I’ve invited friends who visit Living Our Days to join me in reading the book over the next several weeks. Just as in the Chronicles of Narnia, readers will bond with particular characters and despise others. Written in memoir form, Till We Have Faces chronicles Orual’s howling question, “What do the gods want from us?” and the jarring answer she received at the end of her life.Īll analysis aside, when C.S. Set in a culture in which a woman’s role and status were defined by her beauty, her husband, or both, Orual had neither, but managed to carve out a life for herself based on the love of her youngest sister, Psyche, and the challenge of learning and gaining new skills. Tired of the harsh comments, the too-long glances, and worst of all, the pity, she chose mystery, invisibility - and in the process, she gained renown. Orual, warrior queen of Glome, wore a veil. In his novel based on the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, Lewis uses the narrative to explore themes such as the limits of reason, the selfishness of natural love, and the nature of faith.

He believed Till We Have Faces to be his best book. The book’s symbols imaginatively manifest the ambiguous nature of religious language.Ask an author to name his favorite of all the books he’s written, and most will demur, insisting that it’s like trying to choose a favorite child. This implies a faith in language itself, specifically in the analogical discourse, with its “is” and “is not” logic, that is fundamental to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

In these scenes, Lewis, I argue, portrays language’s capacity-specifically the language of religious ritual and story-to articulate a reality beyond the limits of discourse, in short, a divine reality. In this article, I consider three pivotal scenes that provoke reflection on the symbolic language embodied in the story’s religious rituals.

For instance, its depictions of pagan rituals are essential to the story’s thematic tapestry. But despite its ancient pagan setting and absence of explicit apologetics, Lewis’s text invites theological reflection. Unlike many of Lewis’s more famous works, the book does not contain a clear argument for Christianity. Lewis remains beloved in the popular imagination, his last published work of fiction, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956), is relatively little known.

Till we have faces