The Refiner’s Fire: Myth

The Empty Face Of Evil

Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis’s powerful retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, focuses on the face of evil—its definition and habitation. Orual, the selfish Queen of Glome and sister of Psyche, narrates the tale. She meets the gods face to face and must cope with the inevitable result. The queen’s mentality is a mixed one. She has all the dark fear of the gods that so pervades her tale, but she also has a Grecian logic instilled by her beloved schoolmaster the Fox, a slave from Greece.

Queen Orual tries to make the gods the villains of the tale, to put them “in the dock,” as modern man has done with God (see Lewis’s essay “God in the Dock,” in the collection of essays under that title published by Eerdmans).

Although Orual always speaks as if there were several gods, her tale revolves around two, the dark, bloody Ungit of the temple of Glome and the son of Ungit, the Shadowbrute or Beast of the Grey Mountain. These two are the barbaric versions of the Greek Aphrodite and Cupid. The tale, too, is the same. The beautiful Psyche is sacrificed to appease the gods, who are thought to be jealous of her beauty.

From Orual’s point of view, the gods are dark and malicious creatures, allowing men little moments of pleasure only to dash the poor creatures down again. She complains:

The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us [Till We Have Faces, A Myth Retold, Time Incorporated, 1966, p. 86; succeeding references are to this edition].

Worse yet, the gods do not allow men to plan their own little idiocies and blasphemies; they increase the pain by diverse cruelties:

It is, in its way, admirable, this divine skill. It was not enough for the gods to kill her; they must make her father the murderer [p. 70].

Throughout her narrative, Orual complains in this way about the workings of the gods.

Not only does she point up the capricious and malicious intentions of the gods; she also stresses the dark and bloody aspect of holiness. Her description of Ungit evokes all that is most lush and terrifying in the archetypical earth mother:

In the furthest recess of her house where she sits it is so dark that you cannot see her well, but in summer enough light may come down from the smoke-holes in the roof to show her a little. She is a black stone without head or hands or face, and a very strong goddess [p. 4].

Not only is she ugly, but her worship is less than symbolic. It consists mainly of ritual sex and blood sacrifices. Orual discusses the gods with the Fox and so tells him of Ungit:

That was how I came to tell him all about Ungit, about the girls who are kept in her house, and the presents that brides have to make to her, and how we sometimes, in a bad year, have to cut someone’s throat and pour the blood over her [p. 7].

All these complaints are merely the most spectacular ones Orual can make against the gods. Their real malignancy in her opinion is based on the very ambiguity of their natures. If Ungit were just bloody or the Shadowbrute just cruel, then men might be able to cope with them. Not so, however. Worst of all there is the frightful possibility that they might be real and beautiful rather than loathsome, but so capricious as to refuse to let men know their true natures.

Orual’s central problem is the one common to modern man. Everything that happens to Psyche on the mountain might be illusion and fantasy. It might also be real. There is no way to know until the knowing can do no good. The situation is similar to that in the modern spectacular novel The Exorcist. Everything might be caused or at least explained by natural phenomena and psychic disorders, but there is an equal chance that the supernatural could be responsible. The human being must choose what to believe, for the gods or demons are not telling.

Psyche never doubts the real and benevolent natures of the gods, whereas Orual with her rational training and her angry loathing continually wavers between doubt and despair. The thing that most enhances Orual’s doubts is the exact meshing of Psyche’s childhood fantasies with her later vision of the god of the mountain. Throughout her childhood Psyche insisted that she would marry the god of the mountain and live in his palace. Later when Orual finds her, apparently in rags, Psyche insists her dream has come true. Orual, good psychologist that she is, is convinced that Psyche in her fear and loneliness has only gone mad and come to believe in her own fantasy world.

At the same time, however, Orual believes it may be possible, only very slightly possible, that the god is there after all. The most ambiguous thing that happens to Orual is that she looks up in the morning mist and sees the palace of the god. Then immediately it fades into swirling shadow. Orual asks in query against the gods:

That moment when I either saw or thought I saw the House—does it tell against the gods or against me? Would they (if they answered) make it a part of their defense? say it was a sign, a hint, beckoning me to answer the riddle one way rather than the other? I’ll not grant them that. What is the use of a sign which is itself only another riddle?

She goes on to speculate on her sleepy, disturbed state at the time she spied the palace and ends in doubt:

They set the riddle and then allow a seeming that can’t be tested and can only quicken and thicken the tormenting whirlpool of your guesswork. If they had an honest intention to guide us, why is their guidance not plain? Psyche could speak plain when she was three; do you tell me the gods have not yet come so far? [p. 118].

Despite the vision, however, the doubt is so strong that Orual must give in to the practical fear that her sister is fantasizing and needs to be awakened.

Awaken Psyche she does, but it is Orual who must bear the face of reality. She sees the god above the river, and this time there can be no doubt. “A monster—the Shadowbrute that I and all Glome had imagined—would have subdued me less than the beauty this face wore.” The god rejects Orual pitilessly, seeming to imply that all her doubts “had been trumped-up foolery, dust blown in my own eyes by myself.” Her defense is that it had not seemed so, that perhaps the god had altered the past by making himself known. She questions again the mercy of the gods: “And if they can indeed change the past, why do they never do so in mercy?” (p. 152).

Mercy is what Orual cannot find in the faces of her gods. That lack of mercy is her charge. Later, when she goes on her journey to foreign lands and hears the original tale of Cupid and Psyche, she says of it:

It was as if the gods themselves had first laughed, and then spat in my face.… It’s a story belonging to a different world, a world in which the gods show themselves clearly and don’t torment men with glimpses, not unveil to one what they hide from another, nor ask you to believe what contradicts your eyes and ears and nose and tongue and fingers [pp. 212, 213].

The first section of her book ends with her final restatement of the same desperate theme:

To hint and hover, to draw near us in dreams and oracles, or in a waking vision that vanishes as soon as seen, to be dead silent when we question them and then glide back and whisper (words we cannot understand) in our ears when we most wish to be free of them, and to show to one what they hide from another; what is all this but cat-and-mouse play, blindman’s buff, and mere jugglery? Why must holy places be dark places? I say, therefore, that there is no creature (toad, scorpion, or serpent) so noxious to man as the gods. Let them answer my charge if they can [p. 218].

So ends Orual’s charge against the gods.

Lewis seems to be saying that evil appears to be the responsibility if not the folly of the gods. They are dark, mysterious, and capricious, unable to be understood or evaded. One must note again the nature of the gods in this situation. They appear to be like spoiled children, playing with men for their personal sport and distraction. They are very like the wicked King or Orual’s nurse, the foolish Batta, determined to act for their own pleasure and diversion, uninterested in the effects their actions are going to have on unfortunate mortals.

It is not, of course, Lewis who is saying such things at all; it is Orual. For her, all evil is concentrated in the actions of the gods. The reader, however, is caught up in the story, so that he or she is tempted to begin to sympathize with Orual, to begin to reject any notion of benevolent deity and to accept the likelihood that malevolence does go back to the very basis of the supernatural structure beyond the natural universe. With the second section of the text, however, this impression changes. It is not the gods who are evil; it is man, or, more specifically, it is a woman.

The process of self-understanding through which Orual passes is a terrifying one because it speaks with such truth. As an old woman, she had finished her text against the gods with the words “no answer.” She opens her work again because she has received an answer in the form of various dreams and waking visions, all evoked by some astounding personal revelations. Orual encounters at the end of her life the uncomfortable truth about her own nature. Essentially what she discovers is that rather than loving those whom she thought she loved, she has used them up, devouring their strengths and energies. Like the demanding mother and wife in The Great Divorce, Orual asked everything from those she claimed to love. Her foolish second sister, Redival, she rejected for the witty teacher, the Fox, and for the lovely Psyche. Bardia, the captain of the guard, Orual’s real love, she used up so that he became worn and exhausted in her service. And worst of all, Psyche she condemned to ceaseless wandering not because she loved Psyche but because Psyche’s love for the god made Orual mad with jealousy.

Orual comes to realize that the selfishness was not the god’s but her own. While she had been blaming others, it was she who had possessed and devoured every good thing within her reach, she who had snatched selfishly at whatever she had wanted. She realized that her ugliness is not alone in her face but goes to the base of her being. Her face is like the swollen rock face of Ungit, covered with sacrificial blood. She says:

It was I who was Ungit. That ruinous face was mine. I was that Batta-thing, that all-devouring womblike, yet barren, thing. Glome was a web. I was a swollen spider squat at its center, gorged with men’s stolen lives [p. 242],

The worst kind of evil is the wrong kind of love, love that clutches and possesses rather than loosening and liberating.

The horrible self-awareness, however, is not all that Orual receives from the gods in their answer. She also sees a vision in which Psyche journeys to Hades and brings back a case of beauty for Orual. The beauty is, of course, the self-awareness that makes her see that evil is within and not without and that it can be overcome only by unselfish love. Moreover, unselfish love can be achieved only when one is aware of his or her own motivations. Lewis, through Orual, says it this way:

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy. of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they bear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? [p. 257].

Orual had been the wicked sister, sacrificing her younger sister for jealousy, but is was not the simple jealousy of the old legend. It was the jealousy of a love that seeks to possess the beloved, even at the cost of breaking that beloved’s heart. The jealousy of the possessive lover, be he mate or parent or child or sister, has destructive potential far greater than any mere resentment of one sister for another’s good fortune in marriage.

That is Lewis’s final statement on evil. Essentially, it is the wrong kind of love. It is childish and unable to see beyond its own ends and interests. It is love Eve had for Adam when she doomed him to death because she did not want to be deprived of his company. It is the opposite of the love described in First Corinthians 13. It is that dark glass in the lines: “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13:12). Evil is the desire to have, to own, to devour others rather than to let them be and grow in their own ways and times. It is Orual’s grace and blessing that, despite her own worst efforts, the gods allow her to see her corrupt self in time. She dies redeemed, aware of the nature of real love.

Such a marvelous molding of Lewis’s ideas on evil does not happen so clearly in his fiction until this last work. He has had the ideas before and has certainly portrayed the evil characters as petty tyrants and nasty villains, but he has never connected all the threads so beautifully so that the natures of his creations melded with the import of his ideas as they do in his creation of Orual. When one sees her motivations, hidden as they have been, one sees where the source of evil had been all along.

Evil is the face of blank, malicious selfishness. It turns in upon itself, again and again unable to look out to others. No other person is there for his or her own sake but only for the feeding and care of the evil-doer. What the evil man calls love is only a sort of hunger aimed at the total consumption of the emotional lives of those around him. What he calls justice is the selfish granting of his own welfare and pleasure, whether on a personal or a universal scale. And what he calls good is that which will benefit his own aims at the expense or despite the needs of those around him. He is evil not because he wills to be an evil man but because he can do nothing else but will his own narrow desires. For Lewis, the only way to stop evil in others is to condemn its meager emptiness; the only way to stop it in ourselves is to look inward through the dark glass to try to see our real faces beyond.

JANICE WITHERSPOON NEULEIBJanice Witherspoon Neuleib is assistant professor of English at Illinois State University, Normal.

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