Although many readers today are only familiar with C.S. Lewis as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, he is also widely recognized amongst apologists as one of the greatest Christian communicators of the twentieth century.
In 2023, one of his significant but lesser-known works, The Abolition of Man, celebrates its eightieth birthday. This is a profound work and it has been cited on the floor of the United States Congress and also by the late Pope Benedict XVI. In this article, we will learn a little about the author and examine the background, content, and impact of this seminal and prophetic book.
Lewis’s early atheism
Clive Staples Lewis was born in 1898 in Belfast, Ireland. From a very early age, the young Lewis insisted on being called “Jack,” a term of endearment used by his friends and family throughout his life, as well as by many of his fans today.
At the age of nine, following the death of his mother, Jack Lewis was sent to join his brother at a school in England. The young Lewis despised his time at boarding school so much so that he threatened to kill himself if his father did not move him elsewhere. Fortunately, he was eventually sent to be tutored by “The Great Knock,” William T. Kirkpatrick, a man who had taught both Jack’s brother and father with great success.
His time with Kirkpatrick sharpened Lewis’s intellect and cemented his atheism. Having been raised in the Church of Ireland, Lewis fell away from his childhood faith while at school. Kirkpatrick had been raised a Presbyterian, but Lewis said that the only element of his faith that remained was that on Sundays he did his gardening in a slightly more respectable suit.
Under Kirkpatrick’s tutelage, Lewis gained entrance to Oxford University, but following the outbreak of World War I, he found himself at the front-line trenches in France on his nineteenth birthday. After being wounded in action, Lewis returned to England where he assumed care of the family of one of his fallen comrades.
At Oxford University, he excelled in his studies of ancient languages, history, and philosophy. He taught philosophy for a time but decided to earn a further degree in English and spent the majority of his career teaching this subject at his alma mater.
The most reluctant convert
It was during this time at Oxford that Lewis returned to belief in God. In his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he wrote “I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” He was a theist but not yet a Christian. A short while afterward, following a long late-night talk with his friends Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien, he once again returned to faith in Jesus Christ.
The remaining thirty years of Lewis’s life were exceptionally productive. He wrote books in numerous genres: fantasy, science fiction, theology, literary criticism, etc. Authoring books such as The Problem of Pain gained him a following as an apologist for the Christian faith. His time as an atheist added to his credibility and his clarity of thought steel manned his opponents.
During World War II, he was invited to address the nation on the radio, and these talks were later collated to form one of his most popular books, Mere Christianity.
Riddell Memorial Lectures
It was also during this time that Lewis was invited to give a series of lectures at the third-oldest university in England, the prestigious University of Durham (pronounced “Duh-rum”), as part of the annual Riddell Memorial Lectures.
Lewis was invited to lecture for three consecutive evenings. The talks were well-received and collectively published under the title The Abolition of Man in 1943. The first print run sold out immediately, requiring three more to be undertaken within the first year.
Before we look at the content of these lectures, we should first consider in more detail their historical context, particularly in relation to the philosophical ideas popular at the time.
The illogic of logical positivism
One philosophy that had gained supporters since the 1920s was known as “logical positivism.” This system asserted a “verification principle” that denied all claims to truth except those that were (a) scientifically verified or (b) tautologies, such as “All triangles have three sides” or “All bachelors are unmarried.” Since all claims pertaining to morality and metaphysics fail this principle, such claims were regarded as nothing more than expressions of emotion.
Of course, the claim that metaphysical statements are meaningless is itself a metaphysical statement. As with subjectivism and scientism (and sola scriptura), it is a system that fails its own test. Logical positivism makes claims about reality, which violates its own standard, since these claims are neither tautologies nor can they be empirically proven by science.
There were two proponents of this system who lived close to Lewis, A.J. Ayer in Oxford and I.A. Richards in Cambridge. Lewis came into contact with both.
In 1946, he debated Ayer on this subject at the Oxford Socratic Club. Lewis and Richards had met previously when Richards gave a lecture in Oxford. Lewis was Richards’s host at Magdalen College and upon discovering that there were no books in the room where his guest was to spend the night, Lewis handed him a copy of Richards’s own book and said, “Here’s something that should put you to sleep.” When Richards opened the book he saw the margins were crammed with Lewis’s savage commentary on his work.
By 1943, England had somehow survived the terror of the Blitz, but the end of the war was still not in sight. One can see why, given this historical context, Lewis would be passionate about refuting a philosophical system that attempted to undermine any concept of objective right and wrong, good and evil.
A dense work
One reviewer of The Abolition of Man wrote, “No summary can do justice to the fineness of Mr. Lewis’s thought.” Nevertheless, in the remainder of this article I will attempt to give the reader at least some idea of the content of each of Lewis’s lectures in the hope that it will inspire some to pick up and explore this rich text.
If the reader would like some short, preparatory reading, the first four chapters of Mere Christianity argue for objective morality. Since these chapters were originally given as radio addresses to the general public, it is a more accessible introduction to Lewis’s thought on this subject. I would also recommend an essay by Lewis found in Christian Reflections called “The Poison of Subjectivism,” wherein he outlines a compact version of the argument made in Abolition.
Abolition is certainly one of Lewis’s denser works. In it he sometimes sounds more like a poet than as a philosopher. I would suggest reading it slowly and carefully, ideally followed by a discussion with friends over a pint of English ale or a nice cup of tea!
Lecture 1: Men Without Chests
Lewis’s inaugural lecture sheds light on the bizarre subtitle of his lecture series: “Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools.” He explains that a publisher had sent him a high school English textbook to review. Although Lewis scholars have since discovered its real name, here he calls it only The Green Book.
The book recounts the story of Samuel Taylor Coleridge overhearing two tourists commenting on a waterfall, with Coleridge endorsing the one who described it as “sublime” and being sickened by the one who described it as merely “pretty.” The authors of The Green Book respond by saying that Coleridge was wrong. They claim that the two men communicated nothing about the waterfall itself, only their subjective feelings about it which they then projected onto the waterfall:
When the man said, “This is sublime,” he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. . . . Actually . . . he was not making a remark about the waterfall but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really, “I have feelings associated in my mind with the word sublime, or, shortly, I have sublime feelings” (The Green Book, “The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing”).
Lewis was shocked to find the corrosive ideas of logical positivism present in an English textbook and was concerned that it would subconsciously shape the next generation:
It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all (The Abolition of Man, “Men Without Chests”).
Over the course of his career, Lewis would operate his own counteroffensive, smuggling Christian truth past the “watchful dragons” of his readers through his books, particularly in his science-fiction trilogy and The Narnian Chronicles.
To illustrate the danger of The Green Book’s approach, Lewis draws on Plato by describing man as a tripartite entity. The first part is what he calls “the belly,” representing our impulses and appetites which make us more akin to animals. The second is “the head,” our rational thoughts that make us closer to the angels.
Lewis says that when “the head” and “the belly” are in conflict, the animalistic side of us will always win, which is why the two should always be mediated by “the chest,” which he says is composed of our ethical and religious sentiments. It is this integration that makes us rational animals and ultimately human: “It is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is a mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal” (Ibid.).
Unfortunately, “the chest” is the very thing The Green Book attempts to jettison. In attempting to undermine absolute standards of goodness, truth, and beauty, they dissuade the development of the virtues which they inspire: “We remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst” (Ibid.).
Lecture 2: The Way
After ending the previous lecture by discussing “the chest” that integrates the cerebral and visceral parts of ourselves, Lewis speaks about something that helps to inform that element in humanity. Catholicism refers to this as “natural law,” morality inherent in human nature and not simply arbitrary creations of society. Rather than using this term, Lewis adopts one from Confucius called “The Tao” (pronounced dow) or, in English, “The Way.”
Lewis likely used the term Tao in response to I.A. Richards’ fascination with Confucianism, as well as to illustrate that he’s not arguing for Western values or Christianity or even religion in general. Instead, he is arguing for an objective standard that is ubiquitous in every society and culture throughout time. He provides copious evidence for this in the book’s appendix, where he quotes from many historical texts, including Anglo-Saxon, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, Norse, Native American, and Roman.
Despite claims to the contrary by atheists such as Sam Harris, it is not possible to ground morality exclusively in science and logic. We must first have foundational principles, and it is these starting axioms that Lewis calls “The Tao.” It is not something so much for which we argue but something we assume to be true and then from which we argue. Any attempt by educators to break away from The Tao would spell disaster: “The rebellion of the new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed, they would find they had destroyed themselves” (The Abolition of Man, “The Way”).
Lecture 3: The Abolition of Man
In his final lecture, Lewis offers a dystopian vision of a society that rejects the Tao. He suggests that the treacherous path begins by taking a single element of the Tao and emphasizing it to the exclusion of the rest. Naturally, this ends in disaster, since no society can function unless the virtues are in balance: “There is none of our impulses which the moral law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage” (Lewis, Mere Christianity (book I, ch. 2).
Lewis says the Tao ultimately will be rejected and that there will then be an attempt to reshape man in the name of “progress,” an attempt to guide humanity towards Utopia, regardless of the collateral cost to humanity. This will be orchestrated by a small group of “conditioners” who, without the Tao to guide them, will remake man in their own image. Since they are without the Tao, they will be guided not by reason but by instinct. Ironically, at the moment they think they are gaining mastery over nature, they will be defeated by it. Man as “Man” will no longer exist—he will have been abolished.
Eighty years later
It is hard to read Abolition and not consider Lewis’s words as prophetic; we are already some way down the road he describes. We live in an age in which we are told knowledge is restricted to what can be discovered in a test tube or under a microscope. We live in a time of moral relativity and subjectivism. We live in a world where the fundamental truths of natural law have been discarded and there are active attempts to redefine and reshape humanity accordingly.
In fact, the logic of The Green Book goes a long way toward explaining much about modern society. If one rejects all statements of value as simply an expression of feelings, they are neither true nor false, and therefore it makes rational persuasion impossible. In disputes, all one can do is to protest against those with different feelings. This is best summed by Alasdair MacIntyre in his book After Virtue:
It is easy . . . to understand why protest becomes a distinct moral feature of the modern age and why indignation is a predominant modern emotion. . . . Protestors can never win an argument . . . [but] never lose an argument either. . . . This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective” (p. 71).
If we deny objective values, we cannot “reason together” (Isa. 1:18). We can only shout at each other.
The Way Forward
If this article has piqued your interest in the enduring relevance of The Abolition of Man, I would strongly encourage you to read it. If you have difficulty reading it, I would suggest purchasing After Humanity, a tremendous book written by Fr. Michael Ward that I have found indispensable in grappling with Abolition. If you prefer fiction to philosophical disputation, then consider reading That Hideous Strength, the final book in Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy. In the preface, he explains that his story is the narrative companion to Abolition and expresses many of the same ideas. In its pages you will encounter vivid scenes of what happens when objective values are abandoned and a group of misfits attempt to reshape humanity.
The Abolition of Man is not a religious work per se but an apologetic in defense of objective value. It is a prophetic warning against subjectivity and the abandonment of natural law. Lewis warns us that pursuing this path would culminate in the attempt to reshape humanity and inevitably eradicate all that makes us truly human.