‘To whom my own glad debts are incalculable’: St.Augustine and human loves in The Four Loves and Till We

Have Faces

Introduction

In The Four Loves C.S. Lewis discusses a passage from

Augustine’s Confessions, where Augustine recounts the death of

a close friend and his intense grief. Lewis takes issue with

a claim that he attributes to Augustine: that we ought to

choose the object of our love based on what will be the

least likely to cause us grief. Lewis claims that

Augustine’s philosophical milieu has obscured his

Christianity; his focus on the individual’s happiness, as a

stable possession of the summum bonum, runs counter to the

sacrificial character of charity and the vulnerability that

accompanies all love. Lewis, I argue, misses the profound

things Augustine is really saying in this part of the

Confessions, and misunderstands the discussion of rest and

security in God’s love. Nonetheless, in Lewis’ Till We Have

Faces, the very things he would later misinterpret and

overlook in his treatment of Confessions IV are woven deep

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into the fabric of his finest novel. In this respect Lewis

was more Augustinian than he realized.

The Four Loves and Augustine

In the final chapter of The Four Loves, ‘Charity,’ C.S.

Lewis mentions the ‘glad debts’ he owes to St. Augustine. He

does so, however, to contextualize a criticism of the great

bishop of Hippo. It concerns Augustine’s treatment of his

anonymous friend’s death in Confessions IV. On Lewis’ reading,

Augustine reflects on his devastating grief and ‘draws a

moral’: do not love something that will only die and cause

you great pain. ‘This is what comes, [Augustine] says, of

giving one’s heart to anything but God. All human beings

pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you

may lose’.1 While he shows much trepidation in disagreeing

with Augustine, Lewis goes on, in a justly famous passage,

to reject utterly the idea that security should guide us in

determining the object of our love.

1 C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960; reprinted 1991), p. 120.

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To love at all is to be vulnerable. Loveanything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safein the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.2

The fact that Augustine proposes the faulty moral should be

attributed not to his Christianity, says Lewis, but is

rather ‘a hangover from the high-minded Pagan philosophies

in which he grew up’.3

Lewis, I claim, has misread Augustine, who is up to

something much different, and much deeper, in Confessions IV.

Consider the deathbed scene Augustine describes. His friend

has been baptized while unconscious. When he comes to,

Augustine begins to mock the baptism and expects his friend

2 Lewis, Four Loves, p. 121.3 Ibid.

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to join in; after all, he received it ‘while entirely absent

in mind and unaware of what was happening’, and while

conscious had fallen in with Augustine’s Manichaeism.4 Much

to Augustine’s surprise, the friend looks on him as upon

‘his enemy’, and tells him to desist, on pain of losing his

friendship. This must inform our reading of Augustine’s

later exclamations, which can seem to justify Lewis’ reading

if taken out of context: ‘Woe to the madness which thinks to

cherish human beings as though more than human! (O dementiam

nescientem diligere homines humaniter!) How foolish the human heart

that anguishes without restraint over human ills, as I did

then!’5 Augustine attributes the depth and pain of his grief

to the fact that he had loved ‘a man doomed to death as

4 Augustine, Confessions, translated by Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: NewCity Press, 1997), IV.4.8. Texts in English from the Confessions are from the Boulding translation unless explicitly noted otherwise. Citations from the Latin are from Augustine, Confessions: Introduction, Text, Commentary, 3 volumes, edited and translated by James O’Donnell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992). Texts from the Confessions will be cited by book (Roman numerals), chapter and paragraph number (Arabic numerals), as here. 5 Confessions IV.7.12. Boulding’s translation of the first of these lines is unfortunate, in my view. Augustine laments the madness that does not love humans humaniter; he does not say here that he loved his friend as more than human. The translation encourages the reading that I aim to counter in this essay. F.J. Sheed’s translation (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006) of this line is much more literal: ‘O madness that knows not how to love men as men!’

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though he were never to die’ (moriturum acsi non moriturum).6 At

first glance, these look like condemnations of excessive love

for a beloved, and would perhaps suggest the moral that

Lewis sees in the text: Augustine ought to have loved his

friend less; he ought to have stayed cool and detached.

In the deathbed scene, though, Augustine was an enemy

to his friend precisely because he mocked his baptism and

tempted him from his eternal destiny. Thus he treated his

beloved, who was really entering eternal life, as if he

would perish utterly, and indeed he was an obstacle to his

friend’s salvation. He loved too little, not too much. His

love was not too exalted for its object, but too low and

impoverished. It is also far from clear that security is

Augustine’s point of emphasis. He recounts how he tried and

failed to comfort himself: ‘If I bade [my soul], “Trust in

God,” it rightly (iuste) disobeyed me, for the man it had

held so dear and lost was more real (verior) and more lovable

than the fantasy in which it was bidden to trust’.7 Here

truth and goodness are the indications of what we should

6 Ibid. IV.8.13. 7 Confessions IV.4.9.

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love, not security or freedom from harm. Moreover,

Augustine’s false Manichean god was certainly defined as

immortal. Why, then, was it just for his soul to reject that

comfort? If security matters most, if it is ‘our highest

wisdom’ (as Lewis frames the position),8 and if Augustine

was thinking of an undying being under the name ‘god’, it

seems that his soul would have been wrong to disobey. Yet he

says otherwise. To be sure, a false god is a strange kind of

security, but this passage shows at least that Augustine is

not simply talking about security and safety from loss.

Falsehood can anesthetize as well as truth—better in many

cases!

Why, then, does Lewis read Augustine the way he does?

He cites Book IV, Chapter 10 in particular. Here is the text

that seems most congenial to Lewis’ reading:

Let my soul use these [created] things to praise you,O God, creator of them all,but let it not be glued fast to them in love through the sense of the body,

for they are going whither they were always destined to go, toward extinction;

8 Lewis, Four Loves, p. 121.6

and they rend my soul with death-dealingdesires, for it too longs to be, and loves to rest in what it loves.9

The line ‘let it not be glued fast to them in love through

the sense of the body’ is particularly resonant with Lewis’

claim that Augustine is reflecting ‘high-minded Pagan

philosophies’ here: a Stoic or Neoplatonic detachment.

Likewise, in Chapter Nine Augustine writes, ‘Blessed is he

who loves you, and loves his friend in you and his enemy for

your sake. He alone loses no one dear to him, to whom all

are dear in the One who is never lost’.10

Augustine does, of course, point out that we find our

rest only in God. That in itself can hardly be objectionable

to Lewis. He cites, as a greater authority than St.

Augustine, St. Paul, who says he would have had “sorrow upon

sorrow” if Epaphroditus had died.11 But Paul also counseled

the Thessalonians not to ‘grieve as those do who have no

9 Confessions IV.10.15. Boulding has ‘let it not be glued fast to them by sensual love’ for non in eis figatur glutine amore per sensus corporis. I have modified the translation to preserve the integrity of the phrase ‘per sensus corporis’, the importance of which will emerge below.10 Ibid. IV.9.14.11 Philippians 2:27. Revised Standard Version (London: Nelson, 1969), p.183.

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hope’.12 Lewis cannot be denying that our ultimate happiness

is found in God, or that hope is better than despair, or

that ‘ye shall find rest for your souls’! No, the objection

is more specific, namely that Augustine would have us choose

the object of our love on the basis of unworthy

considerations: security from loss and the avoidance of

suffering. Lewis asks, ‘Who could conceivably begin to love

God on such a prudential ground—because the security (so to

speak) is better? Who could even include it among the

grounds for loving?’13 But the above passages, in which

Augustine praises God for freeing his holy ones from loss

and suffering, are not sufficient as evidence for Lewis’

reading. For on that reading Augustine is offering a ‘method

for dissuading us from inordinate love of a fellow-

creature’.14 The method is to spell out the pain of loss and

then to propose a moral: love only that which will never

bring you pain.

12 I Thessalonians 4:13. RSV, p. 189.13 Lewis, Four Loves, p. 120. 14 Ibid., pp. 119-120.

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Lewis, however, misses the central thrust of this

section of the Confessions, and consequently misunderstands

the import of Augustine’s statements about finding rest in

God. Running through chapters 4-12 of Book IV is an explicit

concern with truth. As seen above, Augustine could not

console himself by trusting God, because his friend was more

true (verior) than the false god of his imagination. In

Chapter 5 he addresses God: ‘you who are truth’.15 In

Chapter 8 he says, ‘I had poured out my soul into the sand

by loving a man doomed to death (moriturum) as though he

were never to die (acsi non moriturum)’—notice how explicit the

Latin text is in pointing out the contradiction, the untruth

in his manner of loving.16 When he recounts how he began to

find comfort in his other friends’ company, he again passes

judgment on himself: ‘This was a gross fable and a long-

sustained lie (ingens fibula et longum mendacium); and as our

minds itched to listen they were corrupted by its adulterous

excitation’.17 This is a reference to 2 Timothy 4:3-4: For the

15 Confessions, IV.5.10.16 Ibid., IV. 8.13.17 Ibid.

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time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching

ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and

will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.18 Augustine

concludes Chapter 9 with this marvelous line: ‘Your law is

truth, as you yourself are truth (et lex tua veritas et veritas tu)’.19

He admonishes his soul in Chapter 11: ‘Fix your dwelling

there, lay up for safe-keeping whatever you have thence

received, if only because you are weary of deceits (fallaciis).

Entrust to Truth whatever of truth is in you…’.20

In keeping with the nature and title of the Confessions,

Augustine is immediately concerned with confessing the truth

about this episode in his life. (It is not clear that he

‘draws a moral’ until Chapter 12: it is quite different, as

I will show, from the one Lewis identifies.) The truth, he

now realizes, is that his love for his friend was riddled

with falsehood. He loved his mortal friend as if he would

never die; on the other hand, he regarded his friend’s true

eternal life as a superstition to be mocked. That much is

18 RSV, p. 196. See O’Donnell, Commentary Vol. II, p. 232, for the version of the biblical text Augustine would most likely have used. 19 Confessions, IV.9.14.20 Ibid., IV.11.16. Sheed has ‘emptiness’ for fallaciis.

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clear from the deathbed scene. Augustine goes further,

though, in the subsequent meditations on time and eternity.

Indeed, it is striking how much of this part of Book IV

anticipates the celebrated treatment of time in Book XI.

Let us return to the line which is the most likely

candidate for Lewis’ moral: ‘Let my soul use these things to

praise you, O God, creator of them all, but let it not be

glued fast to them in love through the sense of the body

(non in eis figatur glutine amore per sensus corporis)’. The

qualification in the last phrase—per sensus corporis—invites

question. If Lewis’ reading is right, it seems misplaced;

the pain of losing the beloved is not merely a sensory

affliction, as Augustine makes very clear in Chapters 8 and

9, where he describes his friendships so beautifully:

There were other joys to be found in their company which still more powerfully captivated my mind—the charmsof talking and laughing together and kindly giving way to each other’s wishes…Such signs of friendship sprang from the hearts of friends who loved andknew their love returned, signs to be read in smiles, words, glances and a thousand gracious gestures. So were sparks kindled and our minds (animos)

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were fused inseparably, out of many becoming one.

This is what we esteem in our friends, and so highly do we esteem it that our conscience feels guilt if we fail to love someone who responds to us with love, or do not return the love of one who offers love to us, and this without seeking any bodily gratification from the other save signs of his goodwill. From this springs our grief if someone dies…21

Since even his worldly friendships have to do with the union

of souls (animi), not just bodies, and since this union of

soul is the spring of our grief, why does Augustine pray

that his soul ‘not be glued fast to them’ in love per sensus

corporis?

The answer has to do with time and eternity, and the

kind of existence we creatures have. In Chapter 10 Augustine

reflects on this very matter, and it is worth seeing the

text in full:

Turn us toward yourself, O God of Hosts,show us your face and we shall be saved;for wheresoever a human soul turns, it can but cling to what brings sorrow unless it turns to you, cling though it may to beautiful things outside you and

21 Confessions, IV.8.13.12

outside itself. Yet were these beautifulthings not from you, none of them would be at all. They arise and sink; in theirrising they begin to exist and grow toward their perfection, but once perfect they grow old and perish; or, ifnot all reach old age, yet certainly allperish. So then, even as they arise and stretch out toward existence, the more quickly they grow and strive to be, the more swiftly they are hastening toward extinction. This is the law of their nature. You have endowed them so richly because they belong to a society of things that do not all exist at once, but in their passing away and successiontogether form a whole, of which the several creatures are parts. So is it with our speaking as it proceeds by audible signs: it will not be a whole utterance unless one word dies away after making its syllables heard, and gives place to another. Let my soul use these things to praiseyou, O God, creator of them all,but let it not be glued fast to them in love through the sense of the body,

for they are going whither they were always destined to go,toward extinction; and they rend my soul with death-dealing desires, for it too longs to be, and loves to rest in what it loves. But in them it finds no place to rest,because they do not stand firm;

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they are transient, and who can followthem with the senses of the body?

Or who can seize them, even near at hand?Tardy is carnal perception, because itis carnal; such is the law of its nature. Sufficient it is for another purpose, for which it was made,but insufficient to catch the fleetingthings that rush past from their appointed beginningto their appointed end. In your Word, through whom they are created,they hear your command,“From here begin, and thus far you shall go.”22

Two things should be noted about created things here: first,

even as they grow perfect, becoming most fully what they

are, they pass into non-existence; second, they exist only

as parts of the whole. Each created being, taken as a whole,

includes all the passing moments of its existence, but in

any moment only a part of the being is present. Moreover,

our senses, since they are corporeal, only connect us to

objects moment by moment. Thus to cleave to a beloved thing

‘through the bodily sense’ is to love it piece-by-piece

22 Ibid., IV.10.15.14

rather than as a whole. This is how objects of a love that

cleaves per sensus corporis can ‘rend’ the soul (Augustine’s

verb is conscindere: ‘to tear in pieces’); the lover is

seeking to rest in and find union with something that does

not rest or have unity in itself.

Nor is the soul rent only when our friends die: ‘who

can seize them, even near at hand?’ See also Chapter 6: ‘I

was miserable, and miserable too is everyone whose mind is

chained by friendship with mortal things, and is torn apart

by their loss, and then becomes aware of the misery that it

was in even before it lost them’.23 Augustine’s soul was

broken up, cut into pieces (concisus),24 and Chapter 8

describes how his other friendships patched up (resarcire),

repaired (repare), and remade (recreare) it.25 What sort of a

repair is indicated by his stark judgment: ‘This was a gross

fable and a long-sustained lie’.26 This is the more

surprising since it is followed immediately by the beautiful

depiction of friendship, quoted above, which is not simply a

23 Confessions, IV.6.11. My italics.24 Ibid., IV.7.12.25 Ibid., IV.8.13.26 Ibid.

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catalogue of errors. This life of friendship, ‘lie’ and

‘fable’ notwithstanding, really was a kind of union of

souls, and Augustine presents it as truly displaying ‘what

we esteem (diligitur) in our friends’. The description of

friendship as fusing many souls together into one continues

the thematic language of dissolution and unification, which

parallels the vocabulary of falsehood and truth.

And yet something about his friendships was thoroughly

untrue. Augustine still did not love his friends according

to the truth about their existence (and his own). The most

obvious untruth was simply that he still loved mortal beings

as if not mortal. The deeper untruth, which emerges from the

consideration of time and eternity, is that Augustine loved

his friends partially, since his soul cleaved to them in

love ‘through the sense of the body’. Or better, he sought

to love them as a whole, and indeed there was a union of

souls between them; since he was in the grip of a false

doctrine of the soul, though, he was torn between the desire

to love in full and the ignorance of what a full human being

really is. The false doctrine, the ‘gross fable’ embraced by

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Augustine and these friends, is Manichaeism, which did not

acknowledge God’s incorporeality, much less that of the

soul. Thus Augustine accuses himself:

Why follow your flesh, perverted soul? Rather let it follow you, once you are converted. Whatever you experience through it is partial, and you do not know the whole, of which these experiences are but a part, although they give you pleasure. Were your carnalperception able to grasp the whole, wereit not, for your punishment, confined toits due part of the whole, you would long for whatever exists only in the present to pass away, so that you might find greater joy in the totality. … So it is always with the constituent elements of a simple object, constituents which do not all exist simultaneously: in their entirety they give us greater pleasure, provided we can perceive (sentiri) them all together, than they do separately.27

Human beings, insofar as they are temporal things, do not

exist all at once, but always have only a vanishing sliver

of their complete being. A complete apprehension of a human

being would encompass his or her whole life; a still more

perfect apprehension would grasp that life all at once.

Correspondingly, a more complete love for one’s friend would27 Confessions, IV.11.17.

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encompass his or her whole life; a still more perfect love

would perceive it all at once. Here is how another author

illustrates such an experience:

And yet (this is hard to say) with all this, even because of all this, she was the same old Psyche still; a thousand times more her very self than she had been before the Offering. For all that had then but flashed out in a glance or gesture, all that one meant most when one spoke her name, was now wholly present, not to be gathered up from hints nor in shreds, not some of it in one moment and some in another. Goddess? I had never seen a realwoman before.28

The author, of course, is C.S. Lewis, in perhaps his most

profound work, Till We Have Faces. Psyche is the beloved half-

sister of the narrator, Orual. This text is from a series of

visions that Orual has as she nears death, visions which

reveal to her the truth about her life and loves.

Till We Have Faces and Augustine

There are several striking echoes of Augustine’s

Confessions throughout Lewis’ novel, and indeed in its entire

narrative structure and main preoccupations. Like Augustine,

28 C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1956), p. 306. My italics.

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Orual writes a confession; hers, however, begins as an

accusation against the gods, upon the charge of taking away

her beloved cruelly (as well as unjustly, irrationally, and

inexplicably). It begins as a condemnation of the gods for

their incompatibility with human loves and goods, but ends

up as a confession of the divine love. In the divine love

those human loves find their full being, and in reference to

it the past takes on a completely different light. The last

full line that Orual writes, ‘Long did I hate you, long did

I fear you,’29 instantly brings to mind the great prayer in

the Confessions: ‘Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and

so new, late have I loved you!’30

Even the line from which the title is taken, ‘How can

they [the gods] meet us face to face till we have faces?’ is

thoroughly Augustinian: God is nearer to us than we are to

ourselves, and we cannot even know who we are without his

light and grace.31 From the great prayer of X.27.38 again:

‘Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you,

29 Lewis, Till We Have Faces, p. 308.30 Confessions, X.27.38.31 Lewis, Till We Have Faces, p. 294.

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and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong,

I, misshapen. You were with me, but I was not with you.’32

Likewise, at the beginning of Augustine’s recounting of his

friend’s baptism and death: ‘Who can of himself alone extol

your deeds, even those you have wrought in him alone?’33

Augustine cannot even call upon God unless God first brings

about a change within him. Thus at the opening of the

Confessions he asks, ‘How shall I call upon my God, my God and

my Lord, when by the very act of calling upon him I would be

calling him into myself?’34 At the beginning of Book XIII he

provides an answer: ‘Into my soul I call you, for you

prepare it to be your dwelling by the desire you inspire in

it.’35 ‘The structure of Till We Have Faces is built around

Orual’s attempt to remember, to recount the truth of her

past life: first to accuse the gods, and finally to confess

God’s goodness and mercy. She finds that not only has she

systematically suppressed the harsh truths that lie within

her—the selfishness at the center of her most cherished love

32 Confessions, X.27.3833 Confessions, IV.4.8.34 Confessions I.2.2.35 Ibid. XIII.1.1.

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—but that she is consequently unaware of who she truly is.

The veil she wears over her unlovely face is the outward

sign of the veil she has drawn over her soul’s deepest

ugliness. Thus for Orual, as for Augustine, true self-

knowledge cannot be attained without God’s grace.

The question Orual asks—‘How can the gods meet us face

to face till we have faces?’—implies more than a lack of

self-knowledge, however. It implies that the self is not

even formed sufficiently to relate to God in the proper way.

This theme is a definitive one in the Confessions, and Book IV

is no exception. Then there is of course the famous

treatment of the fragmentation of the will in Book VIII: ‘I

was at odds with myself, and fragmenting myself’.36 Much more

could be said about the Confessions and Till We Have Faces; I will

focus mostly on the elements of Confessions IV.4-12 that are

paralleled in Lewis’ great novel. What Lewis missed in the

passage from the The Four Loves is just what he sees and

communicates so marvelously in Till We Have Faces.

36 Ibid. VIII.10.22.21

Augustine confesses the fragmentation of his soul in

his love for his friends. In the texts in question, he

attributes this to his cleaving in love to temporal things

through the senses of the body. Since the objects of his

love, to which his soul is united, are fragmented through

time, he too is fragmented with them. To this spread-out

existence, with each part taking the place of the last,

Augustine contrasts the establishment of things in God’s

eternity. ‘If kinship with other souls appeals to you, let

them be loved in God, because they too are changeable and

gain stability only when fixed in him (et illo fixae stabiliuntur):

otherwise they would go their way and be lost (irent et

perirent)’.37 It is not just that without God they would

eventually be lost to death; even before they perish (perire)

they continually pass (ire). In God the soul and what it

loves have their true firmness and integrity:

Entrust to Truth whatever of truth is inyou, and you will lose nothing … all your labile elements (fluxa tua) will be restored and bound fast to you … [and] shall stand firm with you and abide,

37 Confessions, IV.12.18.22

binding you to the ever-stable, abiding God.38

Just so, Orual finally sees Psyche as complete, as holding

her very self all at once, rather than ‘some of it in one

moment and some in another’. This at last is a ‘real woman’.

Lewis, like Augustine, sets up a parallel between the

scattered temporality of human existence and the transience

of words; these are set against the completeness of life in

God’s eternity and the eternal Word, which does not depart

as our speech must, and yet is the Truth itself. Orual’s

last lines, broken off in mid-sentence by her death,

acknowledge this:

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fear you. I might—39

Augustine’s vision of God reaches its highest point in the

vision at Ostia with his mother, Monica. And indeed, he too

38 Ibid., IV.11.16.39 Lewis, Till We Have Faces, p. 308.

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relates and contrasts temporal words with the eternal life

of God, the eternal Word.

And as we talked and panted for [God’s Wisdom], we just touched the edge of it by the utmost leap of our hearts; then, sighing … we left the first-fruits of our spirit captive there, and returned to the noise of articulate speech, wherea word has beginning and end. How different from your Word, our Lord, who abides in himself, and grows not old, but renews all things.40

I noted earlier that Augustine is principally concerned

with truth (not security) in this part of Book IV. Likewise,

in Orual’s final visions she is told repeatedly that ‘all

here is true’,41 and in particular that her understanding of

her past loves was, to use Augustine’s words, ‘a gross fable

and a long-sustained lie’. The unity of Orual’s life story

as she wanted to tell it turns out to be illusory. Lewis

goes so far as to say (through the revelations given in

Orual’s visions) that the divine can change the past;

hyperbole or not, Lewis shares with (or learns from)

Augustine the idea that the temporal is in the process of

40 Confessions, IX.10.24.41 Lewis, Till We Have Faces, p. 300, 304.

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being taken up into the eternal. Augustine says to his soul

that its transient things (fluxa) will be reformed and

renewed (reformabuntur et renovabuntur), will ‘stand firm … and

abide’ in God.42 Lewis has a character tell Orual that

‘nothing is yet in its true form’.43 To be sure, Lewis goes

further with the idea that God can change the past. The

import of this striking claim, however, has to do with the

untruth of Orual’s own memory and self-understanding. It is

the story she has told to herself that must be revised; that

is the ‘past’ that God will change. Like Augustine’s,

Orual’s confession is not a mere record or biography, but a

movement of the soul towards God. In writing her charge

against the gods she starts on the inexorable and painful

road to seeing the truth: that a hard kernel of blind,

voracious selfishness lay hidden at the heart of the story

she told herself. She can only understand what she is and

what she has been by suffering, by being broken and

unraveled so as to be transformed in God’s love. She has to

bear, unwittingly, the sorrows of Psyche.

42 Confessions, IV.11.16.43 Lewis, Till We Have Faces, p. 305.

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Her final vision, when ‘the god’ is approaching, shows

a glimpse of this transformation’s end: ‘The air was growing

brighter about us; as if something had set it on fire. Each

breath I drew let into me new terror, joy, overpowering

sweetness. I was pierced through and through with the arrows

of it. I was being unmade. I was no one’.44 At the end of

the vision Orual sees herself remade as another Psyche, the

same yet subtly different. She had to be unmade through

suffering. She had to have her untrue, self-constructed self

unraveled through confession and revelation, in order to be

remade in God.

Compare this masterfully drawn vision to the end

of Confessions XI:

Now as my years waste away amid groaningyou are my solace, Lord, because you aremy Father, and you are eternal. But I have leapt down into the flux of time where all is confusion to me. In the most intimate depths of my soul my thoughts are torn to fragments by tempestuous changes until that time whenI flow into you, purged and rendered molten by the fire of your love.

44 Ibid., p. 307.26

I will stand still, then, and find firm footing (solidabor) in your Truth who is shaping me to himself (in forma mea, veritate tua)…45

Augustine (the author) and Lewis see so many of the same

truths here: Orual and Augustine (as the character of his

own confession) deeply misunderstand their own loves, even

those which seem, at the time, pure and transparent. They

and their beloveds can only be truly understood and truly

loved in the light of God’s eternity, not in the scatterings

of time and not in the lies they tell to try to stitch

themselves back together. The divine love melts them both

down to remake them in the truth, and yet this new creation

is more truly itself than the partial existence encountered

in this mortal life: Psyche is ‘a thousand times more her

very self’; Christ is Augustine’s true form. Finally, loving

the beloved in God does not mean ‘apathy’ or cool

detachment. On the contrary, it means loving him in his full

being, as he most truly is and ought to be. Though the

falsity in Augustine’s love is more directly tied to an

intellectual shortcoming, while Orual’s is explicitly rooted45 Confessions, XI.29.39—XI.30.40.

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in a grasping self-love, nonetheless Augustine’s was not

merely an intellectual error.

A final point of convergence cannot be overlooked, and

it clarifies how Augustine’s love was untrue in both the

intellectual and the moral senses of the term. Orual’s love

for Psyche was increasingly marred and transformed by

possessiveness. Indeed, this is what her condemnation of the

gods becomes in the end: a bare assertion that Psyche is

hers, and that no happiness that the gods can give Psyche

could reconcile her, Orual, to losing her possession. This

is the reductio of her charge against the gods. In the course

of the story, however, two moments stand out. The first is

when she visits Psyche on the night before she is to be

offered up as a sacrifice to the gods. Orual finds her

strangely resigned and even joyful at her coming death, and

she resents this in Psyche. Orual thinks she has come to

comfort Psyche, but even in her first telling she reveals

that she has also, or instead, come to experience how much

Psyche needs her. For a moment Psyche succumbs to fear, and

as they weep together, Orual confesses that this was ‘a kind

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of sweetness in our misery for our first time. This was what I

had come to her in her prison to do’.46 When Psyche recovers and

reveals that she has a joyful hope about going to be the

god’s bride, Orual ‘grudged her that courage and comfort’.47

She cannot encourage Psyche in a hope and happiness that

involve departing from her, from Orual. She will have

possession of the beloved over the beloved’s happiness.

And this is only a foreshadowing of the climactic

moment when Orual forces Psyche to choose between her love

for Orual and her new life as the god’s beloved. Orual

cannot or will not see the palace where Psyche dwells, and

is unable or unwilling (she cannot at the time determine

which it is) to believe Psyche’s story. Since Psyche will

not consent to leave or to break the god’s command by

bringing a lamp to their bedchamber, Orual forces her by

vowing to commit suicide if Psyche does not carry out the

‘test’. She makes herself into the enemy of Psyche’s

happiness. It is at this moment that Lewis strikes a note

46 Lewis, Till We Have Faces, p. 70. My italics.47 Lewis, Till We Have Faces, p. 75.

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strongly reminiscent of the friend’s deathbed in the

Confessions:

The look in her face now was one I did not understand. I think a lover—I mean, a man who loved—might look so on a womanwho had been false to him. And at last she said, “You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know. It is like looking into a deep pit. I am not sure whether I like your kind betterthan hatred. Oh, Orual—to take my love for you, because you know it goes down to my very roots and cannot be diminished by any other newer love, and then to make of it a tool, a weapon, a thing of policy and mastery, an instrument of torture—I begin to think Inever knew you. Whatever comes after, something that was between us dies here.”48

This is the moment when a human love, set in opposition to

the divine, ceases to become love: this is Lewis’ main

concern in The Four Loves. Consider again the deathbed scene

between Augustine and his friend. The former does not

explicitly wish to deny his friend the greatest good, but

that is precisely what his mocking tends towards.

Augustine’s love, though not entirely false, is riddled with

falsehood and incompleteness: he acknowledges neither his 48 Ibid., p. 165.

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friend’s true nature nor his newfound grace. Consequently he

not only loves falsely but, in part, fails to love, since he

is an obstacle to the greatest good for his beloved. His

friend is right to look on him as if upon an enemy. And this

is exactly the great sin of Orual: her love, which she sets

in opposition to the divine, shrivels into itself until only

the desire to possess remains. She wants no happiness for

Psyche that lessens her possession.

Drawing a Moral

What has become of the moral that Lewis attributed to

Augustine? It should be apparent by now that it was a

misreading, but exactly where it went wrong deserves some

attention. Augustine does praise the firmness, completeness,

and yes, the security of the love of God. He does bless the

man who loves all others in God and for God, since ‘he alone

loses no one dear to him’. And yet Augustine is not talking

at all about a guide to choosing one beloved over others.

Rather, he is presuming (correctly, I think) that the lover

always desires to be and to remain unified with the beloved,

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and points out how deeply impossible this is unless he is

loved in God. Again, this is not a guide for choosing one’s

object of love, as if Augustine were giving us a criterion

for shopping among the possible things we might love. God is

not simply another item on the list of possible loves. He is

Love itself and Life itself, and our very existence tends

into nothingness without him. To love each other in

accordance with what we truly are, and what we are to be,

requires us to love in God.

Moreover, it is not simply or even principally the

avoidance of suffering that is at issue, but rather the

fullness and completeness of love. Indeed, it would be a

strange lover who would prefer to love partially rather than

completely, and would prefer a partial and sorrowful

existence for his beloved to the perfection of joy and

fullness of life. Lewis reads Augustine as ‘drawing a moral’

in Chapter 10. Grammatically, however, Augustine does not

begin issuing imperatives until Chapters 11 and 12, where he

addresses commands to his soul and to all his fellow

sinners. And there we find, not a solipsistic guide for

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building one’s happiness by selecting the safest beloved;

rather, these injunctions transcend the individual focus of

the first-person narrative and speak of a communion of love.

First he addresses an imperative to his soul:

Entrust to Truth whatever of truth is inyou, and you will lose nothing; your rotten flesh will flower anew, all your diseases will be healed, all your labileelements will be restored and bound fastto you; they will not drag you with them in their own collapse, but will stand firm with you and abide,binding you to the ever-stable, abiding God.49

Then, in Chapter 12, he tells his soul to bring others to

God and, in a beautiful and extended passage, gives the

words the soul should say to those it loves. I quote part of

it here; it is evident that Augustine is not giving his soul

calculating advice about achieving maximum freedom from

heartbreak. Rather, he is commanding his soul to bring other

souls to their true good, their true life:

If kinship with other souls appeals to you, let them be loved in God, because they too are changeable and gain stability only when fixed in him; otherwise they would go their way and belost. Let them be loved in him, and

49 Confessions, IV.11.16. My italics.33

carry off to God as many of them as possible with you, and say to them:

Let us love him, for he made these things and he is not far off … There is no repose where you are seeking it. Seek what you seek, but it is notthere where you seek (quaerite quod quaeritis, sed ibi non est ubi quaeritis)… He whois our very life came down and took our death upon himself … Impatient ofdelay he ran, shouting by his words, his deeds, his death and his life, his descent to hell and his ascensionto heaven, shouting his demand that we return to him. Then he withdrew from our sight, so that we might return to our own hearts and find himthere. He withdrew, yet look, here heis … Life has come down to you, and are you reluctant to ascend and live?[…]

This is what you must tell them, to movethem to tears in this valley of weeping,and by this means carry them off with you to God, because if you burn with thefire of charity as you speak, you will be saying these things to them by his Spirit.50

Though Augustine speaks of seeking repose here, he is not

using security as a criterion to choose the object of love.

We already are seeking to rest in the beloved; that’s what

50 Ibid., IV.12.18. My italics. Boulding has ‘Search as you like, it is not where you are looking’; I have given my own translation of that line, with the Latin supplied for comparison.

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love seeks. We are already seeking happiness--that’s what

humans do—but we are seeking it not just for ourselves but

for the beloved as well. Here, in the culmination of this

episode in the Confessions, Augustine tells us that we should

love our friends in God and bring them to God out of love

for them. He does not tell us, who love mortal beings, to

find a different beloved, but to love our friends in God,

‘who is our very life’. God is so intimately present to us

that loving the friend in Him does not take us away from our

friend; on the contrary, it is the only way to love our

friend as he or she ought to be loved. We cannot turn our

face in love towards the beloved till we have faces.

Conclusion

Lewis mistakes Augustine’s aim in Confessions IV when he

comments on the passage in The Four Loves. This is striking in

light of the deep convergence between Till We Have Faces and this

section of the Confessions. Till We Have Faces, which is riddled

with the very Augustinian themes that Lewis missed in The

Four Loves, was written shortly before the latter book. So it

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seems that he simply missed something he should have seen.

(Indeed, Lewis misidentifies Augustine’s friend as

Nebridius, which makes it perhaps more plausible that he

missed the context here.) And yet he spoke the more

important truth by saying that his ‘glad debts’ to Augustine

were ‘incalculable’. We ought not to blame him too much for

losing count of the incalculable on this occasion,

especially since he makes such marvelous use of these very

ideas in the novel. The argument presented here is one small

indication of the depth of Till We Have Faces, which to my mind

has no equal in Lewis’ writings. The debts it owes to

Augustine’s Confessions, whether known or unknown to Lewis,

are glad indeed for us who are fortunate enough to read it.

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Works Cited

Augustine. Confessions: Introduction, Text, Commentary. 3 volumes.

Edited and translated by James O’Donnell. Oxford:

Oxford UP, 1992.

_________. Confessions. Translated by F.J. Sheed.

Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006.

_________. Confessions. Translated by Maria Boulding. Hyde

Park, NY: New City Press, 1997.

The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version: Old Testament, New

Testament and Apochrypha. London: Nelson, 1969.

Lewis, Clive Staples. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt,

Brace, 1960. Reprinted 1991.

________________. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. New York:

Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1956.

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