The primary theme of Lewis' book, Till We Have Faces, is the danger of insubordinate and selfish love. By "insubordinate love" I mean love, which, as it were, attempts to usurp the higher places in the hierarchy of love that Lewis defines in his work The Four Loves. In that work, Lewis writes of the risks of placing certain kinds of love above the most important kind of love, which he calls charity, the Divine Love. Till We Have Faces, therefore, puts into a story the ideas Lewis expressed in his other work.
I find Lewis' theme to be a fascinating one: who would suspect that love could be so harmful? Lewis warns the reader of a very subtle evil that can cause a great deal of harm. Orual, motivated by her love for Psyche, yet also dominated by pride and selfishness, destroys both her own and Psyche's happiness. Orual's love, a love that Lewis believed must be subordinate to Divine Love (represented by the love of Cupid for Psyche), attempts to usurp that Divine Love, and thus ceases to become love. In The Four Loves, Lewis argued that love that maintained its proper position in the hierarchy becomes more of itself, that is, becomes far more loving than if it tried to rise above its place. Indeed, he argued that in rising above its place it ceases to become love at all. Orual's love for her sister, a love that was once sincere, becomes unrecognizable as love as she becomes jealous; it even sinks to the level of hatred, as she would rather Psyche be unhappy with her than happy with a god.
These two works are not the only ones in which I have seen Lewis express this idea: it is briefly encountered in The Great Divorce. A wife attempts to persuade an angel to give her back her husband, who is in heaven, so that she can take care of him. She complains of how she sacrificed all her happiness for him so that he could be improved, yet fails to realize that she was probably a great source of his unhappiness. Though it is certain she once loved her husband, she, too, would rather have her husband unhappy with her than happy in heaven.
In the conclusion of Till We Have Faces, Orual finally becomes aware of her selfishness, but only after she has suffered greatly. She discovers that Psyche did love her after all (she believed that she did not), and in fact loved her more Orual was herself capable of loving Psyche. Psyche's love lacked that insubordinate quality, and therefore grew more beautiful and complete than Orual's love could. But, in her last vision, Orual is made beautiful by Psyche's love as she lets go of her selfishness and begins sincerely loving Psyche again. Through Till We Have Faces Lewis argues that one must not put one's own love above Divine Love, yet he does not devalue these other kinds of love. On the contrary, he stresses that all loves will become more beautiful when they are subordinate to the Divine. More importantly, he warns that love that usurps ends up not being love at all.
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