Work record
Till We Have Faces
1956 · Postwar Contemporary · Novel · English
Abstract
Background. Lewis had wanted since youth to recast the Cupid and Psyche episode in Apuleius, whose envious sisters he found unconvincing. He finished it rapidly in 1955 with Joy Davidman reading each chapter, and it became his final novel.
Narrative. An aged ruler sets down her lawsuit against heaven. She recounts raising a radiant younger sister who was given to a mountain deity during a pestilence, finding the girl content as his wife, refusing to credit an unseen palace, and compelling the lamp-lit betrayal that brought banishment. Decades of capable, masked rule follow. A later addendum records how encounters and visions dismantle her case before the court of the dead.
Structure. The second part reads the first against itself: the narrator remains the same, yet the reader learns to distrust her earlier testimony. A brief closing note signed by the priest Arnom records the queen's death and how the manuscript was found, setting the whole as a document left behind by her.
Themes. Possessive affection set against self-giving love; Greek rationalism, primitive cult and their partial truths; the will behind unbelief; vicarious suffering; becoming a real self before God.
Significance. Considered by its author his finest book, it is now widely ranked among the major twentieth-century reworkings of ancient myth.
Main characters
- Orual: Plain elder princess, later veiled queen, who narrates her grievance
- Psyche: Her beloved half-sister, sacrificed and wed to a god
- The Fox: Greek slave-tutor and Stoic counsellor
- Bardia: Soldier who serves the queen faithfully until exhausted
- Trom: Tyrannical king who gives up his daughter
- Redival: The middle sister, shallow and resentful
- The Priest of Ungit: Keeper of the goddess's dark temple
- Ansit: Bardia's widow, who confronts the queen
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Summary
Till We Have Faces, subtitled A Myth Retold, rewrites the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius's Golden Ass, told by one of Psyche's elder sisters. Orual, now an old queen of Glome, a small barbarian kingdom on the edge of the Greek world, writes her book as a formal accusation against the gods. Her mother dead and her father, King Trom, harsh and violent, she grows up ugly and unloved, taught Greek poetry and Stoic philosophy by the Fox, a captured Greek slave, and cared for by the nurse Batta alongside her pretty sister Redival. When the king's second wife dies bearing a daughter, Istra, whom the household calls Psyche, Orual raises the child and loves her with her whole heart. Psyche's beauty becomes a cult; then plague, drought and rebellion come, and the old Priest of Ungit, the dark goddess of Glome, declares that Psyche must be the Great Offering, left bound to the holy Tree on the Grey Mountain for the god of the Mountain, the Shadowbrute. Orual, sick with fever, cannot prevent it. Afterwards she climbs the mountain with Bardia, the captain of the guard, to bury what is left, and finds Psyche alive and radiant in a hidden valley, saying she is the bride of the god and living in his palace. Orual sees no palace. Torn between the Fox's rational explanation of a mountain outlaw and Bardia's fear of a monster, she returns, stabs her own arm, and forces Psyche to promise to light a lamp and look at her husband while he sleeps. That night a storm wrecks the valley; the god appears, sends Psyche into exile, and tells Orual that she too shall be Psyche. Orual veils her face for the rest of her life. As queen she becomes a strong ruler: she wins a single combat against Argan of Phars, frees the Fox, reforms the house of Ungit under the new priest Arnom, and depends on Bardia until he dies of overwork. His widow Ansit tells her she devoured him. On a journey Orual finds a shrine where Psyche is worshipped as a goddess and hears a priest tell the tale as though the sisters had seen the palace and envied her, which provokes her written complaint. Part Two, added in her last days, records how the eunuch Tarin and Ansit showed her the truth about her loves, and how visions bring her to Psyche's labours and to the court of the gods, where reading her complaint aloud is itself the answer. There she sees Psyche restored and, in the pool, herself made beautiful, just before she dies. Geoffrey Bles published the novel in London in 1956, with a dedication to Joy Davidman, and Harcourt, Brace issued it in New York in 1957.
Virtues in this work
- Humility: Before the judges Orual hears her own complaint for what it is and gives up her case against the gods.
- Faith: Psyche trusts her unseen husband in the valley although her sister can see no palace and pleads with her to doubt.
- Fortitude: Orual fights Argan of Phars in single combat to secure her kingdom and Trunia's cause.
- Charity: Psyche goes among the plague-stricken people of Glome to touch and bless them though she may catch the fever.
Plot or Argument
- Part One, Chapters 1-4: Glome and the Fox
Orual's childhood under King Trom; the arrival of the Fox as tutor; the birth of Psyche and Orual's devoted love for her; Psyche's growing beauty and the people's worship of her.
- Part One, Chapters 5-7: Plague and the Great Offering
Fever, famine and lions strike Glome; the Priest of Ungit names Psyche as the Accursed who must be given to the god of the Grey Mountain; Orual falls ill and Psyche is led to the Tree.
- Part One, Chapters 8-15: The valley and the lamp
Orual and Bardia find Psyche alive in the valley; Orual cannot see the palace; on a second visit she wounds herself to force Psyche's promise, the lamp is lit, the god's judgement falls, and Psyche is driven into exile.
- Part One, Chapters 16-20: The veiled queen
Orual takes the veil, succeeds her father, defeats Argan of Phars in single combat, frees the Fox, and rules Glome for decades with Bardia and Arnom; the Fox dies and Bardia wears himself out in her service.
- Part One, Chapter 21: The shrine of Istra
In a foreign land Orual hears a priest tell Psyche's story with the sisters seeing the palace and acting from envy, and she resolves to write her case against the gods; her book ends that the gods give no answer.
- Part Two, Chapters 1-2: Tarin and Ansit
Meetings with Redival's former lover Tarin and with Bardia's widow Ansit show Orual how her love consumed those around her.
- Part Two, Chapters 3-4: Visions and the judgement
Orual dreams of performing Psyche's labours, is brought before the judges of the dead, reads her complaint and hears its true meaning, is shown by the Fox how she bore part of Psyche's anguish, and sees Psyche return as the god draws near.
Characters
- Orual, narrator and protagonist
Eldest daughter of King Trom and later the veiled Queen of Glome, who writes her accusation against the gods.
- Psyche (Istra), Orual's half-sister
Beautiful, gentle youngest princess, offered to the god of the Mountain and made his bride.
- The Fox (Lysias), tutor
Greek slave and Stoic philosopher who teaches the princesses and becomes Orual's counsellor.
- Bardia, captain of the guard
Loyal, plain-spoken soldier who goes with Orual to the mountain and serves her until his death.
- Trom, King of Glome
Orual's violent and fearful father, who surrenders Psyche to save himself.
- Redival, middle sister
Orual's pretty, spiteful sister, later married off to a foreign prince.
- The Priest of Ungit, old priest
Grim servant of the goddess who demands the Great Offering and stands firm against the king.
- Arnom, new priest
His successor, a more modern priest who works with Orual and adds the closing note to her book.
- Ansit, Bardia's wife
The widow who tells Orual how much her husband's service to the queen cost his household.
- Batta, nurse
The princesses' gossiping nurse, later a bitter old servant in the palace.
- Trunia, prince of Phars
Exiled prince whom Orual supports against his brother Argan and who marries Redival.
- Tarin, former guard
Once Redival's admirer, later a eunuch in a foreign court, who tells Orual of her sister's loneliness.
- Ungit and the god of the Mountain, the gods
The dark goddess of Glome and her son, the unseen husband of Psyche.
Lessons
Love that devours
Orual's love for Psyche, for the Fox and for Bardia is real, but it wants to possess. Lewis shows natural affection turning jealous when it cannot bear the beloved to belong to another, even to a god. Only when Orual sees what Ansit and Tarin see does she recognise the hunger in her devotion.
- Why does Orual insist that Psyche must light the lamp, and what does she tell herself about her motives?
- What does Ansit accuse Orual of, and is the charge fair?
- How does Orual's love for Psyche differ from Psyche's love for Orual?
Seeing and not seeing
Psyche sees a palace where Orual sees only heather and rock. Lewis leaves open whether Orual's blindness is inability or refusal, and why each piece of evidence leaves her unpersuaded. Lewis ties her uncertainty to her wishes: if the god is real, Psyche belongs to him and not to her.
- On the second visit Orual briefly glimpses the palace in the mist. Why does she explain it away?
- Are the Fox and Bardia each partly right about the god of the Mountain?
- What would it have cost Orual to believe Psyche?
Reason, sacrifice and the holy
The Fox's Greek reason and the old Priest's dark, bloody religion stand opposed for most of the book. In Part Two the Fox admits that his clear philosophy left out something the Priest knew: that the divine is weighty, demanding and not reducible to explanation. Lewis lets each side be partly corrected by the other.
- What does the Fox teach Orual about the gods, and what does he later admit he got wrong?
- Why does the old Priest say holy places are dark places?
- How does Arnom's newer religion compare with the Priest's?
Getting a face
Orual veils her face and writes a complaint that she believes is her whole truth. When she reads it before the judges she discovers it is a small, repeated cry of self-pity. The title suggests that a person must first become honest and whole, with a true face and voice, before she can meet God.
- Why does Orual take the veil, and what does it allow her to hide?
- What happens to her book when she reads it aloud before the judges?
- Why does the novel end with Orual seeing herself in the pool beside Psyche?
Context
Lewis had been turning over the Cupid and Psyche story since his undergraduate years, when he began a poem on it, because Apuleius's version seemed to him to make the sisters' conduct incomprehensible. His idea was that the palace should be invisible to the sister, so that her refusal to believe becomes understandable and tragic. The finished novel, set in an imagined kingdom touched by the Hellenistic world, is his most sustained treatment of natural love and its corruption, the subject he would analyse a few years later in The Four Loves (1960).
Composition
Lewis wrote the book quickly in 1955 after years of false starts, discussing it chapter by chapter with Joy Davidman, to whom it is dedicated. Geoffrey Bles published it in London in 1956, and Harcourt, Brace published the first American edition in New York in 1957. A short Note at the end explains how Lewis changed Apuleius's tale.
Reception
Early sales and reviews were modest compared with Narnia, though Robert Gorham Davis, reviewing it in the New York Times in January 1957, praised its imaginative unity. Lewis called it far and away his best book, and many later critics have agreed, treating it as his most accomplished novel and a major modern retelling of classical myth.
Comparisons
- the-golden-ass
Apuleius's tale of Cupid and Psyche, told by an old woman within his novel, is Lewis's source; Lewis keeps the lamp, the exile and the labours but makes the palace invisible to the sister and tells it from her side.
- the-last-battle
Published within months of each other, both close Lewis's fiction with a final unveiling of reality, the dwarfs who cannot see the feast in the stable and Orual who cannot see the palace standing for the same refusal.
- that-hideous-strength
Jane Studdock and Orual both resist a divine claim on them because they fear being possessed, and both find that surrender is the way to becoming fully themselves.
- meditations
The Fox's Stoicism, with its talk of nature, reason and the divine in all things, echoes Marcus Aurelius; the novel honours its discipline while showing what it cannot explain.
- confessions
Both are written as addresses to God that begin as self-defence or self-examination; Augustine and Orual each discover that the one they address knew them better than they knew themselves.
- the-bible
Orual's complaint against the gods and the presence that finally answers it recall the Book of Job, where God's appearance, not an argument, ends Job's case.
Quotes
“How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
“I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer.”
For Students
A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.
Reading Guide
Watch for
- Every time Orual says she loves someone, and what she wants from that person in return.
- The scene in the valley where Orual briefly glimpses the palace through the mist and then talks herself out of it.
- The veil: when Orual puts it on, what others imagine is behind it, and when it comes off.
- How the Fox's explanations of the gods change between Part One and Part Two.
- The last line of Part One and how the last chapter of Part Two answers it.
Key terms and names
- Glome
- The small kingdom where Orual is born and later rules, on the fringe of the Greek-speaking world. Its religion centres on the goddess Ungit.
- Ungit
- The goddess of Glome, worshipped as a shapeless black stone in a dark house of blood and incense. She corresponds to Aphrodite in the Greek myth.
- The Great Offering
- The sacrifice of the Accursed to the god of the Grey Mountain, demanded in time of disaster. Psyche is chosen for it.
- The Shadowbrute
- The people's name for the god of the Mountain, Ungit's son, imagined as a monster. Psyche finds him to be a divine bridegroom.
- The Fox
- Orual's Greek tutor, a slave who teaches Stoic philosophy and poetry. He stands for clear reason that will not admit mystery.
- The veil
- The covering Orual wears over her face from Psyche's exile onward. It hides her ugliness and also her true self.
- The complaint
- Orual's book, Part One of the novel, written as a charge against the gods. Read aloud before the judges, it reveals what she had hidden from herself.
Seminar Questions
- Comprehension Why does the Priest of Ungit say Psyche must be given to the god of the Mountain, and why does King Trom agree?
- Comprehension What does Orual do to force Psyche to light the lamp, and what happens as a result?
- Comprehension What does Orual learn from Ansit after Bardia's death?
- Interpretation Orual claims she acted to protect Psyche. What other motives does the novel reveal, and when does Orual herself see them?
- Interpretation The Fox says the gods are only stories, Bardia fears they are monsters, and Psyche says she is their bride. How does Lewis use these three views to frame Orual's choice?
- Interpretation Why does Orual's complaint, which she thought was a powerful case, turn out to be so small when she reads it to the judges?
- Interpretation In Part Two Orual learns she bore part of Psyche's labours. What does this say about suffering for and with another?
- Big Question Can a person love someone too much, or is the problem with Orual's love something other than its amount?
Faith Connections
- 1 Corinthians 13:12 (Scripture)
Paul says we now see through a glass darkly but then face to face, and shall know as we are known. Orual's last vision, when she finally sees and is seen with her true face, dramatises this promise and gives the novel its title idea.
- Job 38-42 (Scripture)
Job demands a hearing from God, and when God answers out of the whirlwind Job's case falls silent. Orual's accusation ends the same way: in the presence of the god, her questions die away.
- Matthew 10:37-39 (Scripture)
Jesus warns that one who loves father, mother, son or daughter more than him is not worthy of him, and that one who loses his life will find it. Orual must give up her claim on Psyche before either can be whole.
- C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960), chapter on Affection (Great Conversation)
Lewis describes how natural affection, good in itself, can become jealous and devouring when it is made a god. The analysis reads almost as a commentary on Orual.
Logic and Rhetoric
Central argument: Orual argues that the gods are unjust: they took Psyche from her, hid themselves, and gave no answer. But her case depends on the claim that she loved Psyche purely and could not have seen the palace. Part Two shows both claims false: her love was possessive and her blindness partly willed. Therefore the fault lay in the accuser, and the gods' silence was the silence of a judge waiting for the defendant to become honest enough to hear.
Rhetorical device: unreliable first-person narration. Part One is Orual's self-justifying brief against the gods; Part Two, written by the same narrator, reveals what the first account concealed, so the reader must reread her earlier claims in a new light.
Debate: Resolved: Orual was more to blame than the gods for Psyche's suffering.
Writing Prompts
Essay: Trace the veil from the day Orual first puts it on to her vision in the pool at the end, and argue what Lewis means by the title's claim that the gods cannot meet us until we have faces.
Comparison with The Golden Ass: Compare the sisters in Apuleius's tale of Cupid and Psyche with Lewis's Orual. Argue how Lewis's single change, the invisible palace, transforms a fairy-tale villain into a tragic narrator.
Medical Lens
Medicine appears at the edges of the story. A pestilence with fever sweeps Glome, and Psyche goes among the sick and lays her hands on them, which turns the people first to worship and then, when the sickness persists, to demand her sacrifice. Orual herself is laid low by fever at the moment of the offering. The Fox treats grief and fear with Stoic precepts, a literary picture of philosophy offered as consolation, and the novel lets Orual find that consolation insufficient without dismissing it. Bardia's death after years of exhausting service and Orual's prolonged, hardening grief over Psyche are drawn with psychological care. Part Two proceeds through dreams and waking visions that Orual cannot tell from reality; the novel presents them as true spiritual experience, and any clinical reading of them would be interpretive.
- Part One, Chapters 4-5
Fever spreads through Glome; Psyche touches and blesses the sick, and the people's gratitude turns to fear as the plague continues.
- Part One, Chapter 7
Orual lies ill with fever while Psyche is prepared for the Great Offering.
- Part One, Chapters 1 and 20
The Fox counsels the princesses with Stoic maxims on death and loss, and later grows old and dies in Orual's service.
- Part Two, Chapters 2-4
Orual's visions of becoming Ungit, of Psyche's labours and of the court of the dead, which she cannot separate from waking life.
Creative Prompts
- Essay
Read the Cupid and Psyche episode in Apuleius and then Part One of Lewis; argue whether making the palace invisible to Orual makes her more or less guilty than Apuleius's jealous sisters.
- Dialogue
Write the conversation the Fox and the old Priest of Ungit might have had about Psyche on the night before the Great Offering, keeping each true to his own view of the gods.
- Fiction
Retell the night of the lamp from Psyche's point of view, using only what the novel shows.
- Classroom
Make a two-column chart of Orual's complaints in Part One and what she learns about each one in Part Two.
Further Reading
- The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis
Lewis's 1960 study of affection, friendship, eros and charity, which names the possessive love Orual embodies.
- The Golden Ass, Apuleius
Contains the original tale of Cupid and Psyche (Books IV-VI).
- Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces, Peter J. Schakel
Book-length study of the novel (1984).
- C. S. Lewis: A Biography, Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper
Verification notes
Publication facts (subtitle A Myth Retold; Geoffrey Bles, 1956; source in Apuleius; Lewis's remark that it was far and away his best book; his explanation of the title; Robert Gorham Davis's New York Times review of 13 January 1957) were checked against en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Till_We_Have_Faces. The dedication to Joy Davidman, her chapter-by-chapter collaboration beginning in March 1955, and the 1957 Harcourt, Brace American edition were confirmed through search results from the Wade Center co-director David Downing's essay (apilgriminnarnia.com/2018/10/12/a-place-for-till-we-have-faces-by-david-c-downing-wade-center-co-director) and bookseller descriptions of the first American edition. Quote 1 was checked against Dappled Things (dappledthings.org/deep-down-things/5441/how-can-they-meet-us-face-to-face-till-we-have-faces), which prints it in the passage at the judgement seat; quote 2 against The Gospel Coalition (thegospelcoalition.org/article/lewis-till-we-have-faces/), which prints it with the following sentences. Chapter divisions (21 in Part One, 4 in Part Two) and chapter locators for episodes are from knowledge of the novel.
- Text is under copyright; check quotations against an authorized edition before publication.
- Confirm that both quotations fall in Part Two, Chapter 4, and their exact punctuation.
- Confirm the chapter ranges given in plotOrArgument and medicalLens passages (Part One has 21 chapters, Part Two 4).
- The furtherReading entry for Peter J. Schakel: confirm the exact title (Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces, 1984) before citing.
- Confirm whether the Fox's personal name Lysias is given in the novel itself.