ABSTRACT: C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man and Ransom Trilogy offer unique insights for Christians aiming to recover a biblical anthropology amid a secular society. In these works, Lewis demonstrates the futility of mankind’s pursuit of self-determination — a pursuit that subverts the foundations of goodness, truth, and beauty (what Lewis calls the “Tao”) while also depending on those foundations for any sense of coherence. At the same time, he points the way toward the anthropological rescue we need. Lewis’s three lectures in The Abolition of Man correspond to the three books of the Ransom Trilogy, which work out the consequences of his ideas in narrative fiction.
For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and scholars, we asked Louis A. Markos (PhD, University of Michigan), Professor of English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, to explore C.S. Lewis’s diagnosis of the core mistakes of contemporary anthropology in The Abolition of Man and his Ransom Trilogy.
We will not be able to properly govern our country, raise our children, teach our students, or instruct our parishioners until we can determine who and what we are as human beings. That task, difficult at most times, has become increasingly so for an age that claims that man, woman, sexuality, and marriage are fluid concepts; that people are defined by the groups they are part of; that there are no fixed, transcendent codes of morality; that truth is another name for power; and that standards of beauty are necessarily relative and subjective.
Many in the church today think we can resolve these problems by restoring a traditional understanding of philosophy, theology, ethics, sociology, pedagogy, and aesthetics. While I second these goals, I would argue that we will not be able to achieve them without also reclaiming a traditional understanding of anthropology. Until we have the courage and wisdom to return to a biblical view of man, we will not be able to resist those who would govern, nurture, educate, and spiritually direct us in a manner that is as self-destructive as it is anti-humanistic.
At the core of biblical anthropology lie two nonnegotiables. First, we are not products of impersonal, arbitrary evolutionary forces but creatures made in the image of God (imago Dei) who possess inherent value and worth. Second, though created good, we are fallen and depraved, in need not only of salvation in Christ but of having our virtues cultivated, our affections trained, and our desires ordered in accordance with objective, absolute standards of goodness, truth, and beauty that, far from being man-made social constructs, are universally valid and binding.
Companions for the Cause
Christians today who are committed to restoring a proper view of man have an ally in the greatest apologist of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis (1898–1963). Though Lewis offers much help in his best-known apologetics books (Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce) and his beloved Chronicles of Narnia, we would do well to expand our reading of Lewis to include his searing critique of modern educational philosophy (The Abolition of Man) and his anthropologically incisive science fiction novels, The Ransom (or Cosmic) Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength.
The Abolition of Man (1943) began its life as a series of three talks that Lewis delivered at the University of Durham for the Riddell Memorial Lectures. In the talks, he shows what happens to school and society when objective moral values are reduced to subjective feelings and man himself is reduced to a tool and a cog to be manipulated and conditioned.
The Ransom Trilogy charts the cosmic travels and personal transformation of a materialistic philologist named Ransom. In Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Ransom is kidnapped by mad scientist Weston and taken to Mars, where he communes with rational, unfallen creatures who live in a just society structured like Plato’s Republic. There his eyes are opened to deeper spiritual realities and the true nature of virtue. In Perelandra (1943), Ransom is brought to Venus to help prevent the Venusian Eve from giving in to the temptations of a demon-possessed Weston. In That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (1945), a bourgeois couple named Mark and Jane Studdock get caught in a struggle between a totalitarian, demon-led, dystopian group and a mystical, loving society led by Ransom.
In what follows, I shall cull vital insights from each of the three short chapters that make up The Abolition of Man (“Men Without Chests,” “The Way,” and “The Abolition of Man”) and illustrate those insights with passages from each of the three novels in order to offer a commentary on (and hopefully some solutions for) our anthropological disarray.
‘Men Without Chests’
Lewis begins his exposé of the dangers of subjectivism by citing a passage from a high school textbook whose name he conceals under the pseudonym The Green Book. In the passage, the authors, whom Lewis calls Gaius and Titius, retell a story in which Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge overhears two tourists react differently to a waterfall. Coleridge affirms the one who calls it “sublime” but scorns the one who calls it “pretty.” Rather than use the story to teach their young readers that waterfalls are, in fact, objectively sublime and should provoke a feeling of awe, the authors reject Coleridge’s assessment and insist that waterfalls are neither sublime nor pretty. Sublimity, like beauty, exists only in the eye of the beholder.
“The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book,” Lewis argues, “will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and, secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.” Were the issue at hand merely one of determining whether this or that natural formation is sublime or pretty, the stakes would not be so high. Unfortunately, what Lewis calls “sentences containing a predicate of value” quickly come to include any and all statements having to do with religion (holy or blasphemous), philosophy (true or false), morality (good or evil), virtue (courageous or cowardly), and the arts (beautiful or ugly).
In the subjectivist worldview that Gaius and Titius subtly instill into students, things and actions are not essentially or intrinsically sublime or pretty, holy or blasphemous, true or false. On the contrary, only our perceptions of things and our feelings about actions attach these emotive values to them. Such a view — taken for granted by most modern (and postmodern) educators — runs directly counter to the traditional Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian understanding. Absolute goodness, truth, and beauty are as much written into the weave of our cosmos as are the laws of nature and the mathematical tables. Because we possess reason and virtue on account of the imago Dei, we are capable of discovering and discerning those a priori principles; because we live in a state of fragmentation, our reason and virtue must be properly trained to perceive and heed them.
“St. Augustine,” Lewis writes, “defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it.” Before the Enlightenment and the rise of progressivism and utopianism, it was understood throughout the Christian West that the central role of education was to properly order the desires of young people. Only by such a process could they grow into virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens who react as they should to good and evil, courage and cowardice, beauty and ugliness.
The same was true in the thought of those higher pagans that the early church respected and learned from. Lewis continues,
Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in “ordinate affections” or “just sentiments” will easily find the first principles in Ethics: but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful.
If education is to be restored to its proper function, then we must restore an understanding of ourselves as creatures made to connect with the goodness, truth, and beauty in our world rather than purposeless products of material forces that can only project our own personal meaning onto a meaningless world. If we can restore that, then we can restore what Lewis calls “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”
How do we achieve this restoration? By resuscitating, and heeding, what Lewis dubs the Tao, the universal moral-ethical code that is written in our conscience and that tells us what we ought to do and how we ought to behave, even, and especially, when we do not want to. By using a term from Taoism to name this code, Lewis emphasizes its transcendent, cross-cultural nature, which holds equally for Western Jews and Christians as it does for Eastern Hindus and Buddhists.1 “Those who know the Tao,” maintains Lewis in refutation of the subjectivism of Gaius and Titius, “can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.”
That students should be properly trained to recognize and respond to the Tao is not only necessary for raising virtuous citizens; it is necessary for preserving a free society. Borrowing a metaphor from Plato, Lewis argues that the only way our head (the seat of reason) can rule our belly (the seat of selfish and destructive appetite) is by the help and mediation of our chest (the seat of virtue and sentiment). Unfortunately, the subjectivism of Gaius and Titius, by teaching students that our desire to align ourselves with goodness, truth, and beauty is nothing more than a personal value detached from “reality,” eats away at the chest, causing it to shrivel and atrophy.
This atrophy of the chest leads to the sad irony of modern (progressive) education. At the very moment our society cries out for citizens with courage and self-sacrifice, it shuts down the only fountain from which they can issue. “In a sort of ghastly simplicity,” writes Lewis in the closing paragraph, “we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
Restoring Ransom’s Chest
Ransom, the hero of Out of the Silent Planet, begins the novel as a modern skeptic trained to trust only what his senses tell him and to reject as sentimental and superstitious all values that cannot be materially quantified. When he first meets the inhabitants of Mars, he dismisses them as primitive because they lack technology and live under an aristocratic system. As the novel progresses, he meets and hunts with a race of beaver-like warriors who help him gain a chest as he comes to appreciate their medieval virtues of courage, chivalry, justice, and hierarchy.
Ransom’s education opens his eyes to the goodness, truth, and beauty of Mars, its three rational species, and its guardian spirit. Weston, who accompanies him on the voyage, takes a very different path that renders him blind and deaf to the wonders around him. Rather than recognize that the Martians honor the same Tao known on earth, Weston isolates one aspect of the Tao — the call to ensure the survival of the human race — and uses it as an excuse to eradicate the indigenous life on Mars to make way for human colonization in the never-ending fight for species preservation.
In his justification for why he has the right to do this, Weston echoes the “morality” that remains when the Tao is deconstructed and the chest is allowed to shrivel: “Life is greater than any system of morality; her claims are absolute. It is not by tribal taboos and copy-book maxims that she has pursued her relentless march from the amoeba to man and from man to civilization” (chapter 20). On the contrary, it is precisely by means of those “tribal taboos” and “copy-book maxims” that each generation has passed down its wisdom and virtue to the next, thus ensuring that humans remain human.
Ransom and Weston illustrate that the difference between a traditional education in the Tao and the progressive education advocated by The Green Book has to do with the way students are viewed and, therefore, treated: “The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds — making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation — men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.”
‘The Way’
In the second chapter of Abolition, Lewis develops more fully the nature of the Tao (which means “the way”). As we just saw with Weston, many today have an ironic habit of throwing out those parts of the Tao they do not like — sexual mores, respect for parents, traditional marriage roles, and so forth — and then justifying their beliefs and behaviors by referencing something that can only be found in the Tao.
Gaius and Titius’s “scepticism about values,” Lewis explains, “is on the surface.” He continues,
It is for use on other people’s values; about the values current in their own set they are not nearly sceptical enough. And this phenomenon is very usual. A great many of those who “debunk” traditional or (as they would say) “sentimental” values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process. They claim to be cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos, in order that “real” or “basic” values may emerge.
The problem, however, is they cannot say where those real or basic values come from. Surely, they could not have arisen from Darwinian natural selection! Many are happy to dismiss traditional virtues they do not like as superstitious or medieval, while sanctifying the absolute goodness of things like diversity, equality, and tolerance. But all three of these “values” are rooted in a Tao-centered belief in the inherent value of all human beings, which is itself rooted in the imago Dei. Even a belief in the validity of science rests finally on two beliefs that cannot be extracted from the “facts” we experience: (1) There is an order and harmony in the cosmos that exists apart from us, and (2) we can trust our senses to perceive that order.
Lewis may well have Weston in mind when he writes that the proposition “this will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved” (emphasis original). But the belief “society ought to be preserved” comes from the Tao, not from factual observations of the “real” world. Gaius and Titius seem to think animal instinct will do the job of grounding such beliefs, but the Tao is precisely that which enables us to choose between competing instincts. Indeed, it often urges us to choose the weaker instinct, which would not be the case if we lived in a purely Darwinian world, where the only goal would be to pass on our genes.
“There has never been,” concludes Lewis, “and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world.” Expounding further, he writes,
What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) “ideologies,” all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.
The Tao is a package deal; we cannot sacrifice duty to parents over duty to posterity, or vice versa. If we would retain our humanity, we must embrace the whole Tao. The attempt to free ourselves from the Tao does not lead to liberation but to destruction. We can only function properly if we know what we were made for, what Aristotle called our telos or purposeful end. But it is the Tao that connects us to our telos and so keeps us human. As he argued in “Men Without Chests,” it is through the chest, the dwelling place of the Tao, that we are most human, for by our head we are like the angels, and by our belly we are like the beasts.
Liberated to Destruction
In Perelandra, Ransom travels to a newly created world (Venus), Eden-like in its infancy. Weston, too, is there. He tempts the Venusian Eve three times to, essentially, sever herself from the Tao and become an autonomous individual who acknowledges no limits to her desires and retains the right to remake herself as she sees fit, apart from the telos “imposed” on her by her Creator (Maleldil) and the Tao.
Weston begins his temptation of “Eve” by parading before her mind images of modern liberated women to make her resent Maleldil for what he has withheld from her. These spirited ladies, Weston claims, “always reach out their hands for the new and unexpected good, and see that it is good long before the men understand it. Their minds run ahead of what Maleldil has told them. They do not need to wait for Him to tell them what is good, but know it for themselves as He does. They are, as it were, little Maleldils” (chapter 8). Like the biblical serpent, Weston tempts Eve with the promise that she will become “like God” (Genesis 3:5). Unfortunately, those who try to rise above their created status (step outside the Tao) to become like angels end up falling below their status to become like beasts. It is by the chest that we are most human, not by the head or the belly!
Having failed to make Eve seek godhood, Weston tempts her with the insidious lie that Maleldil wants her to disobey.
[Maleldil] longs — oh, how greatly He longs — to see His creature become fully itself, to stand up in its own reason and its own courage even against Him. But how can He tell it to do this? That would spoil all. Whatever it did after that would only be one more step taken with Him. This is the one thing of all the things He desires in which He must have no finger. Do you think He is not weary of seeing nothing but Himself in all that He has made? If that contented Him, why should He create at all? To find the Other — the thing whose will is no longer His — that is Maleldil’s desire.
I can think of no better summation of the modern desire to achieve radical self-sufficiency by throwing off all limits that are not self-generated. The Tao stands in the way of that desire, and so the Tao must go, even if the proposed utopian program for total human liberation cannot be justified apart from it.
‘The Abolition of Man’
In his final chapter, Lewis considers what will happen to a society that pushes past the schoolroom to the political realm to enact a utopia cut adrift from the Tao. The goal of that society will be to raise man above nature, so purifying and perfecting him that he will no longer be dependent on anything outside of himself. Unfortunately, what claims to be power over nature turns out to be “power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
Once the few in charge — Lewis calls them the Conditioners — learn how to alter and manipulate the genes of millions to produce the kinds of people they need for their brave new world, the people so conditioned will have lost the ability to make meaningful decisions for themselves. Without a set standard derived from the Tao to determine the proper nature and telos of human beings, alterations will become not only permissible but mandatory. Nothing will stand in the way of the perfection of the species, of man finishing what nature began!
To this dystopic future, Lewis adds a dark twist. His Conditioners will be different from the teachers, tyrants, and inquisitors of old.
In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao — a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received. . . . This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education.
And then a second, darker twist. “Liberated” from the Tao, the Conditioners will have no standards by which to judge their own actions. Who (or what) will control them then? They will be controlled, Lewis argues, by chance impulses. But chance is but another name for nature.
It is from heredity, digestion, the weather, and the association of ideas, that the motives of the Conditioners will spring. . . . At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely “natural” — to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be nature’s conquest of Man.
Ironically, in trying to break free from the control of nature, we give nature full control over us, thus abolishing in the end not nature but man. Had we remembered the imago Dei, we would have safeguarded all that makes us human by remaining within the protective limits of the Tao. Had we remembered that we are fallen, we would have realized the folly, the futility, of trying to perfect ourselves in our current state.
Cruel N.I.C.E. Guys
To drive home the prophetic warning of The Abolition of Man, Lewis climaxed his Ransom Trilogy with a third novel that fictionalizes what might happen if a group of Conditioners cut off from the Tao attempted to enact their anti-human utopian plans. In Lewis’s tale, the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.!) seeks to use science to establish an efficient, technocratic, omnicompetent state. As a symbol of their aspirations, they find a way to preserve the decapitated head of a criminal. They dub their creation the Head and take orders from it, unaware that the Head is not controlled by the dead brain of the criminal but by demons.
In chapter 3 of The Abolition of Man, Lewis reminds his readers that the rise of magic during the Renaissance was a twin not of the church but of the simultaneous rise of science. Both endeavors, Lewis argues, proceeded from the same desire to control nature and force her to do man’s bidding, no matter the cost. In That Hideous Strength, N.I.C.E.’s efforts to control and remake man take them outside of the Tao, and, by so doing, leave them open to demonic forces.
In the story, the protagonist, Mark, is given a career opportunity with the insidious institution. As he is drawn deeper into N.I.C.E., he realizes that to be a Conditioner himself he will have to bow down to the Head. To help relieve him of any superstitious qualms he might have about pledging his allegiance to a scientific/demonic idol, he is thrown into a lopsided room filled with architectural features and works of art that are deliberately twisted, deceptive, and nihilistic. The intent is to cause Mark to give up on any fixed, transcendent moral, philosophical, or aesthetic standards that might strengthen him against sacrificing his true nature to the blasphemous, evil ugliness of the Head.
But when they force him to confront the room, something happens that the leaders of N.I.C.E. did not foresee.
The built and painted perversity of this room had the effect of making [Mark] aware, as he had never been aware before, of this room’s opposite. As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else — something he vaguely called the “Normal” — apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. But there it was — solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. (Chapter 14)
In the nick of time, he remembers who he is: not just Mark Studdock but a human being made in the image of God into whom the Creator has inscribed a conscience able to discern right from wrong, virtue from vice, rightness from perversion. As a result, his humanity is preserved by a reconnection with the Tao rather than abolished by a defiant rejection of all those rules, codes, and standards meant to protect him from the self-destructive rebellion of his sinful nature.
Seeing Through the Lopsided Room
Nearly every time someone turns on Netflix, goes to a Hollywood film, doomscrolls Facebook, watches a TikTok video, or attends his first semester at Harvard, Columbia, or Stanford, he risks being sucked into Lewis’s lopsided room: of having his Tao-based decency and common sense disrupted and turned on their head. Let us be thankful that Lewis’s Abolition of Man and Ransom Trilogy provide a vocabulary and a narrative for exposing the lies and madness of a world that, with one hand, puffs us up to the level of gods, and then, with the other, reduces us to animals.
We must neither surrender our inheritance as individuals of inherent value and worth nor forget that we are broken and easily led astray. The future of our society, our schools, and our individual souls depends on it.
Lewis proves this by lining up, in his lengthy appendix, the moral codes of a dozen different cultures from around the globe that embody the same basic understanding of ethical behavior. ↩
Desiring God