![]() Burnless fire, brutish beauty, and devouring love-seen in this light, it is not anomalous for Lewis to combine beauty with terror. Hence one reads about an insupportably beautiful Cupid who for the very force of his beauty insists on veiling his face from Psyche, his bride hence that same God of Love is named the “Shadowbrute” by the Glomians and the Priest of Glome declares that, with respect to the gods, “the loving and the devouring are all the same thing”. ![]() In fact, no book of Lewis is so redolent with paradoxes of this dual nature than Till We Have Faces. “ took me,” says Psyche, “in his beautiful arms which seemed to burn me (though the burning did not hurt)”. ![]() Thus when Orual is “touched by an angel” in Till We Have Faces, the touch burns-but with a fire that does not incinerate (one thinks here of the burning bush in Exodus Chapter 3). The decay he notices is only an affirmation of one side of the paradox to the omission of supernatural terror, and, as Pascal says about a true paradox, geniuses touch both extremes at once. Fortunately, Lewis holds tightly to his paradox of beauty and terror. ![]()
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