Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man, by Nathan Snaza

Taken in isolation, The Abolition of Man is different from most of C. S. Lewis’s other works. It is not a work of fiction or a work of expressly Christian apologetics. It is, however, rightly recognized by Dyer and Watson as “the lynchpin for understanding of all of [Lewis’s] work.”1 The thesis set out in The Abolition of Man is foundational to C. S. Lewis’s worldview. Lewis explored its implications in the third novel in his scientific trilogy, That Hideous Strength, which Lewis expressly described as a story whose moral was “the serious “point” which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man. 2 In the last decade, there has been renewed attention in The Abolition of Man. Michael Ward has published a critical commentary on The Abolition of Man, 3 while Justin Buckley Dyer and Michael J. Watson have written a book analysing Lewis’s views on politics and natural law.4 John Gray has described The Abolition of Man as “prescient,” “prophetic” and at least as relevant now as it was when it first came out.

That Hideous Strength is clearly connected to C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, where he writes of the conditioners who seek to create a new society via the rejection of universal moral law and the rise of an educational and scientific elite. For Lewis, That Hideous Strength was a way to communicate the concerns expressed in The Abolition of Man in a story format that would appeal to those who might not read a treatise on the subject.
 This paper examines his concerns about a totalitarian threat as expressed in The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, and then shows how those concerns appeared in his post-war correspondence. Were his fears and concerns valid? How, in particular, did he communicate his concerns to his many correspondents? How predictive did he consider That Hideous Strength to be as he experienced the reality of post-WWII Britain?

Contemporary Perspectives on C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man : History, Philosophy, Education, and Science

On the surface, Out of the Silent Planet appears to be C.S. Lewis' first halting exploration into the realm of ‘the space-and-time story’. However, there is a deeper and more significant experiment involved; Out of the Silent Planet is Lewis' first attempt at a philosophical narrative exploring a specific theme, a technique which he will later incorporate into his most famous works, the Chronicles of Narnia. In Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis is examining the tri-part Platonic soul as he presents it in The Abolition of Man, using the three species of Mars as representations of each aspect. This article demonstrates how these three parts are represented: the seroni being the Head, the pfifltriggi being the Belly, and the hrossa being the Chest, as well as the other connections between The Abolition of Man and the first book in the Ransom Trilogy.

C. S. Lewis wrote Studies in Words "to help students understand the lexical and historical meaning of certain common words, in effect, to assist “a more accurate reading of old books.” His choice of words, with their classical, European, and British contexts, is reflective of Lewis’s vocation as a professor of English literature. However, the chosen words also contain moral meanings. While the primary purpose of Studies is to train the reader in making conceptual distinctions, it also provides a kind of training in interpretive and historical responsibility that runs parallel with Lewis’s view of the natural moral law. The twin concerns of historical accuracy and ethical judgment are always beneath the surface in Studies in Words, for Lewis is modeling for his readers an understanding of public meaning and lexical change, along with a psychology of agency based on beliefs and intentions that is worth engaging, even accepting or rejecting.5 That is, he is practicing what he recommends in The Abolition of Man—a formative education with commitment.

This article aimed to highlight the reasons for a criticism by the Irish writer Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) towards the direction of youth education in Europe, notably in the United Kingdom, in the 20th century. His criticism gained as his main thesis what the writer called “the abolition of man”, resulting from an educational system that promotes an alleged rationality that prevented the development of an intermediate element in the human being between the cerebral and the visceral. For Lewis, that intermediate element is the emotions that, well trained, endow the intellect with capacities to deal with the mere animal organism. For this purpose, our starting point in this work was outlined by the cut of a broader work, which consists of an exhibition that, in general, highlights some guidelines that point to the composition of a Philosophy of Education in C. S. Lewis. We seek to collect, initially, the elements of a philosophical anthropology, collected directly, by an interpretative procedure, from the vast work of the author in question, particularly The Abolition of Man, Pure and Simple Christianity, The Weight of Glory, Christian Reflections, The Four Loves, Letters from a Devil to His Apprentice, God in the Dock, Ethics to Live Better, Christian Reflections, among others. In addition to these texts used as a direct source, we also take the work of Gabrielle Greggersen, entitled The Philosophical Anthropology of C. S. Lewis, where the author makes an interpretive incursion into the author’s fictional literature texts, as well as the works biographies of Alister MacGrath, Conversing with Lewis and The Life of C. S. Lewis, in which the Irish philosopher’s life and work are richly detailed. Keywords: C. S. Lewis. Philosophy. Education. Philosophy of education. Philosophical anthropology

In citing this wonderful quotation from C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man [1], one can criticize contemporary bioethics as mostly talk and little action; in fact, practitioners in the field of medical ethics have had very little to do until the mid-twentieth century, for only at this time did the biological advances arouse American ethicists from their slumber [2].

C. S. Lewis wrote extensively about gender in both nonfiction and fiction works. In nonfiction, he lays out a specific understanding of gender with logical clarity; in fiction, Lewis develops a series of poetic images magnifying the depth of meaning found in being masculine and feminine. In both forms of writing, Lewis celebrates the goodness of God’s gift of gender, and summons his readers to receive the gift with gratitude. Reading Lewis’s works on gender functions as an antidote to gender ideology. Rather than a severing of felt experience and bodily reality, Lewis calls his readers to see the ideas of masculinity and femininity as the higher realities which express themselves in physical form. Such a view invites each human being into the larger story of God’s creation, enabling gratitude for being made imago dei: “male and female created he them.” His essays on gender are occasional in that certain moments prompted Lewis to bring forth his reasoning with logic and clarity. In “Priestesses in the Church?” Lewis considers gender as part of God’s creational order and argues that only a male priest can represent God to the congregation. Lewis’s ideas about gender fit within the theory of natural law and human nature outlined in The Abolition of Man. In The Four Loves, Lewis considers the question of friendship between the sexes; in that context, he makes an argument both about what is required for friendship, and how the sexes relate within that matrix. Because men and women share in the imago dei, friendship between the sexes is possible; Lewis contended that such friendship was highly unlikely because men and women lacked the common activities, interests, and intellectual preparation to form the matrix from which friendship grew. In this respect, Lewis’s conclusion would most likely change in the present given the rise in female participation in aspects of life previously only available to men. Today, men and women have a great deal of common activities, and more women are attaining the highest academic levels of study than men. Both of these changes enable a greater potential friendship between men and women.

I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of the third part of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Much ink has been spilled analyzing Lewis’s thoughts on the dangers of subjectivism as outlined in the first two parts of the book, but less so on the endpoint to which Lewis thinks subjectivism leads when whole societies succumb to it. Yet Lewis himself, or at least his editor, thought the final part important enough to name the lecture series after it, and dramatize it in a novel afterward. If Lewis saw the train leaving the station over eighty years ago, we would be wise to consider whether he was right about its direction and its destination. What follows is an attempt to do so, from the perspective of a twenty-plus year veteran of America’s high-tech workforce. Having spent two lectures pointing out the dangers of subjectivism, and in particular the dangers of conditioning future generations to be subjectivists, Lewis pulls back the camera in the eponymous Abolition lecture to analyze the concept behind this impulse to condition, namely, the concept of “Man’s conquest of Nature.” He spends some time deconstructing this phrase. First, he makes clear that this was a common euphemism in his time which really meant “the progress of applied science.”1 Today this term is no longer in vogue; rather we use the more generic “technology” to refer to the same concept. It is relevant to note that as our power has increased through applied science, our notion of what this means in detail has become less specific. We no longer speak of “Man’s conquest of Nature,” which conjures a vision of ever-expanding power and control over the environment in which humans live. Instead, we use the mere “high-tech,” which only makes one think of seemingly—but not truly—less weighty concepts such as computers and smartphones. Already in our euphemisms subjectivism has fundamentally influenced the way we think about the future.

C.S. Lewis is considered one of the most prominent Christian apologists of the twentieth century. But he held a deep distrust of the work of the rational faculty that was not properly oriented by the imagination, which explains in large part his turn to writing imaginative fiction later in his life. Through his fiction Lewis was trying to demonstrate, rather than rationally explain, what the world would look like if Christianity and a broader moral worldview were true. Lewis explains this understanding of the imagination and its importance for right thinking in a variety of essays and in his two most profound books, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image. This chapter examines the arguments Lewis makes and the metaphors he uses in these works to demonstrate how the foremost Christian apologist of the twentieth century prioritized the imaginative faculty over the rational.

This paper considers C.S. Lewis’ “doctrine of objective value” in two of his major works, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image. Lewis uses the Chinese name Tao, albeit with an incomplete understanding of its origins, for the objective worldview. The paper argues that Tao, as an explicit theme of The Abolition of Man, is also a determining undercurrent in The Discarded Image. In the former work, Tao is what Lewis wants to defend and restore against twentieth-century secular ideologies, which Lewis condemns as infected with “the poison of subjectivism”. In the latter work, where Lewis presents one of the best accounts of the European medieval model of the Universe, objective value (the Tao in Lewis’ argument) underlies both how the model has been shaped, and how Lewis, as a medievalist, accounts for and draws upon it as an intellectual and spiritual resource. The purpose of this parallel study is to show that Lewis’ explication of the Tao in The Abolition of Man, which is a “built-in”, implicit belief in The Discarded Image, provides a critique of tendencies towards the subjectivism prevalent in Lewis’ lifetime. These tendencies can be traced into the moral relativism, pluralism and reductionism of the twenty-first century, giving Lewis’ work the status of twentieth-century prophecy.

The Abolition of Man is sometimes viewed as an attack on science. This interpretation is, of course, erroneous. Anticipating this criticism, Lewis states that his remarks are not an attack on science but instead a defense of value—the value, among other things, of science. Lewis goes on to suggest that science might itself be the remedy for the dark moral malady that The Abolition of Man accounts for and describes. The purpose of this study is to show that, in the work of Michael Polanyi, Lewis’s aspirations regarding the curative powers of science are in fact realized. Polanyi not only demonstrates the bankruptcy of scientism, but he does so in a manner that, while revealing the inspiring character of genuine science, greatly clarifies Lewis’s project. Polanyi deepens and broadens Lewis’s analysis in The Abolition of Man , thereby offering an indispensable service to those who have learned to respect this very important work.

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis draws attention to a particular English textbook, exposes the philosophy behind it, warns of the consequences for moral and political life, and reminds us of an alternative. This article updates The Abolition of Man. Following Lewis’s pattern, I begin by drawing attention to the content and pedagogy of an unidentified Christian school English program. Using Alasdair MacIntyre’s framework, I argue that the philosophy behind it can be traced to the contemporary encyclopaedic projects of Rawls and Kohlberg and the genealogical projects of Foucault and Gee, which have produced a dichotomy between justice and virtue and a problem of authority with significant consequences. The two projects converge making each internally inconsistent. Tradition provides a way out, but an encounter with these other projects should lead tradition to find its own language and resources for progress in areas like diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging; learning disabilities; and the classical canon.

In The Abolition of Man and “Is Progress Possible?,” C. S. Lewis reflects on the nature of the human person, science, liberty, and the role of government. These topics were also debated during the 2019–2022 coronavirus pandemic. This article reflects upon the lessons we might learn from Lewis in respect of those aspects of the pandemic, especially as found in the United Kingdom and United States. In considering Lewis’s approach we find a depth of wisdom in balancing liberty, scientific expertise, social and economic concerns, and the role of government.

By Wesley A. Kort. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-19-514342-6. Pp. 194. $25.00. If Doris T. Myers' fine book C. S. Context (1994) offers readers an understanding of public context of language when wrote his best fiction 1940s and 1950s, Wesley A. Kort's C. S. Then and Now attempts to place Lewis's context of twenty-first-century America. Kort, Professor of Religion at Duke University, has written a thoughtful, penetrating book. While he could have focused narrowly on sociology of religious ideas Lewis's work, Kort avoids this pitfall; instead, he takes readers into what I think of as most useful aspects of Lewis's for people [particularly university students] attempting to articulate `world and life views' that are both relevant to our current location and informed by religious (9). Although Kort admits that is dated he nonetheless argues that in his there are strategies, critical moves and insights, and large bits of construction worth imitating and using. In particular, Kort finds much to admire Lewis's avoidance of two errors characteristic of contemporary American Christianity: viewing modern culture as and irremediable and believing that can be self-enclosed (5). Accordingly, Kort's goal is to take insights of then--roughly his writings of 1940s and 1950s--and try to apply to contemporary American culture now In his first chapter, Retrieval Kort notes that literary have moved away from formalism and disciplinary orthodoxy and toward interdisciplinary as well as matters of theory and practice that engaged Lewis--education and curricula, value theory, continuities between high and popular culture, relation of power and ideology to beliefs and ideas, and moral consequences of intellectual and technological imperialism. As a result, the combination of literary with historical, theoretical, cultural, critical, and moral/religious ingredients normalizes Lewis's current literary studies (13). Much of rest of chapter considers how Lewis's goes a long way toward retrieving and reconstructing a relation between religious belief and English culture. The next chapter, Reenchantment explores how Lewis believes that religion can be rightly understood only by people who live a world that is at least to some degree (33). In addition to providing an historical review of how world came to be disenchanted for most people, Kort refers to Lewis's The Abolition of Man as primary text which analyzes and critiques this disenchantment. In large measure Kort argues that sees human relationships as ail-important; however, since cultural movement has been toward more and more isolation and individuation, disenchantment bas been inevitable result. He summarizes what we can learn from Lewis: For world once again to be enchanted [...] we must recognize (1) that we have a cultural location, (2) that our characteristic methods of analysis are partial and strategic, (3) that larger world has a real or potential value and meaning which must be recognized, and (4) that as individuals and groups we have value not primarily isolation from or opposition to others but relationships with them (49). The third chapter, Houses considers the place of spatial language Lewis's work (53). Citing examples from works as varied as Surprised by Joy, The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, That Hideous Strength, Till We Have Faces, Mere Christianity, and The Screwtape Letters, Kort shows how uses housing as a metaphor for an adequate sense of world and of one's relations to and within it (65). The core of book is Culture both literal middle chapter of seven and longest one book. …