiction kept me afloat as a teenager, let me tell you.)
Now, his particular intellectual engagement is, again, very white Anglo-Irish early 20th-century Oxbridge. It's got some extreme limits. But it's also got some heft and attempts at honest engagement with...reality. Which is more than most evangelical-approved people could get away with.
So yeah, I read his fiction, I read his nonfiction, he was important to me. Even when I made the transition to progressive Episcopalianism, he could fit inside my world pretty neatly. I mean: lots of things I'd disagree with him about! But I could still appreciate the good he had to offer.
Now, though, as whatever I am religion-wise at the moment (a deist? just a plain agnostic? pre-Jewish? Can you be pre-Jewish? aspiring towards Judaism? WHO THE HELL KNOWS), I'm less comfortable with him. And my awareness of him as an author kept intruding on my enjoyment of this book in ways that I find very rude!!!
As a general reader (as opposed to the critical reader I was in undergrad engaging with all those classic texts), I'm pretty much of the Author Is Dead school in that...I don't care about the author's life. I just judge the book by how good it is on its own. Obviously there are exceptions--authors can go too far morally and I will reject them (JKR, OSC, etc.) But generally I don't want to know anything about the author as a person and I just don't care. I read the book. I engage with the book. That's all.
But it's completely impossible for me to read Lewis like this. Impossible. The entire book, I kept thinking, "What is he saying about faith? How is he using this as an allegory for Christianity? What is his theology here?"
This is possibly unfair. Yes, the Narnia books are mostly allegorical and very heavy-handed in ways that Tolkien and I agree are annoying. But Till We Have Faces is a book for adults and is much more subtle and I don't think he meant for it to be allegorical. I think he was genuinely engaging with the question of the Virtuous Pagan and what faith might be like for those who have never encountered Christianity. And also just writing a good novel.
But I can't help it! I was constantly, constantly wondering about how his theology was showing through! Especially since I know that I would disagree pretty profoundly with that theology now. So I was kind of ~looking for things I needed to disagree with~ which is just not a fun way to read a novel. It tainted my enjoyment!
To Lewis's credit, I do not think it's easy to pin down his theology in this book. He's definitely got a Point of View, which is that the Divine is so far beyond us that the questions we ask of It are nonsense and only the Divine Itself can be the answer. Which many people would find a cop-out, but I don't entirely disagree with. At any rate, it's something I can totally accept within the bounds of the novel.
I also really, really appreciate what he's doing with regards to the things we tell ourselves are love that are really not love. They're about possession and our own egos, and they are toxic to the "beloved." A very good theme to explore! As is the ways in which we rationalize our own choices to ourselves, how we skew our memories of reality in order to make it fit the narrative we've chosen, etc. That's so good and done so well.
I wish I could just take that stuff and leave the question of his theology alone! But it's there, irritating me through the whole reading of the book, like a popcorn husk stuck under my gum. It's very annoying! I wish I could read the book without all that baggage!
But this book was written by C.S. Lewis, so I have ~thoughts~ buckle up.
I read the book for the first time in my early teen years and didn't really ~get it~. When I tried it again several years later, I loved it. And this is my first time rereading it since at least my early 20s. I had forgotten a lot of stuff that happens! It was a joy to revisit!
For those of you who don't know, it's a retelling of the Eros and Psyche myth from the pov of one of the sisters, but it's really a deep dive into how possessiveness rots love and also the human relationship to the divine. It's got a very, very unreliable narrator, some interesting worldbuilding, and good prose. I love it lots.
But dude, it was written by C.S. Lewis, so I can't just judge it by what's on the page!
It is hard to overstate the stature of Lewis in American Protestant circles. He is widely beloved by both the high church Mainline types and the more intellectually-inclined evangelicals. The evangelicals use him as a kind of trump card: yes, Mark Noll, the scandal of the evangelical mind might be that there's not much of an evangelical mind, but we've got C.S. Lewis. So there!
This despite the fact that I am confident that Lewis would utterly reject most things about white American evangelicalism. He was, after all, a Victorian-born Anglican academic. He was conservative, yes, and in some ways that really piss me off. But he wasn't the white American evangelical brand of conservative. (Thank God.)
So I've never really been able to understand why white American evangelicals claim him. But whatever: they do. They really do. Those on the less fundamentalist side of things read Narnia to their kids. (The fundamentalists hate fantasy and probably hate Lewis, but I didn't hang out with them so I don't know.) Mere Christianity is widely, widely recommended (though I think less frequently read outside of those Fred Clark calls the "faculty lounge evangelicals.") The Screwtape Letters is proof that conservative Christians can do satire, yes we can!
And if you're a precocious evangelical child who asks questions (ahem), people will tell you, "Just go read C.S. Lewis!" a lot.
Lewis was very much the product of his time and the fact that he was a white Anglo-Irish dude born in the Victorian era shaped by Oxbridge in every conceivable way. As such, he held, as I mentioned before, a lot of Bad Views. There's plenty to criticize him for. But I do think he was a talented writer and at least trying to be a good person, and let me tell you: he was a lifeline to a lot of us precocious evangelical kids/teenagers who desperately wanted intellectual engagement and weren't finding it anywhere else. (Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle's nonfiction kept me afloat as a teenager, let me tell you.)
Now, his particular intellectual engagement is, again, very white Anglo-Irish early 20th-century Oxbridge. It's got some extreme limits. But it's also got some heft and attempts at honest engagement with...reality. Which is more than most evangelical-approved people could get away with.
So yeah, I read his fiction, I read his nonfiction, he was important to me. Even when I made the transition to progressive Episcopalianism, he could fit inside my world pretty neatly. I mean: lots of things I'd disagree with him about! But I could still appreciate the good he had to offer.
Now, though, as whatever I am religion-wise at the moment (a deist? just a plain agnostic? pre-Jewish? Can you be pre-Jewish? aspiring towards Judaism? WHO THE HELL KNOWS), I'm less comfortable with him. And my awareness of him as an author kept intruding on my enjoyment of this book in ways that I find very rude!!!
As a general reader (as opposed to the critical reader I was in undergrad engaging with all those classic texts), I'm pretty much of the Author Is Dead school in that...I don't care about the author's life. I just judge the book by how good it is on its own. Obviously there are exceptions--authors can go too far morally and I will reject them (JKR, OSC, etc.) But generally I don't want to know anything about the author as a person and I just don't care. I read the book. I engage with the book. That's all.
But it's completely impossible for me to read Lewis like this. Impossible. The entire book, I kept thinking, "What is he saying about faith? How is he using this as an allegory for Christianity? What is his theology here?"
This is possibly unfair. Yes, the Narnia books are mostly allegorical and very heavy-handed in ways that Tolkien and I agree are annoying. But Till We Have Faces is a book for adults and is much more subtle and I don't think he meant for it to be allegorical. I think he was genuinely engaging with the question of the Virtuous Pagan and what faith might be like for those who have never encountered Christianity. And also just writing a good novel.
But I can't help it! I was constantly, constantly wondering about how his theology was showing through! Especially since I know that I would disagree pretty profoundly with that theology now. So I was kind of ~looking for things I needed to disagree with~ which is just not a fun way to read a novel. It tainted my enjoyment!
To Lewis's credit, I do not think it's easy to pin down his theology in this book. He's definitely got a Point of View, which is that the Divine is so far beyond us that the questions we ask of It are nonsense and only the Divine Itself can be the answer. Which many people would find a cop-out, but I don't entirely disagree with. At any rate, it's something I can totally accept within the bounds of the novel.
I also really, really appreciate what he's doing with regards to the things we tell ourselves are love that are really not love. They're about possession and our own egos, and they are toxic to the "beloved." A very good theme to explore! As is the ways in which we rationalize our own choices to ourselves, how we skew our memories of reality in order to make it fit the narrative we've chosen, etc. That's so good and done so well.
I wish I could just take that stuff and leave the question of his theology alone! But it's there, irritating me through the whole reading of the book, like a popcorn husk stuck under my gum. It's very annoying! I wish I could read the book without all that baggage!
