Before reading this essay, I would recommend reading Till We Have Faces, the novel by C.S. Lewis this essay is based on. I hope you can understand my points without the background, but it's an excellent book, all the same.
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Makeup, the internet, and programs for editing
photographs have made it easy to hide one’s true face. If a woman were not content
with her face, for whatever reason, she could hide it under a layer of fake
imagery to the point where she became another person. Such a practice has
become so commonplace that people have forgotten the importance of having a
face. A face does not exist to be pretty, but to distinguish between different
people. This idea of being different—of having an identity—has been lost to the
materialistic view that there is no moral or spiritual significance to a face. By
hiding the faces given to them at birth, such people become faceless in a
sense, seeking to blend in with the world’s common desire to be beautiful. C.S. Lewis worked with this idea of facelessness in his novel, Till We Have Faces, which he based on the myth of Cupid and Psyche. The idea Lewis
seemed to present in this work was that man has no face before God, unless he has been purged with the blood of Christ, when he is
given Christ’s identity.
One of Lewis’ characters in Till We Have Faces, Orual, demonstrated one of the world's uses for having
no face: hiding the ugliness of one’s true visage. Throughout the story, Orual
became progressively aware of her ugliness, not just physically, but
spiritually, too. And as a result, she decided to cover her face with a veil at all
times. Orual also despised the vulnerability of going about barefaced. Without
a veil, Orual’s eyes—which, in literature, are usually considered the windows
to the soul—were open for the entire world to see through. But when she covered
them with her veil, her identity disappeared. This idea of hiding is akin to
Adam and Eve’s fig leaves in the Garden of Eden, after they ate from the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil. They used their leaves to cover up the shame
of their sins, just as Orual used her veil to hide her sins from public view.
This protection served her well for a time, when she became the queen of Glome.
When Orual took the throne, her veil was no
longer merely a covering for her shame, but also a source of power. Orual’s
power came from the fact that she could see the men in her court, but they
could not see her, and thus could not judge how best to work with her. In a
similar way, man cannot see God in His entirety, but He can see us. Thus, Orual
tried to set herself up as a god. Orual’s facelessness was also similar to the
goddess Ungit, the deity of Glome. Because Ungit was merely a lump of rock in
the temple, and ergo had no face, the people (including Orual) had a tendency
toward imagining faces for Ungit. The people also imagined faces for Orual when
she wore her veil, varying between ravishingly beautiful and horrifying.
Man was made to have a face, and not just a physical one.
He was also made to have a spiritual face in the presence of God. But man, in
his sinful state, has no identity unless it is by the will of God Himself. This
is because without God, man has no worth, nothing to recommend him to God because of his sinfulness. A
man may try to be virtuous through his own power, but he will never be able to
do enough on his own that can cover the debt of his sins. However, Christ died
on the cross so that man could have standing with God. When Christ died and took on
man’s lowly identity, He gave man His, so that he could be righteous in the
presence of God. Thus, in a sense, man was given the opportunity to have
Christ’s face. In the same way, at the end of Till We Have Faces, Orual looked at her reflection and saw that she
looked like Psyche, her beautiful sister who had endured many trials for the sake of Orual.
Although physical beauty loses its purpose in death, the
idea behind putting in effort to make oneself appear falsely beautiful applies
to the soul, too. For if a woman’s goal in life is to be beautiful enough to fit
a man’s ideal in attractiveness, she simply becomes another face lost in the
crowd, having no identity. Her focus is centered on the world, not on what is to come
after this world has passed away. Orual’s veil in Till We Have Faces was another form of makeup, since without her true face to remind the people of her ugliness, she was considered beautiful by
almost the entire kingdom. At the end of the tale, though, Orual forsook her
veil and, after a series of visions and arduous tasks, received the beauty of
Psyche as her own. So too, Christians were given the beauty of Christ in the
eyes of God when He died, taking man’s ugliness upon Himself.
