WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Maya Toman: C.S. Lewis's novel "Til We Have Faces" as a response to Augustine's "Confessions."

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

WRFH's Sophia Mandt interviews Senior Classics major Maya Toman's CSP thesis, titled "The Anti-Confessions: Til We Have Faces as a Response to Augustine." From 05/06/25.

You're listening to Sophia Mant, interview Senior Maya Tomin, about her CSP thesis titled The Anti-Confessions, Till We Have Faces as a Response to Augustin on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. So you wrote about both St. Augustine and C.S. Lewis and how Augustine's book Confessions bears some similarities to that of C.S. Lewis's work till we have faces. So I guess for things first, could you tell me a bit about the work till we have faces and then the work confessions, as I'm sure a lot of our audience is not super familiar with either of those? Of course. So I'll start with confessions since that was written first. So St. Augustine was a bishop, but first a priest in the Christian church in the 3 and 400s 80.

He was the Bishop of Hippo, which is in northern Africa, a little south of Carthage, which some of you may know from the Enid. And Confessions was his sort of autobiography that he wrote later in life, but it chronicles his life from birth to about his mid-30s, I think. It's not properly speaking in autobiography. It's not just I did this and then I did that. it's very much a spiritual look at his journey to conversion and true faith in Christ. And some people might call it a conversion narrative, but that's a little misleading as well

because it's not as if St. Augustine ever really was raised in a non-Christian context or even ever really didn't have faith in God in some way. He was born to Christian parents. And at the time that he was born, the Catholic Church hadn't really been established as here are the doctrines you have to believe and here are the ones you can't. It was less, there was less of a clear institutional distinction on doctrine for that church. And so there were different sects of Christianity that taught different things. And there was no clear one true place to be.

And he fell into a sect called the Manichaeans when he was a teenager. And they taught some things like God having a physical body and there being equally strong forces of good and evil in the world. that sort of fought each other, you know, like in Star Wars almost. And he believed that for a while. And most modern Christians today would say, well, that's not Christian. But at the time, there wasn't really a distinction that that said, you can't call yourself a Christian if you believe that. And he does say in confessions that he never stopped believing in God. He just, he wasn't really attending church. And he wasn't really, you know, confessing what we would all, today might call orthodox Christianity. But he did believe in God. And so the conversion,

in confessions is less of a conversion from unbelief to belief and really more of a spiritual awakening and a decision to leave behind sin. It starts with him reading the books of the Platonists and starting to see from them that God is immaterial. So he found in the works of a lot of Platonists this idea that God doesn't have a physical body. And then he started to realize that that was true of the God written about in the scriptures. But then the big change comes when he's unable, he's living with this woman he's not married to. And he, his biggest, the biggest reason that he's not like fully entered the church, gotten baptized or started attending church services frequently, is that he doesn't want to let go of this sin. He knows he's not supposed to be doing it as a Christian.

And he doesn't want to stop. And so he finds himself really unable on his own to do that. And it's sort of a miraculous conversion moment where he's, he opens up the scriptures. and reads a passage from St. Paul and just immediately realizes, I have to let this sin go and does. And then he gets baptized and attends church. And then after that, with the rest of Confessions, Chronicles, it's kind of just like a bunch of musings on memory, time, and being. So calling it an autobiography is a bit misleading. But it's definitely the story of a conversion and strengthening of faith. Yeah. So that's Confessions.

How are you, when were you first introduced to St. Augustine's confessions? I first read it in Great Books 1 at Hillsdale, so three and a half years ago or so with Dr. Lindley, which was one of my favorite classes at Hillsdale. And that is, that was the class that taught me to love it. So it's been in my mind since then. Wonderful. And then, um, could you tell me a bit about CS Lewis's work till we have faces? Yes, of course. So till we have faces is CS Lewis's last. novel. As many of your listeners probably know, he wrote a lot of fiction and nonfiction. He's most famous for the Narnia Chronicles. Until We Have Faces was written near his death in the 1960s. And it's a retelling of a myth of Cupid and Psyche, which was written in the second century

AD by a pagan, middle platonist author named Apuleus. So Apuleus wrote this longer a novel called Metamorphoses, which is different than Ovid's Minimaphroses. It's a lot later, and it's a novel not an epic or a poem, which is about a character named Lucius. He gets turned into a donkey and then becomes a human again and all of his adventures on the way. And in the middle of that novel, we have the story of Cupid and Psyche, which gets told to him. And so Lewis read that story when he was in high school, I think, in Latin. And he liked it a lot, but he saw this central mistake or problem in it, as he would later say. So in the story, Psyche is a beautiful princess.

And she gets to marry the god Cupid. And it's sort of a retribution or sacrifice of her so that Venus, Cupid's mother, will stop hurting her people. because Venus is jealous of her because she's prettier than Venus. So she goes and marries Cupid and in Apalias' story, Psyche's older sisters are jealous of her for getting to marry this god. And so they try to get her to break the terms of her marriage. And she does. She uses a lamp to try to see your husband's face, which has been forbidden to her.

And so she gets cast out. And then the sisters get killed. And then there's a whole bunch of adventures that end up with Psyche and Cic. interview and I had happily ever after. And so Lewis reads this in high school. And he says, no, that's not how it was, which is kind of a funny thing to say when you read a myth. And you're like, no, I know the myth better than you do, oh, writer of myths. But he's decided, he says this is not true to human experience. It's not that the sisters were jealous of her. So the sisters can't see what she has. He says that jealousy is not a strong enough motive. It would have been, they couldn't see what she

had and they didn't believe her. And so he's been trying to write this story since high school. So even that this is Lewis's final novel, it's really almost a retelling of something he's been trying to say since he was very young. And before, initially, when he first started writing it, he wasn't a Christian and he was very angry at God or at the non-god that he didn't believe in because he was an atheist. And so he intended to write the story of Cupid and Psyche and have the sisters be correct and the gods all be evil. And this was his plan. And then he abandoned the story. He wrote a few stanzas of a poem, which you can. can find in some collections of his works, and then he abandoned it. He came back to it many, many years later, and at this point, he was a Christian and did believe in a God who was good. And so in the version that he tells that we have today as till we have faces, the sisters, well, the sister were properly, who's the main character, Orwell, is wrong. The gods have been working for her good all along, and she doesn't see it. And so it's a fantasy story written from the perspective of this older sister, Orwell.

who's telling the story of her younger sister's marriage to the God, and just writing it down near the end of her life. Yeah, so that's Tully have Faces in brief. Okay, you're listening to Sophia Mant interview Hillsdale Senior, Maya Tomin, on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. So in talking about those two works, your essay argues that Toe We Have Faces is a response to St. Augustine, And how is Lewis responding to St. Augustine, or how do you argue this in your work?

Yeah, that's a very good question since that's my thesis. And it took me a long time to figure out how to articulate it. So I'll just start by saying some of the things I think he's doing. And then maybe I'll talk a little bit about how I found that. So Confessions is a story written by someone who used to, for lack of a better word, not have true faith. It's like I said, it's complicated to talk about what exactly Augustine converts from to or what his actual moment of coming to Christian faith might be. But he's writing about his, you know, profligate and wasted youth as an older man who now has a different perspective on those events. And he says multiple times in confessions that things that he thought were working for evil, God worked out for good and that God was using all of these difficult things to bring him to faith. So he has this different perspective on it now than he did at the time when everything was bad. And he hated God sometimes and he didn't want to do the right thing.

And so I first saw a parallel to that until we have faces with Orwell, who's writing down her story. And she is very angry at the gods. And she says, the gods are using all of these things to hurt me and to trick me. They're blowing me big like a bubble before they prick me whenever they make me happy. And so she thinks the gods are working for evil in her life. And in this way, I think it's a bit of an anti-confessions because Augustine is saying, no, the gods have been working for good all along. And Orwell says, the gods are working for evil in my life.

And we see some other sort of anti-confessions motifs as Orwell continually says, no, I don't trust the gods. They are not good. but then the in the end of till we have faces Orwell has an experience where she sees the gods

and she brings her case to them which is the thing that she's written for the first two-thirds of the book she's written it down and she brings it to them reads it aloud and she realizes she says

to have heard myself speak was the answer what is the answer to her complaint that she is a human and she does not understand And so she starts to, she begins to have this understanding that she's just not comprehending what's actually going on. And then we then read the last little section of the novel is what she writes after having gone through a lot and more.

She goes through a lot of trials, which are parallels to the trials of psyche from the original myth. And then in the end, she comes and stands before the gods again and meets her sister again and confesses that she. She's not understood what was going on. And she says, I could not mend my soul unless the gods helped. So she realizes that she's in the wrong and that she has been wrongly misusing psyche and sort of taking advantage of the love that she had for psyche to abuse her sister. And when she says, I could not mend my soul unless the gods helped. I was like, oh, that's a confession.

Because in confessions, Augustine says, it's good Lord to confess to you to say, save me. But I'm paraphrasing. But basically, Augustine's confession is, I can't do it on my own, God help. And then Orwell's confession becomes, I can't do it on my own, God help. And so in the end, what she was trying to be in anti-confessions becomes her confession. And there's a lot of other parallels throughout the story. For example, one of the central motifs of Tilly have faces is the mirror. Orwell looks at herself in a mirror and sees how ugly she is physically.

And then begins to veil and hide her face because she doesn't want to. to look at her face. And then in the end, when she looks at herself in the pool of water, in the final scene with her sister next to her, she's beautiful. And the beauty isn't just some sort of, oh, she's pretty now and she was such an ugly person and now she gets to look pretty and yay. But it's a spiritual change in her that allows her to see herself as beautiful. And Lewis doesn't say if she actually changes her appearance. I don't even know that her appearance actually changes, though. I think it's much more of it, her perspective on her appearance. And in confessions, there are two different scenes where Augustine says that God set him up before a mirror, or as if before a mirror, should look at his face and see how ugly and festering it was.

Basically, this idea that Christians often have that the law shows us our sin, so we see what we should be living like, and then we see how we're not living up to it, and that's like a mirror reflecting back at us our own ugliness. And that shows up in confessions and until we have faces. And then another big thing, well, I guess not a big thing, but a little thing that I caught recently that made me pretty happy is that one of the central scenes of confessions is Augustine stealing pears from this orchard. And he sort of is asking himself, why did I steal those pairs? What was wrong with me? Why would I do that? And he comes to the conclusion that he did it simply for love of the sin. He didn't really have any good motive or even halfway.

excusable motive. It was just entirely out of love for sin and desire to sin. And so the pear the pear orchard, the pear trees are a central motif throughout confessions. And I didn't realize actually till after I wrote the paper, there's a scene where Orwell is having one of the hardest moments of her life and realizing that she's going to have to kill someone in single combat. And she decides to not go to the pear orchard. She says specifically, I'm not going to go to the pear orchard today. I'm not going to go to the pear orchard today to sit there because that was where Psyche and I played and had fun. And I can't remember Psyche right now. It's too hard. And I think that that's sort of just a little nod to confessions like the pear orchard was one of the worst times of Augustine's life.

In contrast, Orwell's experience in the pair orchard was one of the best times in her life. She's afraid to remember it at her worst moment. So another little sort of anti-confessions inversion there. That's just a little fun. I think that's kind of Lewis giving us a little wink nod like, yeah, I am doing the Augustine thing. I'll just mention some pear trees. You'll get it. Yeah. So another question I have is you mentioned diamonds, which is different than demons. Could you speak more on how you found those in one or both of the works or what they are? Because I just find that interesting. Yeah. So I think that with Till We Have Faces, Lewis is kind of doing a double or two levels of anti-confessions.

On the one hand, everything I was just talking about is kind of how it parallels or will parallels the character of Augustine in confessions. But I think at a larger whole, or a larger view, the goal that Augustine has with confessions and the goal that Lewis has with Till we have faces are related but different. I think Lewis is contrary to Augustine in that. And that's where the diamonds come in. So in a plaintiff's philosophy, not necessarily in the writings of plate of themselves, which are hard to interpret. He was this ancient Greek philosopher, and people disagree about what he actually meant,

and there are lots of different schools on that. But definitely in the Neoplatonists and the Middle Platonists. So the Neoplatonists are writers mostly pagan around pre-Rennaissance era, and then some Renaissance Christians were also Neoplatonists, mean they incorporated some Platonist philosophy into their idea of Christianity. And then the middle Platonists, yeah. Could you explain more on what Platonism is? Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. And that's right. I'm going there. So, and then the middle platonists are on the 200s, 80, like, Apaleas. And so, yeah, Platonism is kind of a big basket term for people who follow the philosopher Plato. And he was a, a BC philosopher in Greece who wrote down writings about his mentor Socrates. And basically, I'm not going to try to say what Plato actually meant about everything, because I think that's just so controversial and difficult to say. But what the people who followed him, especially in middle and neoplatonism, took from his writings, are things like, well, there are eternal forms or ideas of the things that exist in the world in the mind of God. And there are ranked levels of being.

So we are humans. We're closer to the bottom of that chain of being. But we can ascend through the levels of being to get to God. and there's disagreement about whether they're monotheistic or polytheistic, whether they have one single god. But I think that the middle platonists at the time of Apalias would have said things like there is one god who is the supreme being. But then there are many intermediary beings who are higher than humans whom we might call gods, even though they're not the one god. and they can help us get to God. They can mediate between us and God.

And then also, a lot of middle platonists believed in reincarnation. So they would believe that if you lived well in this life, you could die and then be reincarnated as a higher level of being, if you'd lived well. Or conversely, you could go down to a lower level if you'd live badly. So there wasn't really an idea of heaven or hell

so much as an idea of better ways and worse ways to live that could get you higher or lower on the chain of being. And so the diamond are a level of being between gods and men, or between the one God and men, I should say. And Daimon is kind of just a neutral term for this type of being, and there could be good ones or bad ones. And so a lot of Christian Neoplatonists took this and said,

yes, this is actually true. There are beings to mediate between gods and men, or between God and men. And there are good ones and bad ones, and those good ones are angels, and the bad ones are demons. Duh, this is true in the Bible. You know, and so they, so a lot of Christian neoplatonists didn't see this philosophy as as fully in conflict with Christianity. They saw it as simply a good way to talk about what angels and demons even are.

And so Diamond would just be the neutral term that covers both of those. And so in the time of Augustine, there were people who were worshipping pagan gods a lot and offering sacrifices to them. And so Augustine's big thing in confessions to some degree, but especially in his longer work city of God, which is properly titled, the city of God against the pagans, and it's kind of his critique of paganism and worship of pagan gods. He says that diamonds who ask for you to worship them are demons. They're evil because the only person who deserves worship is God. This is an accepted standard Christian teaching at the time and today still, that you only worship the one God.

And so if some being who mediates between asks you to please worship it, that's wrong. that's bad, you shouldn't be doing that. And he tries to actually use Platonist philosophy to defend this conclusion and says that if you were really a real Platonist, you'd become a Christian and stop worshipping those pagan gods because they shouldn't be worshipped. It's a little bit iffy on whether that's actually what the Platonists would believe because they disagree among themselves and he's mistreating them sometimes, perhaps. People have argued about this. actually, if you're interested in this, Dr. David DeMarco at Hillsdale in the Classics Department has written a book on Augustine's City of God Book 10, where he explains how Augustine is misinterpreting the Neoplatonist porphyry. So Augustine may not have gotten all of the Platonist ideas correct,

but he definitely has a main point which is stop worshipping these diamonds because you should worship one god. And so he's very concerned with this. And he thinks that any love of or worship of pagan gods is against Christianity. And then in contrast to that is C.S. Lewis. So Lewis is also a Christian who believes in one ultimate God. But Lewis has a much more positive idea of what the pagan gods were or could be for people. He writes in a letter that he says, oh, the Renaissance Platonists thought that pagan gods were angels. And I agree.

Now, I don't know who exactly he's citing. pagan gods were angels in the Renaissance because that's that's again a contested thing there definitely were some Renaissance period this would be like you know 1600s in Europe there definitely were some people in that period who said oh the Diamonds might be angels or pagan gods might all be good but not everyone thought that so I don't know if Lewis is just sort of smoothing over a disagreement or something of the sort and then also it's it's unclear to me again if Lewis really believed that they were angels in all of his writings But you can definitely see, for example, in the Space Trilogy by Lewis, or properly the Ransom or Deep Heaven trilogy, Space Trilogy is its common name.

But he does say in those books that Space is a terrible name for the heavens. So, sorry, Lewis, I didn't mean to offend. But he has these El Dilla, which are sort of angels that mediate between gods and men. And they resemble platonic idea of daimones a lot. And there are good ones and bad ones. And so it seems that at least in his fiction, he's very comfortable with this idea of the pagan gods throughout history, perhaps having been angels, which would mean that they're not leading people astray, like Augustine thinks. And in addition to this, his path to Christianity was first through a love of pagan myth. So he really, really loved the Norse mythology of Balder.

and he really, he loved reading Euripides and Horace and other Latin writers and Latin and Greek writers in high school and college, studied the classics a lot. So he was a big fan of these pagan myths, but he didn't understand why he should accept Christianity as the truth, the truth, because he said, oh, it's just another myth like the other ones. And then through his friendship with J.R. Tolkien and through his studies at Cambridge and more reading, He came to realize that what he ended up articulating was that Christianity was the true myth. And I think in that phrase, Christianity is the true myth. Both words are very important. True is important because to him that means it's a historical fact. It happened.

You can see evidence that Christians existed and that Christ existed and it's corroborated by so many different accounts. It's historically verifiable. And it's a myth, which means for Lewis, that it is, in fact, a story that says something about, you know, the human psyche and how we relate to the world, just like all the other myths. And so, um, he's, he sees all the other myths not as in conflict with Christianity, like, oh, you have to believe in Zeus or Christ, but rather as supporting and leading to Christianity. Like, if you love this trait of Zeus, guess what, it gets fully made real in Christ. And the, anything bad in that myth, like Zeus raping women or Zeus having multiple

wives when he should only have one, well, that's not true of Christ. So the bad gets left behind, but the good gets fulfilled. So he sees myth in general and pagan gods and stories in general as not against Christianity, but as fulfilled in Christianity and leading to it. And so, and that, so for him to go back, he thinks that the daimones or these intermediary beings might actually have been angels. And he thinks that pagan mythology and story itself just simply can lead and should lead to Christianity. So when he's writing till we have faces, Lewis is not saying, oh, no, don't worship the pagan gods. He's saying, well, first off, the pagan stories are really beautiful and I think Christians should appreciate them, which is why he's writing this retelling of a pagan novel, a pagan myth in this

novel. But he's also imagining a, what he thinks, a possible historical past, where these characters Orwell and Psyche might actually be being, to use a very anachronistic term, being saved, like coming to something like a Christian faith. Because the God they meet at the end of the story is never named. He doesn't say it's Cupid. He just says, the only dread and beauty there is, he is coming. And you're like, well, who is he? I think what Lewis is trying to tell us subtly is, this is actually the true God. This is probably pre-incarnation Christ. And Lewis is hypothesizing that perhaps these non-Christians might have been able to see the real God and come to real faith.

Because as he says in a letter at one point about psyche, she's, of course, she's under the cloud, under all of the shadows and shadowy lies and hidden things of the pre-Christian Greek world. She's not fully, she doesn't have full. revelation yet because Christ hasn't been incarnate yet. And the good news has not yet been preached to the Gentiles. But she's doing the best she can with what she has. And she has a deep love for goodness and a deep desire to live well and to understand the truth. And so both Psyche and Orwell, through that deep desire to love God and through, as the way Lewis writes, it really divine intervention that gives them faith, they're able to believe in the true God. And that is where I think that this is really sort of an anti-confessions,

not in a rude way, not like Lewis saying, Augustine, you're so dumb, but rather Lewis saying, Augustine, you're so right that so much is true of what's in the Platonists. Because Augustine says, you know, I found so much truth in the Platonists.

The only thing that was missing was the incarnation. And Lewis says, that's so true. There's so much good there. But there's also so much good in other pagan stories like the mythologies. You don't have to reject mythology because you can love Platonism and mythology and both of them can be precursors and prefigurings of the truth.

So, sorry, that was a very long answer. That's fine. It was a good answer. That's the daimones. And I'll say one last really quick thing, which is that Lewis does say in his book Reflections on the Psalms, he has this little moment where he was writing about Plato and Virgil. And he says that he thinks maybe Plato and the mythmakers themselves are now worshiping God in heaven.

So it's definitely a much more expansive and hopeful take on paganism. than Augustine has, then many Christians have had throughout the centuries, and then many of the Christian people who love Hillsdale probably have. And I'm not saying Lewis is definitely right, but I am saying he's definitely saying something that Augustine would not say. And that's something that he's trying to do through till we have faces. So you're listening to Sophia Mant interview senior Maya Toman on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. So you already answered this in part, but it seems C.S. Lewis understands Christianity as a kind of fulfillment? Or how does C.S. Lewis, you'd say, understand Christianity as existing as some kind of fulfillment?

Yeah. So Lewis is saying something, which I think was actually a lot more about popular understanding of Christianity. Pre, say, I don't know, 17th, 18th century. It's definitely, it's definitely gone out of fashion, I'd say these days. but it's not something crazy, as in it's not unprecedented in the history of Christianity. And this idea is something like Christianity does not represent a break with pre-Christian philosophy and religion, but rather the natural continuation of and correction of it. So I would say that probably a lot of modern Christians see themselves as a break with pre-Christian teaching. They'd say, oh, well, before Christ came, there were all of these lies and these incorrect teachings about how to get to heaven or who God is or how to be a good person. And then Christ comes and says, no, this is the way.

But what Lewis is saying is something more like, before Christ comes, there are a lot of people who are trying to get at the truth. And they're getting at shadowy sort of reflections or prefigurings of the truth. And so there's actually a lot of really good things to be seen in Platonist philosophy and in Greek and Roman myth and in Norse myth. And he would of course say there's special revelation granted to the Jews and to the Hebrew scriptures. He's not denying that whatsoever. But he's saying that the other traditions pre-Christ are not simply just wrong, but they are rather beginning to get at the truth. and then Christianity comes along. And Christ isn't saying,

no, you need to reject everything that's come before. He's saying, no, I am the fulfillment of all that's come before. I am the thing you've been trying to get out all along. And I think a good piece of evidence that suggests that this is at least partially true is in the book of Acts when St. Paul is at the Ariopagus talking to the sort of Greek governing body about that Christian God. He quotes this poet, this Greek poet erratus, in whom we live and move and have our being. He says, even some of your own poets have said this. And so St. Paul is saying, not, oh, your Greek poets were also very wrong about the nature of God,

but rather, no, they were getting at something and Christ is actually the thing they were trying to get at. And now I'm here to tell you about that thing they were looking for. So the way that Lewis is articulating it, I think, until we have faces and in his other writings is that Christianity completes what everyone is looking for anyway. And this is something that I think Augustine would agree with to some extent, because Augustine says, we're restless till we find our rest in you at the beginning of confessions. It's that every Christian heart is rest. Sorry, not Christian.

Every human heart is restless in longing for the truth. And so we're all trying to get at it somehow. And when we do find that truth, it's not that all of a sudden every single restless urge or longing or action or belief that we had beforehand was sin or was just invariably wrong, but that they were all sort of incomplete grasping at something that is now given to us. So, and I think Augustine would agree with that, even if Augustine wouldn't agree that, you know, the page. pagan gods were good or that someone who didn't believe in Christ but believe in a pagan God and sacrifice to that pagan God might be saved. But Augustine would agree that that person trying to sacrifice to a pagan God was reaching for the good in the real God through that. And Augustine even says this. In city of God, he gives this example of this Roman hero, Regulus, who sort of stays true to his beliefs, even in the face of death, ends up being killed for them. And it's not that Regulus was right. But Regulus was, Augustine says, pious. He really cared about his gods and he was trying

to serve them well. And so well, Augustine wouldn't go so far as to say, and therefore he'll be in heaven because he was trying so hard, which Lewis kind of does say in the last battle, where he has a character who was serving a pagan god, a wrong god, his whole life, end up in heaven because of his motivations. And Augustine probably would not say that. But he would say that pagan serving the pagan god, was reaching at something that is the beginning of the truth. This was looking for the real truth. And so Lewis just takes that a step further, in line with a lot of Christians in the Renaissance.

And the Cambridge Platonists, which is a school of Cambridge, of professors at Cambridge in the 1600s around the time of John Milton, a lot of other European and American thinkers throughout the centuries would say, yeah, Christianity is a fulfillment not a break. Thank you for listening to Sophia Mant interview senior Maya Toman about her CSP thesis on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.