IX

Part II, Chapters 1-4:

“Real Life is Meeting”

Chapter 1

PLOT SUMMARY:   After her completion of the writing of Part I, Orual encounters a series of events which cause her to know herself much more fully than before, and force her in fairness to resume writing, to add a supplement on what more she has learned.  From Tarin she learns of Redival’s loneliness when Orual turned from her to the Fox and then to Psyche; and in an interview with Ansit she learns that out of her country’s needs and her own distorted love she had made impossible demands on Bardia and virtually worked him to death.

The brilliance of Lewis’s achievement in Till We Have Faces emerges in Part II, in large measure from the way he returns to and incorporates the Cupid and Psyche myth into his own story.  In the myth Psyche was set four tasks, or labors:  sorting out a huge pile of seeds, gathering wool from the fleece of man-killing rams, fetching a cup of water from an inaccessible mountain river, and bringing Venus a box containing beauty from the underworld.  If, as the god had said to Orual, “You also shall be Psyche,” then Orual too must undertake these labors.¹  For Orual, they will be psychological rather than physical, yet even so they will be no less burdensome and full of anguish.

          The first task, the sorting, the one treated in this chapter, comes with her writing. In the process of writing Part I, Orual dredged up old memories and confronted what she had for many years forced herself to forget.  “I know so much more than I did about the woman who wrote it,” she says of [< p. 69] Part I.  “What began the change was the very writing itself.  Let no one lightly set about such a work.  Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant” (p. 253).  As she writes, and as new events illuminate old ones, she begins to undergo mentally what Psyche, somewhere, was undergoing physically:

All this she is doing for herself, coming to know her motives and the results of her actions. But she is also, by the Way of Exchange,³ helping Psyche, bearing some of  Psyche’s burden. In some of the dreams she becomes, as in the myth, “a little ant, and the seeds were as big as millstones; and labouring with all my might, till my six legs cracked, I carried them to their places” (p. 257).

          The result of sifting and sorting is the separation of what she thought she had been and done and suffered, from what actually had been the case. Specifically, she begins to learn about the quality of her own love, of her self-centeredness and failure to return in kind the love others extended to her. As she wrote about the early days with Redival, for example, she thought about the activities they had shared, and how close they had been, and “how terribly [Redival] changed” (p. 254). From Part I one recalls how it had been:

Through Tarin, to whom Redival then had turned for companionship, Orual comes to realize that Redival had been excluded and left alone. As Tarin put it, “She used to say, ‘First of all Orual loved me much; then the Fox came and she loved me little; and then the baby came and she loved me not at all.’ So she was lonely. I was sorry for her” (p. 255). Orual must admit, “I had never thought at all how it might be with her when I turned first to the Fox and then to Psyche” (p. 256). After all, Redival was beautiful and had golden hair—what more could she need?⁴

          Nor had she thought about the nature of her relationship with Bardia until, after his death, she visited his widow, Lady Ansit. Ansit is, first, the vehicle by which Orual is informed of her greedy, possessive use of Bardia:

Later, after Orual has had time to reflect, she realizes that the burdens she loaded on Bardia were caused less by the needs of the moment than by her possessiveness toward him: “For it was all true--truer than Ansit could know. I had rejoiced when there was a press of work, had heaped up needless work to keep him late at the palace, plied him with questions for the mere pleasure of hearing his voice. Anything to put off the moment when he would go and leave me to my emptiness” (p. 266).

          Ansit also provides a touchstone, a basis for judging Orual, for Ansit knows that love must not clutch onto its object at all costs.  When Orual asks why Ansit did not tell her that Bardia was fatigued and failing, Ansit replies, “Tell you?  And so take away from him his work, which was his life…?  Make a child and a dotard of him?  Keep him to myself at that cost?  Make him so mine that he was no longer his?” (p. 264).  But that, of course, is exactly what Orual has done—used people, devoured them, for her own benefit, rather than freeing and helping them to become themselves:(< p. 71) “Faugh!  You’re full fed.  Gorged with other men’s lives, women’s too:  Bardia’s, mine, the Fox’s, your sister’s--both your sisters’" (p. 265).  Ansit rightly sums up Orual’s situation and a central theme of the work:  “ I begin to think you know nothing of love” (p. 264).

 

Chapter 2

PLOT SUMMARY: Soon after the interview with Ansit, Orual takes part in a spring fertility rutual.  As she sits in Ungit’s house, awaiting the birth of the new year, she reflects on the meaninglessness of it all:  Ungit devours the land, takes from all, but gives nothing.  But then she watches a humble worshipper’s comfort from sacrificing to Ungit and the people’s joy in the general religious celebration.  This leads into a dream in which she and her father descend far below the Pillar Room, where Orual looks in a mirror and sees Ungit.  Having faced the ugly truth about herself, she tries to commit suicide, but is warned by a god not to do it.

          This chapter describes a key confrontation, in Orual’s mind, between the rational and the holy.  Orual’s mind rebels against the “dancing and feasting and towsing of girls” involved in pagan rites, against the darkness and slaughtering and blood, against the devotion of lives and silver to the cause—all this, “and nothing given back” (pp. 269-70).  Arnom seeks to reassure her by allegorical explanations of Ungit:  “‘I think, Queen,’ said he (his voice strange out of the mask), ‘she signifies the earth, which is the womb and mother of all living things.’  This was the new way of talking about the gods which Arnom, and others, had learned from the Fox” (pp. 270-71).  And it is a way of talking which has persisted into the twentieth century.  Why, asks Orual, should explanations of natural things like growth and clouds and rain be wrapped up in so strange a fashion?  “Doubtless,” replies Arnom, “to hide it from the vulgar” (p. 271).  Orual says no more but reflects, “It’s very strange that our fathers should first think it worth telling us that rain falls out of the sky, and then, for fear such a notable secret should get out . . . wrap it up in a filthy tale so that no one could understand the telling” (p. 271). [< p. 72]

          Orual’s words echo those used by Owen Barfield, and after him Lewis, to reply to the naturalistic theory of myths.  As Barfield put it,

Barfield’s description of such thinking as “projecting post-logical thoughts back into a pre-logical age” would fit Arnom as well as the twentieth century, where it is “extraordinarily widespread, being indeed taken for granted in all the most reputable circles.”  Such allegorical explanations take the heart and life out of myth—they are as inadequate as the allegorical readings of the story of Cupid and Psyche which Lewis felt impelled to revise.

          That inadequacy is brought out particularly as a simple peasant woman, distressed and sorrowful, enters the temple, offers a pigeon as a sacrifice to Ungit, sinks down before the god, and weeps bitterly for a very long time.  When she arises, she has received comfort and strength:  “It was as if a sponge had been passed over her.  The trouble was soothed.  She was calm, patient, able for whatever she had to do” (p. 272).  There is beauty in Ungit, a beauty she has always had, discernible to the eyes of humble faith.⁶ Orual is struck in a new way by the woman’s experience, and by the joy which filled the people as the priest enacted the new year’s ritual—“every man and woman and the very children looking as if all the world was well because a man dressed up as a bird had walked out of a door after striking a few blows with a wooden sword” (p. 273).  Rationalistic reservations and explanations ring hollow in the face of such experiences; Orual could have learned of their inadequacy from Psyche, long ago, but she was not ready then to hear and see the truth.  Now, her certainty about her love for Bardia having already been cut from under her, yet another certainty, about the adequacy of reason, has been destroyed.  And as he describes her experience, Lewis has also laid the foundation (< p. 73) in Chapter 2 for the transition from paganism to Christianity to come in Chapter 4.

          But Orual has more to learn before she is ready to meet the ultimate Truth.  Resting in her chamber after the temple rituals, she opens her eyes to see—presumably in a dream—her father standing beside her and wonders, “How could I ever have thought I should escape from the King?” (p. 273). To get beyond her past she must go through her past, as everyone must; the past will not be ignored. Orual, specifically, cannot evade or ignore a crucial part of what made her what she is, a resemblance Psyche pointed out earlier: “You look just like our father when you say those things” (p. 40). Orual herself noticed a “fury—my father’s own fury” (p. 118); and later she recognizes a meanness “like a snarl in my father’s voice” (p. 290) in her accusation against the gods. She and her father descend from Pillar Room to Pillar Room below it—clearly symbolizing a psychological descent into herself:

The play on the word “fox” in the final sentence links the latter half of this chapter to the first half. The level of understanding—into herself and her relation to the divine—for which she now is reaching lies beyond the scope of reason: it comes through what she calls “seeings.” She has undergone a fundamental perceptual change: she now sees things in new ways. In the lowest Pillar Room hangs a mirror—the mirror Orual notes she had given to Redival when she became Queen of Phars (p. 274), which was also the time at which Orual had donned her veil and decided to suppress her old self and become the Queen. Now, pushed past her rational defenses, she must confront that old, and true, self: she looks in the mirror and sees the face of Ungit. Her mind takes details from her experience in the temple—her accusation that Ungit devours everything around her, her observation that Ungit had “no face” or a thousand ugly faces—and associates them with herself, thus admitting, and [< p. 74] accepting, a truth about herself—about the possessiveness of her love—which confirms what she had so recently learned from Ansit.

          She had tried for years to hide, from others but especially from herself; now, having faced herself, her inner ugliness, in the depths of her being, she abandons her veil: “My disguise now would be to go bareface” (p. 278)—a crucial image, which Lewis had planned to use as the title for the book.⁷ It gives the emphasis to the theme of truth—of inner personal truth, unveiled, unforgotten—which is at the heart of the book. Thus she realizes that she is “ugly in soul” (p. 281), but, unable to accept that, she prepares to commit suicide. As she is about to fling herself into the water, a voice comes to her from beyond the river, as a voice came to her across the river after Psyche’s palace was destroyed, the voice of a god telling her, “Do not do it. . . . Die before you die. There is no chance after” (p. 279). Only, in other words, by dying to self before she dies physically can she escape the spiritual death her ugliness of soul deserves.⁸

 

Chapter 3

PLOT SUMMARY: Having recognized and accepted her ugliness, Orual decides to reform and thus achieve beauty of soul, symbolized by the golden fleece of wild, mighty rams. Her old habits and nature, however, crush her efforts at goodness as inevitably as the rams trample her in her efforts to seize some of their wool. She despairs of ever changing, ever achieving beauty, and thus holds fast to the one beauty left in her life, that she “had at least loved Psyche truly.” In another vision, however, she is taken from a burning desert to a courtroom in a mountain where she presents her case against the gods and discovers that her love for Psyche too was distorted, filled with jealousy and possessiveness.

          Lewis returns, in Chapter 3, to the four tasks of the ancient myth. In a dream or vision Orual sees across a river, [< p. 75 ] in a country of the gods, a herd of rams of the gods and things, “If I can steal but one golden flock off their sides, I shall have beauty” (p. 283). Again what was in Apuleius’s tale a physical labor has become psychological for Orual. As Psyche was required to seize a handful of golden wool, so Orual must attempt to “steal” beauty of soul through reform: “If I practice true philosophy, as Socrates meant it, I should change my ugly soul into a fair one” (p. 282). She makes her best effort, crossing the river and approaching the rams, only to be trampled by them, and trying “to be just and calm and wise,” only to discover, “I could mend my soul no more than my face” (p. 282).

          The linking of soul and face here is important: by now Orual’s physical ugliness has become a symbol of her spiritual poverty; her efforts henceforth will be to mend both at once. Again, her suffering and anguish—as “their curled up horns struck me and knocked me flat and their hoofs trampled me” (p. 284)—end up helping another. By attracting the rams to herself, she drew their attention from another woman (Psyche?) and caused them to run past the thorn bushes from which the other was now gleaning golden wool: “She won without effort what utmost effort would not win for me” (p. 284). The thorns become a symbol of the suffering which Orual, as Psyche’s surrogate, undergoes in order to fulfill the tasks.

          Having attempted to achieve goodness and failed, having been told to die, without understanding how or why, Orual despairs. Her life now seems empty but must be lived on—in particular, her duties as judge must be carried on: “The dooms I gave, sitting on my judgment seat, about this time, were thought to be even wiser and more just than before; it was work on which I spent much pains and I know I did it well” (p. 285). Only one comfort had she left, that “however I might have devoured Bardia, I had at least loved Psyche truly” (p. 285). To renew her assurance in this one strength, she gorges herself on Part I, “reading over how I had cared for Psyche and taught her and tried to save her and wounded myself for her sake” (p. 285).

          Her judging and her book mingle, in another vision, with the third task set for Psyche.  She finds herself walking [< p. 76] across a burning desert with an empty bowl which she must fill with the water of death—death to self—and bring back to Ungit (p. 286).  After walking for a hundred years, enduring on Psyche’s behalf the heat and sand, the physical task again turns to a psychological one, and she discovers that she is not carrying a bowl but her book, and that she is on her way to plead her case against the gods.  A crowd of people drag and push and carry her to “a great black hole” which yawns before her and thence “into the dark inwards of the mountain, and then further and further in,” until she reaches the judge (p. 288).

          That this is another descent into the depths of her own being, reminiscent of the descent into the Pillar Rooms with her father, is confirmed as she looks at the judge: “On the same level with me, though far away, sat the judge.  Male or female, who could say?  Its face was veiled.  It was covered from crown to toe in sweepy black” (p. 289).  On the opening page of Part I Orual complained that “There is no judge between gods and men” (p. 3), and again and again she wished for a judge to hear her (pp. 132, 151, 173, 248).  Now the long-sought judge has appeared—herself.  She must stand before herself, naked: “Hands…tore off my veil—after it every rag I had on” (p. 289).  This is not more of the self-reformation she had attempted earlier: now the old Orual, the defenses she built up, the paltry accomplishments (her love for Psyche) which she relied on, are stripped away.  It reminds one of Eustace Scrubb’s futile attempts, in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” to remove his dragon skin himself, and of his need finally to rely on someone else to do it for him.⁹ 

                Orual, as plaintiff and judge, must read—and, even more important, listen to—her own complaint.  The complaint reveals the depth of her jealousy and possessiveness, the fruits of her perverted storge, for she protests mainly against the gods’ taking Psyche rather than killing her.  “You know well that I never really began to hate you until Psyche began talking of her palace and her lover and her husband.  Why did you lie to me?  You said a brute would devour her.  Well, why didn’t it?” (p. 290).  Orual must come to recognize that one did—she did: she is Ungit, gorged with [<p. 77] her sisters’ lives (p. 265).  Her complaint, therefore, is not against the ugliness of the gods but against their beauty, used to lure and entice loved ones.  “We’d rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts.  We’d rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal” (p. 291).  Her complaint is not against their obscurity but their attractiveness:  “You’ll say (you’ve been whispering it to me these forty years) that I’d signs enough her palace was real, could have known the truth if I’d wanted.  But how could I want to know it?” (p. 291).  Her complaint is not that the gods hide themselves but that they exist: “That there should be gods at all, there’s our misery and bitter wrong.  There’s no room for you and us in the same world.  You’re a tree in whose shadow we can’t thrive.  We want to be our own” (p. 291).

          Her complaint echoes a line by George MacDonald—“The one principle of hell is –‘I am my own’”—which Lewis quoted as the epigraph to the chapter “Checkmate,” on his own conversion, in Surprised by Joy.  “I was my own,” Orual continues, “and Psyche was mine and no one else had any right to her” (pp. 291-92).  Here is Orual's utter self-centeredness, naked and unavoidable.  Here is why she must die before she dies.  Here, she admits, “at last, was my real voice” (p. 292).  And to a judge as perceptive and fair as she, she could only admit that her complaint had been answered—that it, in fact, had answered itself.

 

Chapter 4

PLOT SUMMARY: As the trial ends, the Fox approaches, apologizes to Orual for misleading her, and shows her a series of living pictures in which Psyche undertakes the four tasks;  the first three she completes easily, for another (Orual) bore the anquish for her.  The fourth is of greater difficulty, because those who love her attempt to keep her from getting the casket with beauty for Ungit.  She presses on, however, and gives the casket to Orual, who thus achieves beauty of soul in union with Psyche.

          In Orual’s complaint, in her realization of her own jealousy and self-centeredness, she is at last honest with herself.  Now she is bareface indeed; the veil is completely lifted, [<p. 78] the defenses gone; now she can both hear and be heard.  Until, through honest self-searching and reflection upon her experiences, she reached that point, she could only protest vainly and argue defensively.  As she puts it,

Lewis himself, in other works spread throughout his career, illuminates this key passage.  In “Dogma and Science,” written more than a decade before Till We Have Faces, he said,

Learning to like it has, of course, been the business of the latter part of Orual’s life.  And in Letters to Malcolm, written several years after Till We Have Faces, Lewis further describes the same process:

By dropping her pretenses and defenses, Orual gains a “face,” makes possible for herself a new, personal relationship to the divine: “By unveiling . . . we assume the high rank of persons before Him. And He, descending, . . . reveals that [< p. 70] in Him which is Person. . . .  The Person in Him . . . meets those who can welcome or at least face it. He speaks as ‘I’ when we truly call Him ‘Thou.’”¹²

          It is this personal relationship which the Fox now cites to set his former rationalism and the worship of Ungit apart from “the way to the true gods” (p. 295). The Fox appears in Orual’s vision as her guide, much as Dante, in The Divine Comedy, uses Virgil, his symbol of reason, as his guide on his journey through Hell and Purgatory. It is not made clear whether the Fox is normally in a Limbo like that to which the Stoics are assigned in The Pilgrim’s Regress—or whether, as he grew in old age to be less a philosopher and talked “more of eloquence and figures and poetry” (p. 235), he learned “the only means to…fulfillment” of his desires and now resides in heaven. ¹³ In any event, the Fox has changed—and that must challenge the reader to reassess his or her reliance on the rational.  He now admits that he knew and should have told Orual that something was missing from his facile rationalism:

The Fox’s words echo the old Priest’s rebuke of Greek wisdom on page 50:

And both reflect the distinction Lewis made elsewhere between “thick" and “clear” religions:

          It is toward such a blend that Oural’s dual heritage—from Ungit worship on the one hand, from the Fox on the other—is drawing her: a religion of sacrifice, with all that it entails, but of ethical demands as well, a religion very much like (though in the story prior to) Christianity.  A passage from “Religion without Dogma?” summarizes it so pertinently that it deserves to be quoted at length:

But such a religion also involves self-sacrifice, a total, personal commitment: in the Fox’s terms, “They [the gods] will have sacrifice—will have man. Yes, and the very heart, center, ground, roots of a man; dark and strong and costly as blood” (p. 295). Lewis put it as follows in The Problem of [< p. 81] Pain: “ [The soul’s] union with God is, almost by definition, a continual self-abandonment—an opening, an unveiling, a surrender, of itself.”¹⁶ In Letters to Malcolm he adds: “We shrink from too naked a contact, because we are afraid of the divine demand upon us.” ¹⁷ So it was, surely, with Orual—her veil was a defense against exposing her ugliness to herself and herself to Another. Behind her veil she could be her own; now, bare of face, she is ready to be Another’s.

          Having presented her case against the gods, Orual must come before the gods to hear if they will bring accusation against her. While she waits, the Fox shows her, in a series of living pictures, Psyche confronting the four tasks assigned to her—as she approaches them, Orual sees “in her face no such anguish” (p. 299) as she expected to see there; instead she sees ants separating the seeds, Psyche plucking tufts of wool from the brambles, and an eagle bringing a cupful of the water of death from the mountain. The Fox’s explanation again brings the mythical together with the psychological and even the spiritual: “Another bore nearly all the anguish” (p. 300). One of the senses in which Orual “shall be Psyche” is that in living out her long, difficult, lonely existence as the Queen, Orual was bearing Psyche’s burden in Psyche’s place. It was Orual “who bore the anguish. But [Psyche] achieved the tasks” (p. 301). Lewis thus catches up what his friend Charles Williams believed to be at the heart of Christianity, the Way of Exchange. Williams took seriously the words of Paul, “Bear one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2). As Christ bore the burden of sin, taking on himself the suffering due to humanity, so we are to take on ourselves the burdens of others. Lewis commented on Exchange in Arthurian Torso:

This, of course, is the key element in, or even a definition of, agape, the love Christ brought for humanity to imitate from him: “By this we know love, that he laid down his life [< p. 82] for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (I John 3:16).

          Here, then, is that ultimate, selfless divine love which can and must transform the natural loves if they are to be and remain themselves.  The entire theme of the loves, of the distortion of the natural loves into unlove unless they are converted by Love himself, is summed up, encapsulated, in the Fox’s reply to Orual’s question if Ungit is real.  The Fox now speaks the language of myth—that he does so is ironic but also the most telling sign of his transformation; thus what he says cannot be rephrased adequately: myth must be received and experienced, not explained.  The Fox tells Orual:

The passage, in the richness of its myth-language, gathers together the book’s central themes and shows their interrelatedness: the need for the rational and the “clear” to accept the numinous and the “thick” if the gods are to be known fully; the need for the natural loves (Ungit, possessiveness) to be sacrificed in total surrender (“die in childbed,” “go down, to the deadlands”) and be thereby transformed by agape (“bear Ungit’s son,” “become beautiful”) in order even to remain themselves; and the need to reject self-interest (“get free”) in favor of action on behalf of others.

          Now Psyche undertakes the fourth and last of her labors: going to the underworld to bring Ungit a box containing beauty, a task which Orual has been engaged in throughout the story as she went deep within herself to remove, or at least excuse, her ugliness of self and soul.  Psyche begins her journey, a journey to achieve beauty of soul, the journey of her life, and Orual watches in the living pictures as first the people of Glome, then the Fox, and finally a woman-like figure, her left arm dripping with blood, [< p. 83] try to distract and dissuade Psyche, try unsuccessfully to prevent her from completing that journey.

The last five words sum up the fundamental purpose of human beings, that ultimate union with Love, with the divine, toward which their longings have been drawing them all their lives and toward which everything in Till We Have Faces has been pointing.

          Orual’s love has been converted and transformed; she has obeyed the god’s instruction to die to self, which allows her self and her love to be infused by Love itself.  Her words to Psyche reveal the change: “'Oh Psyche, oh goddess,' I said.  ‘Never again will I call you mine; but all there is of me shall be yours’” (p. 305).  With her jealousy and possessiveness goes her ugliness of soul: thus Psyche replies, “I have not given you the casket.  You know I went a long journey to fetch the beauty that will make Ungit beautiful” (pp. 305-6).  Since Orual is Ungit, she receives the box and receives beauty, of body and soul—not as something she achieved herself, as when she tried to change her face and mend her soul, but as a gift.  So it is, slightly later, when she glances down at the courtyard pool, that she sees “two Psyches, the one clothed, the other naked” (p. 307), and finds the ultimate fulfillment of the god’s words, “You also shall be Psyche.”

          First, however, Orual must meet Psyche’s husband, who surely symbolizes Christ.¹⁹ The theme of sacrifice, as Lewis introduces it to transcend Apuleius’s tale and to fulfill what was latent in it, points toward the sacrifice of Christ.  But in Till We Have Faces, set historically before his birth, Christ’s death can only be anticipated.  Thus the Fox is referring to the Incarnation when he talks of “that far distant [< p. 84] day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or we at last are shown how beautiful they always were” (p. 304).²⁰  In humble faith which enables her to recognize divine beauty, to recognize that the divine jealousy and the demand for sacrifice are divine love, Orual can meet the most beautiful of the gods.  She, having become like Psyche, also has an anima naturaliter Christiana [naturally Christian spirit].²¹  And in that spirit, free of her veil, free from defenses and pretensions, now having a face (self), she is ready to meet the gods “face to face”; and the God she meets is Christ.  Lifted out of this world and the temporal in her vision, she meets Christ in the timelessness of eternity, which is always “after” his redemptive activity, and finds salvation.  The Christianization of the themes Lewis has been developing is completed on the final page of the book, as Pysche’s husband comes to judge Orual:

The scene is very familiar—in the encounter with something overwhelmingly, hugely other, in the total loss of self-ownership, in the utterly personal relationship—to the conversion scene in That Hideous Strength.  The description there of Jane Studdock’s response to the numinous, the divine, provides perhaps the best commentary on Orual’s experience:

Orual has been shown at last how beautiful the true God always was, and to this experience her response can only be awe, reverence, worship, obedience, and love.

          The book closes as it opens, by invoking the book of Job.  Job repeatedly asks for a hearing: “But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God” (13:3).  He pleads with God for an answer: “I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me” (23:5).  Eventually God does come, and he “answered Job out of the whirlwind” (38:1); he does not reason with Job, but bombards him with questions which demonstrate God’s greatness and Job’s finitude.  Orual’s closing words could well have been Job’s: “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer.  You are yourself the answer” (p. 308).  And Job’s closing words could well have been Orual’s: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (42:3).  Both works deal with alleged injustice in the universe; both present a case against God; and both agree that the case is refuted not by reason but by the nature of God.  When God makes himself known, whether to Job, to Jane Studdock, or to Orual, the response is the same, a response Lewis believes must be the universal response to a true encounter with the Divine: