PWJ: S3E21 – TWHF (Pt 2 – Ch 2) – “Troubled Vision”
Orual has a vision of the King which help her begin to see clearly…
S3E21: “Troubled Visions” (Download)
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Time Stamps
01:05 – Drink-of-the-week
02:21 – Quote-of-the-week
03:43 – Corona life update
05:40 – Chapter Summary
49:29 – 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 “You can’t keep a good man down” Bush.
• I was drinking a Quarantini. Matt’s self-control collapsed like a house of cards and went and made his own.
• The quote-of-the-week was:
“You cannot escape Ungit by going to the deadlands, for she is there also. Die before you die. There is no chance after.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
• We spoke about how our lives have changed following the Corona virus.
• I gave my 150-word summary:
Orual is in the Temple for the Springtime ritual. She sits in the Temple with Arnom waiting for midday. In the meantime, she peppers the priest with questions about Ungit, without getting satisfying answers. She sees a peasant woman come into the Temple to offer sacrifice on Ungit’s stone and goes away revitalised. At noon, Arnom passes through the western door and is greeted by joyful crowds. When Orual returns to the Palace, she has a vision of her father, who takes her to the Pillar Room. They progressively dig, passing through smaller and smaller copies of the Pillar Room, until they finally arrive before the king’s mirror. Orual sees and declares that she is Ungit. Orual then tries to commit suicide, first with her sword and then by downing herself in the river during the night, but the god of the mountain commands her to stop.
Summary of Part II, Chapter II of Till We Have Faces
• Matt referenced Les Miserables.
• Orual is about to take part in Temple liturgy which she mentioned earlier:
Every spring the Priest is shut into [the Temple] and fights, or makes believe to fight, his way out through the western door; and this means that the new year is born
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part I, Chapter 9)
She gives us some more details:
“the Priest is shut up in the house of Ungit from sunset, and on the following noon fights his way out”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
• We find out what went on during the night:
…there had been censing and slaughtering, and pouring of wine and pouring of blood, and dancing and feasting and towsing of girls, and burning of fat, all night long.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
• Orual talks about the waste in the Temple:
And I thought how the seed of men that might have gone to make hardy boys and fruitful girls was drained into that house, and nothing given back; and how the silver that men had earned hard and needed was also drained in there, and nothing given back; and how the girls themselves were devoured and were given nothing back.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
• We are told the story that the Ungit stone came up from the ground:
“a foretaste of, or an ambassador from, whatever things may live and work down there one below the other all the way down under the dark and weight and heat”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
Orual describes the stone thus:
I have said she had no face; but that meant she had a thousand faces. For she was very uneven, lumpy and furrowed, so that, as when we gaze into a fire, you could always see some face or other.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
• Orual asks Arnom, the priest, a series of questions about Ungit. In the end she gives up, concluding:
“It’s very strange that our fathers should first think it worth telling us that rain falls out of the sky, and then, for fear such a notable secret should get out…wrap it up in a filthy tale so that no one could understand the telling.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
• She witnesses a woman come and worship the Ungit stone and return soothed:
“it was as if a sponge had been passed over her. The trouble was soothed. She was calm, patient, able for whatever she had to do”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
• When the time comes, the priest breaks out of the Temple and is greeted by the people:
“He is born! He is born!” and whirling their rattles, and throwing wheat-seed into the air, all sweaty and struggling and climbing on one another’s backs to get a sight of Arnom and the rest of us…
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
…looking as if all the world was well because a man dressed up as a bird had walked out of a door after striking a few blows with a wooden sword. Even those who were knocked down in the press to see us made light of it and indeed laughed louder than the others. I saw two farmers whom I well knew for bitterest enemies…clap hands and cry, “He’s born!” brothers for the moment”
• Orual has a vision where she and her father dig down through the Pillar Room, below where the Fox can help her:
“There’s no Fox to help you here,… We’re far below any dens that foxes can dig.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
This is appropriate, given that Orual’s name in Greek, oruksis, means “digging” or “excavation”
• She stands in front of a mirror and sees Ungit in her reflection:
“Who is Ungit?” said he, still holding my hand. Then he led me across the floor… I saw that mirror on the wall… I was not so much dragged as sucked along till we stood right in front of the mirror… my face was the face of Ungit as I had seen it that day in her house. “Who is Ungit?” asked the King. “I am Ungit.” My voice came wailing out of me and I found that I was in the cool daylight and in my own chamber.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
She concludes that this vision was true:
Without question it was true. It was I who was Ungit. That ruinous face was mine. I was that Battathing, that all-devouring womblike, yet barren, thing. Glome was a web — I the swollen spider, squat at its center, gorged with men’s stolen lives.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
• Orual reflects on the human soul:
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.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
When she can’t kill herself with her sword, she goes out the Shennit in the middle of the night:
My disguise now would be to go bareface; there was hardly anyone who had seen me unveiled…
It would have shamed me no more to go buff-naked…I was Ungit; I in her and she in me. Perhaps if any saw me, they would worship me. I had become what the people, and the old Priest, called holy.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
However, when she tries to drown herself, the god appears:
A voice came from beyond the river: “Do not do it.” …It was the voice of a god… No one who hears a god’s voice takes it for a mortal’s. “Lord, who are you?” said I.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
“Do not do it,” said the god. “You cannot escape Ungit by going to the deadlands, for she is there also. Die before you die. There is no chance after.” “Lord, I am Ungit.” But there was no answer…
I said that this reminded me an epigram above the gateway of an Orthodox Christian monastery on Mt. Athos: “If You Die Before You Die Then You Won’t Die When You Die.”
It also reminded me of Jesus’ words:
For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.
Mark 8:35
I compared this to the first line of the Beatitudes, that the “poor in spirit” are those who declare spiritual bankruptcy and throw themselves upon the mercy of God.
As a hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God
Psalm 42:1-2
Orual herself reflects:
The voice of the god had not changed in all those years, but I had. There was no rebel in me now. I must not drown and doubtless should not be able to… when I laid my head on my pillow it seemed but a moment before my women came to wake me, whether because the whole journey had been a dream or because my weariness (which would be no wonder) had thrown me into a very fast sleep.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
This is an echo of what Lewis taught in Mere Christianity:
[Man] had tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself. In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor—that is the only way out of a “hole.” This process of surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book II, Chapter 4)