Till We Have Faces

by C.S. Lewis

Love is not a thing to be so used.”

Glome had more and more part in me and Orual had less and less. I locked her up or laid her asleep as best I could somewhere deep down inside me; she lay curled there. It was like being with child, but reversed; the thing I carried in me grew slowly smaller and less alive.

“Oh, that is because she is a very young goddess. She has only just begun to be a goddess. For you must know that, like many other gods, she began by being a mortal.”

Now, instantly, I knew I was facing them; I with no strength and they with all; I visible to them, they invisible to me; I easily wounded (already so wounded all my life had been but a hiding and staunching of the wound), they invulnerable; I one, they many.

It burned me from within. It quickened; I was with book, as a woman is with child.

They gave me nothing in the world to love but Psyche and then took her from me.

Why must holy places be dark places?

They used my own pen to probe my wound.

For it had been somehow settled in my mind from the very beginning that I was the pitiable and ill-used one.

And now those divine Surgeons had me tied down and were at work. My anger protected me only for a short time; anger wearies itself out and truth comes in.

A love can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.

There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.

And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what one only sees we call a dream.

It may well be that, by trickery of priests, men have sometimes taken a mortal’s voice for a god’s. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god’s voice takes it for a mortal’s.

“Lord, who are you?” said I.291

I could mend my soul no more than my face.

In either race, for the love of men or the love of a god, the winners and losers are marked out from birth. We bring our ugliness, in both kinds, with us into the world; with it our destiny.

the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.

Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse and worse the more you reveal your beauty; the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods.

Taken where we can’t follow.

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered.

I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

I never said, too true an image of the demon within.

It is the gods who have been accused. They have answered her. If they in turn accuse her, a greater judge and a more excellent court must try the case. Let her go.”

Grandfather, she was all but unscathed. She was almost happy.” “Another bore nearly all the anguish.” “I? Is it possible?”

The god within you is the god you should obey; reason, calmness, self-discipline.

And mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with the Divine Nature.”

Goddess? I had never seen a real woman before.

“Did I not tell you, Maia,” she said, “that a day was coming when you and I would meet in my house and no cloud between us?”

The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake.

“You also are Psyche,” came a great voice.

I ended my first book with the words No answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away.