I must confess from the outset that I take a profoundly mischievous delight in writing this journal, for I intend to bring a strain of ideas in the work of C.S. Lewis into conversation with T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Little Gidding,” in the full knowledge that Lewis would likely have been quite disgruntled by the similarities of thought I will find there.
What interests me the most in “Little Gidding” is Eliot’s presentation of the limitations of human language and the greatness of the reality behind mortal words. This theme is echoed and expanded in Lewis’ writing. Recently, I have been a bit confused by Michael Ward’s explanation of it in his chapter on Mercury in Planet Narnia, but I think that engaging with our discussions of Till We Have Faces and of “Little Gidding” will clarify the idea for me.
I want to begin with Lewis’ thoughts on the matter, which Ward traces handily through That Hideous Strength, Lewis’ poetry, and The Horse and His Boy, and attaches, in passing, to Till We Have Faces. Personally, I think the latter novel is the most profound expression of it and deserved much more attention than Ward gave it, but I’ll begin at the same place he does. In That Hideous Strength, Mercury is presented as an incarnation of sorts of language—not mortal language, but “essential speech.” Lewis describes him as “The Lord of Meaning.” His coming upon Ransom and Merlin (purer and more profound than his presence with those downstairs, who only express the effects of his nearness) is an exhilarating and almost painful experience expressed, not by human words, but by, “Doubling, splitting, and recombining of thoughts.” It is the ideas that become central, not the words themselves. This seems to indicate that Lewis saw words as somehow insufficient to express reality. Words give meaning, but they also exclude it—fully expressing meaning is a great, often impossible, and sometimes terrible task (as Orual explains in the end of Till We Have Faces—more on that later).
This concept, depicted inconclusively in That Hideous Strength, finds further body in The Horse and His Boy. I find Ward’s argument that the Chronicle is an expression of Mercury’s essence almost entirely compelling, and his implication that Aslan specifically embodies Mercurial characteristics particularly interesting. Ward writes, “As Aslan ‘guides and gathers’ the children and the horses… he also teaches them to speak in a new way, a way that encompasses silence.” I think this is a tremendously important and compelling point. Lewis contrasts meaningful speech with empty words in The Horse and His Boy, caricaturing the Calormene’s speech, for example. On page two of the book, Lewis says that they generally talked “to one another very slowly about things that sounded dull.” Ward makes a hilarious comparison between long-winded and inane Calormene proverbs and brief, powerful Narnian ones. However, the book also makes it clear that some emotions and experiences are too great for words. When Shasta first sees Aslan, Lewis writes, “After one glance at the Lion’s face he slipped out of the saddle and fell at its feet. He couldn’t say anything, but then he didn’t want to say anything, and he knew he needn’t say anything.” Other characters are moved to silence at points in the book by encounters with Aslan. One might say that encounters with the numinous left them speechless—but not in an empty sense. Ward describes it as “an eloquent silence, an articulacy of a spiritual kind.” He astutely summarizes,
“McGrath is of the opinion that ‘one of the many merits of the writings of C. S. Lewis is that they take seriously the way in which words can generate and transform experience.’ This is an important observation, and most relevant to this passage in The Horse and His Boy; but we must be clear what kind of experience is being generated. It is not, principally, an experience containable by more mere words.”
Such a view has definitive spiritual implications. Here again, it is necessary to cite Ward. He writes,
“Lewis held the view that ‘prayer without words is best’; one should try ‘not to verbalise the mental acts.’ He believed that prayer could not be identical with normal human language because no form of words would be fully adequate to the task of addressing its ineffable subject… God is the supreme example of those concrete realities which are too definite for language: ‘The ultimate Peace is silent through very density of life. Saying is swallowed up in being.’”
Words absent such fundamental reality are meaningless. Which leads us to Till We Have Faces.
Throughout the book, Orual expresses a strong sense of the importance of communication. It is vital to her that her story be told, that truth be expressed. She must make her accusation against the gods, and a fundamental part of that accusation is that they themselves are unclear. In speaking about the appearance of the palace on the mountain, she queries bitterly, “What is the use of a sign which is itself only another riddle? … Psyche could speak plain when she was three; do you tell me the gods have not yet come so far?”
What Orual learns, though, is that the communication of the gods is obscure to mortals not because they cannot communicate in our language, but because we are too caught up in our empty words to understand the deep realities that surround us. She writes, “No one who hears a god’s voice takes it for a mortal’s.” In the same way, the matter they communicate differs fundamentally from our own because their truth is too great for words. Thus, when she recites her case against them, their answer is utter silence, silence which reveals to her the real nature of her complaint. When the judge inquires if she is answered, she can only say, “Yes.” Then, she can look back and see the folly of her entire narrative. Her explanation is as follows:
“The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean… When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your sould for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dugout of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
This passage makes it clear that humans are all caught up in words—in empty narratives that distract us from the truth of our condition. We must be brought to that “eloquent silence” before we can receive an answer—a silence terrible in its vision, but wonderful in its liberation. When Orual at last releases her complaint, she is able to look on the god’s face, to apprehend the truth, greater and more beautiful and awe-full than her words can express. It is this vision of reality that is true spiritual language, true communication.
“I ended my first book with the words no answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.”
This vision, this apprehension of truth and spiritual articulacy does not come cheap. The Fox confesses, “ I made her think a prattle of maxims would do, all thin and clear as water. For of course, water’s good; and it didn’t cost much, not where I grew up. So I fed her on words.” In reality, however, these words are insufficient—true communication, to have a face, requires sacrifice, like the worship of Ungit required sacrifice. When the gods finally communicate with Orual for the first time, the message they give her is, “Die before you die. There is no chance after.” To be free of her resentment, free of her endless prattle of accusations and her flawed vision, Orual must completely release all things she clings to—her pride and her selfish love—everything that makes her Ungit. “All, even Psyche, are born into the house of Ungit. And all must get free from her. Or say that Ungit in each must bear Ungit’s son and die in childbed—or change.” Freedom from Ungit, true vision and the life-giving silence it produces demands “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)”. Which, of course, brings us to T.S. Eliot and “Little Gidding”.
This poem resonates profoundly (ironically enough) with the ideas Lewis is expressing in Till We Have Faces. Eliot wrestles as a poet with the insufficiency of language and struggles with the sacrifice which the redemption of his poetry and his soul demands, but his reasoning also ends in hope. In the first section of the poem, he explicitly lays out the insufficiency of words to express the divine and eternal.
“And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment.
…You would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.”
Here Eliot expresses the knowledge that is forced upon Orual in that terrible moment of silence: that all our perceptions are empty and insufficient, shells and husks of meaning, and the real narrative of our lives can only be seen when we are stripped of our preconceptions and sinful presumptions. We must stand apart from our imperfect human judgments and wait in silence and in prayer.
Like Lewis, Eliot asserts that prayer is something too great for our human speech. Words inevitably hinder our meaning, distract us from the fundamental reality of our situation, which is the communion of our souls with God.
“And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.”
The truth of the supernatural cannot be expressed in the language of the living.
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
The dead’s communication is tongued with fire—with the fire of the Holy Ghost, which purifies both thought and word. It is this communication which our prayer must mimic, mimic without the hindrance of words, but with the assistance of the Spirit. As Lewis says, “In true prayer, God speaks to God.” Eliot here recognizes that the things eternal are, “Concrete realities which are too definite for language,” to borrow Ward’s words. In places marked by holiness, like Little Gidding, he senses a nearness to living souls which are more real and alive and articulate than he has ever been. Expressing truth in words will always come at a cost. As he remarks, “Any action / Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat / Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.”
His only hope of ever achieving the sort of articulacy which he senses about him in the fellowship of the dead is to sacrifice everything. “Our only hope, or else despair / Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-- / To be redeemed from fire by fire.” Words are empty and clear like water on their own. We must make the ultimate sacrifice to achieve that state of simplicity which allows us a vision of the holy and the real. For Eliot, this means the sacrifice of control over his poetic meaning: in order to communicate truth, his tongue too must be baptized by Pentecostal Fire, which may imbue his writing with meanings he does not intend. This loss of poetic control is terribly painful—just as the realization that she is indeed Ungit is for Orual. Like that realization, it leads to vision. “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And now the place for the first time.” Submission to this refining fire uses our prior experiences to produce vision and beauty and life. If we ‘die before we die,’ the fire we chose will turn out to be only the means to holiness. If we refuse to die, all the fires we pass through are infernal flames, the flames which shall accompany us for eternity. This teleological interpretation of our lives is a theme which turns up over and over in Lewis’ works as well. To put it in his words, “The Divine Nature can change the past. Nothing is yet in its true form.”
Fundamentally, both Till We Have Faces and “Little Gidding” powerfully express the costs and beauty of Christian hope. Redemption costs nothing less than everything. It requires sacrifice and self-knowledge, and ultimately, it demands we undergo the pain of death. However, that death is only a means to rebirth—it is the process that allows us to be given faces. It forces out of us the endless rambling of empty words and pushes us into a place of silence that allows us to discover what it means to live in a world of truths too real for words. It brings us to the place where we can truly begin to see God face to face, which is ultimately the answer to all our questions. It is the hope of this final and complete vision that gives us hope even in the midst of winter. As I said before, both Till We Have Faces and “Little Gidding” end with a beatific vision of sorts. Orual beholds the God in a vision and is thereby prepared to behold Him in truth when the time comes for her to die. Eliot concludes by providing an image of heaven, the ordered paradise of Dante’s Divina Commedia. How strange, that Lewis should see himself and this man as having opposite approaches to life and faith, when in reality, they end by preaching the same message of an ordered, teleological universe, full of supernatural realities greater than the words and places and things that represent them. Both point their reader toward this vision, that they may achieve that state of surrender to the truth which transcends language, believing:
“All shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
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