Document Type

Thesis

Date of Completion

4-28-2021

Department

Interdisciplinary

Academic Major

Interdisciplinary Studies - BioScience and Philosophy

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Mac Sandlin

Abstract

C.S. Lewis’s standalone title Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold transforms the Greek mythos “Cupid and Psyche” into a novel about human nature being deified. In TWHF, Lewis presents an arc from pagan dualism through rationalism and finally to our relational God who makes us holy like Him. Lewis studies have suffered from the lack scholarship applying St. Thomas Aquinas’s christened Aristotelianism which would illuminate the metaphysical foundations that Lewis founds his words and builds his worlds upon. In Aristotle metaphysical biology he proposed that the human soul is neither an altogether separable spirit divorced from the bodily flesh, nor is the soul the mere physical matter itself. The soul is rather the form of a natural living body as well as its first actuality and substantive intellect. St. Thomas Aquinas undertakes Aristotle’s buried ideas and consecrates in the resurrection of human nature in Christ. Human nature in full body-soul union has been crucified and resurrected in Christ; therefore, human nature has the final telos of becoming that which God is by partaking in the fullness of God’s Triune life and love. St. Thomas’s hylomorphism and Christian theosis are the twin tenets underpin TWHF. Through these themes, Lewis contends that human nature is a unified body-soul that is destined to become the fullness of the divine nature. Hylomorphism and theosis constitute the tradition of theological anthropology that Lewis received and handed on. The form, matter, and intention of Lewis’s ‘myth retold’ is wound around these principles: the metaphysics of human hylomorphism and the mystery of Christian theosis.

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