The ancient and modern rationalists, on the other hand, have a penchant for subsuming the poetical under the rational. In so doing they lose sight that without the poetical reason becomes mere rationalism rationalizing what ought never be rationalized, planning an Holocaust in two hours and making the trains run on time without inquiring as to their destination…; that while it is true that one may not reason by images alone, the other side of the coin is also true: that one may not reason by concepts alone at the risk of losing sight of reality out there and having logic without experience or experimentation eat its own tail deluding itself that everything can now be explained by an ideology formulated in a closet.

The other delusion is that of thinking that within the world of human reason, the universal precedes the particular and the relative. Even the classical rationalist Aristotle recognizes in his Metaphysics that it is the other way around: the particular precedes the universal. Things may be different within the mind of God wherein verum and factum are one and the same, but Vico is analyzing how the human mind functions by examining human artifacts such as language, institutions, artistic objects galore, etc. He goes as far as saying that nature which has been made by God will never be fully known by Man. What is more properly scientific and knowable by Man are the cultural products as encountered in his/her history. Which is to say: Man is his own history.

After this brief recapitulation of Vico’s speculation on the poetical let us see how Lewis’ Till We Have Faces reflects those Vichian principles. The quote at the beginning of this essay by the heroine Orual supplies the title for this mythological novel which, with the exception of Perelandra, C.S. Lewis considered the best he had ever written. Curiously enough, it had little commercial success. So, perhaps commercial success is not such a reliable yardstick by which to judge the power and endurance of a myth but rather, as Jung has pointed out, the existence of certain collective persistent archetypes of the human imagination which seem to be vital for a proper understanding of the human condition. They seem to repeat themselves in different forms in different cultures, even those with no contact with each other, but always retain their underlying logos.

The myth has no author; rather, the myth expresses the collective unconscious, the common wisdom of a people and it is usually poetical. Vico calls it “the common sense” of a whole people and he proved it by pointing out that philologically the Odyssey and the Iliad could not have been written by the same man. Which is to say, there is no Homer proper and Plato was misguided in subsuming him under rationality and demoting the symbol of the common sense of the people from “educator of Hellas” to the role of a mere poet entertainer. That was on operation which subsumes the common exoteric wisdom of the Greeks to Plato’s own esoteric wisdom fit only for a few elitist initiates.

The story in Till We Have Faces is basically a retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche (as told by Apuleius) but with a twist. The twist is that in this story Psyche’s sister is not jealous. Although we do not know the name of Phyche’s sister, Lewis gives her the name Orual. In a sense she is the personification of what later Lewis in his The Four Loves will call filia (friendship: the second kind of love) and eros (sexual love: the third kind of love).

In the character of Orual there is much of Joy Davidman, the American admirer with whom Lewis corresponded for several years and whom he ends up marrying, passing from filia to eros and eventually to agape, as portrayed in the movie A Grief Observed. It is not however a realistic portrait of her. As with Dante’s Beatrice this is a real woman who has been transformed into a myth, a myth that grows on the reader every time the novel is read. The archetype that Orual incarnates is that of the spiritual journey, from pagan worship to apostasy and atheism and then, by way of Platonism, to her final surrender to God.

It parallels Joy’s pilgrimage from her Jewish background by way of atheism and Communism to her final conversion to Christianity after reading Lewis’s own description of his conversion experience in Surprised by Joy, written some thirty years before he met Joy, who in some uncanny way becomes the incarnation of the phenomenon of sudden unexplained joy and grace which led him to God; the reversal of Dante’s experience who thirty years later meets Beatrice as a “donna angelicata” [an angelic woman] via imagination. Which is to say, the myth of Joy appears in Lewis’ life before the real Joy and it lasts long after Joy has transcended time and space. Myths and symbols in fact have that kind of power: they transcend time and space even as they incarnate the history of mankind.

In the novel there is the physical Joy, the middle aged and not particularly good-looking woman who for a long while Lewis considers nothing more than another friend, just as Baudia in the novel treats Orual. So the theme of friendship in the true sense of that word, i.e., as filia going beyond mere affection, is explored but not exhausted. The theme merges into that of the beautiful woman married for love in the ordinary sense and then the sudden perplexity as one jumps forward some twenty years or so to find her middle aged, tired, no longer physically attractive. It is important to remember that Lewis and Joy married when they were both in their fifties.

The question Lewis seems to be exploring is: Does love survive? Is the love of affection and friendship (the first two kinds of love as described in his The Four Loves) stronger, even better, than erotic love? Lewis was already exploring this issue in his youth when he is writes a ballad on the story of Helen of Troy. There too we find a twist. Menelaus meets Helen ten years later, after the fall of Troy and finds her an utter disappointment: she is now tired and beaten by the terrible realities all around her. But on the way back home he finds out that the real Helen is in Egypt, as beautiful as ever. The same theme of Helen having a double who has gone to Troy with Paris is also explored by Euripides in his play Helen of Troy, and again in modern times by Haggard and Land’s The World’s Desire. Menelaus now has to choose between the two Helens. In fact, the real Helen is the tired Helen of Troy and not the beautiful Helen of Egypt.

It is intriguing that Lewis dedicates the novel to Joy Davidman, who is by now his wife and a few years away from her tragic death with bone cancer. Are the two Helens, combined into Orual, none other than Joy? For this work, much like Dante’s Commedia, is an allegory, which is to say, a work of historical imagination: Psyche is an instance of anima naturaliter Cristiana, that makes the best of the pagan religion she had retreated to (just as Virgil did) and in so doing is guided toward the true God. In a way she is like Christ as every good man and woman is like Christ. She is not a mere symbol but a case of human affection in its natural condition: true, tender, suffering.

However, since this love is natural, not yet agape (the ultimate, fourth kind of love), it is still possessive, ready to turn to hatred should the beloved cease to be its possession. What such love cannot stand is to see the beloved passing into a sphere where it cannot follow; into that fourth dimension of love wherein a Therese of Avila and a John of the Cross, or a Francis of Assisi and Clare, can be true friends on this earth and forever after, wholly bypassing the third stage of love.

This is undoubtedly a recurring myth in Western Literature and ironically it has been called “Platonic love.” The very title of this novel suggests that at the end of the journey we shall meet the gods because we shall have taken off our comfortable masks and our hubris to be known as we really are. Then each of our lives will be translated into the universal language to be placed in the book of Life and everybody will be able to read everything about everybody else. That will be the ultimate history book. The story will be everlasting and in it, true intimacy shall reign, without jealousy or promiscuity. Indeed, after all our peregrinations we will arrive at the place we were exiled from and know the place for the first time.

PART ONE
PART TWO