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Fate vs. Providence, Reflections on City of God, Part 4

In Book IV of City of God, Augustine argues that Rome’s greatness is not due to the pantheon of gods they worshipped. At the beginning of Book V Augustine turns to fate, destiny, and astrology to show that Rome’s greatness was not written in the stars either. As you can imagine such discussions lead very quickly into the deep waters of free will and God’s foreknowledge.

As others have noted, City of God 5.9 is worth reading and rereading, but I want to discuss a different aspect of this section of the book, namely the difference between a pagan notion of fate or destiny and a Christian notion of providence. This distinction, it seems to me, lies at the very heart of Augustine’s own thinking, and at the heart of how Christians perceive reality and the vicissitudes of history. Fate and destiny are faceless, and they are nameless too, to the extent that there is no one to thank for blessing and no one to rail against for cursing. To be sure, as Augustine discusses at length, Rome deified their conception of Felicity and Fortune in order to put a face to the nameless force, but for Augustine that is exactly the problem. In naming these goddesses, Fortune and Felicity, the Romans rightly intuit the need for a face on the other side of reality, but they don’t go far enough in identifying the one true God of history and the universe.

Providence, on the other hand, is the will of the benevolent God playing out in time and space. Providence, in its fullest sense accounts for both free will and foreknowledge, and places ultimate causes in the hands of the God of Christian revelation. There are two very practical things to note about a Christian view of providence. 1) Though the ultimate purpose of seemingly random events remains inscrutable, the character of the one governing them is not. The God of Christian revelation is loving, compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast mercy. For all his power and might, the face behind reality is ultimately kind. 2) There is no area of life or reality left merely to chance. Again, we might not understand events and our experiences fully, but the promise of Christian revelation is that the expanse of Providence spans from the movement of the celestial bodies to the intricacies of a bird’s wing. As Augustine puts it,

“Thus God is the supreme reality, with his Word and the Holy Spirit–three who are one. He is the God omnipotent, creator and maker of every soul and every body; participation in him brings happiness to all who are happy in truth and not in illusion; he has made man a rational animal, consisting of soul and body; and when man sins he does not let him go unpunished, nor does he abandon him without pity…From him derives every mode of every being, every species, every order, all measure, number, and weight. He is the source of all that exists in nature, whatever its kind, whatsoever its value, and of the seeds of forms, and forms of seeds, and the motions of seeds and forms. He has given to flesh its origin, beauty, health, fertility in propagation, the arrangement of the bodily organs, and the health that comes from their harmony. He has endowed even the soul or irrational creatures with memory, sense, and appetite, but above all this, he has given to the rational soul thought, intelligence, and will. He has not abandoned even the inner parts of the smallest and lowliest creature, or the bird’s death (to say nothing of the heavens and the earth, the angels and mankind)–he has not left them without a harmony of their constituent parts, a kind of peace. It is beyond anything incredible that he should have willed the kingdoms of mean, their dominations and their servitudes, to be outside the range of the laws of his providence.” City of God, V.11

As I read this beautiful passage, I imagine what Augustine would have made of quantum mechanics in this regard and the awe and worship he would have felt to know that providence extends to the infinitesimal just as much as to the infinite. And a passage like this reminds me at base what is so immensely practical and life giving about theology. Discussions of Providence, free will, and sovereignty can certainly be anything but life giving, but to affirm and believe in, and ultimately be comforted by God’s providential care of all things is to know freedom and peace and to be filled with worship and awe.

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Worship, Empire, and the Fickle Human Heart, Reflections on City of God

“But the worshippers and lovers of those gods, whom they delighted to imitate in their criminal wickedness, are unconcerned about the utter corruption of their country. ‘So long as it lasts,’ they say, ‘so long as it enjoys material prosperity, and the glory of victorious war, or, better, the security of peace, why should we worry? What concerns us is that we should get richer all the time, to have enough for extravagant spending every day, enough to keep our inferiors in their place…Anyone who disapproves of this kind of happiness should rank as a public enemy: anyone who attempts to change it or get rid of it should be hustled out of hearing by the freedom-loving majority: he should be kicked out, and removed from the land of the living. We should reckon the true gods to be those who see that the people get this happiness and then preserve it for them.” City of God, Book II, Chapter 20

In this passage, as a master of rhetoric, Augustine uses hyperbole to great effect. By adopting the voice of a typical Roman citizen, he skewers both the Roman deities and those who worship them. He also tellingly reveals one dark aspect of imperialism–the calloused disdain of the privileged for those beneath them. More broadly, here and throughout Book II, Augustine is examining the ways in which false worship distorts the worshipper. In Augustine’s logic worshippers become corrupt because the gods they worship are corrupt. Worship is formative and shapes the worshipper into the image of the thing worshipped.

As this passage shows, for Augustine what was ultimately disordered about Roman worship was that it was a means to an end. In other words, the worship was false not just because the gods themselves were false, but more importantly because the worship was offered as a way to secure some other thing, such as wealth, happiness, security, prosperity. The last line sums up this theology: “We should reckon the true gods to be those who see that the people get this happiness and then preserve it for them.” In other words, we will offer worship only to the extent that it benefits us. It is interesting on this count to see the ways in which Roman gods are in one sense simply personified versions of the thing desired–a god of war or reason, a goddess of love or wisdom. It is also interesting to note how many of the Greek and Roman myths narrate gods acting on their behalf to secure some thing desired.

This passage also reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a book where the gods of the old world, the gods of mythology, roam the American landscape mostly as grifters and vagrants because they are no longer worshipped and are only vaguely remembered. They have been replaced by new gods, like television, media, celebrity, technology. And one of Gaiman’s points in writing, besides providing a vastly entertaining story and interesting world, is to show in which human worship is doled out in order to receive benefits. Old gods are traded for new gods when their are new benefits to be had.

Even if you aren’t religious in any way, I think it is instructive to take Augustine’s words and Gaiman’s story and think of how mercenary and fickle the human heart really is. Our affection is so fleeting. Our devotion so often given for selfish reasons. Why is that? Why do we have such a hard time remaining steadfast? It is also instructive to consider the inscrutable God of providence and Lord of history that Augustine commends and to wonder how it would shape and form us to worship Him.

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How do we suffer well? Reflections on City of God

“When the good and the wicked suffer alike, the identity of their sufferings does not mean that there is no difference between them. Though the sufferings are the same, the sufferers remain different. Virtue and vice are not the same, even they undergo the same torment. The fire which makes gold shine makes chaff smoke; the same flail breaks up the straw, and clears the grain; and oil is not mistaken for lees because both are forced out of the same press. In the same way, the violence which assails good men to test them, to cleanse and purify them, effects in the wicked their condemnation, ruin, and annihilation. Thus the wicked, under pressure of affliction, execrate God and blaspheme; the good, in the same affliction, offer up prayers and praises. This shows that what matters is the nature of the sufferer, not the nature of the sufferings. Stir a cesspit, and a foul stench arises; stir perfume, and a delightful fragrance ascends. But the movement is identical.” City of God, I.8

Throughout City of God Augustine describes the providential ways of God as inscrutable. For him, God certainly acts in and through history, but his exact motivations and purposes are unknown. To be sure, Augustine, as a Christian, has a sense of the overall trajectory of history (everything is moving towards the City of God) but the particulars of history and vicissitudes of the everyday often remain mysterious. This is another way of saying that Augustine doesn’t have a complete answer to the question of why do we suffer, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have anything to say about suffering itself.

Again this is where Augustine becomes relevant for us. Though we are not living through the particular circumstances of the fall of Rome, we are none the less caught in the messiness of history, trying to make sense not only of our own lives but also of the circumstances all around us. Augustine’s reminder that the same experience of suffering produces different results can help us in the midst of our lives because it reminds us that we don’t have to spend all our time thinking about the spinning wheel of history, but instead can concentrate on the quality of our own character rooted by faith in the one who moves the wheel of history. While concentrating on suffering in general helps us cultivate a theology of suffering, concentrating on the particular of our suffering and how we respond to it helps us cultivate character.

This point has been driven home to me lately, as I have witnessed in the last few weeks different people suffering in similar ways (grappling with cancer), and yet their responses have been profoundly different. For me Augustine’s contrast of the stinking cesspit versus the pleasant perfume draws the contrast between what I have seen both vividly and accurately, and has driven home a simple point, but a point philosophically minded people like me need reminding of–witnessing particular suffering is so different from thinking about suffering in the abstract. I so often think about the problem of suffering from a detached, rarified viewpoint and only ask the question why. Why would God let these things happen? But if I only ask that question, I fail to confront the particularity of suffering in individuals, to meet them and empathize with them in the midst of their suffering, and in so doing ask a total different question–how is it that two people can suffer in extremely similar ways and yet react in such opposite ways? Why is it that suffering produces such different results?

Don’t get me wrong. Both the general and particular viewpoints on suffering are necessary. The question of suffering in the abstract helps us grapple with the nature of God, humanity, and the world, and Augustine himself is an able guide through these issues, showing us ways to think deeply about the nature of suffering in general. But the question of suffering in the particular helps us grapple with the quality of life and character, and helps us confront what can sometimes be a terrifying question–what kind of people are we becoming–a question that is often only answerable in the crucible of suffering.

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Would Augustine have kept a blog? Reflections on City of God, Part 1

On the First Things blog, Collin Garbarino suggested people join him in reading Saint Augustine’s City of God over the course of 2014. I decided to do just that because I’ve wanted to read it for a while now, but tackling it seemed so daunting. But his suggested pace of three pages a day or so seemed more than manageable, and the slower pace has its charms. For one, I am able to linger over the details a bit more, and for another, I am able to think about how the whole thing fits together. At this point, I’ve been able to keep up, so I’m about 125 pages in, and I thought blogging some reflections on my reading would help me process this mammoth book and keep me on my reading track. These reflections will not be systematic in any way and won’t serve anyone as a reading guide, but I do hope they might help me and maybe others process how vital Augustine’s thinking is even now and maybe even especially now.

In this first post, I simply want to reflect on how vital and relevant the book seems. It’s striking that even among a slew of historical details and all the particulars of Roman history that the underlying themes resonate so strongly. His reflections on the nature of empire, on suffering, on the nature of history itself have much to say to us now. Which I suppose is another way of saying the book is a classic for a reason. Even with its particularity it speaks almost universally. Take this statement, for example, where Augustine reflects on the desire of empires to insatiably expand:

“Why must an empire be deprived of peace, in order that it may be great? In regard to men’s bodies it is surely better to be of moderate size, and to be healthy, than to reach the immense stature of giant at the cost of unending disorders–not to rest when that stature is reached, but to be troubled with greater disorders with the increasing size of the limbs” (III.10).

One thinks here not only of empires that have expanded only to find themselves decaying from the inside, but in our own time, one thinks of corporations and financial institutions who are massive and lumbering and who may unknowingly carry cancer in their limbs as a result of their ever expanding size. I can’t but think when I read these lines that the flailing arms of an ailing giant can do great damage.

On another note, it’s interesting to reflect on how Augustine would have published his thoughts in our time. Certainly the thousand page brick sitting on my desk right now would have had a hard time getting published, even though the sprawling and discursive nature of the book is part of its charm. Because of its myriad interests and expansive scope, I wonder if he would have used a forum like this one to collect his thoughts. I know its anachronistic, and maybe even offensive to some, to think of City of God like a series of blog posts, but the book and chapter structure lends itself to small blog post like chunks. Of course, I could just be thinking this because I’m reading it in a blog-like way, three pages at a time.

Even so, there is something very un-blog like about the book because his project is to integrate the particulars into a coherent whole like a unified field theory of history and theology. It is hard to imagine any project in our time having such ambition, and if it did we would probably say it was doomed to failure from the outset. Which is one of the charms of reading old books–they don’t have to conform to our notions of what is possible and achievable.

I’m only a month into this, and it would be too hard to catch up, so if you read this, I would encourage to dive into *City of God* with me.

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Storytelling as Raising the Dead

In this fascinating clip, filmmaker Ken Burns discusses the nature of story and his attraction to historical subjects. For him, good stories are more than they seem on the surface because “the genuine stories are about one and one equaling three.” Such stories dig at the deeper things in reality because “the things that matter most to us-some people call it love, some people call it God, some people call it reason-is that other thing where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that’s the three.” And it is this greater something we are all looking for in stories, so much so that we tend to “coalesce around stories that seem transcendent.”

What I found most interesting in Burns account was his self-understanding of why he tells stories in general, and historical stories in particular. For him telling historical stories is a kind of “waking of the dead.” So in seeking the very transcendence he describes, Burns points to a kind of resurrective power in stories, particularly in stories about history. His fascination with such stories stems from losing his mother to cancer at a young age: “It may be obvious and close to home whom I’m actually trying to wake up.”

Beyond the haunting and beautiful resurrection imagery inherent in this statement, Burns, by identifying this kernel in his own experience, describes what Stanley Hauerwas calls an “intuition of meaning.” In his memoir *Hannah’s Child,* Hauerwas reflects on the impulse to tell his own story, and for him, memoir comes not from recounting events for the sake of recounting events. Rather memoir comes from events coalescing around a central intuition, an insight into how these events might be thematically related. Quoting Sven Birkerts, Hauerwas says these intuitions result from “the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story.” So for Burns, his mother’s early death provides an intuition of meaning, a place to begin his own story. While for Hauerwas, his mother’s Hannah-like prayer of dedication to the Lord provides his intuition of meaning.

So I’m wondering, as I think about my own future, and even as I attempt to write in a more personal vein, what is my intuition of meaning?

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Once Upon a Time vs. In the Beginning

Once upon a time…

A recent article by Maria Konnikoiva examines the enduring power of these four little words. As she notes, some variation of the phrase appears in most languages, pointing to its near universal use and appeal. But why is the phrase so powerful? What makes stories, especially fairy tales, so affective? Konnikova argues that the phrase offers us both distance and vagueness by placing us in another time in an upspecified place. Such psychological distance allows us “the possibility of comprehending far more about reality than can come from reality itself.” And such vagueness allows us to insert ourselves into the story, to try out different lives and scenarios. Such stories, then, offer a kind of virtual reality in which we can process our own stories. As Konnikovia says,

“The world of once upon a time is not reality. It is a creation of make-believe. It is an invitation for fantasy and imagination to take the stuff of real life and do with it what they will—and perhaps, to translate the newfound truths back from story to actuality. In the realm of the imaginary, anxiety doesn’t become less anxious, nor tragedy less tragic. But in that world, you can make sense of it all from a distance. It can’t touch you in quite the same way—and yet it can lead you to a much deeper understanding and feeling of realities that would be too impenetrable without those four magic words at the fore.”

Konnikovia argues that stories, especially fairy tales, have psychological value because they give us a place to ennact pieces of our own lives and a means to process our own anxities. And while I don’t want to deny this pscyhological function of stories, because I have experienced it myself, I do want to contrast it with what I take to be a Christian understanding of story.

Take the way the Bible begins. “In the beginning…” pulls us into the narrative in similar way to “Once upon a time.” But while “In the beginning” gives us a sense of distance, it is only a chronological distance, more akin to “Once upon our time.” No matter how far back those words stretch, we are placed firmly within our own time and space. Whatever one thinks about the historiticity of Genesis in general or of chapters 1-3 in particular, the Bible wants us to know that this is our story and this is where we came from.  

As another example of Biblical storytelling, consider the opening of Samuel. It begins, “There was a certain man…” Such a phrase offers us neither distance nor vagueness.  Here we have a specific man in a specific time with specific wives and and specific problems. We are not distanced from this man, Elkanah. Rather we are thrown into the middle of his family sorrow–his beloved wife Hannah is barren. Yet in the midst of all the specificity, fairy tale like things happen. Against every odd, Hannah conceives a child. Even in our age of fertility doctors and artificial insemmination, the reversal of barreness is a kind of miracle. And the song Hannah sings in exulatation to the Lord has all the sweep and force of epic poetry, cataloging a host of reversals: the rich become poor, and the poor become rich, the proud are cast down and the humble are exalted, the fertile become barren and the barren become fertile. Indeed, one of the great tropes of stories is reversal–the unexpected the rise of the unlikely figure, and it is one of God’s favorite tropes. We need only look to the incarnation and crucifixion to see that God loves reversal and that he knows how to tell a story.  

To put the contrast another way, while Konnikovia’s approach rightly affirms the benefit stories have for our understanding of reality, the Scriptures point to something even bigger–the narrative shape of reality. It is one thing for us to examine our lives by means of other stories. It is quite another to affirm that reality itself is a kind of story and to thereby conclude, whether consciously or not, that there is a storyteller. From my bias, one reason fairy tales are powerful is that for all their fancy, for all their distance and vagueness, they point to the narrative shape of reality. Indeed, even when stories aren’t “true” they inevitably speak to the narrative shape of our lives by pointing to true things. This is because we live in the world of “in the beginning” where God spoke or “narrated” everything into existence.  In the God narrated world, we cannot help but place ourselves in stories because we cannot help but see our lives as part of his story. 

I suppose a merely psychological understanding of narrative would say that natural selection is telling the story. If so, then one reason I believe in God is for completely aesthetic reasons–I think a creator God who narrates the world and who is bringing reality to its ultimate conclusion makes for a better story than Darwin and the Big Bang.

 

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Earnest Words in Swirling Noise – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot at Ten

Early in college, I fell in love with Wilco. I know how that sentence sounds, but I’l write it anyway, simply because I also know how many others could write the same thing. Or if not about Wilco, then about some other band that has become synonymous with the glories and terrors of coming of age in a city not your own. So last week’s tenth anniversary of their greatest album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was something of a moment for me. Not because I can’t believe it’s been ten years, but mostly because I still haven’t outgrown YHF. So much of what I listened to and read and thought and believed ten years ago has proved both embarrassing and ephemeral. But not YHF. It’s importance has only grown for me. For one, the album has such a stranglehold on my sense of taste, that I can’t help but judge other music’s greatness by its standard. It is truly canonical for me, by which I mean it is a measuring stick for other artists and albums. For another, it in some sense shaped my own sense of wanting to write. More on that later.

 

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Before YHF came out I had devoured *Being There* whose tracks “Misunderstood” and “Sunken Treasure” stand among my favorite all time songs. And Summerteeth was a revelation–Beatles and Beach Boys filtered through alt-country swagger. Still, for all their greatness and the obvious experimentation in those albums, nothing could have prepared me for YHF.

I bought the album the day it came out, back when people did such things. On the way home, I sat alone in my car and listened to the opening track over and over. The seven minute dream wrapped in a nightmare wrapped in a dream that is “I am trying to break your heart” took immediate hold of me. I don’t even remember driving back to my dorm. I only remember listening to that song on repeat and the vague impression of lights flashing and passing me in the dark. It was the strange lyrics, the almost haphazard drums, the plink of the child’s piano, the strained and weary voice. But mostly it was the swirl of noise, the impending sense of chaos. I reveled in the noise, turned up the volume, let it wash over me.

As the best articles celebrating the tenth anniversary of the album have pointed out, the whole album is about wanting to be understood and also about the terror of actually being understood. It’s about vital messages coded in noise and misdirection, and about the hope and fear there is someone on the other side to both receive and decode those messages. Those messages come mostly in the form of ambiguous lyrics. I will never really know what “I am an American aquarium drinker” means exactly. I can’t exegete the deeper meanings of “take off your bandaids cause I don’t believe in touchdowns,” or delve the implications of “our love is all of God’s money.” But I love these lines. Such lyrics are at once ambiguous and earnest. They are exactly the things I was trying to say, but couldn’t or wouldn’t. I understand that these are the very reasons some people hate this album. And in the hands of lesser artists such lyrics are nothing more than nonsense, or worse still unbridled pretension. But for Wilco, layered in the haze of static and delivered in Jeff Tweedy’s broken voice, such lyrics are messages about the inherent fragility of messages. There is so much say and so many ways for that to be misunderstood.

In college I started writing poetry. Partly because I had always wanted to write poetry and partly because I was hopelessly enamored with the girl who edited the literary journal for the English department. The fact that she would read the entries spurred an incredible flurry of terrible poems. And the fact that she would read the entries meant I would never dream of submitting them. Even though they weren’t anything resembling a love poem, and even though they weren’t veiled confessions of devotion, I still felt I would be exposing a nerve. I couldn’t risk being understood.

Eventually, I let other people read versions of those terrible poems. And I even wrote some more. I guess I figured that even if people got it wrong, or worse still got it right, and I was found wanting, it was still worth writing. This may have been because I came to see that the world often feels like YHF sounds.

At the end of “Poor Places,” there is a swell of static, and as it peaks you hear the faint accented voice of woman emerge from the noise. She repeats the phrase, “Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot,” over and over, even as the static get louder and louder. It is clearly a code, a message veiled in subterfuge. It is not meant to be understood by just anybody. But it is meant to be understood by somebody. I heard those three words, sent out across radio waves, hoping to alight somewhere and to be heard by someone, as an apology for art, as a kind of artifice themselves, a cry made in hopes of making sense of things in the midst of chaos. 

In this same vein, I’ve always find a particular lyric in the closing song arresting. In “Reservations” Tweedy sings, “The truth proves it’s beautiful to lie.” Like the rest of the album the statement is veiled in ambiguity, but one way to take it is that the truth makes art necessary. We have to interpret our world, and that world is often enveloped in noise and static, not unlike much of YHF. Even so, we can take the noise and make it into something. When it comes to art, the artifice is a kind of lying, but to me such artifice proves that the world is worth paying attention to and worth interpreting after all. This is certainly why I type out words that maybe only a handful of people will ever read.  I am simply trying to make sense of the noise. I am hoping, praying even, that as I tap out dispatches, there is someone on the other end.

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Beholding God or How People Change

“The air was growing brighter and brighter about us; as if something had set it on fire. Each breath I drew let into me new terror, joy, overpowering sweetness. I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one. But that’s little to say; rather, Psyche herself was, in a manner, no one. I loved her as I would once have thought it impossible to love, would have died any death for her. And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted. Or if she counted (and oh, gloriously she did) it was for another’s sake. The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming. The pillars on the far side of the pool flushed with his approach. I cast down my eyes.” C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Looking back over my posts over the last couple of months, it’s clear to me that I’ve really spent the summer thinking about one question—What does it mean to encounter the divine?  Till We Have Faces is in many ways a book length answer to that question. And in reading the novel, I realized that encountering God can never be an end in itself. Rather, it is about transformation, or as we Christians call it, sanctification. In fact, as Christians, our own ongoing transformation actually depends on our beholding God.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18).

In Exodus when Moses asked to gaze on the glory of the Lord, simply seeing the passing glory of the Lord made his face shine with a resplendent glory so radiant that the people of Israel asked him to wear a veil. And in reflecting on that encounter in light of Christ, Paul makes an astonishing claim–our relation to God through Christ is even greater than Moses’ because we come to God with unveiled faces by the power of the Spirit, and in beholding him we become like him. In Christ we are able to gaze on God, a reality that sparkles and cuts like a diamond because to gaze on the divine is to encounter both terror and beauty, both dread and joy.

Terror and dread because who we are and what we desire is finally exposed. Just as Orual is finally able to see how sickly her love for Psyche is in the presence of the divine, we too are exposed, laid bare, disintegrated in God’s presence. One reason I believe people don’t really seek God, don’t really read their Bibles or pray with any real earnestness is because deep down they know to do so is to risk exposure, to have their desires revealed as petty, to have their loves exposed as anemic. The sound of the Lord comes to the garden like a storm, and we hide ourselves because we know that we are naked.

But it is not just terror and dread. It is beauty and joy too. God is not simply beautiful—he is the source of beauty. As Augustine says, God is, “The beauty of all things beautiful.” This means that the rush of joy we experience in the presence of earthly beauty, in faces and sunsets, in symphonies and meals, in laughter and mountains, finds its source and fullness in the face of God. To gaze on him is to experience the fullness of beauty which is itself the fullness of joy. But it is more than that. To gaze on God is to be realigned with and by the source of beauty itself, a beauty that actually changes us into the fullness of beauty itself-the face of Christ.

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Love and Beauty in Till We Have Faces

Till We Have Faces is C.S. Lewis’s imaginative reworking of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. It is a meditation on the nature of beauty and ugliness and of love and hate, and because gods and goddesses encounter men and women throughout, it is also a novel about the nature of the divine, of revelation and epiphany. Told from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister, Orual, as she wrestles with the loss of Psyche, it is a beautifully complex and moving novel, and Lewis considered it his most accomplished work of fiction. I don’t want to give much of the plot away because I hope that you will read the novel for yourself. But I do want to reflect on some of the novel’s themes as a way of processing some of the thoughts from the previous posts on epiphany and the nature of revelation. In this post I want to look at the intertwined themes of beauty and love in the novel.

Orual is the first-born daughter of the King of Glome, a violent madman who desires nothing more than to sire a son. But his second marriage only produces a third daughter, Psyche, an exceptionally beautiful child, whom Orual takes under her care. But Orual’s love for Psyche is a devouring sort of love, an all-consuming obsession, even from the beginning. She alone wants to possess Psyche and her affections.  And this devotion is perhaps primarily motivated by Psyche’s beauty, which Orual describes as one might describe a god’s, saying, “Her beauty, which most of them had never seen, worked on them as a terror might work.” Indeed, the subjects of Glome are convinced that Psyche must be a goddess. Because she is ugly herself, Orual, it seems, wants to become beautiful by being in Psyche’s presence. As Orual says, “She made beauty all around her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When picked up a toad—she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes—the toad became beautiful.” Orual is the toad in a certain sense. She desires to become beautiful, to have a face, by possessing Psyche for herself, and as the novel progresses this hunger only makes her more ugly.

Later in the novel, Psyche is offered as an appeasing sacrifice to the Mountain Brute.  After the sacrifice Orual decides to go and gather the remains of her sister, only to find that Psyche is still alive. As she relates what has happened to her, Psyche believes she has married the god of the Mountain, who she believes is no brute at all, while Orual believes that this so-called husband who refuses to show his face is either the mountain-brute or an opportunistic mountain dweller who has tricked her. Because Orual cannot believe Psyche’s happiness is real, she demands that Psyche expose the face of her husband. And as Orual makes these demands, Psyche realizes that Orual’s consuming, possessive love is a kind of hate, saying, “You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know. It is like looking into a deep pit. I am not sure whether I like your kind better than hatred.”

In other words, Orual’s ugliness is not primarily physical. Rather her devouring love for Psyche makes her ugly. Psyche by contrast is not just physically beautiful—her love is beautiful as well. She doesn’t wish to go against her husband’s wishes because she trusts him. Earlier in the novel she goes among the plagued people because they believe her touch can heal. She is willing to give of herself in hopes of helping others. Love and beauty are contrasted with hate and ugliness, and so the novel, read a certain way, is a study in sanctification, in Orual’s love becoming more beautiful, of her gaining a face. So in the next post, we will turn to the themes of faces and epiphany.

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Jonathan Franzen and the Danger of Seeing Through Everything

Since my last post, I’ve still been reflecting on the nature of epiphany in contemporary literature, particularly in the novel Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Despite my reservations about the real possibility of actual epiphanies in novels like Franzen’s, I haven’t read a recent novel that better captured the world as it is right now. Franzen’s stated purpose as a writer is too write novels that are accessible to as many people as possible but that still grapple with big ideas (see his essay “Mr. Difficult” in How to Be Alone).

One way he accomplishes this is with a liquid and inviting prose style that shows you his literary world without drawing much attention to itself. His prose is transparent. But transparency characterizes more than his prose style—it also describes how he views the world. He wants to see to the heart of things, and as a very good novelist, his gift as a cultural observer is in making things transparent. Much of the novel occurs post 9/11, so thematically the novel grapples with rise and fall of the political topography resulting from that tragedy. But in his quest for  transparency, he has just as much venom for environmentally motivated liberalism as he does for war profiteering neo-cons. No one, it seems, is immune from his critical eye.

For example, Franzen uses the occasion of a Bright Eyes concert, an event he describes as being “almost religious in its collective seriousness,” to explore generational attitudes toward music. And with nothing more than a couple of lines he is able to conclude some fundamental things about my generation:  “They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming.” In a flash all my earnest allegiance to indie music was exposed for what it often is—a highly selective and somewhat pretentious kind of consumption. And the novel is full of these barbs. But the prose is so crisp and the characters so compelling, that you are willing to risk his unrelenting gaze.

The benefit, of course, of seeing through everything is that not much is lost on you, and Franzen has an amazing ability to skewer hypocrisy and to layer everything in irony. In reading the novel though, I couldn’t help but be reminded of C. S. Lewis’s observation that to see through everything is to ultimately see nothing:

The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles…If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

So after reading a book that saw through everything, and after thinking about epiphanies, I wanted to read a book that was undergirded with a sense of the divine. It is the divine that not only makes real epiphany possible, but that also ensures there is something more than total transparency. With that in mind, I decided to reread Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces, which retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche through the eyes if Psyche’s sister. It is a novel about encountering the divine, about epiphanies in the original sense of the word. And in reading it I realized the main character and narrator, Orual, is a lot like Franzen. She can often see through things and describe things as they are, but in the end, her willful blindness to see what is actually there leads to her undoing. Over the next few posts, I want to explore the nature of epiphany in Till We Have Faces.