Psyche in Paradise

TILL WE HAVE FACES (313 pp.)--C. S. Lewis--Horcourt, Brace ($4.50).

C.S. Lewis is an Oxford and Cambridge don who has long been an apostle to the well-educated agnostic. To scoop unbelievers out of the waters of doubt into the net of faith, Anglican Lewis uses all sorts of urbane literary lures ranging from Platonic debate (The Screwtape Letters) through self-confessions (Surprised by Joy) to Gothic-romantic fictional allegory (Perelandra). This last category, to which the present book belongs, displays Lewis at his most difficult.

Till We Have Faces twists the ancient Psyche myth into strange new shapes. The action takes place in the barbaric Kingdom of Glome, somewhere north of civilized ancient Greece. The central figures are the beauteous Princess Psyche, a symbol of sacred love, and her ugly sister Orual, a symbol of profane love. By contrast, their Greek slave tutor, Lysias the Fox, is a symbol of the rational, worldly skeptic of all ages. The Fox tells the princesses that their country's religion, which revolves around a shapeless stone earth-mother deity named Ungit, is a pack of lies. But Ungit's priests bully the king into offering up Psyche as a human sacrifice to redeem the kingdom from an ill fate. The heartbroken Orual makes a pilgrimage to recover her sister's bones from the mountain site of the sacrifice, and to her amazement finds Psyche luminously alive. Through Psyche's newly gained mystical vision, Orual is given a glimpse of paradise, but rejects it as an insane mirage. By her lack of unquestioning faith, Orual condemns herself and Psyche to long years of purgatorial labors.

Author Lewis point seems to be that divinity can only address humanity in opaque hints and fragmentary revelations, since a mortal mind is no more capable of comprehending the divine plan than an infant is of understanding Shakespeare. Lewis advances this argument less through his stiff allegorical characters than through nimble theological dialectics, plus such gaudy abracadabra as temple harlots and garish bird masks that Ungit's priests don during blood sacrifices. But if the proper use of reason is to know where reason ends, Lewis' myth-making serves its purpose well, for the book carries the mind to the craggy limits of rationality where nothing seems more reasonable than the leap to faith.

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