The attempt to divorce mythos (the imaginative) from logos (the rational) is as old as Plato’s Republic. The risk of that intellectual operation is that one ends up in rationalism, what Vico dubs “the barbarism of the intellect," pure reason rationalizing what ought never to be rationalized. C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is a fine example of Vico’s poetic philosophy that keeps the two friendly to each other without forcing one to become the handmaiden of the other.

“How can the gods meet us face-to-face till we have faces?”

The Tolkien trilogy “Lord of the Rings” has already grossed Hollywood more than a billion dollars. Were one to stand outside the theater and poll people exiting from the movie, in regard to the other fine scholarly books that Tolkien wrote as professor of ancient Nordic languages at Oxford University, I suspect that precious few would be able to mention even one. The same would probably apply to Tolkien’s friend and colleague at Oxford, C.S. Lewis.

Many have read his The Chronicles of Narnia, few know his other inspiring books harmoniously joining literature to philosophy, mythos to logos. It is an intriguing phenomenon, this of the popularity (the exoterism) of narrative myths and the unpopularity (the esoterism) of abstract rational treatises. I’d like to explore it through the analysis of a novel by C.S. Lewis, which is really an ancient myth with a universal archetype: Till We Have Faces.

The phenomenon above described is not modern. It is in fact as old as Plato’s controversy against Homer in The Republic; or Roman Stoicism and Epicureanism. Few are aware that Seneca was also a fine poet and wrote Latin tragedies in verse. It was he who “inspired” that “wannabe poet” named Nero who was jealous of his own lyre, one of the mad emperors of the Roman Empire. One of Seneca’s tragedies, Oedipus, has even been translated and successfully staged in modern times. In the Renaissance his poetic tragedies were much better known than his Stoic philosophy.

In Fellini’s film Satyricon there is a scene where we see a Greek poet reciting beautiful poetry in Greek who at a certain point gets pelted with food by the Roman bacchantes. One wonders if those decadent Romans were pelting a poet banished by Plato or if they would have accorded the same welcome to a Plato or an Aristotle. Be that as it may, I’d like to explore the phenomenon by taking a look first at what passes for a plausible explanation of this intriguing phenomenon, one that I would dub esoteric, because it is usually put forward by those modern neo-Platonists and rationalists who consider philosophy the province of the few and the intellectual elites.

The argument goes like this: most people are incapable of hard, serious thinking. This is because they are genetically not programmed for it (the Forrest Gump type strangely associated by some of my European friends with Americans in general…) or don’t have the time for it, or they are too lazy to bother with it; most people are pragmatic and make due with pragmatic reason, the cunning street reason of an Ulysses (what Whitehead calls practical reason), they do not need the reason of a Plato (what Whitehead calls speculative reason).

Moreover, most people need to make a living and lack the time and the leisure needed for such esoteric activity; they are the “ilioti” of the times of Plato: they work so that people like Plato can have the leisure to think for them in the academy, cogitating on the cogito, be it the ivory tower or a closet. This of course begs the question: what happens to the many, those that Marx called the proletariat, and the aristocratic elites of Europe called “the unwashed masses?" How are they to cultivate their mind, assuming they have one? Well, let’s see, for them there is the poetical with which to sugar-coat the bitter pill of pure unadulterated reason. Within this line of thought, it stands to reason that the metaphor dealing with particulars is to be considered inferior to the abstract concept dealing with the universal.

Enter Descartes in the 17th century to inform us via his Discourse on Method that in fact these humanistic modes of thought associated with the poetical and the metaphorical are nothing but an inferior kind of reasoning to be discarded for geometrical abstract thinking; it is inferior because associated with the mind-set of a child who uses imagination in lieu of reason. Children and semi-idiots like Forrest Gump imagine fairy tales, men on the other hand reason and device philosophical rationalistic schemes and ideologies galore. To entertain the simpletons, the intellectual elites may once in a while, noblesse oblige, even throw in a myth or two as an illustrative point to help the feeble minded, as in fact Plato does in some of his dialogues.

Lucretius, who wrote De Rerum Natura, would probably explain the phenomenon that way. He wrote his masterpiece of Latin verse, still studied today by classicists for its sheer aesthetic beauty, merely to sugar coat the bitter pill of atheism for the masses: the fear of the gods, or religion, which enslaves men to idolatry, superstition and ignorance to be relinquished by the rational mind. Not too dissimilar from the premise of modern rationalists such as Voltaire many centuries later. Now, Plato would see a definite problem with such a posture, as we read in The Republic.

For him, De Rerum Natura, despite its aesthetic beauty, would still be bad poetry. Why so? Because it is the kind of poetry that does not praise the gods and does not exalt the heroes. Lucretius, "gotch you!" To exile you go. You are a subversive of the established order in the republic; the beauty of your poetry, its form, makes it all the more deceptive and alluring to those who cannot think; it sugar-coats a pernicious content. So Plato gets busy, and as a philosopher-king that he is, he legislates laws which would swiftly banish Lucretius or any other “bad poet” from the polis, and if he will not obey the laws, then capital punishment is the final solution, because evil needs to be excised from the purity of the body politic.

Evil is anything that threatens the common good. If it all sounds rather Puritanical, it is. All Puritans are Platonists: at any time they may in good conscience kill your material body to save your spiritual soul imprisoned in the body and they would rather hear "soul of Christ" in church rather then "body of Christ". Moreover, within Platonism, the beautiful, which is to say poetry, literature, painting, music or any other poetical enterprise must relegate itself to its proper place: to be a handmaiden to philosophy.

At this point one is tempted to ask the question: would Plato tolerate aesthetically inferior poetry as long as it serves the purposes of the body politic and the common good? Of course Plato was no Stalin but his conception of the role of the poetical begins to echo that approved in the former Soviet Union only some twenty years ago. There, fine poets such as Boris Pasternak could only be published abroad; his Doctor Zhivago, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, had to be published in Italian in Milan. Idem for Alexander Solzhenitsyn who was first imprisoned and then banished from the Garden of Eden called the Soviet Union and ended up in idyllic Vermont, USA.

One begins to wonder if indeed the failure of the praxis at Syracuse of Plato’s political abstractions indicates something wrong with his philosophy just as the failure of the praxis of Heidegger’s existential philosophy within that other garden of Eden, the Nazi Wagnerian mythological kingdom of the Neibelung Nordic sagas, may also indicate something wrong with his theoretical scheme of reality.

In light of what we have argued so far, what is one to make of Tolkien’s and Lewis’ reverting to mythological narrative as a strategy to re-introduce the poetical and the transcendental into a Western culture mired in the positivistic, the rational, the scientific, the overtly material and the merely immanent; a culture in love with its rationality and efficient push-button technological solutions and pill-popping fix-alls. Which of course begs the question: are they also what Plato would define as “bad poets” trying to fool the unwashed masses by making more palatable their more esoteric scholarly works, while Hollywood laughs all the way to the bank? Here too, there is much to ponder.

In any case, I would argue that such is not the case with either of the two scholars since they did not conceive poetry/reason as a duality of sort. Rather they saw them as a unity, in a Vichian sense. That explains in part the popularity (the exoterism) of their narrative. Without repeating here what I have already previously written on Vico’s poetic philosophy for Ovi attempting to show how unique such philosophy is within the body of Western thought, let me merely remind the reader that the uniqueness of Vico lies in his consummate ability (the “ingenium’) to bring together the poetical and the rational by tracing the development of human reasoning from cave man in the era of the gods, to that of the heroes, all the way to the full-fledged reason of Plato and then showing how this repeats itself cyclically without destroying a purpose apparent in cosmological and human history.

PART ONE
PART TWO