Whenever I struggle to understand what C. S. Lewis is trying to say in his works of nonfiction I find it helpful to go to Narnia.
For example, if in reading Mere Christianity, and one struggles with the concepts Lewis introduces, one need only to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The ideas are embodied in the characters of Aslan, the Pevensie children, and others.
The same is true in Lewis’ other works. One that I think is so important for our cultural moment is The Abolition of Man. The opening essay is titled Men without Chests. It is a critique of the education system, because, as Lewis says, modern education fills kids’ heads with knowledge and their bellies with passion, but it doesn’t do anything to cultivate the chest.
This idea from Lewis is something Aristotle taught; that the head is the seat of reason and the belly is the seat of passion. Aristotle believed that good citizens are people whose head governs the belly. You never really want to meet someone whose belly always wins the day.
Aristotle thought that the head could govern the belly through the creation of good habits. And there’s certainly a lot of truth to that. But if you’ve ever been in a real conflict between your head and your gut, you know what typically happens? Your reason becomes an instrument to justify whatever it is that you want more than anything else.
My friend Michael Miller, a senior fellow at the Acton Institute, describes the belly or the gut as an 800-pound gorilla saying, “feed me, feed me, I want. I want, feed me, feed me.”. The head, on the other hand, is like an 80-pound professor with a bowtie. Who’s going to win if there’s a conflict between the gorilla and the professor? The gorilla, eventually, is going to win nearly every time.
This is what C. S. Lewis understood, and this is what he was critiquing in the educational system in his essay Men Without Chests. That, in addition to having a head filled with knowledge and a belly with passion, reveal that we can only function correctly if we have strong virtue; if we had a chest. In other words, a moral will that is formed to care and to want virtuous things has the strength to say “no” to amoral things.
This is what Lewis says in The Abolition of Man, but if you need help understanding what Lewis is trying to say in the preface, Men Without Chests, it is good to go to Narnia, specifically The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It has one of the best opening lines of any book ever: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” Eustace is the boy without a chest. Readers discover this as soon as Lewis introduces him. What’s the problem with Eustace? He’s a spoiled brat. How did he become a spoiled brat? Well, according to Lewis, from schools that filled his head with knowledge and his belly with passion but did nothing to cultivate his moral chest.
One of the best thematic undercurrents in a Voyage of the Dawn Treader is how Eustace develops a chest. To give you a hint as to how, it has an awful lot to do with another character in Narnia. It’s one of the smallest characters, but to borrow Lewis’s phrase, one that has the biggest chest. His name was Reepicheep, the mouse. He is my daughter’s favorite character in all of Narnia. My guess is he’s a favorite of many of you as well.
The essay Men Without Chests is just one simple sample from The Abolition of Man that shows how important this book is to understanding our current cultural moment. Lewis’s analysis of culture in it is more relevant now than ever. It is a must read for any and every Christian, and I’m very grateful that Dr. Michael Ward, one of the foremost C. S. Lewis scholars on the planet; a researcher from the University of Oxford and a visiting professor at Houston Baptist University, has written a companion guide to the Abolition of Man. The guide is called After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man.
Michael Ward takes readers on a chapter by chapter, essay by essay journey through the most important ideas in the Abolition of Man. And because we think that the analysis in this book is so critical to understand our cultural moment, we’d like to send you a copy of both The Abolition of Man and After Humanity: A Guide to the Abolition of Man for a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month.
If you make the donation this month, we will invite you to attend a special webinar series where Dr. Ward has graciously agreed to provide introductions to various parts of the Abolition of Man for the friends of the Colson Center.
So, get your copy of the Abolition of Man and a copy of After Humanity, along with access to the live webinar and prerecorded introductory videos, by visiting www.breakpoint.org/october and give a gift to the Colson Center.
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