Orual’s Free Speech

An Explanation of Parrhesia from Till We Have Faces

You have not experienced C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces until you have read it in the original Attic Greek. Bizarrely, most readers and even most scholars treat Till We Have Faces as if it is a work of English-language fiction—some novelistic retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of the ugly stepsister. But Lewis himself made clear that he was the translator, not the author, of Till We Have Faces (which is not a novel at all, but rather a forensic oration written to be delivered before a heavenly court). Orual, virgin queen of Glome, originally wrote her charge against the gods in the ancient Greek of roughly the fourth century B.C.—the language of Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Aristotle’s Rhetoric

Sadly, however, the original Greek of Till We Have Faces has been lost, and only Lewis’ faulty English translation survives. Thus, to understand fully any passage in Till We Have Faces, the modern English-speaking reader must first back-translate. 

Consider, for instance, the speech’s opening lines. In just a few sentences, this exordium conveys a strong sense both of Orual’s character and of her place within the Ancient Greek literary canon. 

“I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have no husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. . . . Being, for all these reasons, free from fear, I will write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write. I will accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain. That is, I will tell all he has done to me from the very beginning, as if I were making my complaint of him before a judge. But there is no judge between gods and men, and the god of the mountain will not answer me. Terrors and plagues are not an answer. I write in Greek as my old master taught it to me. It may some day happen that a traveller from the Greeklands will again lodge in this palace and read the book. Then he will talk of it among the Greeks, where there is great freedom of speech even about the gods themselves. Perhaps their wise men will know whether my complaint is right or whether the god could have defended himself if he had made an answer.”

In this short essay, I lack both the time and the ability to consider all the ways that the novel’s original Greekness ought to shape interpretations of Till We Have Faces. I will largely limit myself to examining these opening lines (quoted above). But note that Orual stresses the Greekness of Till We Have Faces throughout her oration. “In Greek” and similar phrases appear repeatedly, as Orual often tells her expected reader—some future “traveller from the Greeklands”—which parts of the dialogue were spoken in Greek and which in the native language of Glome. A manuscript colophon at the work’s end states that local priests preserved Orual’s book in their temple library until a “stranger” from Greece finally arrived to take it away. 

Elsewhere, Orual jokes about an author who wrote a history of Glome “twice, in Greek and in our own tongue” but whose knowledge of the latter language was so weak that the non-Greek version was “often laughable and most so where he thought it most eloquent.” Surely, when Lewis translated this section, he had Till We Have Faces in view, for Lewis’ work functions like that Glomish history: written poorly in his own language, English, but far clearer if one could just get their hands on the original Greek. Lewis likely also alludes to the famous medieval manuscript “The Red Book of Westmark” here—for Lewis’ close friend and colleague, J.R.R. Tolkien, translated all his Middle-Earth books and their rambling appendices from texts in Sindarin and other forgotten tongues out of this now-lost manuscript. 

Let us focus, however, on Till We Have Faces exordium (quoted above)—especially, on just a single phrase in that opening, on Orual’s captatio benevolentiae. Orual flatters her expected reader and states there that she hopes her charge against the gods will be discussed “among the Greeks, where there is great freedom of speech even about the gods themselves.” In Glome, in contrast, Orual herself—as a bitter, aged, childless queen—can write a book “free from fear,” but no one else in the realm possesses that liberty.

Hardly surprising that the commoners of Glome were afraid. Even if they did not worry about divine retribution, they understandably feared Orual herself—who was no great defender of speech rights. More than once in her oration, Orual threatens to have people’s tongues cut out for speech that offends her. And, although Orual never carried out these torture threats, her father—the old tyrant—evidently did. Glome was no land of liberty.

According to Orual, however, the far-off Greeks can speak about gods and men frankly, for they have “great freedom of speech.” This is striking, as Lewis would have known, for there is only one ancient Greek word that could be translated into English as “freedom of speech.” The original Greek is lost. But Orual must have written that the Greeks possess great parrhesia.

Parrhesia, to some fourth-century Greek stranger, would refer to the privilege of a citizen to speak openly as they wish without fear of reprisal. In Plato’s Republic, for instance, Socrates stresses that democratic people claim at least to be “free” with parrhesia and the license “to act how they wish” (557b). Socrates—executed in the end by the Athenian demagogues—did not particularly believe this claim of freedom, but he recognized that it was part of democratic man’s self-serving official ideology. 

Regardless, parrhesia was not limited to citizens in a polis. Often, it meant the freedom that poets and philosophers had to rebuke tyrants and emperors. Thus, Liddell and Short’s dictionary gives “frankness” and “outspokenness” as synonyms. For Aristotle, parrhesia towards fellow humans was the mark of the “great-souled” man, the paragon of excellence in the active life, who does not fear the crowd and cares “for the truth more than for reputation” (Nicomachean Ethics 1124b29). More negatively, though, the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws (908d) cautions that parrhesia “about the gods and about sacrifices and oaths” is the behavior of an impious person whom the city’s Nocturnal Council must correct or imprison.

C.S. Lewis may have thought of some or all of these examples when he translated Orual’s charge. After all, Lewis was supremely well-read in Greek philosophy, took a first in Greats, and only became an English professor when no job offers in Classics appeared. But Lewis likely also had a specific Christian intertext in mind. Parrhesia and its cognates occur dozens of times in the New Testament, usually to characterize the boldness and plainness that marked the preaching of Christ and his apostles. Peter and John, for instance, demonstrate parrhesia (Acts: 4:11, 4:29, 4:31) when they proclaim before the Sanhedrin that no threat of punishment will keep them silent about the name of Christ for “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” The apostles were great-souled men. 

Orual, however, does not merely want the freedom to defy men. The gods, for Orual, are the worst tyrants. She wants to present her charge as a plaintiff against the gods themselves, confident that they will have to answer her rather than just strike her down with a plague or other nemesis. That is, she wants—and at the end of her oration gets—the freedom to speak the truth before a righteous judgment seat. 

I would suggest, then, that Lewis had a different set of New Testament passages in view when he translated Till We Have Faces opening: the uses of parrhesia in the Epistle to the Hebrews. In Hebrews 4:14-16, for instance, the author of Hebrews promises that Christians have parrhesia to “come near before the throne” of God and “receive mercy,” because in Christ, we have a “high priest” who can “sympathize with our weaknesses, having been tested in all things as we are, but without sin.” Later the book, the author counsels that, by the blood of Christ, humans have parrhesia “in accessing the holy places” (Hebrews 10:19). Therefore, “do not thrown away your parrhesia,” for it will have “a great recompense” (Heb. 10:35)—just compensation in the legal sense. Parrhesia about God and atoning sacrifices is not punished; it is rewarded. 

Orual begins her oration believing she has nothing to fear from speaking freely in the gods’ courtroom because she is old, lonely, and friendless. She believes that political institutions—the arbitrary power of her barbarian monarchy, the public deliberation of Greek democracies—supply freedom of thought. But when she finally comes before that judgment, Orual discovers that the true ground of her liberty is different. There can be no freedom without the moral governance of the universe. She is free to speak because the god was her friend and advocate from the start.


Image Credit: Unsplash

Print article

Share This

Nathan Ristuccia

Nathan Ristuccia is a First Amendment attorney and the author of Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe (2018) and of Advent Lights: Five Tales of God’s Arrival (2024)")