Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and the Moral Backbone of the American Founders

 

When Marcus Tullius Cicero retreated to his villa at Tusculum in 45 B.C., he was a man in mourning. His daughter Tullia had died, the Roman Republic was collapsing into dictatorship, and his public voice—once Rome’s conscience—was being silenced. In Tusculan Disputations, Cicero turned from politics to philosophy, trying to answer a question that has haunted thinkers ever since: how can the soul find peace amid loss, injustice, and mortality? His answer, grounded in Stoicism and Roman virtue, became a handbook for enduring adversity with dignity. Eighteen centuries later, that same book helped shape a new republic across the Atlantic.

The American Founders’ Roman Education

The American founders did not just admire Cicero—they lived in his intellectual world. Latin was the bedrock of their education. They read De Officiis, De Re Publica, and Tusculan Disputations as moral training, not antiquarian study. George Washington, who lacked formal classical schooling, nevertheless absorbed Cicero’s Stoic lessons through his voracious reading and through the culture of republican virtue that the ancients infused into the colonies. Washington’s biographers record that he owned and reread the Tusculan Disputations, keeping it among his most personal books. His calm endurance during Valley Forge, his refusal of a crown, and his farewell to public life all echo Cicero’s vision of the wise man who rules himself.

John Adams, the philosopher of the Revolution, read Cicero in the original Latin. He quoted him incessantly in letters to his son and to Jefferson. Adams saw in Cicero a model of the citizen-orator—one who speaks truth to corruption and whose virtue is tested by exile and defeat. “All the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character,” Adams wrote. Jefferson agreed, calling Cicero’s writings “the most precious repository of ethics that ever was written.” Benjamin Franklin, too, drew upon the Stoic calm and self-discipline that Cicero praised; his Poor Richard’s Almanack distilled ancient maxims into a distinctly American vernacular.

Philosophy for a Republic

The Tusculan Disputations are structured as five dialogues, each exploring how philosophy can heal the soul: overcoming the fear of death, bearing pain, moderating grief, mastering passion, and cultivating virtue. Cicero argues that happiness depends on the soul’s independence from fortune. The wise man does not deny pain or injustice; he transcends them through reason and moral habit. Virtue, not pleasure or wealth, is the only true good.

These ideas became the ethical grammar of the founders. In a world without kings, they needed an inner monarchy—a self-governing conscience. Cicero’s insistence that liberty depends on virtue provided the philosophical foundation for republican government. As Washington put it in his Farewell Address, “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” That sentiment is lifted almost directly from Cicero’s moral writings.

The Tusculans also taught the founders a disciplined approach to emotion. Cicero, mourning his daughter, reasoned that grief must be tamed, not indulged. “The wise man,” he wrote, “will not be broken by sorrow.” Washington’s stoic reserve—the restraint that baffled and impressed his contemporaries—was not emotional vacancy but moral discipline. It was the Roman ideal transposed into the wilderness of the New World.

From Roman Virtue to American Character

The founders’ world was steeped in Roman imagery. The Senate, the Republic, the eagle, the fasces—all came from the classical vocabulary of power tempered by reason. But Cicero’s influence went deeper than symbols. His Tusculan Disputations taught that the state is only as sound as the souls who compose it. Liberty cannot survive without self-command. The book became, for the founders, a moral exercise—a way to prepare the mind for civic duty.

Adams, who often despaired of democracy’s passions, leaned on Cicero’s faith in rational discourse. Jefferson, despite his Enlightenment optimism, drew on Cicero’s belief that nature itself prescribes virtue. Even Franklin’s pragmatism—the idea that moral improvement comes through habit and self-examination—echoes Cicero’s advice that philosophy is practice, not theory.

When Washington surrendered his commission at Annapolis in 1783, he enacted a Ciceronian drama: the virtuous man relinquishing power to save the republic. Cicero had failed to save Rome; Washington succeeded, at least for a time, in embodying what Cicero imagined—the statesman guided by reason, uncorrupted by ambition, serene before fate.

Why It Still Matters

Reading Tusculan Disputations today, we feel both the distance of centuries and the immediacy of its counsel. Cicero’s Rome fell; America endures, but not without strain. The founders believed that philosophy could fortify freedom, that private virtue was the public armor of a republic. Their debt to Cicero is not academic—it is existential. As long as Americans prize liberty, they inherit the same challenge that haunted Cicero: how to remain free inside, even when the world convulses outside.

Cicero wrote to console himself. The founders read him to strengthen a nation. In both cases, Tusculan Disputations proved that wisdom is the republic’s first defense.

The Five Dialogues of Tusculan Disputations

Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (45 B.C.) are organized into five books, each a conversation between Cicero and an unnamed interlocutor. The purpose of each dialogue is practical—how philosophy can train the soul to rise above fear, pain, and misfortune.

Book I: On Contempt of Death.
Cicero opens with the bold claim that death is not an evil. The soul, he argues, is immortal—or if it is not, then oblivion is no harm. Fear of death enslaves the mind; freedom begins with accepting mortality.

Book II: On Bearing Pain.
Here Cicero fuses Stoic and Platonic ideas: pain is endurable because it touches the body, not the soul. Virtue consists in fortitude—the mastery of sensation by reason.

Book III: On Grief.
Written while mourning his daughter Tullia, this section turns personal. Cicero insists grief must yield to discipline and reason. Excessive sorrow, he says, dishonors both the living and the dead.

Book IV: On the Other Disturbances of the Mind.
Cicero examines anger, lust, envy, and fear as “diseases of the soul.” Philosophy, properly practiced, is medicine; it cures by restoring inner balance and self-command.

Book V: On the Sufficiency of Virtue for Happiness.
The final dialogue crowns the work: virtue alone guarantees happiness, regardless of fortune or fate. The wise person, governed by reason and moral duty, remains free even under tyranny or exile.

In these five meditations, Cicero forged the ethical code that later guided Washington, Adams, and Jefferson—the conviction that liberty begins within the soul.

Former Foes, Now Allies! My New Friend Ihor was on the other of the Cold War

 

Ihor Chernik and I in the Cannon Congressional Office Building

(Good pun, soldiers in the Cannon building....)

Today and tomorrow I am one of 700 delegates from around America advocating for Ukraine in the U.S. Congress.  This is my fifth trip to DC since Russia invaded Ukraine.  I have met many immigrants from Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Today was the first time I met a soldier from the other side of the East-West Cold War border.  

Ihor Chernik grew up in Lviv, Ukraine.  He went to college to study electrical engineering. He joined the Soviet equivalent of ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) called Вое́нная ка́федра (Voyenaya kafyedra or Military department). The program required three years of military service. Ihor was commissioned and became a Soviet signal corps officer.  

From a base in Poland, he monitored NATO communications. During peace, his unit was listening for signs of impending war in our radio traffic.  During a war Ihor and his unit would be tracking NATO forces in the battle.  

Several hundred miles away in West Germany, I was training my tank crew to fight a Soviet invasion. Most experts (including Tom Clancy in Red Storm Rising) believed would begin in the Fulda Gap in the center of divided Germany. 

World War III never happened. 

Ihor left Lviv in 1994.  He came to America and a job with IBM as a network systems engineer.  He and his wife Larissa lived in Fairfield County, Connecticut, until Ihor retired in 2020.  Now they live in New Hope.  He started skiing at age 6. Retirement allowed Ihor to spend winters in Vermont as a ski instructor. 

In two meetings today, Ihor and I talked Congressional staffers we were on opposite sides in the Cold War but are now united in support of Ukraine.  We will both be working to support Ukraine and will be together in the spring the next time the American Coalition for Ukraine comes to Washington DC.  

When Ihor found out my paternal grandparents emigrated from Odesa (in 1900 and 1901) he said we should go there together.  So far, Lviv is the only city I have visited in Ukraine.  Let's hope our journey will be a celebration of the defeat of the Russian invasion. 

---- 

To be clear: Ihor and I were not deployed to opposite sides of the Cold War battle line at the same time. I was a tank commander in tank Bravo 13 in Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 70th Armor from October 1976 to November 1979. Ihor served from 1983 to 1986. From 1982 to 1985 I was a tank commander in tank Bravo 14 in Alpha Company, 6th Battalion, 68th Armor: an Army Reserve unit in Reading, Pennsylvania. If the Soviets had invaded, we had tanks ready in storage in Baumholder, West Germany. Thankfully, war did not break out.

And There Was Light: A biography of President Abraham Lincoln by Jon Meacham

Jon Meacham’s And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle is not a sentimental biography. It’s a clear-eyed account of a man and a nation wrestling with the moral contradictions at the heart of American life. Meacham presents Lincoln not as a saint of progress, but as a politician who learned, through suffering and conviction, that compromise could no longer sustain a republic half slave and half free.

From the first chapters, Meacham emphasizes that slavery was never simply an economic institution—it was the foundation of an entire worldview. The Confederacy did not secede merely to preserve local control or tariffs. It fought to protect and expand a slave empire that its leaders believed divinely ordained. Southern visionaries spoke openly of a future stretching from the Caribbean to South America, with slavery in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, and even Brazil. The “Golden Circle,” as some called it, would extend the plantation system across the tropics and cement white supremacy as the natural order of civilization.

This dream was justified from the pulpit as well as the legislature. Meacham quotes Baptist and Presbyterian preachers who cited Scripture to defend bondage as the will of God. In their theology, slavery was not an evil tolerated for economic necessity—it was a moral good, proof that a benevolent hierarchy governed both heaven and earth. To challenge it was to challenge divine design. The Confederacy saw itself as the Christian republic, the true heir of America’s founding virtues, while the industrial North was portrayed as godless, materialist, and corrupt. In that sense, the Civil War was as much a religious conflict as a political one—a contest between two competing revelations of what it meant to be American.

Against this moral certainty stood Abraham Lincoln, who had despised slavery since childhood. Born into frontier poverty, he grew up in the rough equality of laboring men and absorbed from the start that no human being should own another. Yet Meacham shows that Lincoln was not an abolitionist by temperament. He was cautious, pragmatic, and devoted to the Constitution’s framework of compromise. For decades, he believed slavery could be contained and would die of its own contradiction. But the South’s determination to spread bondage beyond its borders shattered that illusion.

The heart of Meacham’s book lies in tracing how Lincoln’s moral clarity slowly overtook his political caution. Through the 1850s and early 1860s, he balanced on the knife edge between law and justice, between holding the Union together and confronting the evil that threatened to define it. By the summer of 1862, he concluded that emancipation was not a radical measure but a national necessity. The Proclamation that followed transformed the war from a struggle over secession into a crusade for human freedom.

Meacham contrasts two visions of America that clashed on the battlefields of the Civil War. The South, he writes, saw the nation as defined by the Constitution of 1787, a document that protected slavery and limited federal power. Lincoln, especially in the Gettysburg Address, redefined America’s essence as found in the Declaration of Independence—the promise that “all men are created equal.” That difference was not semantic; it was central. The Confederacy clung to the past, to the world as it was; Lincoln called the nation to live up to the ideal of what it could be. The full text of the Declartion is here.

One of Meacham’s strengths is how he ties Lincoln’s moral awakening to the larger history of Christian thought in America. He shows how religion could sanctify both bondage and liberation, how the same Bible could arm both the oppressor and the emancipator. In that sense, Lincoln’s faith—quiet, unorthodox, rooted in providence rather than dogma—becomes the antidote to the self-righteous certainty of the slave theology. His moral universe was built not on divine entitlement but on human empathy. “Nothing stamped with the Divine image,” he once said, “was sent into the world to be trodden on.”

By the end of the book, Meacham has made clear that Lincoln’s greatness lay not in perfection but in growth. He evolved from a cautious lawyer defending the Union into a wartime president willing to risk everything to redeem the nation. His victory was not just military but moral: he reclaimed the American experiment from those who would have frozen it in 1787 and gave it new life under the words of 1776.

And There Was Light is a moral biography of a man who understood that freedom must be chosen and defended again and again. The slave empire dreamed by the Confederacy died on the battlefield, but its justifications linger. Meacham’s Lincoln reminds us that America’s light, however dimmed, depends on our willingness to see each person as created equal—and to act on that belief.

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis – A Review

C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce is both a dream-vision and a philosophical fable about eternity. The title, drawn from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, declares Lewis’s intent: to separate good from evil, Heaven from Hell, clarity from delusion. Yet this separation is not drawn across the cosmos but inside the soul. In barely 150 pages, Lewis maps a moral geography that turns Dante’s Divine Comedy upside down.

Dante’s Hell descends in great concentric circles four thousand miles deep, ordered and monumental. Lewis’s Hell is the opposite—an endless, thin “grey town” where it is always evening and always drizzling, where the damned quarrel and drift farther apart forever. For Dante, Hell has weight; for Lewis, it has almost none. Lewis's inferno is a place of shadow beings so insubstantial that a blade of heavenly grass can pierce a ghost’s foot. The geography itself expresses the moral truth: evil is not powerful but hollow, a privation rather than a rival to the good.

The book begins when the narrator, standing in that dim town, joins a line of quarrelsome spirits boarding a bus for excursion to the borders of Heaven. When he arrives in heaven the narrator's journey recalls Dante’s ascent. His guide is not Virgil, but George McDonald. They see radiant spirits who try, one by one, to persuade the visitors from Hell to remain. In Lewis’s cosmology, the doors of Hell are locked from the inside; each soul may step into Heaven if it will only let go of pride, fear, or resentment. Most cannot. They prefer the familiar fog of self-justification to the sharp light of grace. Lewis turns the grand punishments of Dante's imagination into quiet moral choices.

One of the book’s most striking scenes involves the meeting of the narrator with a heavenly procession: a radiant woman of unimaginable beauty passes by, attended by spirits and children. She is greeted as a queen of Heaven, yet she was a simple maidservant on earth—“Sarah Smith of Golders Green.” The inversion is deliberate. Where Dante populates Paradise with saints, theologians, and emperors, Lewis crowns the humble and forgotten. His Heaven has no hierarchy of intellect or fame; its citizens are those who loved purely and forgave completely. The scene redefines glory not as achievement but as transformed love. The last are truly first.

Throughout the encounters between ghosts from Hell and solid spirits from Heaven, Lewis dramatizes the clash of perceptions. The damned see Heaven as intolerably bright and hard; the saved perceive it as solid, real, and alive. The same landscape appears either radiant or painful depending on the eyes that behold it. Here, as in Till We Have Faces, perception reveals moral reality. The grey town is not far from Heaven in distance but in vision. To enter Heaven is not to travel upward but to wake up.

Lewis’s prose here is economical but vivid—half dialogue, half parable. He moves swiftly from satire to tenderness, exposing self-deception with the clarity of a moral anatomist. A bishop insists that Heaven cannot exist because it contradicts his theology; a mother’s love for her dead son curdles into idolatry; an artist refuses salvation because he would rather paint Heaven than dwell in it. Each episode reveals a truth about human attachments: love and intellect and imagination can all become traps when turned inward. In Lewis’s hands, the bus ride from Hell to Heaven becomes a psychological pilgrimage through the motives of the human heart.

The Great Divorce presents goodness as solid reality. Hell may feel vast to those inside it, but from Heaven it is a tiny crack in the ground, smaller than a pebble. Evil is not symmetrical with the good; it is parasitic on it. Lewis’s inversion of Dante is complete: the moral universe is not a balance of powers but a contrast of substance and shadow. Heaven outweighs Hell because it is real.

By the end of the vision, the narrator begins to fade, sensing that he must return to his world. The solid country dissolves into sunlight, and he wakes, aware that what he glimpsed was truth in its most condensed form. Lewis ends not with thunder or revelation but with stillness. Eternity, he suggests, is not remote or future; it is the moment when illusion falls away and we see things as they are.

The Great Divorce is luminous—a meditation on the substance of Heaven and the thinness of Hell, and on the freedom to choose eternities. 

JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times--The 17th Annual Fall Conference of the Hannah Arendt Center

 

“We’re back from Covid! Finally,” said Christine Gonzalez Stanton, bursting with genuine joy, at the opening of the 17th annual fall conference of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. Stanton is the executive director of the Hannah Arendt Center and one of the organizers of the conference. After years of difficulties with travel for attendees and speakers along with masking and distancing, this year saw the main auditorium and breakout sessions packed with conference goers. The attendees included students from Bard and many local high schools and colleges as well as members of the Hannah Arendt Center. Everyone crowded together in the common areas and the lunch line and registration area.

The conference, titled JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times, was held in Olin Hall on the campus of Bard College. To attend the conferences each year, I drive from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to attend the two-day gathering, this year on October 16 and 17, so I usually arrive as the first session is beginning. This year I drove well past Olin Hall to find parking, another indication that the attendance was much higher than in recent years. I have been attending the conferences since 2019, so after one year of a packed auditorium, Covid affected everything, including parking, which was easy in 2021 when the conference returned to in-person sessions after a webinar in 2020.

In future posts I will write more about the talks that comprise the conference program. I will admit, I had trouble linking Joy as a theme to Hannah Arendt. I have read all her works, many as part of the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center. Joy is not the first word that comes to my mind in works defining totalitarianism, chronicling the modern history of revolutions, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and presenting a unique view of love in Saint Augustine.  

Roger Berkowitz made a compelling case for connecting Hannah Arendt to the theme of the conference in his opening remarks. Other presenters tied various expressions of joy to their fields of study and to our current hour. In a discussion session, Teju Cole mentioned the joy one can feel in triumph over an opponent.

My own experience of joy is the overflow of happiness seen among friends and family at moments of reunion—possibly returning from a war, recovering from a serious illness, or after a long time apart. This bubbling happiness I have felt and seen in others is what I saw when Christine Stanton effused about this year’s conference soon after it began. She was in a moment of joy. 

That moment reflected the summary of Joy on the conference website: "Joy is at once more visceral and more risky than happiness. What brings you joy? Joy can emerge in a lover's gaze, in the transcendence of Beethoven's late sonatas, in the embrace of a once-wayward child. Joy is not mere happiness; nor is it satisfied contentment. Joy is the lasting delight we feel when touched deeply by what matters most." 

Following the theme of the conference, joy is most vivid in dark times or in the shadow of dark times. In Iraq, when helicopter crews returned from dangerous missions, sometimes in blackout sandstorms, the happiness bubbled over. The normal stoic affect of pilots, crew chiefs, and door gunners fell away for a while to share deep delight.

The conference presenters, necessarily, were trying to define and discuss joy, which requires dissecting—fatal for the subject of the study. Like those trying to define humor or love, they were striving to explain what ultimately must be experienced.

I couldn’t stay for every panel, but I didn’t need to. The theme of the conference wasn’t confined to the program. I saw joy in the crowded hallways, in the greetings between old friends, in the simple fact that people crowded together again after the disruption of the Covid years. It was the same kind of joy I’ve seen in soldiers home from war, reunited with their families. 

Joy also happens in small moments.  I had a chance to talk with Hillary Harvey, the communications manager of the Hannah Arendt Center between sessions. It was fun to catch up. It was the same with several other people I ran into during breaks and lunch. People I met at conferences since 2019 and who, like me, come back year after year.  It was fun to share small joys in the larger context of joy in dark times.

A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger’s A Death in Belmont is more than a true-crime account of the Boston Strangler murders — it is a deeply researched meditation on violence, race, fear, and justice in a turbulent time in America. Junger teases apart the tangled threads of a notorious serial murder investigation within the larger context of the 1960s, showing how the murder of President John F. Kennedy and the unraveling of public trust shaped the pursuit of a killer who terrified Boston for years. The result is a compelling, disturbing, and ultimately convincing narrative about guilt, identity, and darkness in American life.

Junger does not simply recount the crimes chronologically. Instead, he puts them in their historical moment — a time when America was reeling from shocking acts of violence. The assassination of JFK in November 1963 is not treated as a separate event but as a backdrop to the story of the Boston Strangler. 

Both cases — one a political assassination that shattered a nation’s confidence, the other a series of brutal murders that terrorized an entire city — represent a moment when Americans began to feel that the world around them had become unstable and frightening. Nuclear war came close to reality just the year before. Junger uses that national mood to deepen his exploration of how fear and suspicion shape the pursuit of justice.

At the heart of the book is the murder of Bessie Goldberg, a Belmont housewife strangled in her own home in March 1963. Goldberg had hired a Black handyman named Roy Smith to clean their house that very day. Hours later, Goldberg was found dead. Smith was arrested, tried, and convicted of her murder. He always maintained his innocence and died in prison.

Junger’s connection to the case is deeply personal. He grew up in Belmont about a mile from the Goldberg's home.  He was a toddler at the time of the Goldberg murder. His parents hired a contractor to build a studio onto their home. On the day Bessie Goldberg was killed, one member of the crew was working in Junger's home. That worker, Albert DeSalvo, a small-time criminal and sexual predator, eventually confessed to being the Strangler, but not to Goldberg’s murder. 

Junger use of this proximity, the murderer walked through his family’s living room, keeps the book personal and tense throughout his investigation into what really happened. He examines the broader series of murders attributed to the Boston Strangler, a name that came to embody fear itself in 1960s Massachusetts. Between 1962 and 1964, thirteen women (fourteen including Goldberg) were murdered in their homes, often sexually assaulted and strangled. The omission of Goldberg by DeSalvo has long fueled debate about whether DeSalvo was truly responsible for all the killings.

Junger treats this question with rigor and nuance. He reviews the evidence against DeSalvo and explores the skepticism that many investigators and journalists still harbor. There was no physical evidence tying DeSalvo to several of the murders, and his confessions contained factual errors. Yet Junger is unpersuaded by the doubts. He assembles the available evidence, the patterns in the killings, and the psychological profile of the man himself. The portrait that emerges is of a compulsive predator whose behavior fits the known facts of the crimes — including, Junger argues, the murder of Bessie Goldberg.

What makes A Death in Belmont so persuasive is its balance of forensic detail and broader social analysis. Junger delves deeply into the investigative techniques of the time — primitive by today’s standards — and the public pressure to deliver justice quickly. He also does not shy away from the racism of the Goldberg case: Roy Smith, a Black man in a white suburb, was an easy target for a fearful public and a prosecution eager for a conviction. Junger’s handling of this subject is unsparing, showing that racial bias contributed to a miscarriage of justice. In one of the very sad moments in the book, Roy Smith is convicted of murder on November 23, 1963, the day after Kennedy was assassinated. 

Yet Junger’s central conclusion is that Albert DeSalvo was almost certainly the Boston Strangler, and the weight of evidence suggests he also killed Bessie Goldberg, even if he never admitted it. The fact that Smith was convicted of Goldberg’s murder while DeSalvo confessed highlights flaws in the justice system. It also reflects the chaos and confusion of an era when trust in authority, shaken by Kennedy’s assassination and other national traumas, was collapsing.

In the end, A Death in Belmont is not just the story of a murder case; it is a story  about America at a time of national crisis. Junger shows how public fear, racial prejudice, and institutional failure can converge to distort justice. He also captures the way national events, like the assassination of a president, seep into local tragedies, shaping how they are understood and remembered.

This is a meticulously researched and deeply unsettling book. I found myself persuaded by Junger’s case: Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, and Bessie Goldberg was one of his victims. A Death in Belmont is a chilling reminder that evil often hides in plain sight. I was nine years old when I first heard reports of the Boston Strangler on the radio. Belmont is nine miles from Stoneham where I grew up. 

I loved this book. It deepened my admiration for Sebastian Junger’s work — an admiration that began after I met him at the Hannah Arendt Conference in October 2024 and has grown with each of his books I’ve read since. A Death in Belmont shows how deeply he can connect historical fact, personal story, and moral complexity.

 

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

 

C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is his last and his best novel, my favorite of his more than 40 books. (I have read all the books published in his lifetime and many of the posthumous publications.) 

It is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche transformed into a meditation on love, faith, and the blindness induced by our beliefs. It is a book that resists easy categorization: part myth, part psychological drama, part spiritual journey. More than any of his earlier fiction, it exposes how perception shapes reality and how love, when mixed with possessiveness, can turn divine beauty into human pain.

The novel’s narrator, Orual, is the older sister of Psyche, the princess whose beauty captivates their small, barbaric kingdom of Glome. Orual is plain, intelligent, brave, and fiercely loyal. She raises Psyche after their mother’s death and comes to love her with an intensity that borders on worship. When plague and famine strike the kingdom, the priest of Ungit declares that Psyche must be sacrificed to appease the goddess Ungit. Psyche is left on the Grey Mountain as a bride for the god of the West Wind. Orual’s world shatters.

From this point, the novel divides into two overlapping realities. Psyche, when Orual finds her again on the mountain, claims she is living in joy — rescued by a god who has taken her to a beautiful palace invisible to mortal eyes. She is radiant, serene, and transformed. Orual, however, sees only a desolate hillside and Psyche standing among the rocks and rain. To her, Psyche’s vision is madness born of trauma and loneliness. 

The mountain scene is the central confrontation of the book and one of the most haunting moments in twentieth-century fiction. Two sisters stand side by side, both utterly sincere, both certain of what they see — and both right in a sense. Lewis captures the agony of divided perception: one person living in a reality of faith, the other trapped in the limits of sight. 

When Psyche refuses to leave her invisible palace, Orual demands proof. She begs Psyche to disobey the god’s command and look upon him with a lamp while he sleeps. It is an act born of love but twisted by pride and fear. When Psyche does as her sister insists, the god’s wrath drives her into exile. Orual, realizing too late what she has done, spends the rest of her life haunted by guilt. “I did not know how I hated the gods,” she writes later. “I was their enemy for having loved too much.”

The second half of the novel follows Orual’s reign as Queen of Glome. She becomes a capable and just ruler, a woman who hides her face behind a veil and her heart behind the duties of power. Her wisdom and strength as a monarch contrasts sharply with her spiritual weakness as one who cannot forgive herself. Lewis shows her crown as both salvation and disguise: she fights for her kingdom with courage but never escapes the inner war with the gods. The political battles of her reign, defending Glome’s independence, administering justice, commanding loyalty, mirror her spiritual struggle for meaning. She wields authority outwardly while inwardly living in rebellion against divine authority.

What makes Till We Have Faces extraordinary is its moral and emotional honesty. Lewis does not offer easy redemption. Orual’s eventual vision — her final confrontation with the gods in a kind of dream-trial — reveals that her “complaint against the gods” was really a complaint against love itself. She wanted Psyche for her own; she could not bear a love that transcended her control. Only in the end, when her face is finally “given back” to her, when she sees herself truly, does she glimpse the divine beauty Psyche had seen all along. “How can they meet us face to face,” she asks, “till we have faces?”

Lewis’s prose in this novel is spare, rhythmic, and powerful. There is little of Narnia’s mythic brightness here; instead, he writes with the gravity of Greek tragedy. The landscape of Glome is as harsh and real as the human soul it represents. Every image — the mountain, the river, the dark temple of Ungit — serves as both physical place and psychological symbol.

Till We Have Faces a story of perception. The same scene on the mountain is heaven or rubble depending on the eyes that behold it. Psyche’s faith allows her to see the palace of the gods; Orual’s reason and jealousy reduce it to stone and mud. Between those two visions lies the entire struggle of belief. By the end, Orual’s reign, her power, her intelligence, and her love are all stripped bare until only one question remains: can the human heart bear to see truly?

In its depth and ambiguity, Till We Have Faces stands as Lewis’s best mature work in a widely varied corpus of brilliant books. It is a myth retold that is etched into my understanding of the world.