Veiling and Revealing: Ancient Myth and Christian Grace in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces

Abstract

Veiling and RevealingAncient Myth and Christian Grace in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces Philip A. Rolnick (bio) “You cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live.” (ex 33:20, 23) But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. . . . And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. (2 cor 3:16, 18) Myth in general is not merely misunderstood history . . . nor diabolical illusion . . . nor priestly lying (as the philosophers of the Enlightenment thought) but, at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination. (c. s. lewis)1 C. S. Lewis loved to read myths, and Till We Have Faces, pointedly subtitled A Myth Retold, is an attempt to write one. In Lewis’s retelling, the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche is given a pseudo-historical grounding, greatly expanded, and intertwined with and transformed by Christian principles. Portraying multifaceted forms [End Page 22] of love (and their distortions), and surprising events of grace, revelation, and human response, Lewis surreptitiously Christianizes the myth. At the same time, he uses the myth’s pagan and historicized setting to gain new perspective on the divine nature and wisdom— and subtleties of the human soul. Myth, Truth, and History As is well-known, Lewis, around the age of 32, converted to Christianity after a life-changing conversation with J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. What is not as well-known is that this conversion conversation pivoted on the understanding of myth. Tolkien and Dyson were able to show Lewis a basic inconsistency in his thinking: If in a pagan myth he encountered a god sacrificing himself and then rising again, Lewis was delighted and moved; but at the same time Lewis thought he must reject the accounts of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection. Once awakened to the imaginative and emotional import of the story of Christ, soon thereafter Lewis became convinced of its historical reality. As he wrote to his lifelong friend Arthur Greeves, “Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened. . . . It is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths.”2 Lewis’s conversion joined his love of myth to his love of reality, to what really is the case, and in the case of Christ, to what “really happened.” In a paper given about fifteen years later, Lewis sees other myths and religions as anticipations of a truth that will be more fully revealed in Christianity: “I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualisation, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man.”3 Lewis’s inclusiveness, at once both sensible and charitable, is put to creative use in Till [End Page 23] We Have Faces, a work that instantiates his idea of Christianity as the fulfillment of earlier, mythic anticipations. Lewis came to have very orthodox Christian beliefs, but he continued to hold myth in high esteem. In a substantive footnote in Miracles (1947), written when he was already famous, Lewis elaborated thoughts on myth that would later shape and color Till We Have Faces: Just as, on the factual side, a long preparation culminates in God’s becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate as History. This involves the belief that Myth in general is not merely misunderstood history . . . nor diabolical illusion . . . nor priestly lying (as the philosophers of the Enlightenment thought) but, at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.4 In the “long process” that leads from ancient...