Till we have faces covered part 4
How can we have self-knowledge, and cultivate it in the young as well, if we have faces covered? Perhaps the most poignant answer to this question lies in C. S. Lewis's final novel, Till We Have Faces. Having gone most of her life hiding her face in a white veil, Orual comes to the end of her life and finds her complaint against the gods answered in a surprising way. She assumes she knows herself and others in her life with an almost infallible knowledge. But she is shocked to find herself in a vision standing before the court of the gods, stripped of both her veil and of the speech for which she had been preparing all her life. "The complaint was the answer," Orual tells us, "To have heard myself making it was to be answered" (305).
This is that same reciprocal law that Roger Scruton says operates within the healthy human relationships where true self-knowledge is revealed in the sacred countenance of the other. "I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly," says Orual, "nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out 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?" Aside from this being one of the finest lines in English prose, Lewis is so instructive here. The metonymy of the face stands not merely for that embodied "speech" which lies at the very center of our being but for our very identity. The human face is how we are known and in the gaze of others how we know ourselves.
What of that child I observed gazing at her mother? How will this affect her social development, her own psychological well-being, or her emotional competence? "True goodness, simplicity, and kindness cannot so be hidden," says Marcus Aurelius, writing in the second century. "In the very eyes and countenance they will show themselves." And in contemplating the face of her mother, was the child not also contemplating her own being as well? And if the face conveys some knowledge of our identity, then it must also convey some knowledge of the origin from which that identity comes.
Covering the face, then, is to obscure the loudest and most communicative aspect of the image of God. It is literally an icon. If this is the cost for wearing the damn mask, then it is a heavy one indeed. For the game of peek-a-boo continues with no end in sight.
Devin O'Donnell is the author of The Age of Martha, a book on leisure and education (Classical Academic Press, 2019). He served as Research Editor of Bibliotheca and has taught literature for 15 years. He writes for the CiRCE Institute blog and is currently Headmaster of St. Abraham's Classical Christian Academy. He is a classical hack, who came up through the manhole covers of learned society to find wisdom.
This article is from Touchstone Magazine
A Journal of Mere Christianity
Touchstone is a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content, with editors and readers from each of the three great divisions of Christendom—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox.