IV

Chapters 6-7:

Love and Longing

PLOT SUMMARY: The Fox and Orual try to convince the King to take measures, any measures, for saving Psyche, but he refuses. Orual’s offer to take Psyche’s place is refused, because she lacks beauty, and Psyche is imprisoned in an inner room of the palace. When Bardia, who is guarding the door, refuses to allow Orual to enter, she takes a sword and tries to fight him. He disarms her easily, but allows her to enter. The interview with Psyche seems the reverse of what it should be: Psyche, strong and controlled, comforts Orual, who is bitter and resentful, partly at Psyche because the latter seems so little moved over their parting. When Psyche begins to talk of her old longing for the gods and for death, Orual accuses her of cruelty and lack of love, and their interview ends on a very unpleasant note.

Lewis once commented, in response to the difficulty people had with Till We Have Faces, “I’m surprised that people don’t see that it is about jealousy and possessive love.”¹ The difficulty may be less a failure to see that it is about possessive love than a failure to understand the way possessive love and love-longing oppose each other in Orual and the way Platonic and Christian ideas about love and longing give shape to a conflict which threatens to tear her life apart.

          It would not be unfair or misleading to call Till We Have Faces a development in fiction of the central themes Lewis would spell out a few years later in The Four Loves. Each of the four loves—storge (to use its Greek name), or affection; philia, or friendship; eros, or love between the sexes; and agape, or unselfish love, godly love—has an im-[< p. 27] portant place in Till We Have Faces, though only the first appears in Chapter 7. Lewis calls storge, philia, and eros the “natural loves,” and agape “divine love.” His thesis about the loves is that the natural loves can remain themselves, can remain loves, only if they are infused with, or transformed by, divine love, or agape; left to themselves, cut off from agape, the natural loves will become corrupted, will gradually cease to be loving and will in fact, eventually, turn into forms of hatred.

          Lewis had illustrated all this much earlier in The Great Divorce, in which he describes two women, now in hell, who have characteristics resembling Orual’s. One is a mother who loved her son, Michael--gave up her whole life to him, she says, did her best to make him happy, and, after his death, lived only for his memory: “Keeping his room exactly as he’d left it: keeping anniversaries: refusing to leave that house though Dick and Muriel [her husband and daughter] were both wretched there.”²  All this points toward the fact that her love went bad, became “uncontrolled and fierce and monomaniac” (p. 84; 92). She admits finally that she would rather have her son with her in hell than free to be happy in heaven. The other is a wife who devoted her life to her husband, Robert. “It was I who made a man of him! Sacrificed my whole life to him!” (p. 77; 85). It was she who forced him to work thirteen hours a day, to strive for promotions, to buy a more expensive home, and to give up his old friends and begin to entertain “properly.” She still thinks that she could make something of him: “I’ll take charge of him again. I will take up my burden once more” (p. 81; 89). The real concern of both women is themselves, not Michael or Robert: “I want my boy, and I mean to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever and ever” (p. 86; 95); “Please, please! I’m so miserable. I must have someone to—to do things to” (p. 81; 89). Such, Lewis affirms, is the inevitable fate of all natural loves left to themselves: “They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods” (p. 84; 93). The natural loves need to be converted, infused with divine love, if they are to remain loves. They must be recognized as second things, not mistaken [< p. 28] for first things: this is the principle underlying all love, that “you cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God” (p. 84; 92).

          In such terms Lewis traces the degeneration of Orual’s storge for Psyche in Till We Have Faces. Orual took the place of the mother Psyche never knew, and no child was ever better loved or more devotedly cared for. No terms seem adequate to encompass Orual’s love: “I wanted to be a wife so that I could have been her real mother. I wanted to be a boy so that she could be in love with me. I wanted her to be my full sister instead of my half sister. I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich” (p. 23). Psyche has the beauty, grace, and ease that Orual does not have, and Orual in some measure finds fulfillment in Psyche, as well as purpose and a return of love: truly she could mark her first sight of Psyche as “the beginning of all my joys” (p. 20).

          In the very greatness and depth of her love—in its excess, one might say—are danger signs as well. For “this craving, of all love-cravings,” Lewis warns, “easily becomes the most unreasonable.”³ Storge is a need-love, or acquisitive love, which gratifies the giver, and a gift-love, or unselfish love, as well—“but one that needs to give; therefore needs to be needed. But the proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.” Storge should work toward making itself unneeded, but, as a natural love, in itself it has no power to do so: “The instinct desires the good of its object, but not simply; only the good it can itself give. A much higher love—a love which desires the good of the object as such, from whatever source that good comes—must step in and help or tame the instinct before it can make the abdication. And of course it often does.”⁴ But it did not in the case of Orual, and the results in Chapter 7 are precisely what Lewis has described here.

          The evidences of perverted storge abound. Orual needs the assurance of Psyche’s love and reacts sharply to any suggestion that Psyche’s love is less intense than her own: “Why must she say care friends?” (p. 69); “the parting between [< p. 29]her and me seemed to cost her so little” (p. 71). Orual needs to feel needed, in the same old ways:

And Orual wants Psyche to have only the good Orual gives her. Psyche’s assurance and strength irritate and even anger Orual, not because Psyche is comforted but because she finds that comfort apart from Orual: “Though the things she was saying gave her (that was plain enough) courage and comfort, I grudged her that courage and comfort. It was as if someone or something else had come in between us” (p. 75). All the good in Psyche’s life is to come from Orual, and all her love is to be for Orual: “I did not want her to bring even the Fox in now” (p. 73). When Psyche begs, “Oh, look up once at least before the end and wish me joy. I am going to my lover,” Orual, in the throes of injured storge, snaps back, “I only see that you have never loved me” (p. 76). Orual, who should have been a source of comfort and encouragement to Psyche, ends up through her distorted natural love being the opposite: “Had I not come to her to give comfort, if I could? Surely not to take it away. But I could not rule myself” (p. 72).

          The source of Psyche’s comfort instead was her longing, or Sehnsucht, which was also a powerful force in Lewis’s life. Lewis defines it as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”⁵ Momentary experiences of satisfaction, through sudden encounters with beauty in nature, literature, or music, or more often through the memory of such encounters, only intensify the desire, and the pain always associated with it. When Lewis refers to it, he uses such terms as “stab,” “pang,” and “inconsolable,” or calls it a “particular kind of unhappiness or grief, [but] . . . a kind we want.”⁶ Unlike other desires, in which pain arises from the absence of satisfaction, pain is inherent in this desire—inherent because attainment of its object is [< p. 30] and remains inseparable from death, from death of self. Lewis puts it most directly in the chapter on Heaven in The Problem of Pain: “We need not suppose…that eternal life will not also be eternal dying. It is in this sense that, as there may be pleasures in hell (God shield us from them), there may be something not all unlike pains in heaven (God grant us soon to taste them).”⁷ The object of this desire, also unlike other desires, is often unknown or mysterious: “It was a sensation, or course, of desire; but desire for what?”⁸ Lewis’s autobiography is the account of his search for the object of his longing, or “Joy,” as he calls it there. He discovered at last that the longing was for union with God, and that longing is God’s way of attempting to draw people to himself. It is God’s way of preventing people from remaining satisfied with this world and forgetting that “our real goal is elsewhere.”⁹ As Lewis put it in Christian Behaviour,

          Such longing was a part of Psyche’s being throughout her life. From the beginning, Orual reports, she “was half in love with the Mountain. . . .  ‘When I’m big,’ she said, ‘I will be a great, great queen, married to the greatest king of all, and he will build me a castle of gold and amber up there on the very top’” (p. 23). In her delirium when she was ill with the plague, “she talked most of her gold and amber castle on the ridge of the Grey Mountain” (p. 33). And now, because of that longing, she does not fear what the next day may bring:

The chapter’s two themes, of perverted love and longing, converge as Orual can only feel excluded and injured by Psyche’s expressions of a delight and comfort found outside Orual: “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from . . . my country, the place where I ought to have been born” (pp. 75-76).

          The chapter’s themes blend two key influences on Lewis’s thinking, Platonism and Christianity, in a provocative way. Plato, and Lewis, believed that human beings were made of body and spirit, the former linked to the physical world, the latter to the spiritual world of permanence and the Real; for Plato (though not for Lewis), the spirit existed in the spiritual realm before being trapped in a physical body at birth, from which it seeks to escape and return to the spiritual world. Earlier Psyche mentioned that the Fox knew but did not accept such a theory:

          Orual, however, is not open to such experiences, despite warnings against limiting her sources of knowledge. Thus Psyche tells her, “Sister, I have come to feel more and more that the Fox hasn’t the whole truth. Oh, he has much of it. It’d be dark as a dungeon within but for his teaching. And yet . . .” (p. 70; ellipsis in the original). She adds, “There must be so much that neither the Priest nor the Fox knows” (p. 72). Later Psyche is able to get beyond both Priest and Fox, as she says in telling Orual about her experience on the mountain:

The true knowledge does not come from the Priest’s rituals, or the Fox’s reasonings, or the images of Psyche’s youth. It rests on what Lewis in a prefatory note to the book called “vision.”¹³ Orual, unable to go beyond the Priest or the Fox, is instead torn between them. She reflects on this later: “But I could not find out whether the doctrines of Glome or the wisdom of Greece were right. I was the child of Glome and the pupil of the Fox; I saw that for years my life had been [< p. 33] lived in two halves, never fitted together” (p. 151; see also p. 152). The two halves must come together if Orual is to find love, peace, and happiness, but they will do so only as she becomes the pupil of Psyche and is able to move beyond the limitations of both Glome and Greece. [< p. 34]