"Is Till We Have Faces Lewis's Best Book?" Andrew Lazo Ep. 1 LFSS Season 8

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Welcome to the c.s. lewis festival scholar series. I'm your host, david krause. The annual CS Lewis Festival takes place each fall in Petoskey, Michigan along the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan. The festival is a unique collaboration in the US of the arts, education and faith communities, drawing visitors from throughout the country. For the lineup of speakers and events for this year's festival in October, please Visit us@cslewisfestival.org as part of this growing podcast series, we're taking a look at the 2025 Lewis Festival and the theme the Faces of CS analyzing the author from new angles. We feature now two of these speakers, starting with the keynote address from Reverend Andrew Lazzo. Andrew is an internationally known speaker and writer specializing in Lewis and the Inklings. He's a frequent speaker around the US and the UK and has written on CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. Andrew has been working on a long awaited study of Til we have Faces, making groundbreaking discoveries along the way. He shares his discoveries in this podcast, including a convincing claim that Till we have Faces is Lewis best book. He wants to move the markers on how we have felt about Lewis for the last 70 years. Is this Lewis's best book? You decide.

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I better be good after all of that. Yes, I have broken the tenth Commandment. Thou shalt not covet. Ever since I heard about Petoskey, I was at the Wade center and I met Michael Ward and Sarah was there and Walter Hooper was there and Chris Mitchell and they talked about going up to Petoskey and I said, oh Lord, someday. So it's a joy to be with you all. Thank you for taking the time at the end of a long week and I hope that we'll keep you awake for the next little bit. Let me me ask a quick question. How many of you have read Till we have Faces? How many of you have not read Till we have Faces yet? There you go. How many started and couldn't finish because it was so confusing? There we go. And how many of you had the what I call the Till we have Faces whiplash? You read all of CS Lewis and then you finally turn to his last novel and you read it and you're like, what was that? Yeah, me too. I hope to clear up some of that between today and tomorrow. I hope to make a convincing claim for Till we have faces as C.S. lewis's best book. It's a bone of contention on our podcast, but we'll get to that tomorrow. But I want to do much more than that in our time together. Hope to attempt something really special. I want to try to move the markers or at least begin to do so in how we have thought about CS Lewis for the last 70 years. I want to propose a shift to the entire focus of Lewis studies and I want to start that tonight and help us to think more clearly about the whole of what C.S. lewis was about. I want to get my arms all the way around him. Pray for me now and in the hour of my death. It's a lofty aim, but during our time together I'll try to prove my points. And yes, there will be opportunities tonight and tomorrow for you to argue with me. I hope that you are preparing questions. I can't wait to take them. We'll take questions tonight after my talk. We'll have an interactive deeper dive tomorrow and I'll take any questions you have about what I've said tonight about Till we have Faces about anything related to Lewis and his friend. That's between 9:15 and 10:15 tomorrow morning we will do a live Pints with Jack podcast. I don't think we've ever gone live for a podcast, haven't we? So we're trying something new and we'll be doing that tomorrow afternoon between 1:45 and 2:45. I'm a huge CS Lewis collector. I love first editions. And Kristen, pretty soon as she saw the bank budget go down and the stacks go high, she said, one in, one out, lazo. So I have brought a number of collectible rare C.S. lewis books. They are there for sale, but also if you've never held a first edition or smelled one or whatever, they'll be there tonight afterwards and I'd be happy for you to take some home. But also I'd love for you to just have a chance to see them. I'm going to try to cover two decades worth of my own studies and as clearly as possible tonight. And I'm going to start right now. So if I'm going to do two Decades Worth, maybe I just need a shortcut. Why was CS Lewis's Till we have Faces his best book? Because he said so. In fact, here's exactly what he said about Till we have Faces in correspondence after that book came out in England in 1956 and in America in 1957, 70 years ago. To one correspondent he says, everyone says it's my best book. To another he says, I think it much my best book. But not many people agree. He says to another, I'm so glad you like Till we have Faces because so few people do. It's my Biggest flop for years. And so, of course, I think it my best book. Maybe, like me, you turn to Till we have Faces as a last resort. You've read all of his other fiction. You figure, I finally better get around to this. And it's so very strange. It is purposefully so. And I'm going to unravel some of those mysteries tonight. As David said, that's part of my doctoral dissertation that I'm currently writing. And then what I hope to do is to take that doctoral dissertation within about a year, year and a half, and turn that into the defining critical book on CS Lewis, until we have Faces. And I hope to have that come out by the 70th anniversary of the American publication. So Lewis says it's far and away my best book. This is his last quote, far and away my best book. But it has, with the critics and the public, been my one great failure. An absolute flop. There's that word again. No one seems to have the slightest idea what I'm getting at, but I do. Now let's examine this statement by C.S. lewis. He says Till we have Faces is his best book. He says it repeatedly. There are, as I can see them, only four possibilities. Maybe he was lying. Doesn't sound like him to me, though. Does it to you? Maybe he was exaggerating. Right. Everybody else doesn't like it. So I think it's my best book. That quote seems a little reactionary, but the others seem to be categorical, historical. Far and away my best book. Much my best book. Maybe he's exaggerating its importance. I don't know. I think that he probably at the end of his life, he died in 1963, within an hour of John F. Kennedy. He writes the book in 1955. It comes out in 56, 57. He's at the height of his powers. He's just finished Narnia. He knows what he's about. He's just been invited to a new professorship at Cambridge that they created for him. I don't think that he's exaggerating. The other possibility, he's lying. He's exaggerating. Maybe he's a bad literary critic. I don't know that that holds water. And so I think the only other possibility is that it was his best book. But I have an idea. In fact, I think this book, not only Lewis's best, but also the book that defines what Lewis was all about in the entirety of his writing life before his conversion to Christianity as much as afterwards. And so I'm going to give you the keys that I've discovered in years of study, decades of study of this book. Here are the keys to understanding what C.S. lewis was about. I think that this is a modernist novel. Where's Suzanne? There she is. Great. I'm going to make my case. Whatever good thoughts you have to send to me, please do. By the way, I've left, for the interest of time, a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor. But I'll have that tomorrow during our diving deeper into Till we have Faces. I will take your questions, but I also have some material that I had to skip over necessarily, so you don't get to see any beautiful pictures by Marcel Duchamp or Piet Mondrian today, but maybe tomorrow it's a modernist novel by definition. I'll go a little bit into that. I also think that it is Lewis's most holistic book. I think that you can find until we have Faces, every other book, essay, poem, letter that he ever wrote. In fact, David helped me find a quote, until we have Faces, that comes from letters to Malcolm, chiefly on prayer. Here's the problem. Till we have Faces was published in 1956. Letters to Malcolm wasn't published until 1964. Books that Lewis hadn't written yet are in Till we have Faces. I've got some proof for you tonight. In addition to being a modernist novel, his most coherent or holistic book, I think that it is Lewis's best autobiography. And we will look tonight at the autobiographical arc that spans all of Lewis's writing. And I also need to borrow for this last point, a phrase from his dear friend, J.R.R. tolkien. In his essay on fairy stories. Tolkien talks about fairy stories. How does every fairy story begin, once upon a time. And how's it end? Happily ever after. Right. Tolkien calls happily ever after eucatastrophe, meaning a good catastrophe, a sudden surprise, happy ending. And he says Tolkien does. In this kind of mythopaic manifesto that Lewis participated in and agreed with. He says that when we find a happy ending to a story, it serves as a kind of evangelium, meaning literally just good message. You can see that word angel, right? An evangelist is somebody who is a messenger with something good. Okay, So I think that this is Lewis's clearest declaration of the Good News. In fact, I'll be so bold as to say it's his clearest evocation of the Gospel. Until we have Faces, Well, I've set myself a high bar. I better be able to prove it. So let me see what I can do. But as we look at what's happening in this maddening, magnificent novel. Perhaps we'd better follow Lewis's late advice from the Four Loves. Lewis says in that book, published in 1960, the human mind is generally far more eager to prevent praise and dispraise than to describe and define. Not to put too fine a point on it, and maybe you will give me a moment of pastoral privilege, but can you imagine what our country would look like last week and next week if we were more eager to describe and define what we mean rather than praise or dispraise? What do you mean by fill in the blank for whatever current issue is so troubling? Tell me about despair, Mary Oliver says, and I will tell you mine. Lewis's great gift is that he helps us not to praise or dispraise, but to describe and define. And so as I talk about CS Lewis's Till we have Faces being his best book, let me describe and define what I mean. And to do so, I am going to quote again from Jack Lewis, using two very related images. In the beginning of his preface to Paradise Lost from 1942, Lewis starts out his discussion of Milton's great epic by defining what an epic is. And in the very first, on the very first page, he says, the first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral, is to know what it is, what it was intended to do, and how it is meant to be used. And so as I talk about tiliad faces, that's what I intend to do. I intend to tell you what it is, what it was intended to do and how it was meant to be used. And maybe Suzanne will forgive me for not addressing today in this talk the intentional fallacy. We can get to that later. What Till we have Faces is, is, according to the subtitle on the very cover of the book, a myth retold. Any of you who haven't read it, haven't reread it, haven't finished reading it, or haven't made it to the note at the end, read the note first. It gives a summary of the Cupid and Psyche myth. That's the myth that is retold. And then Lewis talks about his process writing that story. So he summarizes the myth and he says what changes he made and said what he was doing about it. That really should be the forward I give apologies for on behalf of the publishers who put it in the wrong place. It's a myth retold. The lead character is the older is Orwell, and she's the older sister of Psyche. And Psyche is one of the leading characters. And so this is by very nature a psychological novel. And this sort of thing was all the rage when Lewis and Tolkien were writing. Not unusual that he should write something of a psychological novel. And you certainly see Orwell's psychological journey. It is in addition to that, a feminist novel. Lewis says, I believe I have done what no other writer in English literature has done before me. I believe I have spoken for the length of the book through the mouth of an ugly woman. In fact, he passed around the manuscript to his women friends and said, I'm very anxious to make sure that no masculine note intrudes. He's writing through the mouth of a woman. He's collaborating with his future wife to make sure that he has that feminine voice down. And most of my female readers of Tilia Faces assure me that he does a fairly good job, especially from a guy born in Belfast in 1898 and raised in the very male confines of Oxford. It is also, as I've mentioned, a modernist novel. So if I told you that we are supposed to describe and define, you've probably got a question for me about this last point. What's the question? What do you mean by British literary modernism? I was hoping you would ask that. Thank you. This is what I did my master's degree in at Rice University. Suzanne did her undergraduate there. We have some colleagues that we share. Wonderful people. Roughly, please. This is for. Not for the technicians. So roughly. British literary modernism runs around 1900 to around the 1950s. It is a sort of movement of movements. It's not monolithic. There are lots of different movements in modernism. For example, Futurism, Imagism, Expressionism, Cubism, Absurdism, Surrealism, Amigism, imaginism, Symbolism and vorticism. Modernism is a movement of movements. It's also a movement of manifestos. Any little coterie of 10 or 20 or 30 people think the Bloomsbury Group, right? Any group writing their kind of. This is what we believe in in that age, were a piece of modernism. Early on in British literary modernism, you had the war poet, Siegfried, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Dulce at Decorist, Mori, all of these war poets. And of course, World War I is a key element of modernism, 1914 to 1918, a lot of these poets went in very idealistic and came out desperately shattered. Lewis was in the same war, writing the same poetry. In one of his poems published in 1919, he says, at the end of one, our throats can bark for slaughter, cannot sing in Fact, sneakily, when I taught modernism at Rice University for the final exam, I set one of Lewis's war poems, but I didn't tell them who wrote it. And I said, examine this as you. You know, as a piece of modernist literature. And they saw everything that they saw in the rest of the war poets. Another element of British literary modernism are its founders are its key canonical figures. William Butler Yates, T.S. eliot, Virginia Woolf. Supremely, Ezra Pound is American, I'll grant you, but he had such a hand in helping Elliot, who is also American but lives in England, and in helping him write the kind of canonical poem, the Wasteland, that I include him here because he was so influential. W.H. auden, a student of Tolkien's, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, D.H. lawrence, Eric Blair. Does that name mean anything to you? George Orwell had correspondence with CS Lewis. These are some of the canonical writers that make up modernism. And so the ethos of modernism. And I discovered this when I was doing my master's in British literary modernism, and my advisor said, you are not allowed to read any more of Lewis and his ilk. You have to just read the modernists, and you have to read about the modernists. So I did. I put the books away and I read all about modernism, and I found out that they were talking about Lewis and. And Tolkien at the turn of the century in response to the Industrial Revolution and Darwin and loads of other things. There's this sense of optimism in the future and this sense of progress. And people are streaming into the cities. The steam engine is bringing people together fast. The world is too much with us in 1914-1918 is World War I. And I don't believe that we have begun to overcome the effects of World War I. We are still living in its shadows. It had that great an effect, I believe, on Western culture. It led to a kind of fragmentation. It wasn't just the bombs blowing up and blowing up, people and buildings blowing up. There was a fragmentation of the whole ethos of the society. And that's characteristic of modernism. And they often write in light of that fragmentation and despair. That's why I have a picture in my slides that I set aside of Duchamp with the nude descending the staircase and all kind of in fragmentism. Right. Shatter all of the figures. And that led to a great deal of despair. This is characteristic on British literary modernism. How am I doing, Professor Shumway? Am I getting close? Okay, I got a thumbs up. I'm going to keep going. Another great interest of the modernist is language. Finnegan's Wake and James Joyce experimenting with language over on the other side of the ocean. Edith Stein doing some of the same. There are four fascinated by mythology because anthropology starts around then and anthropology leads to the study of the ancients or the primitive cultures and the stories that they tell. And so that's part of why so many modernists talk so well about mythology. James Joyce's Ulysses, the Sibyls in Eliot. It goes on and on. They're also very interested in the city. Leopold Bloom walking around Dublin. Clarissa Dalloway walking around London looking for flowers. Right. And so this is part of what's going on. Let me offer you just a thought. Oh, I'll do more of this tomorrow. But Lewis and I include his friend. Tolkien were modernists by every measure on the screen. They wrote in the same time period. They were a movement, the Inklings. They had their own manifesto on fairy stories. They were war poets. Tolkien was inspired to start writing the Lord of the Rings in the trenches of the battle of the Somme. He's in the trenches in 1916 in the Somme, as he says. My job as a poet is to write for God and truth, to kindle a new light in the world, or what is much the same thing, to rekindle an old light. He's doing the same things. These are war poets. John Garth has done excellent work on Tolkien and the war. William Butler Yeats, Lewis met in the 1920s and fellow inkling Charles Williams was a member of the Second Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a magic working society, and Yeats was a member. There's a picture of inkling Charles Williams and W.B. yeats together. Lewis and T.S. eliot worked together at the end of their lives. Auden, as I mentioned, was a student of Tolkien's. There are all kinds of overlap and they also were dealing with progress and war and fragmentation, especially until we have faces and despair. Don't you recall some of that despair of Orwell in that book? She's also interested in language. She's writing in Greek. It's a myth retold. And Orwell renovates the city of Gloam. And not to put too fine a point on this, but what's the last book of the Lord of the Rings? The Return of the King. Who's the king? Aragorn. And where does he return? The white city of Gondor. These were modernists. That's just the thumbnail. So I've made the case that it's a modernist novel. Now let me talk about it being Lewis's Most holistic book, Remember the questions, what it is, what it is intended to do. That's where we're moving on to and how it is meant to be used. So what did Lewis intend to do with Till we have Faces? Well, fascinatingly, Carl F.H. henry, the American theologian, the founder of Christianity Today, apparently we don't have a copy of his letter wrote to C.S. lewis and asked Lewis to write evidently theological articles for Christianity Today. It's guesswork. We don't know exactly. Lewis, of course, was a famous defender of the faith. Faith wrote great apologetic works such as the Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, the Miracles did all of this in the 50s. But in the mid-50s, when Lewis, a few months after finishing Till we have Faces, is approached by Henry, he writes back to Dr. Henry and says, I'm sorry, my thought and talent now flow in different, though I think not less Christian channels. And I do not think I am at all likely to write more directly theological pieces. The emphasis, the underlining is in Lewis's letter. If I am now good for anything, it is for catching the reader unawares through fiction and symbol. My wife will say more about this when she talks about Narnia tomorrow. I have done what I could in the way of frontal attacks, but I now feel quite sure those days are over. Not less Christian, his fictional symbolical work. What he means is Narnia until we have faces, not directly theological pieces. So what kind of theology is Lewis going to write? Indirect theology. Which is exactly what we find. He is catching the reader unawares. There's your Till we have Faces. Whiplash through fiction and symbol. He's done what he could in the way of frontal attacks. See how he puts it in battle language? Now he's using fifth column attacks or flanking attacks. But he's not directly defending the faith as he did with apologetics. He's returning to his native voice, and that is a voice that speaks through fiction and symbol. Far and away, his best book would embody this approach far better than his other works. What other book does this very thing so well as Till we have Faces? None should be the answer. How did it all start for me? Well, in 2006, I was invited to give a two week course on two of Lewis's books. It was a summer seminar and I was doing it for college credit. They spent two weeks with me for hours every day, and then they wrote me papers and like a professor normally does, at least a professor as lazy as me, I had written the prospectus and then I got on the plane and I Figured, oh, I better have the class come. That I come up with. And so as I'm rereading Till we have Faces, on the way to teach it along with Lewis's book, the Four Loves, I realized that Lewis is talking about all four of the loves until we have Faces. I wasn't sure why I picked the four loves. It was kind of instinct. But as I reread, I began to see them pop up. This is what Orwell says right at the very beginning. This is the very first page of the book, the very first paragraph, the very first sentence. I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have no husband. That's the love. Eros. I have no child. That's the love Storge. Nor hardly a friend. Philia. Friendship. Love through whom the gods of love can hurt me. That's agape. Or agape. All four of the loves in one sentence. I was bowled over. I thought, surely that's an accident. And then 22 pages later I found this. Orwell says I wanted to be a wife so that I could have been Psyche's real mother. That's Eros romantic love. I wanted to be a. Or I'm sorry, that's storgi. I wanted to be her real mother. That's familial affection. I wanted to be a boy so she could be in love with me. That's Eros romantic love. I wanted her to be my full sister instead of my half sister Philia. Friendship. I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich. The four loves are right there. And in fact, in those very strange vision scenes at the end, it's a denouement of all the times that she should have loved. Redival, Ansett, the Fox, Bardia, even Pooby. Certainly Psyche. And one by one you see how she has thwarted all four of those loves. But love has not turned from her. Oh my gosh, it was all there. Then I realized I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of God's free being. Free from fear. For all of these reasons, I'll say to the gods what nobody else will say. She talks about not being afraid of things. And I've got lists of all the things in the book that she's afraid of. In fact, she's lying throughout the whole book. She admits it. People don't like it when I say that she was lying. They're like, oh no, she was just self deceived. She was that. But she's also very deliberately lying to us all the way through book one. It's not just self deception. She knows she's doing it. Don't believe me? I got a list of 50 of them. She's lying and she admits it. On the first page of book two, this is what she says. Since I cannot mend my book, I must add to it. To leave it as it was would be to die perjured. What are you doing? When you commit perjury, you are lying to a judge. And at the beginning she says there is no judge between gods and men. And at the end she is answered by the great God of love, who is the judge between gods and men. If you've read the book, you remember the scene. She's lying to us. And so just like Screwtape, in order to get any spiritual insight that is reliable, you have to take what she says and turn it right side up, just like we did with Screwtape. And I'm like, oh, this book is the four loves. This book is screw type. I wonder what else. More in a minute about these things. It's also the Great Divorce and I'll prove it to you in just a moment. Well, if it's all three of those books, anybody who has read with any kind of width in CS Lewis knows that if he has an idea somewhere and it comes up in a couple of other places, what's likely to. What are we likely to find? We're likely to find that he talks about that idea everywhere. Lewis is one of the most thematically unified writers that I've ever met. If he talks about a theme, it's going to pop up everywhere. Everywhere. So this is why I believe that Lewis is one of the most. That this book is one of Lewis's most holistic. Everything that Lewis writes is, until we have faces, I'll prove you a little bit and then we'll do the lion's share of that work tomorrow during the podcast at 1:45. I left a lot of the proof out, so please come back. Here's what Lewis's best friend Owen Barfield said about him and this support the point. Somehow what C.S. lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything. This is his exact contemporary, the wisest and best of his unofficial teachers saying, testifying to that holistic unity in all of Lewis's work. It's an astounding claim and I'm about to offer some support for it. We can assume that if this is one of the things that Lewis does supremely well, Till we have Faces would be the best example of this. And it is. Watch this. You ready? These are the ways that Lewis is so holistic. There are direct quotes of other books until we have Faces. I'm going to give you an example of a book before Till we have Faces and a poem after tonight. The tropes and themes popular in Lewis are littered throughout Till we have Faces. Although David believes, my co host believes that the Great Divorce is Lewis's best book for the last couple of years. I keep getting texts from him. Oh, here's how Tully of Faces is really good. And here's how the quotes and oh, did you notice this? And he's been done more work on Tuiya faces in the last couple of years than I have. These tropes and themes are repeated everywhere. They include a commitment to language. Lewis is always concerned about language, a commitment to clarity. Lewis is trying to make things clear. Here's a PhD exam question for you that Jerry Root would be glad if I asked you the other Jerry Root, sorry. How many of you read the Oxford History of English literature in the 16th century, excluding dramatic. Yeah, sort of. Yes, it's a fun ride. And that by the way, is where the, where the name Puddle Glum comes from. Yeah, fantastic stuff. He's committed to language. He's committed to clarity. Right. And if you've really read that book, I bet you you went and downloaded or got a copy of some of some of these obscure Scots poets or whatever. He talks so enthusiastically about other literature that you want to go to and read it. I hope I have the same effect with him. So language, clarity. I've already talked with you about love. Then in addition to direct quotes, repeated tropes and themes, including these three, there are larger patterns in his works. And that's where I want to move the markers. That's where I want to propose a unified field theory of C.S. lewis. It's a mad wish. I hope I can do it. We'll see. You can decide. Here is what Pam. Remember Pam, the mother who had the child when she gets in the great. You've read the Great Divorce. When Pam gets up in the Great Divorce, she wants to meet her son Michael, and she's met by her brother and she's deeply disappointed and she can't wait to do whatever she can to get through whatever she has to go through in order to meet her son. And then when her brother says, you can't get to him like that, here's what he says, she says, I don't believe In a God who keeps a mother and son apart. I believe in a God of love. No one had a right to come between me and my son. Not even God. Tell him that to his face. I want my boy. And I mean to have him. He's mine. Do you understand? Mine. Mine. Mine forever and ever. They say the greatest love in the world is a mother's love. But she would drag her boy from heaven back to hell. Tell me, what part of that is love? That's not love. That's pride. That's selfishness. It's the very opposite of love. That's 1946. Here's what Psyche says. She was mine. Mine. Don't. Do you not know what the word mine means? But in fact, the gods of love are the only ones who know how to possess a soul without overrunning a soul. You're thieves, seducers. That's my wrong. I'll not complain that you're blood drinkers and man eating. I'm past that. Enough. Says the judge and God of love. Clear Echo. Okay, this is nine years later. How about five years in the future? In fact, let me back that off. As Joy Davidman is dying, C.S. lewis writes her a poem. He says to Joy, all this is flashy rhetoric about loving you. I never had a selfless thought since I was born. I am mercenary and self seeking through and through. I want God, you all friends merely to serve my turn. Peace, reassurance, pleasure are the goals I seek. I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin. I talk of love. A scholar's parrot may talk Greek, but self imprisoned always end where I begin. Only he says to his dying wife, Only that now you have taught me. But how late my lack I see the chasm and everything you are was making my heart into a bridge by which I might get back from exile and grow man. But now the bridge is breaking. For this I bless you. As the ruin falls, the pains you give me are more precious than all other gains. 1960. And if you know that wonderful quote in the four loves. To love it all is to be vulnerable. If you don't want your heart to be wrung and possibly broken, lock it away safe in a casket of your selfishness. The only place that we can be free from the dangers and perturbations of love is hell. I never had a selfless thought since I was born. And finally, when she at last comes to the senses near the end of her life, near the end of the book, Orwell says of Psyche, I never wished you well, Never had one selfless thought of you. I was a craver. I taught her as men teach a parrot to say lies of the poet says the fox unguts a false image. Orwell says I write in the Greek as my old master taught it too me five years earlier. You can find not as many direct quotes but example after example after example where what Lewis is concerned about in all of his other works rings clearly until we have Faces. And that's part of why it's his best book. It should do that. I can't do this. So we'll do this tomorrow. Sorry. So a modernist novel. I hope I've at least made a case. A holistic book. Have I made a case? Okay, I'm going to argue that this is CS Lewis's best autobiography and then I'll get to his clearest act of Avon evangelism. This is where I started with thinking about Lewis's biography. I was reading the Cambridge Companion to C.S. lewis, Peter Skuckle for many years a professor at of at Hope College and of blessed memory. He just died I think in the last year. Got a wonderful chance to meet him once wrote the first book of book length study of Till we have Faces and a brilliant and faithful man. And then he was invited to give the chapter write the chapter for the Cambridge Companion to C.S. lewis. And he wrote the chapter until we have Faces because I hadn't written my book yet, for pity's sake. And here's what he said. And I nodded along as I read it. Nearly all of Lewis's other stories are third person accounts with the narrator providing a reliable point of view to orient the reader. And I'm nodding along. He's contrasting that with Orwell, who is first person and unreliable. And I vowed yes, of course, that's wait. Well, wait, wait. So I began to go to my books. Lewis wrote three published spiritual autobiographies. You know, one probably surprised by Joy, you may have written that. Read that very difficult allegorical apology for Faith, Reason and Romanticism, the Pilgrim's regress. And in 2013 I discovered at the archive and transcribed and published a work called Early Prose Joy. Lewis wrote a spiritual autobiography right after his conversion to theism, but before his conversion to Christianity. And I was the first one to transcribe it out of my hand. I didn't discover it. Laura Stanifer, the archivist, had it neatly labeled and right there. But I was the one to publish that. Those are three published spiritual autobiographies. Early Prose Joy. There's also in Don King's collection of poems an autobiographical poetical scrap. We've got about a hundred lines of a poem called I Will Write down the Portion I Recall, and some of it overlaps with Surprise by Joy. You know of Pilgrim's regress, 1932, Surprise by Joy, written between 1948 and 1955. What you don't know, probably, unless you've dug deeply, is that when he was 18 years old, he wrote a poem called Joy, where he talks about the quest for joy. All of these are about Zenzukt, longing, having and wanting, building the temple though the God has flown him, searching for the pang of joy and never being able to find it. And that's his life story in those three published accounts. The same theme runs through Joy in his book Spirits in bondage, published in 1919. I quoted you a bit this evening. There are also poems that talk about that pang of longing in 1927. The story of Dimer can absolutely be read as a story of somebody seeking joy and never finding it. It seems to be autobiographical as well. In 1938-1943, Lewis injects into the Ransom trilogy. Lewis says, I was trudging along to meet Ransom in his cottage, right? And he says, I've changed all of the names here, which makes me really confused because God says my name is Ransom too. But then he changed Ransom. Never mind. But Lewis, the false unreliable narrator, not only injects himself into the science fiction trilogy, he invents a Latin medieval authority named Natvilsius, which is just himself. He's quoting himself. He's eminently unreliable and always self referential. In the Chronicles of Narnia, at one point, the narrator, Lewis, speaks to Lucy. He talks as if he's writing in the first person. It's happening. We have Till we have Faces, which I'll argue is Lewis's most successful autobiography because he's no longer writing about Joy. You know what he's writing about? I'll tell you in a minute. And then his last autobiography, I'll argue, is a grief observed because of the corner that he turns until we have Faces. Now, what you have is fictional, poetical, creative and autobiographical literature spanning the course of his adult life, trying to get that story that was getting at him. So what was that story? Well, at the beginning of Surprised by Joy, written perhaps in 1948, he says on the very first page, how far the story matters to anyone but myself depends on the degree to which others have experienced what I call joy. There's so much more at stake here. I want to go back to this claim he's talking about writing about Joy. And that's what he does throughout the course of Surprised by Joy. Yes, but I have a question for you. What if he was wrong? He was wrong. Let me show you why. On the last page of Surprised by Joy, he starts it in 1948. Joy Davidman starts corresponding with him in 1949. Joy Davidman begins writing love sonnets to C.S. lewis in 1949 and stops writing love sonnets to him in 1954. And in the spring of 1955, in March, Lewis and Joy Davidman begin collaborating until we have Faces. A month later, Lewis sends off Surprised by Joy to the publisher, mails off the manuscript. Joy Davidman not only typed it up, but was one of the experts on Till we have Faces or I'm sorry, on Surprised by Joy and speaks to the publisher about it. And here's what he says on the last page. What in conclusion of Joy. I know now that that experience had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as. Read it with me. A pointer to something other and outer. Lewis doesn't mince words. He doesn't use them casually, now does he? Watch this. In 1958, he gives a definition of love in the four talks on love that become the four loves. 55. Joy serves only as a pointer to something other and outer, and it never had the kind of importance that I once assigned it. Joy serves only as a pointer to something other and outer. And here's C.S. lewis's definition of love. Love is where we go out of ourself, towards the other. The same words. And isn't that a great definition of love? Not me. Yes, you. Joy served only as a pointer to love. We've gotten it wrong for 70 years and more. Lewis didn't give a fiddler's fig about Joy, except that Joy pointed towards love. Joy, the ache, the longing was the thing that he most needed. When do those stabs of Joy start? Yes, as a child, but also after his mother dies. Joy is the description of the lack of love. And so my argument tonight, and moving forward, is that love is the underlying, overarching theme in all of C.S. lewis's works. So what changes in 1955 that he should start thinking about love in this way? I'll show you what changes. Chad Walsh, who first encouraged Joy Davidman to write to C.S. lewis, to whom the Four Loves is dedicated, took this picture with his family in the back, Joy's boys in the front, Lewis looking very uncomfortable, and Joy looking rather pretty there in the kiln's garden. And according to the Walshes, and according to Lewis's brother Warny in his diaries, according to the oral history accounts from other friends, and according to a personal conversation I had with the priest that C.S. lewis sat next to at college from 1955 until he retired in 1963, Bishop Simon, Barrington Ward, they all said essentially the same thing. Beginning in the summer of 1955, which is when I believe this picture was taken. Lewis brightened considerably when joy came in the room. Marriage was in the air, says another. Everyone could see what was going to happen. Everyone except maybe C.S. lewis. Don't worry, he came around to understand Till we have Faces, we need to understand it as a modernist novel, his most holistic book and his best autobiography. Because his story was not about longing. His story was about love. And he writes it with the woman with whom he had fallen in love, who was already writing him love sonnets. Those sonnets stop when they begin writing, till we have faces together. It's when autobiography intersects with his own biography. And that's the story of love. So remember all of our four loves from the four loves, Eros and Philia and Agape, right? This is that story. Until we have faces. And this is the story Lewis has been trying to get at all of his life. Not emptiness, but fulfillment. Longing. Longing to be loved and to love in return. And that's what happens to him. I gave you that quote. I gave you this quote as well. Here you go. I parsed it out now. Real mother, be in love with me. Full sister, set her free and make her rich. Those four loves are shot through till we have faces. It's what Lewis most cared about. That's what it is. That's what it was meant to do. Meant to do. So how is it to be used? Like everything Lewis did, he meant to use language and story to help his readers see clearly anything he wrote about, especially the most important thing in all the world, the love of God. And so here is the unified field Theory of C.S. lewis. Mythos. Story at Logos. Word right, leading to Claritas. Clarity, leading to caritas. Charity. Caring. If you've read your King James Version of 1 Corinthians 13, it's not love is patient. Love is kind. What is it? Charity is patient. Charity is kind. Coming from the Latin word caritas, which means caring. Not dumping your stuff off at the goodwill. Caring with no thought of return. That's what charity has devolved to. But this is what Lewis is about. He uses story and language in order to help Us see things clearly. And the thing that he most wants us to see clearly is the love of God. Here's the good news. The Evangelium. Until we have faces. Psyche's name means soul, and she is the bride of the God of love, the God of the mountain, who is in Gloam, Eros, or Cupid, who himself is the son of the goddess of love, Anget, Aphrodite, Venus, or, not to put too fine a point on it, Perelandra. And so the human soul is the bride of the bridegroom, who is the son of love and himself the God of love, which sounds an awful lot like what I talk about every single Sunday, dressed just like this, the bride of Christ and Christ the bridegroom, the God of love, and the son of the God of love, the human soul married to the divine. This is the story Lewis was telling. This is what he was all about. There's it a little bit more plainly, but you get the idea. So let me close with the deep secret and let me tell you something that nobody knows. These are the last words. The last two words of book one are the words no answer. Why would the gods. Why would the gods not answer us unless they have no answer? Six times Lewis refers to the words no answer. As a good literature scholar, if he's going to refer to the last two words of book one, we would do well to look at the first two words of book one. And the first two words of book one are Orwell appropriating the holy name of God that he declares to Moses in Exodus 3:14. Orwell's first two words Are I am. And those words I am, occur 66 times through the course of the book. Last two words of book one, no answer. First two words of book one, I am. What's the point of book One? Put them together, friends. I am no answer. Orwell finds through the course of book one where she's lying to us, that she is no answer. And what happens between book one and book two is exactly what happens in Checkmate. In Surprised by Joy, she has a theistic conversion. She begins to speak to the gods. Kindly Lord, she calls him. Good gods, she calls them. She realizes that she is no answer, so she goes in search of an answer. As Alistair McGrath and I have discussed Lewis's most successful autobiography, he writes with the woman that he's falling in love with as he understands that love is what it's all about in this world. And so here's what happens. Oh, I can't wait to show you this. And I'm almost done. Don't worry. I ended my last, my first book with the words no answer. There it is again for the last time. I know now, Lord. Anybody know enough Greek? She's writing in classical Greek to know how to translate, Lord. Kyrios, Kyrie eleison. I know now. Kyrios according to the New Testament. Who is Kyrios? It's Christ, the son of the God of love, who himself is the God of love. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You love yourself are 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. Long did I hate you. Long did I fear you I might. And the book ends with that Em dash. See it? And then Arnom comes along. I, Arnom, priest of Aphrodite, saved this role from the markings after the word might we think the Queen's head must have fallen forward on them as she died. And we cannot read them. I know what she wrote, and so do you. Long did I hate you. There's no ambivalence to that. Long did I fear you. And we know that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Fear is a very helpful ambivalent feeling. Look at the two word pattern. Long did I hate you. Long did I fear you. What must she have written? I might love you. Why does her head fall forward? Lewis and Joy are tired of writing a book or while gets just sick enough to die. Let me ask you it another way. What is she writing in ink? And she writes the words love you. And she realizes that all of her life has been a lie and that the gods have not been cruel. The gods have been loving her. Even her own troubles with Psyche, even her own pains were allowed to pay for the sufferings of Psyche. Another bore nearly the anguish. Talk about the gospel, right? And she looks at those words and why does she bow her head? Because that's how you worship in the ancient world. She bows her head to the God of love. And now what's printed on her forehead you love. Which is the story Lewis was trying to get to and trying to tell us all of his life. And now she and those of us who will allow ourselves to be loved by God have our faces. There it is. What do you think?

A

Thank you, Andrew, for helping to move the markers on how we have felt about C.S. lewis. You have indeed laid out a convincing argument that Till we have Faces, perhaps is Lewis's best book. However, we'll let our listeners decide for the lineup of speakers and events for this year's festival Festival in October, Please Visit us@cs LewisFestival.org this entire podcast has been made possible by the Lewis Festival in Petoskey, Michigan and its many generous sponsors. I'd like to thank the festival as well as podcast producer Zach Smith of Hands Media.