C. S. Lewis once told a story, in Mere Christianity, about a man who wore a mask that made him look much better than he really was. He wore it for years. When he finally took it off, he discovered that his face had grown to fit the mask. What began as a disguise had become a reality.
I have always found that story unsettling.
It isn’t intended to be unsettling. But to our modern eyes, the mask suggests deception. The man has hidden his real face, and somewhere along the way the disguise has become permanent. What began as an act has become an identity.
We live in a time when wearing a public face can seem dishonest. We are encouraged to “be ourselves,” to speak our minds, to show our flaws and frustrations, to “let it all hang out.” Authenticity has become a virtue, and rightly so. But, can it be that whatever is most immediate in us is not necessarily the most authentic?
I have spent a good deal of my life around people who write, research, teach, publish, argue, and speak in public. Scholarship requires a particular kind of face, one that might not seem natural at first. You learn to listen before answering. You learn to say, “The evidence suggests,” when you really want to say, “Obviously.” You begin to distinguish between what you know and what you suspect. You acquire the ability to describe an argument fairly even when you think the argument is wrong. You see the value in keeping your irritation out of your footnotes.
When I first entered scholarly settings, some of this felt like learning to perform a role. I remember being surrounded by people who knew the literature, the terminology, the manuscripts, the arguments, and the history of arguments I had never encountered. They seemed to possess a vocabulary I had not yet learned. I could have tried to conceal what I did not know.
I soon realized that there was another way to belong--I could learn the vocabulary. Eventually, it became a different way of seeing. A source that seems conclusive requires another look. A position that seems foolish deserves to be understood on its own terms. An argument I dislike may contain an observation I need. A conclusion I have already reached may have to be altered by a document I did not expect to find.
Consider the child who is told to say thank you even when she does not feel thankful. At first, she is simply being taught manners. Her words may have very little relationship to her feelings. Then something curious happens. She begins to notice what other people have done for her. She becomes more attentive. She discovers that gratitude is easier to feel when you have developed the habit of noticing gifts. The same thing can happen intellectually. We can practice restraint before we care if we are offending others. We can exhibit fairness before it comes effortlessly. We can exercise intellectual humility while still being very sure that we are right. The practice can expose the distance between the person we are and the person we have the potential to become.
That seems more interesting to me than the familiar opposition between authenticity and artifice.
And that brings me back to Lewis, this time to his last novel, Till We Have Faces. The title comes from a question asked by Orual: “How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
The question comes late in the novel, after Orual has spent much of her life telling her own story. She believes herself to be honest. She has suffered, she has loved, she has sacrificed, and she has carefully assembled the evidence for her own defense. Her account feels truthful because it is truthful in all the ways that matter to her. Yet as the story unfolds, she realizes that the face she has presented to herself is also a mask. She has been unable to recognize how fear and insecurity have shaped what she calls love, or how deeply her own desires have influenced the story she tells other people.
Her problem is not simply that she has been hiding from others. She has been hiding from herself.
Orual comes to understand that she cannot stand before the gods with a story she has carefully constructed. She has to bring her actual face, the face she has been unable or unwilling to see.
That seems to me a useful image for scholarship as well.
We all approach the past with faces already formed by our experiences, our loyalties, our disappointments, and our expectations. The danger is not that we have perspectives. We cannot avoid that. The danger comes when we mistake our perspective for the thing itself.
This is where the scholarly face matters.
I do not want to become a person who has no opinions, no commitments, or no convictions. I want to hold them with integrity, while maintaining the courtesy, precision, and restraint that allow them to be taken seriously.