E. DuBose Post 10: Choice Topic 3

20APR12

Musings on Till We Have Faces

What does it mean that Orual is Psyche?  Is Fox right, that everyone one is a member of one body?  Is this an analogy to the body of the church?  Orual's punishment instead of being killed was to endure all the pain of Psyche.  If Orual had known this is what she would endure, would she have endured it gladly or would her true selfish nature be revealed?  Till We Have Faces really showed many morals and lessons:  lessons of greed and jealously and selfishness.  It showed self sacrifice and how many times it is not acknowledged -- but if the self sacrifice were always acknowledged then that may defeat the purpose of doing it selflessly. 

What is the significance of the veil?  What does the face represent?  Is our true face “ugly”?  If what we were, showed through our face would that determine our beauty of ugliness…is that why Psyche was so beautiful?  Was Orual’s longing for psyche an example of what Lewis talks about in Weight of Glory and how we long to be and know what is beautiful?  Lewis writes in the Weight of Glory, "We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough.  We want something else which can hardly be put into words--to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it" (p 42).  We long for glory, we long for something unseen and unknown.  Glory encapsulates what beauty is.  For now communion with God is the closest we'll get to that. 

It's true, that each person has many faces but I think Lewis was getting at something much deeper in his analogy of the veil covering Orual and even in the veil covering Psyche's statue.  I'm just at a loss as to what that is.

And what does it mean when he says that we cannot see the gods until we have faces?  Is he talking about our souls, our ability to see truth?  Is he referring to the fact that, as humans separated from true knowledge of God and the primary world, we have no faces? I know we have moved onto a new book in class and don't have time to get into the book to deep but I can't help but wonder if there's a profound story within the book that I'm missing.  This was by far my favorite book we have read because of all this thinking and pondering it has produced.   I wish I had an answer, I imagine this blog would be much more interesting if I had.  I'm grasping for ties to other Lewis works and things we learned in the course but my memory fails me.