Regan Flieg: God Revealed in Created Things

In Dr. Redick’s article, “Wilderness, Arcadia and Longing: Mythic Landscapes and the Experience of Reality,” one of the themes I noticed was that nature points us toward the divine, and this reminded me of one of my favorite verses from Scripture (7).  In the Book of Wisdom, one of the deuterocanonical books included in Catholic Bibles but considered apocryphal by Protestants and omitted from most other Bibles, one verse reads: “For from the greatness and the beauty of created things / their original author, by analogy, is seen” (The New American Bible, Wis. 13:5).  Similarly, Redick’s article describes Lewis as seeing “nature as the created world that reflects the numinous and is therefore filled with symbolic potential” (7). The Book of Wisdom sees nature and all of creation’s goodness as reflecting God’s goodness, and this aligns with Lewis’s approach to nature since it holds nature as something that points to something bigger and deeper as well.  Redick explains that Lewis sees nature as pointing to the sublime, and the sublime is attractive and daunting at the same time and can be associated with wild places, calling to mind the idea that the Holy invokes mysterium, tremendum, and fascination (Redick 3, 7).  In other words, nature invokes the same senses that are experienced when encountering God.  Although Redick’s article focuses on nature as reflecting the numinous, the phrasing “created things” from Wisdom, doesn’t necessarily limit itself to what we would usually consider nature.  When we take “created things” reflecting God’s beauty to include humans, we can think of them as reflecting the Divine as well.   

I think this idea is relevant to Till We Have Faces in that Psyche - even before the myth Oural later hears about her claims she is becoming a goddess - can also be seen as pointing toward the numinous.  Alongside the Grey Mountain, which she sees and is drawn to longing for greater, Psyche herself reflects divine attributes as well.  Psyche embodies mystery in that Oural struggles to understand whether she has gone insane or is really living a life of splendor in a castle Oural cannot see.  She invokes fascination through her radiant beauty.  It is harder to see tremendum in Psyche, but not impossible.  It may not be terrifying to her exactly but Oural does note, “How strong she grows.  She’ll be a stronger woman than ever I was,” and Psyche’s strength can be seen as reflecting the numinous as well (Lewis 103).

Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces:  A Myth Retold. 1956. Harcourt Brace, 1985.

The New American Bible.  Saint Joseph Edition of the Revised Edition, Catholic Book Publishing Company, 2011.

Redick, Kip. “Wilderness, Arcadia and Longing: Mythic Landscapes and the Experience of Reality.”  C.S. Lewis: Views from Wake Forest, edited by Michael Travers, Zossima Press, 2008, pp. 137-157. “Wilderness, Arcadia and Longing: Mythic Landscapes and the Experience of Reality.” Philosophy 451, Fall 2020, Christopher Newport University. Class Handout.