In Inferno IX, Dante interprets the myth about “the beauty of the lady changed to ugliness, fascination turned to horror” as a moral allegory of the inability of the hardened heart to repent (Freccero, 127). Hell awaits Lawrence Wentworth because he dares to “look, in Dantean phrase, on the head of the Gorgon in Dis” ( Descent, 216) that is, on the sensual yet terrifying face of the Medusa whose gaze petrifies the beholder and fills him with despair. Through the infernal descent of his protagonist, Williams shows how the lure of deceptive beauty can become a fatal attraction. In their respective novels, Williams and Lewis depict the changing faces of beauty in order to highlight the great difference between true and false visions of the good. This majestic Dante-esque figure, at once frightening and attractive, appears under various guises in Descent into Hell and Till We Have Faces. Lewis concurs that divine goodness implies “something more stern and splendid than mere kindness,” since “even the love between the sexes is, as in Dante, ‘a lord of terrible aspect’” ( The Problem of Pain, 27-9). Ecce, omnia facio ” ( He Came Down, 9-11).

Charles Williams, for instance, points out that while caritas is often likened to “our immediate emotional indulgence,” it should be properly understood in the sense of the “otherness and terror of God.” Encountering the ultimate Other means, in effect, that “Christ exists in the soul, in joy, in terror, in a miracle of newness. This strikingly paradoxical view of the beautiful, especially as it relates to the numinous, resonates in the writings of the Inklings. In a memorable passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, beauty is described as being an “awful thing…mysterious as well as terrible” (97).

Bareface cs lewis