Reverend Brian McGreevy continues his series, Not as Unwise but as Wise: Reflections from C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength on Living Christianly in a Post-Christian World. This is available as a podcast on iTunes.
MEN WITHOUT CHESTS
Gaius, Titius, and The Green Book
Coleridge and the Waterfall: A Deliberate Starting Point Lewis adapts a story from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, recounting a trip she took in 1803 with her brother, William Wordsworth, and his good friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Characteristics of Waterfalls and the Biblical Idea of Living Water
–“They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, cisterns that cannot hold water” Jeremiah 2:13
LEWIS BELIEVES THAT BEAUTY IS A REAL, OBJECTIVE VALUE WHICH WE CAN BE TAUGHT TO RECOGNIZE AND TO LOVE.
Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine:: “Living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order.” “
Rev. Dr. Michael Ward on The Abolition of Man: “In this enduringly influential book, Lewis defends the objectivity of value, pointing to the universal moral ecology that all great philosophical and religious traditions have acknowledged as self-evident. Though Lewis writes as an apologist for Christianity in many of his other works, he here constructs his argument on purely philosophical grounds, making an anthropological claim, not advancing a theological case. Objective value, he maintains, is humanity’s ethical inheritance, which we can extend and develop but may not properly escape. Insofar as we try to deny or subvert this way of being moral, we make ourselves (and those whom we raise or teach or otherwise influence) essentially less than human. We produce ‘men without chests,’ or in other words, people who have no stable heart, no reliable capacity to liaise between intellect and appetite, no ability to distinguish between what is good in itself and what is good for them. Right thus dissolves into might, and sheer willpower takes the place of reason The result is the erasure of our own true identity, ‘the abolition of man.’”
Eight Key Themes in “Men Without Chests”
Analysis developed by Lewis scholar and Christian philosopher Dr. Davey Naugle, who identifies eight key themes in “Men Without Chests”
1: Miseducation—cutting out the soul through the poison of subjectivism
2: Uncultivated souls-–producing “trousered apes” shorn clean of traditional values and noble sentiments
3: Rationale –debunking is easier than scholarly critique, misbeliefs about emotivism, rejecting objective moral value
4: Objective moral values--Lewis offers a survey of representatives from Western and world sources who advocate the objective, universal, timeless principles and truths, or what Lewis calls the Tao (Chinese for “The Way”)
5: Education inside or outside the Tao— Lewis points out that it makes all the difference in the world if education proceeds inside or outside the Tao. The difference is between “initiation” into the universal human heritage of objective values or “conditioning” to a new, subjective set of practical values by which people are manipulated pawns
6: Trained emotions–Without the aid of trained emotions, the intellect or mind which knows what to do is powerless against the animal organism. Only as the Chest, the seat of emotions and sentiments, is rightly trained to respond in accordance with objective moral values, will it be able to control the baser appetites of the Belly.
7: Men without chests The head rules the belly through the chest — the seat . . . of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments . . . these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”
8: Moral irony Given the moral collapse of our culture, we clamour for the qualities that we make it impossible to obtain—we remove the organ but demand the function.
Excerpt from “The Tao of Sentiment”
“While the nature of emotional responses is partly visceral and automatic, a man’s sentiments also have to be intentionally educated in order to be congruent — to be more in harmony with Nature. Such training teaches a man to evaluate things as more or less Just, True, Beautiful, and Good, and to proportion his affections as merited…St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. . . . 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.”
The Art of Manliness Podcast (August 21, 2021)
Eustace Scrubb, Experiment House, and education: Eustace had read all the wrong books!
Practices of Hope and of Wisdom
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
Philippians 4:8-9
Suggestions
- Read things that are beautiful and full of hope, especially books that depict the Beauty, Truth, and Goodness of the Christian worldview — The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, for example — and poetry (Hopkins, Donne, Herbert, etc.)
- Listen to the beautiful order of classical music, choral and instrumental
- Memorize Scripture that encourages you with the wonder of God’s love!
