Face to Face with the Gods

Only tonight did I finally finish Till We Have Faces, a novel by C. S. Lewis that draws upon the myth of Eros and Psyche. Rather than write a book review, I will simply give my recommendation, and share some tangential thoughts of my own gained from the reading. I think this is a book for anyone, regardless of any other like or dislike for Lewis and his other works. And anyone, in this case, means just about anyone, but I’ll add this caveat: as I find often with Lewis, the prose is simple enough for young readers, but the content is (how to put it?) adult, mature, full, extreme, intense, not for most young readers.

I noted some clear similarities in TWHF to The Four Loves and The Great Divorce, especially in dealing with the perversion of “mother love” and the conflation between love and devouring. Very compelling. I have more thinking to do on the matters of love, or (to follow Lewis a little closer) on the matter of loves. I think some of the stuff from TWHF will enrich my reading of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which is next on my list.

What has my head spinning is the tension and conglomeration, as delivered by Lewis, of “paganism,” historical “Christianity,” myth, and the nature of the gods. The power of this work rests somewhere between, on the one hand, the failure of the philosophic account of the gods and, on the other, the inanity of obscure, sterile, merely allegorical myth—or more to the point, the inanity of merely allegorical interpretation of myth. Here, between philosophy and allegory, is the place where men and gods meet each other face to face. And what about this meeting? The gritty ugliness of pagan worship has, for Lewis (and for me), a kind of tangibility and truth above the sophisticated contemplation of the “Divine Nature” that is at once obviously Greek and also recognizably part of the history of the Christian religion. A god untouched by human art has a power of speech, a connection to what is visceral in us, that a beautiful marble statue cannot have. This latter god, crystallized by poetry, by sculpture, by theology and explanation, by moralizing, by merely allegorical myth—humans have so veiled and covered this god with their art that he does not meet with them, for this refinement of the image of the god is also a self-veiling, a hiding away, a denial of what is visceral and therefore the height of all dishonesty. They fashion a face for the god and lose their own faces, so that even when they come to the new god they have themselves no eyes to see and no ears to hear.  And I think Lewis would be on track to point at modern and historical Christianity and say that we, or some of us, in our sophistication and high art, have exchanged the truth about God for a lie, the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things….

Let’s see what Kierkegaard might say to this.

From the Notebook: philosophy

What is philosophy? It has to do with words or signs of some kind, and, at the end of the day, it offers an exhortation. If I try to define it any more precisely, I’ll offend some particular sect claiming to be, or once called, “philosophy.” But by leaving it so broad, I risk offending all philosophies at once.

Hence one may say that a sense of dignity in philosophy only comes about with respect to particular philosophies, and when one talks of philosophy as a whole, all of its dignity evaporates.  Hence also, I think, there is widespread contempt for the study (and students) of philosophy-with-a-capital-Ph, even though each contemner has a philosophy of his own.  But they may not be wrong in this contempt, for Wisdom is vindicated by all her children, and yet Wisdom does not attempt to vindicate herself.

On Augustine’s Confessions: the first steps toward accepting biblical authority

Augustine before his conversion had a strange relationship to the Bible. His thirst for “the immortality of wisdom” that he got from Cicero’s Hortensius, as in Book III Chapter iv, encouraged him to take up the Bible after years of disdaining it, but he could not bring himself to appreciate it at the time, for he came to the text already distrusting the content.  Diverse Manichæan teachings had undermined Christian claims about biblical authority, and he also found the style “far unworthy to be compared to the stateliness of the Ciceronian eloquence” that had led him to approach the text again. As long as anyone despises both the content and the style of a text, it has nothing to offer him. So Augustine was repelled from it.

How would it be possible for him to approach the Bible and read it successfully? He could admire its style if he would radically alter his taste, or else forsake, or forget, his highly technical knowledge about literature and style. But even if he achieved admiration of its style, this would make the text enjoyed in the same way that a painting is enjoyed, as Socrates describes in the Phædrus; it would offer nothing to him but light pleasure, being unable to answer its questioners or teach any new knowledge. Words read as merely pleasing sounds are themselves mute. By this Augustine might have come to admire the Bible, even its writers, and even the personages of its stories, but admiration falls short of the required adoration. The Gospel Accounts repeatedly tell of how Jesus Christ tries to draw a distinction between mere fans and his faithful disciples: to love Jesus Christ for his eloquence would be an ironic failure to hear what he says.

Again, how to approach the Bible and abide? He would need to find a way to apprehend its content without Manichæan contentions before he could ever honestly examine it, let alone be content with it. This is precisely what the books of some astronomers and philosophers did for him. He found in them claims to the wisdom that he craved from Cicero’s exhortation, and also highly plausible accounts that ran against the mystical teachings and fables of the Manichæan books. Against the astronomers, Faustus, the great Manichæan preacher, fell short and was forced to acknowledge so much. And then the skeptics gave young Augustine a place to stand suspended; now the Manichæan fables were as dubious to him as the Bible. The end of Book V, Chapter xiv, describes how he loses his love for the one, but does not thereby gain an appreciation for the other:

[I judged] in that very time of my doubt, that I could not safely continue in that sect, before which I now preferred divers of the Philosophers: to which Philosophers notwithstanding, for that they were without the saving Name of Christ, I utterly refused to commit the curing of my languishing soul. This therefore I determined, so long to be a catechumen in the Catholic Church, (which had been so much commended unto me by my parents) till such time as some certain mark should appear, whereto I might steer my course.

His participation in the church as a catechumen is the intriguing detail here that will be explored in another article with the help of Blaise Pascal.

On Augustine’s Confessions: the Hortensius dialogue provides the negative

Augustine, in the Confessions, recalls a few books from his studies in youth that he considers to have contributed to the overall confession of his life. Among those of which he gives favorable mention is Cicero’s Hortensius,* described in Book III Chapter iv.

When Augustine is around eighteen or nineteen, he is supposed to be acquiring the excellences of oratorical and written style in order to become a lawyer. He approaches the reading of Cicero—“whose tongue almost everyone admires, though not so his heart”—expecting to find beautiful language that he might adopt for his own uses in the rhetorical fields. But Augustine takes the Hortensius to heart in a strange way: he enjoys what is written more than how it is written! This aberration is celebrated by Augustine because that book happens to contain an exhortation to philosophia, which Cicero straightforwardly defines as “the love of wisdom,” as opposed to the common love of dispute that characterizes many activities under the same name. The change in his manner of reading coincided neatly with a message that would change his young views and values.

This was what delighted me in that exhortation, that it did not engage me to this or that sect, but left me free to love, and seek, and obtain, and hold, and embrace Wisdom itself, whatever it was.

It was a turning point in his life in which he left behind “vain hopes” of becoming a wealthy or famous lawyer in order to pursue “the immortality of wisdom.” He even admits that at this time his prayers were turned toward God. And then he writes at the beginning of the next chapter, “I resolved thereupon to bend my studies toward the Holy Scriptures, that I might see what they were.”

Before examining his view of the Bible, it is worth looking at Augustine’s account of the Hortensius in light of the Phædrus dichotomy between books that are barren and those that are fecund. While Augustine speaks favorably of it, he does not bother sharing with the reader any of its content other than the exhortation to love wisdom and how that exhortation led him to reexamine the Bible. It cannot be considered among the fruit-yielding books, because it lacks a manner of endurance. He receives it, and he takes its words upon him, but they do not positively teach him. The Hortensius only provides the negative. In other words, it only leads him away from his current practices, but does not impregnate him with knowledge beyond its own words. It is efficacious, but not fecund. It tells him to pursue wisdom, but Augustine adds “quæcumque esset”—Wisdom itself, “whatever it was”—showing that he was entranced by the thought, but that its marrow escaped him at the time.

In Chapter v he admits that the Bible’s message eluded him in his youth, even though the exhortation to wisdom had encouraged him to read it. It seemed “far unworthy to be compared to the stateliness of the Ciceronian eloquence. For my swelling pride soared above the temper of their style. . . .” Evidently the impression left by the Hortensius, while providing the negative, did not teach Augustine the humility that he considers prerequisite to an understanding of the Bible. It gave him the appearance of wisdom by means of the exhortation to pursue wisdom, but it did not give him the wisdom itself; and so he did not at that time pursue the catholic faith, in which he believes wisdom is found, but fell into the good words and strange Manichæan teachings.

Bringing the Hortensius under the scheme developed from the Phædrus is convenient for speculating about Augustine’s views on the matter, but it will become clear that his views on the Bible do not fit so conveniently into the scheme.  This is equally insightful, though, and so the scheme will continue to be used to bring out a principle that Socrates and Phædrus did not anticipate.

*Because the dialogue is no longer extant, Augustine’s account must suffice for a judgment in this inquiry.