[Bear Pit] Two Griefs Observed

Two Griefs Observed:
The Love and Grief of Jack and Orual

When C.S. Lewis set out to rewrite a classical myth with a focus on grief and love, the resulting story became a personal favorite of his. Later, during his own period of intense grief and anguished love, he wrote a book which has become a favorite of many of his readers. The stories contained within these two books show very different characters in very similar situations. A Grief Observed shows the process of grieving as seen through the candid thoughts of a Christian thinker, whereas Till We Have Faces shows that process through the eyes of a pagan princess. Despite these differences, these writings work together to reveal the profound truth that love is no more than a destructive force when exhibited by one who refuses to acknowledge the goodness of God.

The grief which Lewis experiences after the death of his wife is similar in almost every way to the grief faced by Orual after the loss of her sister, Psyche. As is to be expected, their initial reactions are very similar and they both face the same trials and questions in the course of their grieving. The first challenge faced by Lewis and Orual is the silence of the gods in the face of their loss. Lewis first describes this experience early in A Grief Observed:

When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, … if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.

Lewis describes this silence as one of the most disquieting symptoms of grief; a symptom which causes him to question whether God ever answered his cries at all. Likewise, the apparent silence of the gods is a key part of Orual’s charges against them in Till We Have Faces:

I stretched myself face downward on the floor and called upon [the gods] with my whole heart. I took back every word I had said against them. I promised anything they might ask of me, if only they would send me a sign. They gave me none.

Here as well as elsewhere throughout her narration, Orual names the silence of the gods as the primary source of her anguish. This charge is, perhaps, accurate, for it was Orual’s inability to understand the signs of the gods that drove her to destroy both Psyche’s happiness and her own happiness.

It is this silence of the gods which fosters the inclination to believe terrible things about them. As Lewis states in A Grief Observed, the dreaded silence does not put him in danger of ceasing to believe in God. Rather, “the real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.” Sure enough, Lewis struggles with the question of why he does not believe God to be a Cosmic Sadist or a spiteful imbecile. In an intense moment of passion, he even imagines hope itself to be a divine instrument of affliction: “time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture.” Orual must also judge for herself the nature of the gods and decide whether she will believe “that the gods are real, and viler than the vilest men” or accept Psyche’s interpretation of the matter:

Or else … they are real gods but don’t really do these things. Or even—mightn’t it be—they do these things and the things are not what they seem to be? How if I am indeed to wed a god?

It is important to notice here that Orual does not admit as a possibility the flat rejection of the gods’ existence. Despite the Fox’s lessons, the overpowering presence of the gods in that hour would not allow Orual to ignore them—it would only allow her to form a free opinion of them.

The gods had asked the same question of Lewis and Orual: “Who do you say I am?” The two choose radically different answers when faced with this question, and it is this choice which determines their separate fates. After toying with the idea of the Cosmic Sadist, Lewis dismisses such ramblings as being “not so much the expression of thought as of hatred.” Indeed, he proclaims his renewed faith in the goodness of God and goes on to reconsider the death of his wife in light of this goodness:

If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation …, then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer.

Orual, on the other hand, fails to grasp this truth because she rejected her sister’s claim that the actions of the gods might be very different from what we perceive. She refuses to give more than a moment’s thought to the possibility of their goodness, even when the God of the Mountain opens her eyes to see his castle. In choosing her own love over the gods, Orual falls prey to what Lewis describes in the Introduction to The Four Loves: “Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself.” Lewis, on the contrary, bows his head in submission to the God who is Love.

Having made their choices, it is clear that Lewis emerges from his grief with a strengthened faith, while Orual immediately and vividly enters a period of self-destruction following her bout with the God of the Mountain. It is Lewis’s faith that pulls him through the grief of his wife’s death. As he says, “Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to H., it no longer meets that vacuum…” The order in which this takes place is important, for as long as Lewis is grasping only for H., he is acting in futility. As soon as he is able to look first to God, he is given all things in abundance. Orual, having blasphemed the goodness of the gods, vows to be always veiled, thus creating the veiled queen as an instrument intended to destroy Orual and steal from the gods whatever punishment they would inflict. By the end of the first book of Till We Have Faces, however, it is clear that Orual’s symbolic suicide does not release her from the agony of her loss, but only sets her in a more tragic situation than before.

A drastic change occurs in Book II of Till We Have Faces; Orual is shown the true nature (i.e., the face) of her love and is redeemed when she comes to understand the absolute goodness of the gods. Despite what it seems, Orual’s love is not a case of isolated selfishness, but a case “of human affection in its natural condition: true, tender, suffering…” When this case of human affection is made to stand stark naked before the gods, the claim that she has laid upon the object of her love reveals that she makes one fatal and false assumption:

We’d rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal. … That’s why I say it makes no difference whether you’re fair or foul. 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.

The fatal assumption, of course, is that her love would be able to exist apart from the gods. Without acknowledging the goodness of the gods, Orual suffers a sort of sickness which flows over to plague her love for Psyche, turning it into a controlling and selfish love which feeds on false feelings of nobility and heroism. It is not until the judge puts a stop to Orual’s complaint that she comes to understand the fallacy of her charge and, subsequently, the goodness of the gods. It is at this realization that she truly gains the face with which to face the gods.

The most significant factor that contributed to Lewis’s recovery and Orual’s destruction—and subsequent redemption—was the attitude that each adopted toward the goodness of the gods. As long as Orual denied that the gods could be good, her love for Psyche robbed the girl of her freedom to attain any individuality. This love found its greatest pleasure when Psyche was under the control of Orual. It is interesting to note that C.S. Lewis was not immune to this perturbation of love, and he often displays it in the first chapter of A Grief Observed. Throughout the chapter, he frequently laments his tendency to substitute for his wife “a mere doll to be blubbered over.” Accordingly, it is not until Lewis assents to the goodness of God that he is able to find peace after the death of his wife.