Becoming Psyche: The Stoic Way and the Platonic Way in Till We Have Faces

Abstract

In C.S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces, philosophy appears not merely as an academic subject but a distinctive way of life and paideia for the formation of the soul. We see this model of philosophy in the figure of the Fox, who practises Stoicism and instructs the three sisters – Orual, Redival, and Psyche – in its way. Lewis’s novel shows the Stoic care of the soul to be insufficient for the task set to Orual by the god – that she shall become Psyche – and gestures instead toward Platonism as offering a better model of paideia and a truer conception of the soul, both its desires and its ultimate destiny of union with the Divine. In the end, however, Orual’s encounter with the Divine also points beyond Platonism, anticipating a Christian conception of divine love and grace.