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"A hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head."
- C.S. Lewis
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Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis
Written by Larry Taunton
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| Fiction |
 Till We Have Faces is the C.S. Lewis classic in which he retells the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche. I read the book after being compelled to do so by my three boys, all of whom loved it.The book is not typical C.S. Lewis fare. Lewis's fiction usually contains obvious Christian symbols and parallels: Aslan = Christ, Witch = Satan, and so on. J.R.R. Tolkien, by contrast, believed in a kind of natural theology, that is, if one writes as a Christian, he doesn't need to put deliberate Christian markers into the story because his Christian worldview will come to the surface naturally. To that extent, Till We Have Faces seems much more like the work of Tolkien than Lewis. I was most struck by Lewis's description of selfish love. Here, Lewis gives us a picture of love that is demanding, possessive, and prideful; the sort that we have all experienced or witnessed. But Lewis gives us a greater understanding of how true love must behave. In this regard, it is as though Lewis has fictionalized, both positively and negatively, I Corinthians 13, the "love chapter." In a powerful scene that puts Orual, the book's central figure, in the dock before the gods who re-examine her life's story in the light of their truth, rather than her version of it, Lewis challenges our trite, cheap, commercialized (e.g., "Jesus is my co-pilot") notions of the transcendent and restores something of its awe and majesty. It is enough to give one pause. |