Christians Reading Classics
Christians Reading Classics
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis with Oliver Traldi
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What does it mean to love someone well — and what does it cost when that love curls inward? Nadya Williams and Oliver Traldi discuss C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, tracing how Lewis reframes the myth of Cupid and Psyche to expose the jealousy beneath even the most devoted love, the limits of philosophy before the divine, and what it means to render an account of your own life.
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A Striking Lewis Passage
SPEAKER_00Since I write this book against the gods, it is just that I should put into it whatever can be said against myself. So let me set this down. As she spoke, I felt, amid all my love, a bitterness. Though the things she was saying gave her, that was plain enough, courage and comfort, I grudged her that courage and comfort. It was as if someone or something else had come in between us. If this grudging is the sin for which the gods hate me, it is one I have committed. Orwell, she said, her eyes shining. I am going, you see, to the mountain. You remember how we used to look and long? And all the stories of my gold and amber house up there against the sky, where we thought we should never really go. The greatest king of all was going to build it for me. If only you could believe it, sister. No, listen, do not let grief shut up your ears and harden your heart. It is my heart that is hardened. Never to me, nor mine to you at all. But listen, are these things so evil as they seemed? The gods will have mortal blood, but they say, whose? If they had chosen any other in the land, they would have been only terror and cruel misery. But they chose me, and I am the one who has been made ready for it ever since I was a little child in your arms, Maya. The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to reach the mountain, to find a place where all the beauty came from.
Welcome And Guest Introduction
SPEAKER_00So wrote C.S. Lewis in his novel, Till We Have Faces, published in 1956. 70 years ago this year. Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from New Orthodoxy. I am Nadia Williams, book's editor at New Orthodoxy, and the author of Christians Reading Classics, the book. And today I am delighted to talk about C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces with Oliver Trollti. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, and he is presently an assistant professor at the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership, a civic center at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of Political Beliefs, a Philosophical Introduction, published in 2024. And you can read his shorter essays all over the place, including in American Affairs, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Point, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Oliver, thank you for taking the time today.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much for having me to talk about this great book.
What Makes A Work Classic
SPEAKER_00Well, and before we talk about this great book, we have to start with a regular question for this podcast. What is a classic?
SPEAKER_02What is a classic? Great question. I think this might be something I uh encountered in trying to figure out what makes classical music classical when I was a teenager. Um it has one face that faces toward its own time and another that faces uh, let's say, toward eternity. Um, but you also might say toward our ours or toward the future or towards later times. Um one thing this means is that a a classic is something that can be re-encountered, um uh that bears re-encountering, that isn't, you know, um that doesn't seem to be sapped of everything valuable um after people have talked about it a little bit. Um that isn't merely uh discussing an issue that is sort of a hot topic that uh that people stop caring about. You know, it's not necessarily something that's part of a trend. All this is a very negative way of defining a classic sort of by saying what it isn't. Um but maybe maybe that's the best I can do at the moment. Um, it it's interesting uh as well how many there's a question of how many classics there are. Recently on Twitter I raised the question, what if you were to try to make a an entire Greek book syllabus that's a kind of shadow syllabus, that that's you know, the not so great works of authors, the ones that we don't read, or the things that didn't quite survive. Um I think um many of those works might turn out to have classic qualities. So there can be forgotten classics, they're sometimes called, or there are these um in classical music, there's the story, for example, of Mendelssohn somehow discovering some of the works of Bach or something like that. Um I don't remember the details. I probably got something wrong there. Um, but uh yeah, I guess for me it's something that we that we can continue to learn from, um, that continues to to make us think, and that has some relationship to uh to themes that are going to be relevant for for human life, uh sort of no matter what era we're in, uh no matter the circumstances around us, uh, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00It does. And it's funny to think that perhaps there is some element of luck or chance about it. It's not exactly a scientific process, like which books became the classics that everyone keeps reading, and which ones, like your point with the shadow syllabus, perhaps even great books by someone whose other books made it into the canon, if you will.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Um, it's interesting thinking about it in the context of the book we're gonna talk about today, um, till we have faces, you know, C.S. Lewis thought this was his best book. Um, it's certainly rather different than some of the books um he's known for. Uh I think that that's often true of say um, you know, there's some sense in which a classic is popular. You know, it it's it's um it's something anybody can encounter. But, you know, if we think of say popular music, uh that also makes it sort of lowbrow or simple. Um uh lots of bands, you know, real fans of the bands will say, you know, oh, you you have to really get into their old stuff, you have to really get into their experimental stuff, you know. Um a real fan of Nabakhov, you know, Lolita might not be their favorite. They'll have read all the other all the other Nabaka, maybe they'll love Panin the most or something like that. Um or a real fan of uh some thinker. You know, I work with sort of intellectual historian types, I'm not one myself, but they read the letters of their favorite thinkers. Maybe some of the best writing or the best thoughts are in their letters. Um so it is interesting thinking about these choices we make when we decide what is a classic. Um, you know, there's a question of what we gain, what we lose. Um But I I do think that there's some there's some quality that seems to that seems to kind of shimmer through, just like um this is something worthwhile, you know, what when you engage with certain things. Um, not I'm having a good time reading this, uh, or I'm learning something even exactly, but just sort of like this itself. Um, there's something very healthy about this work. There's something very full of life about this work. Um, I don't know. I don't know if any of that made much sense.
SPEAKER_00I think so. And again, it gets at the process of this is not a scientific formula where you can plug in a bunch of things and like out pops an incontroversible like list of classics. That's um, and perhaps that's what it is with humanities. We have to talk through it, we have to think about it, and most of all, we have to keep reading.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Um yeah, I definitely agree. I definitely agree.
Oliver’s Winding Great Books Journey
SPEAKER_00So you've spent your entire um academic career and kind of your um intellectual journey with great books of various sorts and programs, in fact, that were specifically focused on that. So I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about your intellectual journey, maybe like start with high school and college and to the present and how these experiences have shaped you as a reader and thinker.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I actually think of myself as an interloper in the Greek books world. So I'll I'll explain why. Um I've been here and there. Um I don't know, I've I've had I've had a this sort of wandering, which um, you know, I like to think is the sort of stuff of good intellectual biography, you know, this sort of the sort of life that can, you know, well, you'll you'll see what you think. Um so I left high school early um to go to a college called BART, uh where I entered interested in music. I wanted to be a composer. Um but uh I found that the world of music, um well, there were two big problems. One is that it involves people kind of yelling at you a lot. Um there's a movie about this about a drummer called Whiplash, I think, although I've never seen it, but um they're just the norms are a little bit different in music. You're kind of scolded a lot, and uh, you know, small mistakes are anyway. I I found very quickly that I I I just didn't I didn't know if I needed that to continue being part of my life. Um and uh I also had never had much discipline. Um and I found that this was I was getting to a point uh in my career if I wanted to be a musician that my I had to sort of build back my my piano playing from the ground up. I had sort of unlearn everything I've done done and relearn it. And uh this seemed like a, you know, I thought I was I was 17 years old, you know, I was so old at this point that all the work I'd done up to that point, it would have been such a waste to redo it. Obviously, now you, you know, once you actually live a bit, you realize that it's nothing at all to remake what you've done by age 17. Um and I also so I guess there was a third thing. I found that I didn't completely understand the world of music composition. Um, all the composers uh were were very experimental, and you know, there was um I sort of loved the beautiful melt melodies that I heard in classical music or that I would encounter in, say, music in movies or video games. And so I was actually kind of recruited by the classics department, which I came to love from a few classes I took on ancient ancient poetry and ancient philosophy. Um, and they urged me to do a summer program at the Sydney University of uh New York, where I learned Greek and an intensive ancient Greek in an intensive 10-week manner, uh, which was the first sort of intellectual challenge of my life. Um, and I was up to it, which was great. Everything had been kind of easy up to then, and this was difficult, and it was great. Um that program is legendary, by the way, if you're hearing it, yeah. It is, it is it is a legendary program, and when you meet people who have been through this program, it's an instant, uh, instant connection, instant thing to talk about. There are many of us everywhere, obviously in classics, but also in philosophy and literature and also outside of academia, just people who were sort of erudite, uh, perhaps didn't in college. Um, but there weren't many jobs in ancient Greek. Um, and uh I went to law school for a year um in 2009 to 2010, and then I left because I didn't want to be a lawyer, and there was also a lot other going on in my life. I was still quite young and I was kind of a mess. Um, but I I never followed up my interest in philosophy and sort of figuring out deep truths about the world and figuring out what I ought to do and how I ought to live. Um, so the next thing I decided to do was to do a master's at Tufts, uh also a somewhat legendary program. Um and uh after a few more stops and starts, uh I ended up applying to PhD programs uh and I went to Notre Dame. In Notre Dame, there was also a lot of sort of bouncing around trying to figure out what to do at different points. I was focusing on metaphysics, logic, philosophy of science. Um, I ended up writing a lot about epistemology, the question of what justifies our beliefs, which beliefs would be rational, what we can know. Um and uh that's where my first book came out of the question about what we can know about politics. Um and coming out of my PhD, uh I was selected for this fellowship at Princeton at the James Madison program. Uh I think due to my some of my online shenanigans. Um and uh that put me into the world of great books and more political theory. Um and uh the year after that I spent in Tulsa at Jen Fray's Honors College. Uh where we it was all great books all the time. Um and and now I'm here. And now I'm back to doing some more writing and analytic philosophy, what you might call professional philosophy if that phrase even makes any sense. Um so now I'm I'm sort of a mix now. I'm still back to as you can tell, I'm always trying to re figure it out, reconfigure it. Um and uh we'll see, we'll see how the great books and the and the logic shopping uh end up working together. But I I still have a, you know. I think the the thing that puts me the most at odds with great books people is I think I'm as much a writer as I am a reader. Um I think writing is super important, and I think reading the great books, um, you know, they're they're so impressive, but it should also, in the way impressive things sometimes do, it should make you brave as a writer. You know, you don't need to, not everything you write needs to be an epicycle on an epicycle on an epicycle of an argument that already exists. You know, you can you can tackle things in big ways, you can make big claims, um, and you can try to write the sorts of things that that might be, you know, closer to classic status rather than being, you know, professionalized and sort of um and sort of chopped up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I really like this. I mean, the journey sort of uh as you're telling it, and you probably realize it, in a way, it actually does make sense at the end, even if at the time perhaps each twist and turn did not.
SPEAKER_02I hope so. I mean, and I also, you know, I'm sure it will continue. If I know myself, I know that it I will continue to do things that don't quite make sense at the time and hope that they make sense later um based on some of these instincts.
SPEAKER_00The connection of reading great books and also writing is one that um I find perfectly natural. And I know as you noted, not everybody does. But um, even the MFA program I run here at um Ashland University, our uh motto is read great books, write your own grade book, which is mildly arrogant, but you know, the point is if you read a lot, and we require MFA students to read 50 books over the course of their two years in the program, if you read a lot, your writing certainly will improve.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think there's a there's a clear connection. It's not just that reading improves your writing, but I also think writing writing improves your reading. I actually think some attitudes towards the great books are hard to maintain. Uh if you write a lot. Um and writing, and this is another theme of Till We Have Faces, writing is writing is a form of thinking. It's a form of thinking through things. Um and uh of course that's uh one reason why many great books were written to help people think through things. Um and uh, you know, it's not clear that we're engaging with the great works in the right way if we're not doing our own writing. Um, you know, you you're not supposed to, well, who knows, supposed to. That's an odd phrase, but um, you know, you might not be getting the most that you can out of them if you simply put them aside and say, Well, that was nice, you know, um, time to go barbecue or whatever. Um and uh yeah, so I think writing writing uh you know it's funny we were talking about my college career. I remember the college brochure had all these courses with titles like writing as reading as writing. Um who knows what the difference between reading and writing is. Um but uh yeah, I think we we we must write. Um it's an interesting time to be thinking about the value of writing, certainly with AI. Um but I which I can also talk about more as I produced a book with AI and I thought a lot about what was lacking, um the experience of it and the experience of reading it. Um But yeah, there's there's certainly um I had forgotten that you were up in Ashland, you're actually quite near. Um and uh I don't know if but one of my colleagues, uh Debbie O'Malley, is an Ashland graduate, I believe. Um so we we have some sort of Ashland connection here in Toledo. Um but uh yeah, I think it's important to do writing, important to do writing of all types. Um uh I think it's good to write some poetry now and then. It's good to care about your sentences, um, even as a philosopher. Um, and it's good to care about your logic, even as a poet. Those are both things that are hard to convince people of. Um And in the end, you know, I think I'm a very this again puts me at odds with some people who deal with the great books in a certain way, but I'm a very non-generic in in the sense that uh, you know, genres blend together for me. Um, you know, I can read something in a novel and think, well, what's the philosophical argument? And I can read a book of philosophy and say, well, I really love the sound of these sentences. Um and I think to an extent that's the way my writing turns out as well. Um, things are kind of of a piece.
Enter Till We Have Faces
SPEAKER_00I think this naturally brings us to C.S. Lewis, who also didn't care about genres or well, blended genres, and kind of um wrote just an incredible variety of things, including a lot of poetry, poetic translations. Um, his retirement project, which unfortunately he never got to finish, was a verse translation of Virgil's Aeneid, and the little bit of it that survives is just gorgeous. But today we're talking about till we have faces. So get us into it. So let's let's say hypothetically, someone is listening who has never read it. What would you say they need to know as they walk into it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so great question. Um Well, it's a retelling of an ancient myth, which sort of more takes the side uh of the villain of the myth, um and sort of less uh I actually didn't do my I didn't Do my studying and I didn't remind myself what the myth involves. Um uh but it is set in the ancient world. Um, it's not a modernization. Um, it's set in a world that is more, well, what somebody like me would think of as more superstitious, um, more violent. Um, and uh, you know, there's a question about uh what is the place of writing and thinking and all the stuff that we started out talking about in such a world? Um, there's a philosopher character, a great character called the Fox. Um, there's a question of what good is philosophy? Does philosophy get you all the answers? Um there's uh a lot of questions about the nature of love and beauty. Um maybe those are the most fundamental questions. And uh yeah, overall, you know, it's obviously um it's a religious book. Um, so it's a book, you know, God is a character in the book. But uh, I think even for a you know, an agnostic like myself, there's a great deal to take from it about um uh how we treat one another, the uses we make, the misuses we make of one another, um uh the power we have over one another, our jealousies, um, our jealousies of even the proper bearers of that power, the things that are truly good or truly beautiful, um, which properly merit our time and attention. Um, and these things are kind of interwoven in, you know, a series of relationships and events and dramas um that set uh in kind of uh, you know, one thing that makes it, I think, uh a kind of great work is that uh it chronicles the whole life uh of this woman, um, who's named Orruwel in the story, um who's the daughter of a king who's not very good and not very nice, and learns to be a very good queen. Um, but also her whole life is defined by uh a relationship with a younger sister who uh sort of becomes an ancient uh sacrifice and in the end becomes a goddess and her feelings about those things. Um and uh yeah, there there's there's it's I haven't done a good job explaining if there are there are so many themes that are interwoven and there are they're they're it's done in such um such an evocative way that you know anybody who has lived looking at the story of this woman's life, you know you know, you see analogs to ways in which uh ways in which you might have misused someone, and ways in which uh you might have been misused, and ways in which you've been jealous even of the good, or have turned away from the good and the beautiful, ways in which you've fallen short, um ways in which you've uh misused your your own uh true and genuine talents, genuine virtues. Um and uh yeah, so I think it's a it's a truly excellent book. It was recommended to me in Tulsa uh by our our secretary, Great Grace Regnier, um, who is married now and has a different name, but I've forgotten that name. Um uh who's also also a philosopher. Um so yeah, really, really, really excellent book. Some beautiful, beautiful sentences, um very evocative sentences as well about all these things. Um a lot stuck out to me as I was reading. Um but yeah, I'd love to hear what you think about
Apuleius And Getting The Myth Right
SPEAKER_02it.
SPEAKER_00It's really, it is really stunning. I remember the first time I read it a few years ago, and it was just like one of those have to sit with it. Um I'm a classicist, so for me, it was uh fascinating to see how C. Lewis rewrote the Roman original. So the Roman original is a shorter kind of, it's a little episode, and it's part of a longer novel by Apolletus, the Golden Act, written in the late 2nd century AD. But of course, Theus Lewis made it completely his own. But fascinating, um Thewis, um, when he um first read it, I think he was at maybe 18, and he kept coming back to that story, that particular episode in Apollous's novel. And at one point he said, um, he wrote, I think, in a letter to someone that Apolletus just got it all wrong. And so for him, it was a matter of like, I need to get this story right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, that's inter it's actually really interesting to think what what did he mean by that? What what what made him think? I mean, it's just a story. We might think, how can how can the writer of a fiction get the fiction wrong? What do you think? That that that that itself is such an interesting notion. Um, but I think when we think about our question of what makes it classic, maybe we can start to get an answer. Um maybe the answer is that Apolaeus was attempting to say something about, you know, true facts about human nature when it comes to things like beauty and jealousy, but that he had misunderstood those things. So perhaps he had misunderstood um the nature of jealousy and the way it works in our lives and what we're jealous of and what we're drawn to. Um you know, I think in the original, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think if I'm the the original the i in the original, uh the beautiful sister is hated for being beautiful. And I think C. S. Lewis, you know, is trying to suggest to us this isn't really the way our relationship with beauty works. You know, one interesting thing about the novel is the Fox, you know, the ancient philosopher, is relating some of the philosophical ideas about the good and the beautiful, which we think of as being characteristic of the ancient Greek world and also of early Christianity, um, ideas that you might find in Plato, but also in Boethius, for instance. Um, the notion, for instance, that we are all drawn towards the good, um, and that people who do bad things thus are to be pitied, because obviously they are they aren't being good. So they're not getting what they want. Uh-um. This has a very stoic feel to it. Um, but yeah, I think the most likely thing is that Lewis thought um, you know, it's interesting. I was talking about the the shadow, the shadow great book syllabus. The golden ass is is, I think, like a very good candidate for including it. I don't think it makes this, I've never read it. I don't think it makes its way onto any of these syllabi. Which is unfortunate. Yeah, my DC colleague Kenry Oliver put it on his list, and it was um, I think it's a a great candidate for for for that sort of thing. Um, I think maybe similar in some ways to Ovid's Metamorphoses.
SPEAKER_00Um and that's actually they share a title in their original. Um, so both of them originally were titled Metamorphoses, except St. Augustine renamed it the Golden Ass for reasons we don't entirely know, and it's stuck.
SPEAKER_02Uh-huh. Yeah. But yeah, I would say that I think um once you say these works have the goal of communicating something lasting and classic about the human experience, you do have the ability to say, well, it's gotten that experience. You know, I have interpreted it correctly. I know what it's trying to tell us. And I also know that it's gotten that experience wrong. Um so maybe that's what Lewis had in mind. Um, but I admit that's just my my my guess.
SPEAKER_00Well, and it's really hard to get into an author's head where we only have that kind of cryptic comment. But one interesting thing that C. S. Lewis does differently, his novel tells the story through a lifetime. So we get our orwell's entire life from beginning to end. Whereas in C. S. Lewis's um sorry, in Apollyus' uh story, we just get kind of a glimpse. It's the zeroing in on Cuban and psyche and becomes kind of um just this brief episode. And perhaps C. S. Lewis is trying to show us that is something almost Herodotean, that you don't know what something means until you see the end.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, this is and this is um, you know, yeah, anybody who's read Herodotus and has listened to Cyrus and Solon and people like that, um, understands this this piece of the ancient Greek mindset. You don't really know if you've lived a happy life, a good life, until um you've seen the life uh work out. Maybe, maybe, maybe even then you don't know. Um, so you know, in analytic philosophy, we love coming up with our little clever examples. So uh, you know, imagine somebody who spent their whole life building up a town, and then, you know, on their deathbed, they say, Look at this beautiful town, I've lived a good life, and the day after they pass, you know, the town catches fire and every building is burned down and the town is destroyed. There's a question of whether we can still say they lived a good life if if everything they built is destroyed the day after. Um But I also think, you know, it's not just the question of of evaluating it all at the end, it's also, you know, the sort of Boethian um, you know there's a sense in which the main character, you know, well, she gets some things and not others, let's say. One very interesting thing about Lewis is the the way he built this main character is um she's she's very unattractive, um, and actually is in in in love with a man her whole life, uh, who who is already married. Um uh and in this telling has two beautiful sisters, not just one. One is beautiful and a goddess, and one is beautiful and kind of sucks. Um but you know, despite being unattractive, she uh develops many things we would think of as virtues, good judgment, courage, prudence. Uh, she's much kinder than her father. Uh her kingdom, she rules it so well. Um, she lives a sort of life, you know. Uh the book is written in the first person. I probably should have started with, I forget if I mentioned that. Um, and uh at times she says, Well, you might have already heard of some of my deeds, you know. Um, she's a conqueror, but uh kind of a kind one, you know. Um, and has lived uh, you know, for for by the standards of her time, was educated in in philosophy and poetry in a way nobody else would have been. Um and has led, you know, in many ways, uh, the sort of life that uh for the time, you know, it's hard to think of what she could have done better, um except for this one thing, having to do with uh her relationship to the beautiful and the good um and and God uh as sort of um channeled or mediated by her relationship with her sister. Um and uh so yeah, I think in some ways uh Lewis takes up a whole ancient world in this book and the kind of arguments, intentions, and different perspectives of this ancient world um in showing us this entire life and having this character reflect on it, um and in showing you know early philosophy and the attempt to put that philosophy into the living, um, into how this character lived. Um and uh I think it's just extraordinarily um impressive uh as a work of philosophical fiction uh
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The Fox And The Limits Of Philosophy
SPEAKER_00want to follow up on that a little bit because that's something that C. Cloud has brought into the story that's not in the original. There are no philosophers in the original um telling of this, um, the Roman version, but C.S. Lewis places the fox as one of those like linchpin figures in the novel. What do what does this mean? What is C. Cloud is trying to tell us? Do we all need philosopher friends?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it it's a great question. Um, this character of the fox is so interesting. Why, why he's inserted and why he exists. You know, to some degree, the fox is meant to show, you know, the fox is a great character, but also kind of gets it wrong, you know. Lewis, you know, probably not a surprise, but you know, the full the philosopher, the arguments don't quite get it right, and some of the superstitions turn out to be true, and you know, there's more to the world than the purely natural, and there is life after death, you know, um, in the world of uh till we have faces. Um and uh and uh so the philosopher in some ways, you know, is just a in some ways is a foil for the actuality, you know, the actual um supernaturality uh of the world. Um on the other hand, you know, there are other senses in which it seems like uh the fox sort of prepares the way for the main character to even encounter this world. Um without him, uh it seems that she she's in kind of danger of becoming much more like her father. She has um his anger, she has his um kind of comfort with killing, uh honestly. Um and uh so the fox kind of civilizes her and puts her on a it puts her at least thinking about the good. Um uh it's mentioned in the book that you know she she she starts looking all around the world for books with her messengers and uh she finds some Platonic dialogues and she finds uh what is it, Aristotle's metaphysics, I think. It's interesting thinking about in the context, which I'm sure Lewis would be familiar with of uh you know the actual ancient philosophers and the Catholic relationship to philosophy. Um you know, I think for some uh the encounter with the supernatural, with what he calls the divine nature, would be through reason. Um and in fact the the phrase divine nature with which uh the fox uses um is actually picked up by the main character um near the end, even though she also she she you know she has to sort of explain how does everything fit together? How does the how do her experiences with her sister and the sort of revelation of a of a kind of physical concrete divine fit with the abstraction of the divine nature? And how does all that all fit with sort of like her need to like live a life and be, you know, and be a queen and things like that? Um as you can tell, I haven't completely worked out what all of this means um myself. Um but yeah, he's a he's a really great character, really interesting character, um, and actually uh a decent introduction to Stoicism, I think. Um and says some things which you know says them in sort of slogan form, but they're actually quite quite philosophically complicated. Um so you know, I love the notion that we should pity people who do evil. This is there in Plato's Gorgias, it's there in Boeethius. Um, and it comes from, you know, the ancient idea that, you know, well, the good is kind of all one thing. There's a kind of unity of the good. Um, and uh so Plato's Gorgias asked this question should we um is it better to is it worse to do evil or suffer or evil? Um and uh Plato says it's worse to, you know, in our modern times we would say, well, depends what you mean. You know, like in some sense, you know, in some sense, yes, and in some sense one, in some sense the other. Um, but in the ancient world, they really wanted an answer to that. They wanted it, you know, they didn't want any, you know, disclaimers or any complications. They just wanted to say, how should I live and which one is better and which one is worse? Um, and uh so the fox does exemplify the view that it is uh worse to do evil than to suffer evil. Um and uh he's a slave, uh, which is also also you know an interesting way to set the character. Um, so yeah, great character. Um, really great character.
SPEAKER_00And the characters really just a character development here is so beautiful, just the way C.S. Lewis tries to get into the psychology of each of the main characters, with Orwell,
Jealousy Love Beauty And Divine Nature
SPEAKER_00uh the first uh person speaker and protagonist, we really get that sense of her personality and her development over time. And I think perhaps that's um also what C.S. Lewis thought was lacking in the original. Apollyus' characters are very quick and simple.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I would definitely agree, but I would also say, you know, in the context of Lewis's own story, you know, near the end, it becomes clear that, you know, human humans are pretty great, and these characters are drawn out to be very compelling. And one thing Lewis makes clear is that like this is this is what makes us dangerous to each other, because there's this other thing, which is true goodness or true beauty, the divine nature. Um, and in in the presentation of Till We Have Faces, uh, we draw each other away from this. Um our love for each other and our desire to keep that love to ourselves, um, rather than to let it be drawn towards the truly good and the truly beautiful. So I think the character development is really just completely. I mean, character development is obviously always great, but here it's really necessary for the story. The characters really must be developed so that you can see the way this dynamic, which Lewis is interested in drawing out, um sort of repeats itself. Um, and uh the end of the book, which happens all in a flash, maybe there's one flaw of the book, you know, it happens maybe a little too quickly. Um, but uh there are these series of relationships that the writer, the main character, Oral, um sort of has clarified for herself. Um so she runs into a kind of ex of her, the sister who's not very nice, um, who's been who her father had made into a eunuch, but who's done quite well for herself otherwise, um, who says, uh, you know, back when, you know, back when your sister was in love with me, she talked about how, you know, she had you all the herself, and then the fox came along, and then your other sister, the one who became a goddess, came along, psyche. And then she barely had anything. And this is so like the jealousy that Oral herself feels about the god drawing up Psyche. I mean, much of the much of the drama of the ending comes from how near god-like the main character herself is in her in her just commanding nature, um, and in her strength of character. Um and uh that in a way is what makes it such a uh such a gripping character in the ancient sense, the sort of character who's the stuff of myths and epics, because she is so she has such a true greatness that she's sort of able to contend with the gods, but also is not able to leave things to the gods in the way that she should, and sort of suffers for it. Um if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00Um it makes sense in a very ancient way. I mean, nothing good ever happens to those who wrestle with gods.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, um that's tragedy right there. The yeah Greek. But it's also, I think, you know, it's a tragedy, but also I think in the context of this story, it's also, you know, we're also not we're not made made to think exactly that she's been punished either. I mean, it it's very odd, you know, that there is a you know, we are meant to feel some sympathy, I think, for the main character. And in the end, you know, I think she is sort of allowed to feel some sympathy for herself. You know, her her, this is very contemporary therapy way of looking at it, probably, but I, you know, I do think we're meant to think that her anger at herself in some ways is is is part of what um keeps her from having these realizations earlier. Um there's um early on in the book, so I don't know, I don't know how much I should tell of the story, but her her sister is sacrificed, and that leads to her being the bride of of the god, um, who maybe is the only god really. There's a there's a god and the the gods, and you know, it's not clear how these things relate to one another. Um uh but um the god says to her, you you shall all you also shall be psyche. Um and the reader is sort of as puzzled as the character throughout the book. Um, what is this supposed to mean? Um, and I guess I'm I'm curious what you think it means, but to me, one thing it means is that uh you know, this happens because I don't want to get into the details, but she she makes Psyche ask the god a certain question where she's not allowed to. Also, very ancient. It's very um Orpheus in the Underworld type thing, right? She sort of looks behind when she's not supposed to. Um, and uh this leads Psyche to sort of wander and suffer. And one of the things that it means is that, you know, Oral, the main character, is also in a sense wandering and suffering through this same period, uh, this kind of linked way. Um, but another thing it means is that um, you know, Oral, it's mentioned often, you know, oh, you have the god's blood, and it's part of the mythology of this kingdom that the that the king's family has the god's blood, but people do believe this. Um, and she also has this effect which Psyche has on people, where uh she draws a lot out of people and draws them away from one another. This is most exemplified in her relationship with the captain Bardia, who she's in love with, and she has this jealousy for the whole book of the captain's wife. And then at the end, it turns out the captain's wife is also jealous of her because she keeps the captain around at work all day and makes him fight these wars, and then he gets home and all he can do is sleep, and the wife actually barely has any of the relationship she can have. Um, and um, you know, there's a sense in which we're we're meant to think Orwall's in some way, the analogy that's drawn almost justifies Orwall's um sort of anger at the gods because they do, you know, they bring us away from one another. Beauty brings us away from one another. You know, there's just this this difficulty about us only having so much attention to give and so much love to give, um, and uh what we do when we encounter um something that really deserves it.
SPEAKER_00That's deep. And that's the sort of thing that we keep coming back to in themes. Great books um encourage us to consider what is truly worth loving.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think it's it's a great question. And when I teach about love, obviously love is a great theme in the great books. Um, and uh at Tulsa, you know, there's love in the poetry of Sappho, love in Plato's Symposium, Ordered and Disordered Love in St. Augustine. You know, I love Augustine because I pronounced it both ways, so I'm sure I got it right, at least. Well, um, I always explain Augustine, and this might not be completely correct, but I explain Augustine as somebody who had he had so much love and he tried directing it in anywhere he could, and nowhere was big enough for it. It's almost like Descartes, you know, Descartes' one of one part of Descartes' argument for the existence of God is well, I can conceptualize the infinite, but I'm not infinite myself. That concept has to come from somewhere, it must come from somewhere infinite. Um and Augustine does a similar thing where it's sort of like, you know, my love must there must be somewhere that it's supposed to go. Well, I've tried going to the Coliseum, I've tried eating and drinking, I've tried sleeping with married women, I've tried stealing pears. None of it, none of it seems to work. So there must be something that's bigger than all this, right? There must be something that is a fitting uh object of all my love, right? Um and uh this is something that I I love teaching students about, again, even in as an agnostic, because it helps us think about love because many of us, I'm certainly, I've had this myself, and you know, teenage students have this. You know, you fall in love whether whether romantic love or just friendship, or even even in terms of one's attention, you know, listening to the same song over and over again or playing some silly game on your phone, which I've been doing a lot recently. Um you sort of put your your love into things that when you think about it, you don't actually value, you know. So the connection between love and value and our need to to have things we value, but also to be valued ourselves, um creates a you know, a lot of complications. Um and um in in some ways, I think till we have faces is about this the simultaneous need to be valued appropriately, but also to have what we value most, and our recognition that uh if we are going to love what we value most, it won't love us back in the same way if we're valuing correctly. Because we are not as good as that thing. We are not as beautiful as that thing, we are not as powerful as that thing, right? And this, of course, this thing could be God if you're religious, but even if you're not religious, it could be great works of art or sunsets or mathematics, you know, any you like we all recognize that there are things that are truly sublime and beautiful. And then we look at ourselves and we think, well, I'm just some freaking guy, you know? Um, and yet when we deal with other people, we think, why are you doing all that math? You should be paying attention to me because I'm so great, you know. Um, and uh so yeah, I think this is this is what's great about this book because this tension in the nature of loving, um and loving correctly, and it's relationship, in a sense, it's relationship to rationality, um, and to order and to the correctness of some love, um is just very, very difficult for us because our instincts about loving and our instincts about being loved, they they they they're intention, you know, um they they're in conflict.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
Complaint Against God And The Answer
SPEAKER_00Well, and I think C.S. Lewis is uh trying to get to this through what resembles apologetics at the end, actually. So Orwell is struggling with the pagan gods. And um, so what you noted, like there's there's a god, but then there are also the pagan gods, and she's very much wrestling with this. But at the end, without spoiling this completely for um readers who haven't haven't picked it up before, it seems like Orwell comes to know the one god.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it certainly does at the end. Um, and it's it's all it's all great for her. Um it's interesting. You called it apologetics to think what is what exactly the nature, you know. I mean, if I were teaching this book, which I may um someday It's interesting to think what the nature of her complaint is. Um in Tulsa. Well, this isn't while I was there, but I actually visited for the, I mean, this tells you something about the program at Tulsa that I have my free will. Went back to Oklahoma to be with the students, um, even after I had worked there on my own dime. So I went there in part for a movie night um where we showed uh Amadeus. One of the complaints of Salieri in this movie is that God made him, it's a very specific complaint, and I think it's very related to this book, and in some ways it's a beautiful complaint. God put him in this specific position, this very precarious position. Because actually, in the movie, it's not that Mozart is getting all of these. Salieri himself has a lot of musical successes, and some of Mozart's greatest pieces are not, they're sort of not understood in their own time. Um, and Mozart himself, in some at some points in the movie, is very poor or in dire streets. But what Salieri says is the real God's real crime against him is he gave Salieri the ability to appreciate just how great Mozart's music was, um, but not the ability to create it. So Salieri has the specific set of characteristics that make him understand just how far short he has fallen, right? Um, and that to an extent, you know, in in some ways, that I think is the nature of the complaint here. Um, that uh, you know, Oral understands just how great Psyche is, and this thing was given to her and then taken away. Um, and uh and Oral, you know, she has all these cold virtues and is a great administrator of a kingdom, um, without necessarily having you know the warmth her sister has. I think it's interesting to think what exactly, you know, what exactly is Lewis's answer to Oral's complaint, right? These types of complaints, you know, are famously hard to answer and famously sometimes answered in, you know, in Tulsa we taught taught the book of Job. And, you know, there's a lot of ways to interpret what God says at the end when he shows up in the whirlwind, but one way is just sort of like, look, you have no idea what's going on. Just don't worry about it. It's certainly the friend who suggests you're gonna find some justice here. Um, that is not that is not right at all. Um, and Lewis says the same thing, you know, you know, thank goodness the gods are unjust. Um uh and thank goodness, but also it's a shame because O'Rawall suffers some things she's not supposed to, but actually at the same time does not suffer uh as badly as she should for the the truly bad things um of her life. Um the response, I think, to me, and I think this could this could be wrong. It's not again, it's from my agnostic perspective, not necessarily the religious perspective, but I take it that part of the response is that everything she has accused the gods of doing, she has done herself tenfold um as queen. And this is part of why these relationships with all the other people in the kingdom are drawn out so much. Um I think that that is that is the part of the answer that I got the most clearly, that I understood the most clearly. Um and uh it's one of those things that, you know, it it's not necessarily a philosophical answer, but the older you get, it's sure is an answer that you feel when you look at your own life, you know. Um, or at least for me.
SPEAKER_00And C.S. Lewis refuses to tie it all up with a neat bow. There's there are hints, there's enough to keep thinking as you finish the book. It's one of those. And I found that ending really just stunning. Like it made me pause and sit there with it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think it's a fantastic ending. Um it is it is a little quick, but the character, one thing I like, and this is part of why I brought up AI in writing, one thing that I like about the book, and that I think might make it teachable. I'm always thinking about what I can teach these days. Um the character makes it clear that the writing up of her complaints is part of what has made her understand their true nature and her own true nature, right? It's the whole process of writing the first part of this book that has made her actually uh see things clearly. Um and it makes her understand uh her jealousy of the gods, and it makes her understand uh, you know, the the extent to which she has been godlike as a queen. Um and you know, she compares herself to a spider at one point, sort of drawing everybody into her kingdom in a web and sort of you know, sucking the life out of them. Um and uh it does seem like although it's an apologetic, there's no denial that the gods do this. You know, there's no denial that beauty does this in the book. That would be sort of pretending that the problem doesn't exist, pretending that the puzzle doesn't exist. Um and there's a time in one of her final sort of visions, or all I think she's in a river, and there are these, you know, holy golden rams who are running uh and they're just kind of running roughshod over her. And she says something like, Well, this is this is what the divine nature is, you know, it's so it's so beautiful and joyous and so above us that it it sort of wounds us just by being, by having all this energy. Um, it's not as though it tries to wound us, but it's just in its very nature, unfortunately, to wound us. Um and so as a book of apologetics, that's a you know, that's something to really wrestle with when talking about the divine nature, right? Um, the fact that the the or at least the the idea that it is inherently wounding. Um and uh it is, you know, in some ways it is a book about wounds. The word wound is used uh frequently. Um and uh people are always being physically hurt um and uh our ability to wound ourselves is is brought up multiple times. Um love is turned into a wound, love is turned into power. Um yeah, anyway, those are some of my thoughts about it as as a as a book of apologetics.
SPEAKER_00Well,
Wounds Sacrifice And The Ending’s Mystery
SPEAKER_00and that's a very theological image also, just the image of Christ's ones.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. Um and uh there's no there's no Christ figure in the book, but there is a suggestion that in some way every there's sort of everybody is Christ-like in the book because the characters are sort of always taking on each other's wounds and pains. Um there's a suggestion near the end that Oral has done this for Psyche. There's also a you know, or earlier Psyche does this for Oral. Um uh Oral does this for Bardia. She does, she she takes on um, she acts as a fighter for uh a visiting um prince, uh in a fight to the death. So people are all are all are always sort of taking on each other's wounds, taking on each other's pains. Um and uh there's something near the end where Lewis says um or or or all things. You know, there have been this these mysteries. It's it's it's you know, God exists, but it's pre-Christian. Um in in it's literally set, I think, in a time period that's meant to be pre-Christian. Um and in this place they have this goddess Ungit, who has a son who's supposed to be, who is the the god who Psyche is meant to be married to. But there's also a question of the marriage is also kind of uh a murder, and the the son and the mother might be the same, um, and they might be the same as other gods. So it said, you know, the gods sort of go in and out of one another, they flow in and out of one another. Near the end, you know, O'Rall thinks, well, maybe people just flow in and out of uh one another as well. And I think this is the part that is sort of in the sense of sacrifice uh and taking on wounds and sins and things like that. This this is the part that's most um Christian as opposed to like Judeo-Christian, um, this idea that we take on each other's wounds and this idea that we sacrifice for one another and can stand in uh as sacrificed for one another. Um and you know, the the the the philosopher the fox, when this sacrifice happens, you know, he says this is all ridiculous, it's superstition. Um, and we aren't completely meant to think it's it's ridiculous, and we're not even meant to think it's completely symbolic either. Um and uh yeah, I think what we're meant to think is there's a sense in which the boundaries between people and things and and and gods and all these things are not um are not so stark and that we can actually we can actually be the same as one another, we can actually experience things for other people. Um and so there's there's an element of of mystery. Um the end to a degree, you know, it reminds me a little bit of um I like it better in Lewis, actually. I don't think it makes very much sense in Dante, but at the end of Dante's Paradiso, you know, he gets to the end and he's just like, you know, at this point it was like you know, just so amazing. Um, but there is a sense in the in the visions that this character has that she she does actually see what it's all about. You know, she she really kind of gets to the source or close to the source. Um and uh yeah.
SPEAKER_00It really is a beautiful book. And if you're listening and you've never read it, you should.
Classics We Wish We Wrote
SPEAKER_00Well, Oliver, this has been such a delight. I have one final question for you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. Of course.
SPEAKER_00What classic book do you wish you had written and why?
SPEAKER_02What classic book do I wish I had written? A lot of answers are coming into my head, you know. I wish I had written The Metamorphoses, which we talked about, because it's just it's just so clever. Um I wish I had written Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy because it's such a brave book, you know. Um I think I I think uh I'm I'm gonna say give me a few more years to see what I can do. And uh maybe, maybe, maybe I won't have to answer it. Maybe I'll write something truly good someday. And I'll try my best. But those are those are two of the first that come to mind uh for the cleverness and for the bravery, um, the metamorphoses and the constellation of falls.
SPEAKER_00Well, and both have stood the test of time, so absolutely.
SPEAKER_02And at the end, uh Ovid, one of the great uh at the end of the metamorphoses, Ovid said, you know, I I bet you you people are gonna still be reading this in thousands of years. One of the best called shots in history. Um, it's absolutely incredible.
SPEAKER_00He proved right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Well, thank you so much, Oliver.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much for having me.