Regan Flieg: Psyche and the Platonic Forms

As I am beginning to read Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, I found the description of Psyche and her beauty in the second chapter particularly striking.  The text reads: “As the Fox delighted to say, she was ‘according to nature’; what every woman, or even every thing, ought to have been and meant to be” (22).  The idea that Psyche is a sort of ideal woman reminded me of Plato’s ideal forms that we discussed at the beginning of the semester with his Simile of the Divided Line.  According to this simile, shadows have a little bit of truth because they participate in their corresponding bodies, which have a little more truth than the shadows because they participate in the concepts, which have a little more truth than the bodies because they participate in the forms, which have more truth than the concepts because they participate in the Good, which is what is ultimately real.  According to this model, as we discussed in class, the forms are the ideal or prototypical forms of the things of which we have concepts.  

In Lewis’s description of Psyche, he seems to present her as the Ultimate Woman, the ideal form for our concept of a woman, which lends truth to individual women, which lend truth to those women’s shadows, portraits, and reflections.  It is most obvious that Psyche is depicted as ultimate or ideal, but it also appears that she, like Plato’s ideal forms, lends meaning to other things in that “when she picked up a toad [...] the toad became beautiful” (22).  Perhaps it is less that Psyche is the Ultimate Woman and more that she embodies (although Plato would likely protest the validity of perfectly embodying any of the forms in the first place since he believed they had to be immaterial) Ultimate Beauty since it is through her that other things can be seen as beautiful.  The body of the toad could only be beautiful because we have a concept of beauty, which is only possible through the existence of Ultimate Beauty.  

This idea is only a loose one that is more of just an interesting thing to think about than an argued position, but I would be interested to hear anyone else’s take on this.


Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces:  A Myth Retold. 1956. Harcourt Brace, 1985.

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