Renascence

Volume 67, Issue 4, Fall 2015

Essays on Values in Literature

The Pagan Sacrament: Venus and Eros in C.S.Lewis's Till We Have Faces

The gods in C. S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces are often supposed to represent the God of Christianity, yet Lewis’s nonfiction suggests that the gods, Ungit and her son the Shadowbrute, should be understood as Venus and Eros, who represent the sex act and romantic attraction, respectively. Throughout the novel, the narrator, Orual, struggles against both sexuality and romantic attraction, and therefore against both deities. By the end of the novel, Orual has reconciled with her sister Psyche as well as with the god Eros. Although there are parallels between Orual’s final visions of Eros and Christian visions of God, the details of the novel tend to undercut the Christian typology that readers have come to expect from Lewis’s fiction.