C.S. Lewis, Beauty, and the Experience of Story
by Alexandra Harper
Great writing is not merely a matter of knowledge, clever ideas, or technical brilliance. These elements illuminate, but only as stars in light of the vast universe. Precise technique is capable of delivering a cold performance absent of the power to transform. Transformation, that is, transfiguration, is the offspring of beauty, the Mona Lisa smile of storytelling, elusive yet captivating. Whatever the genre or audience, great writing draws forth the experience of a story. Great storytellers illuminate the condition of the soul. In the landscape of imagination, a storyteller lures both willing and unsuspecting travellers into their own hearts with longing for beauty.[1]
C.S. Lewis was a master architect of story. While scholars have dubbed Lewis as the literature professor, the sci-fi author, or the apologist, much of his work embodies distilled images of mystery, the longing for divine presence, namely, Beauty. Through the aperture of the imagination, Lewis evokes mythic sensibility with the sublime coherence and wonder of the Christian faith.
Over 50 years after his death, we still sit before the old literature professor—a bachelor save only but for one brief, but grand passion late in life—and watch as Lewis charms rationalists into realms of mystery, faith, and beauty. The great atheist, “the most reluctant convert in England,” had fallen captive to the spell of the “One True Myth.”[2] Myths and stories with mythic elements, channel the numinous, the aesthetic idea of summer, the spiritual sense of wonder endemic to human beings.[3]
Lewis believed that when you enter into the story by suspending disbelief, you can begin to know. All stories contain a series of events and plot but, as he writes, “it is only really a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality. Giantship, otherness, the desolation of space, are examples that have crossed our path.”[4] By his own account, it was not logic, but the experience with grief which slammed shut the door to Heaven for the little boy at his mother’s death. Moreover, it was the haunting experience of beauty that revealed the heartlands of longing for the man.
For Lewis, story grants the possibility of entering into an intimate experience of longing. He writes, “In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive.”[5] If experience is the path over the sea between belief and reason (as Lewis supposed), then our lives are exposed and transfigured through experience. Stories were not simply a creative dimension of the rational animal: stories (and storytelling) are the expression God’s image in man. Lewis’ stories are existentially primordial, that is, they speak to the nature of things. By their mythic elements, they stir longings for reverence. If beauty is to be seen, it is dependent on virtuous, rational beings that can observe and love what is beautiful. The Four Loves helps us to see this.
Looking Along and Looking at Love
Lewis’ contemplative work on love, The Four Loves, serves as a paradigm to his novel Till We Have Faces (TWHF). These two works serve each other in thematic consummation: Whereas The Four Loves gives analytical categories of “looking at” [6] love by explaining the natural affections in relationships (i.e., family, friendship, and romance), TWHF gives the experience by “looking along” [7] and relating a character’s inward journey within these relationships.[8] While the natural loves display different elements of style and application, these three are based on what Lewis defines as “Need-love.”[9] Conversely, Lewis distinguishes Divine love (Agape), as “Gift-Love.”[10] Lewis’ retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche exposes the pathological bent of making love itself the object of worship in place of God.
TWHF invokes the sense of mythic memoir. Orual (the main character) is a lonely, bitter old woman who revisits her memories at the end of her life. She and her sister Psyche were the daughters of a cruel pagan king. Though Orual was clever, capable, and destined to become queen, she is ugly. Because of her father’s taunts, she veils her face from everyone for the rest of her life. Few people truly care for her so when her sister is offered as a willing sacrifice to the god of the Grey Mountain, Orual is devastated. The story unfolds the course of her life, but Orual’s hatred for the gods and Psyche’s love are the fixed lines of tension throughout the two women’s lives.
Lewis’ myth speaks to Fall’s consequent perversions of love and beauty. Through Orual, we travel pathways of worship, treading a labyrinth of hidden icons and dark idols in our need for divine visitations of beauty. Through the myth, Lewis shows that the approaching Presence of Beauty challenges Orual’s notions of love. Orual’s love for her sister (family), the Fox (friendship), and Bardia (romance) imitate the Divine love (agape), but only to an abbreviated extent before each fails to render to God that which is God’s. God is love, but the myth exposes ways in which natural affections will “slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.”[11] For Lewis, the inordinate glorification of love in any of its forms poses the danger. It follows that “love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god.”[12]
Two Portraits of Love
Psyche portrays Need-love related to what Lewis calls Imitation in The Four Loves. Her ability to love is conditional to nearness to God.[13] It is only possible to display any of the natural affections in their totality, not only their characteristic of need, when the soul first responds to God.[14] “’The highest, says the Imitation, ‘does not stand without the lowest.’ [Only a fool] says, “I’m no beggar. I love you disinterestedly.”[15] While Orual cannot love without condition, Psyche’s love can withstand grief and suffering. As the Fox states, “To love and lose what we love, are equally things appointed for our nature. If we cannot bear the second well, that evil is ours. It did not befall Psyche.[16]
The Experience of Longing for Divine Beauty
Psyche was anointed with spiritual passion all of her life. “Almost from the beginning (for she was a very quick, thinking child), she was half in longing love with the Mountain.”[17] When she fell ill with the dangerous fever she spoke “of her gold and amber castle on the ridge of the Grey Mountain. At her worst, there was no look of death upon her face.”[18] Psyche senses a sacred romance with the god of the Grey Mountain since she was a child, and that “all my life, the god of the Grey Mountain has been wooing me.”[19]
Psyche’s fearless zeal and sacrifice enrages Orual who bitterly judges that “the parting between her and me seemed to cost her so little.”[20] When Orual interrogates her, Psyche responds that love trusts unconditionally.[21] She trusts her god’s judgment and reasons, “I’m only his simple Psyche.”[22] Later, Orual begins to see that Psyche suffered immensely because of her selfless affections. As Orual states, “She had no more dangerous enemies than us.”[23]
Despite public adoration, Psyche remains innocent in her beauty.[24] While Beauty leads Psyche to the Wonder, beauty strikes Orual as alien and cruel. When the Fox compares Psyche’s beauty to Aphrodite, Orual fears that the goddess will demand retribution for the Fox’s statement. Yet the Fox understands the essence of Divine Beauty despite his philosophical naturalism: “The divine nature is not like that. It has no envy.”[25] And later, “Those gods—the sort of gods you are always thinking about—are all folly and lies of poets.”[26] Gift-love is neither desperate nor divine love envious so long as natural loves are not abused and twisted into false idols.
In the first half of her life, Orual is aware of her outward ugliness, but believes that her soul is beautiful and good. Only after she suffers loss does she become aware of her jealous, manipulative, and spiteful nature. Through Orual, we learn that what we think and feel remains fantasy if our experience is not grounded in truth. Her ravaged, isolated existence is entirely self-inflicted. At the end of her life, when Orual begins to unveil her own lies, “the gods act to prepare Orual’s heart for the coming God of love.”[27] The ancient and unveiled Orual states, “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer . . . Why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
Two Psyches through the Approaching God of Love
Lewis’ myth shows that “what is near Him by likeness is never, by that fact alone, going to be any nearer. But nearness of approach is, by definition, increasing nearness.”[28] Lewis’ myth is the archetype of our internal condition. Psyche’s journey is our journey. Her desire for beauty and belonging is ours. As the poet T.S. Eliot writes, “We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.”[29] Through the power of imagination, the longing for beauty is nourished from the deeper wellspring, that is, Christ. Divine Beauty ever looms through story in ‘looking along’ and ‘looking at’ love. Receiving its likeness transfigures each soul by gazing upon the Invisible, which was for Lewis, the storyteller’s sacred gift.
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[1] The nature of beauty expresses (or at least addresses) a transcendent, ecstatic, and esemplastic reality. Beauty is love’s aesthetic, the confluence of love expressed through the senses, disposition and awareness: sensory (visual, aural and tactile), sensuality and sensibility. While beauty has distinct functional properties, love and beauty share the same essence. In the fullness of the Spirit, divine love and divine beauty are undiluted expressions of the nature of God. In this essay, I alternate the terms ‘love’ and ‘beauty’ because they are relationally indivisible. In this space, I ask the reader to consider the following: Life often appears as disparate moments quantified by abbreviated definitions (relational fragmentation and imposed identity). The duality of light (wave-particle theory) and the Triune Godhead offer infinite possibilities of being. Because of our fragile, disenchanted lives, we cautiously embrace love and beauty. These are grand mysteries: We know it (beauty) when we see it and we suffer when we don’t. We see the nature of an act or thing by its locality, whether by its nearness (loving and beautiful) or distance (hateful and disfigured) to the divine.
[2] The One True Myth was J.R.R. Tolkien’s apologetic argument to Lewis as they debated the historical reality of the Gospel along Addison’s Walk on the grounds at Oxford University. Tolkien’s idea that there could be one true myth caught Lewis by surprise and gave Lewis the courage to imagine faith.
[3] See Lewis’s explanation of this idea in Surprised by Joy.
[4] Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, “On Stories” (1947), para. 26, p. 18.
[5] Ibid., para. 29-30, pp.20-21.
[6] God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper, Meditations in a Toolshed (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdsman Publishing Co., 1995), 212.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Lewis’s version of the Psyche and Eros myth “is not [meant] to clean up” or “rescue from contamination” but “to show that God is ever seeking…those who will turn to Him.”
[9] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), 11.
[10]Ibid., 11.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Loves, 17.
[13] Loves, 14.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Faces, 86.
[17] Ibid., 23.
[18] Ibid., 33.
[19] Ibid., 76.
[20] Ibid., 71.
[21] Ibid., 162.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid., 304.
[24] Faces, 301.
[25] Ibid., 24.
[26] Ibid., 28.
[27] Dorris Myers, C.S. Lewis in Context (Kent, OH: Kent University State Press, 1994), 211.
[28] Ibid., 16.
[29] T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets.
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About the Author: Alexandra Harper is a graduate of the University of Saint Andrews (UK), where she earned an M.Litt. in Theology, Imagination and the Arts. She also has an M.Div (Apologetics) from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. For several years she has studied how different artistic mediums engage and serve communities in light of the Kingdom of God and human flourishing. Her research supports artists, culture and creation care initiatives through organizations like International Arts Movement, CIVA and the Kindlings.
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