After failing to steel a fleece from one of the rams of the gods, Orual finally gets her day in court! She reads her complaint to the gods and finally receives her answer…
S3E23: “The Judgement of Orual” (Download)
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Time Stamps
01:32 – Drink-of-the-week
03:03 – Quote-of-the-week
03:45 – Patron Toast
05:22 – Charles Williams and co-inherence
08:27 – Chapter Summary
48:15 – Closing remarks
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
This Season, after each episode, Matt and I will be recording a short Skype conversation about one particular topic that was raised during the podcast:
Show Notes
• I was joined by Matt “A Bull in a Bear Market” Bush.
• Marie and I have been watching “Jojo Rabbit”:
• For the drink-of-the-week, Matt was drinking Bacardi & Coke. I was drinking my Engagement Scotch, Glenmorangie La Santa.
• The quote-of-the-week was as follows:
“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 to. But how could I want to know it?”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
• We toasted Patreon supporter, Ted Dougherty.
• We reminded everyone to submit their questions for Andrew Lazo in anticipation of our next interview with him…
• Before we got down to this week’s chapter, I commented that I had been reading “The Fellowship: The literary lives of the Inklings” by Zaleski & Zaleski. I said that something jumped out at me when they were talking about Charles Williams. Charles Williams was one of the Inklings and he taught something called “co-inherence”. I’m not going to do it justice, but here’s the Wikipedia entry:
Co-inherence was a term used in Patristic theology to describe the relationship between the human and divine natures of Jesus Christ and the relationship between the persons of the blessed Trinity.
Wikipedia article on Charles Williams
Williams extended the term to include the ideal relationship between the individual parts of God’s creation, including human beings. It is our mutual indwelling: Christ in us and we in Christ, interdependent. It is also the web of interrelationships, social and economic and ecological, by which the social fabric and the natural world function. But especially for Williams, co-inherence is a way of talking about the Body of Christ and the communion of saints…
He proposed an order, the Companions of the Co-inherence, who would practice substitution and exchange, …truly bearing one another’s burdens, being willing to sacrifice and to forgive, living from and for one another in Christ.
If you recall from our discussions with Patti Callahan, Lewis prayed to take on some of his wife’s suffering when she had bone cancer and, as he lost bone density, she regained it. All this is to say that I think something of this idea might be going on between Orual and Psyche. These visions describe challenges which were traditionally the labours of Psyche, not Orual. I think Orual is somehow mystically sharing in Psyche’s burdens…
• Matt and I talked about an email sent to us from Patti Callahan congratulating Matt on his recent talk at Notre Dame.
• I then offered my summary of today’s chapter:
Orual is given time to ponder the events of the last few days. She concludes that she must make her soul beautiful, but she quickly discovers her inability to do so without divine help.
150-word summary of Part II, Chapter 3.
She has a vision of golden rams where she tries to take some of their wool. They charge her while another woman gleans their wool caught on the hedge.
Orual feels detached from her day-to-day life, but comforts herself with the certainty of her love for Psyche. She then has another vision where she’s seeking the water of death in a desert. She comes to a mountain where is taken into a cave in order to read her complaint against the gods. Rather than reading her book, she reads an older, smaller book, over again and again. Eventually the judge stops her and asks her if she has received her answer. She responds that she has…
• The last few days have been rather intense for Orual. Fortunately, she says that:
“…the gods left me for some days to chew the strange bread they had given me. I was Ungit. What did it mean? Do the gods flow in and out of us as they flow in and out of each other? And again, they would not let me die till I had died”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
She thinks about religious initiations in the Greeklands “whereby a man was said to die and live again before the soul left the body”. She recalls the conversation Socrates had with his friends before he drank the hemlock, saying that “true wisdom is the skill and practice of death”. She supposes that here he’s referring to the death of our passions, desires and vain opinions. She then suddenly thinks she can see clearly.
To say that I was Ungit meant that I was as ugly in soul as she; greedy, blood-gorged. But if I practiced true philosophy, as Socrates meant it, I should change my ugly soul into a fair one. And this, the gods helping me, I would do. I would set about it at once. …but would they help? Nevertheless I must begin.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
• So she tries hard to be good, but it doesn’t go very well…
I would set out boldly each morning to be just and calm and wise in all my thoughts and acts; but before they had finished dressing me I would find that I was back (and knew not how long I had been back) in some old rage, resentment, gnawing fantasy, or sullen bitterness. I could not hold out half an hour.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
This reminded me of what Jack wrote in Mere Christianity:
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 10)
Orual compares it to when she tried to fix her appearance, saying:
I could mend my soul no more than my face.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
She realizes that she can’t do this unless the gods help her and she wonders why they don’t. She thinks that:
…the gods will not love you (however you try to pleasure them, and whatever you suffer) unless you have that beauty of soul.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
Basically, she thinks all of this is predetermined:
In either race, for the love of men or the love of a god, the winners and losers are marked out from birth.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
So, she’s gone from thinking that she can change everything, to thinking that she can change nothing.
• Orual then goes into her room at around 1pm and has a vision. She’s standing by a great river in a gorgeous land. On the opposite bank she sees a flock of rams:
“…high as horses, mightily horned, and their fleeces such bright gold…”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
She recognizes that these are the rams of the gods. She believes that, if she can steal one golden fleece from their sides, she’ll have the beauty she desires. She swims to the other side, where the flocked charges at her:
…a solid wall of living gold. And with terrible force their curled horns struck me and knocked me flat and their hoofs trampled me…
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
They were not doing it in anger. They rushed over me in their joy — perhaps they did not see me — certainly I was nothing in their minds. I understood it well. They butted and trampled me because their gladness led them on; the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is. We call it the wrath of the gods; as if the great cataract in Phars were angry with every fly it sweeps down in its green thunder.
This land is like the foothills of Heaven in The Great Divorce.
• Orual eventually is able to stand back up. It’s then that she sees someone else there, a mortal woman who doesn’t seem to see her. She walks along the hedge of the field, picking the wool which had been caught on the thorns as they rushed at Orual. This causes Orual to despair:
What I had sought in vain by meeting the joyous and terrible brutes, she took at her leisure. She won without effort what utmost effort would not win for me. I now despaired of ever ceasing to be Ungit.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
• Orual seems to come out of the vision. She tells us that she went about her daily life and with the rest of the world oblivious to the turmoil inside her. Although her judgements were thought even wiser and more just than before, she is disconnected from it all, describing people as being “more like shadows than real men”. Although she seeks justice, she doesn’t really care about their petty squabbles. She seems very detached. She has one comfort remaining:
I had at least loved Psyche truly. There, if nowhere else, I had the right of it and the gods were in the wrong. And as a prisoner in a dungeon or a sick man on his bed makes much of any little shred of pleasure he still has, so I made much of this.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
• On a particularly tiresome day at work, she takes this very book…
…and went out into the garden to comfort myself, and gorge myself with comfort, by reading over how I had cared for Psyche and taught her and tried to save her and wounded myself for her sake.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
As she opens the book, she has another vision…
I was walking over burning sands, carrying an empty bowl… I must find the spring that rises from the river that flows in the dead-lands, and fill it with the water of death and bring it back without spilling a drop and give it to Ungit. …if I did all the tasks she set me perhaps she would let me go free.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
• She walks through the desert in the noonday sun for what seems like a hundred years. Eventually she arrives at the foot of some great mountains which were covered:
…innumerable serpents and scorpions that scuttled and slithered over them continually. The place was a huge torture chamber, but the instruments were all living.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
Knowing the well to be in the heart of the mountain, she dispairs.
• She then sees an eagle overhead, sent by the gods. It lands nearby. Reminder her something of the priest, the bird asks her who she is:
“Orual, Queen of Glome,” said I.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
“Then it is not you that I was sent to help. What is that roll you carry in your hands?” I now saw, with great dismay, that what I had been carrying all this time was not a bowl but a book. This ruined everything.
“It is my complaint against the gods,” said I. The eagle clapped his wings and lifted his head and cried out with a loud voice, “She’s come at last. Here is the woman who has a complaint against the gods.” … “Come into court. Your case is to be heard.”
He doesn’t seem to care about her being royalty.
• Orual then tells us that “dark things like men” came out of the mountain and hustled her forward. Orual writes:
I was dragged and pushed and sometimes lifted, up among the rocks, till at last a great black hole yawned before me. “Bring her in. The court waits,” came the voices. And with a sudden shock of cold I was hurried in out of the burning sunlight into the dark inwards of the mountain, and then further and further in, always in haste, always passed from hand to hand, and always with that din of shouts: “Here she is — She’s come at last — To the judge, to the judge.” Then the voices changed and grew quieter; and now it was, “Let her go. Make her stand up. Silence in the court. Silence for her complaint.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
I compared this scene to the latest Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker:
Also, remember the story of the Ungit stone coming up from the earth?
• In the dull light, Orual sees that she’s standing on a pillar of rock. She is surrounded by a great, silent assembly of ghosts. She sees many faces she recognizes: Batt, the King, the Fox, and Argan. She then sees 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.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
The judge orders her to be uncovered and she is stripped naked.
The old crone with her Ungit face stood naked before those countless gazers. No thread to cover me, no bowl in my hand to hold the water of death; only my book.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
Matt mentioned this final talk by Fulton Sheen about meeting Christ:
• The judge orders her to read her complaint. At this, she realizes that she’s not holding her book. It’s an old “little, shabby, crumpled thing”. I think it represents her soul. She finds herself unrolling it:
It was written all over inside, but the hand was not like mine. It was all a vile scribble — each stroke mean and yet savage, like the snarl in my father’s voice, like the ruinous faces one could make out in the Ungit stone.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
• Against her will, she says “I heard myself reading it”… Orual admits to seeing the god and his house. She says “I could have endured it if you were things like Ungit and the Shadowbrute”. Orual articulates her jealousy:
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? I’d have wept for her and buried what was left and built her a tomb and . . . and. . . . But to steal her love from me! Can it be that you really don’t understand? …Those we love best — whoever’s most worth loving — those are the very ones you’ll pick out. 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.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
Rather sounds like Jesus’ words:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; …”
Matthew 10:33-35
• We spoke about a little bit about what we can say about the situation where God takes someone you love.
• Orual continues her complaint:
It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We’d rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We’d rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
…But to steal her love from me, to make her see things I couldn’t see . . . oh, 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? Tell me that. The girl was mine. What right had you to steal her away into your dreadful heights? You’ll say I was jealous. Jealous of Psyche? Not while she was mine… Did you ever remember whose the girl was? She was mine. Mine. Do you not know what the word means? Mine! You’re thieves, seducers. That’s my wrong. I’ll not complain (not now) that you’re blood-drinkers and man-eaters. I’m past that. . . .”
The judge eventually stops her:
Now I knew that I had been reading it over and over — perhaps a dozen times. I would have read it forever, quick as I could, starting the first word again almost before the last was out of my mouth, if the judge had not stopped me. And the voice I read it in was strange to my ears. There was given to me a certainty that this, at last, was my real voice.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
We’re told that there was a long silence…
At last the judge spoke. “Are you answered?” he said.
“Yes,” said I.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 3)
• When talking about Orual’s false self being stripped away, Matt referenced a book, Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner and I quoted a song by the band Casting Crowns:
Is there anyone that fails?
Casting Crowns, Stained Glass Mascurade
Is there anyone that falls?
Am I the only one in church today, feeling so small?
Cause when I take a look around
Everybody seems so strong I know they’ll soon discover
That I don’t belong
So I tuck it all away
Like everything’s OK
If I make em all believe it
Maybe I’ll believe it too
So with a painted grin
I’ll play the part again
So everyone will see me T
he way that I see them
Are we happy plastic people
Under shiny plastic steeples
With walls around our weakness
And smiles that hide our pain
But the invitations open
To every heart that’s been broken
Maybe then we close the curtain
On our stained glass masquerade
• We’d like to thank all our Patreon supporters, particularly our top-tier supporters Kate and Rowdy.
