Jun112022
Book excerpt

“The Abolition of Man [by C. S. Lewis] may be understood as a work of prophecy. All great prophets, whether they be ancient religious figures like Isaiah and Jeremiah or more recent political figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, work on two fronts at once. They prophesy both to critique their contemporary situation and to indicate likely future states of affairs as and when the logic of the present situation unfolds. The old Sunday School definition can hardly be improved on: prophets tell forth and foretell.

“If Abolition were merely a description of war-time Britain, it would not have become the classic that it has. And if Lewis had merely been prognosticating when he spoke to his original 1943 audience, he would not have gained much of a hearing at the time, for how would they know whether his predictions would come true? What marks out his message as genuinely prophetic is that it resonated with its first hearers and has only attracted further attention as the decades have passed.

“His prophecy is largely a jeremiad, largely a negative case. He identifies the subjectivism in his culture and forecasts its probable trajectory. It is chiefly a philosophical forecast, intellectual in intent. He is describing the logical end point of the current situation more than prescribing a remedy to it. There are, to be sure, notes of warning, not to say alarm. There are also some gestures of optimism when he briefly suggests possible mitigating actions that might be taken and considers alternative, more positive, outcomes. But the fact that he ends the final chapter on a hollow note, by depicting moral blindness (‘to “see through” all things is the same as not to see’), indicates that his main purpose is less to change our destination than to predict our destiny. He is simply charting the likely course of unchecked subjectivism, saying in effect, ‘This philosophical error leads to sub-humanity and if a sub-human fate is what we want, that’s the fate we’ll get; we shouldn’t be surprised by where we end up.’ There is something of the same tone in the repeated world-weary words of Hingest, the good scientist, in That Hideous Strength: ‘It all depends on what a man likes.’ We do not have to adopt subjectivism, but if we decide we like it, and make no course correction, it will usher us inexorably to a bad end. The choice is ours.

“Such a bleak perspective is uncharacteristic of Lewis; typically he rounds off his works on bright notes. Perhaps the fact that he is writing philosophy rather than theology helps account in part for the downbeat peroration; the theological virtue of hope need not be brought into the picture. Be that as it may, the sombre tone signals the seriousness of the matter in hand and the need for action to avert the predicted disaster, even if the practical particulars of such action remain mostly unspecified. In good Socratic fashion, Lewis leaves it to his readers to derive from his grave conclusion the desired response, without making it too explicit.”

— from Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Michael Ward talked about this book on Volume 154 of the Journal.

Related reading and listening

  • Aslan, the Christ-figure of Narnia — Alex Markos explores the transformational power of Aslan as the Christ figure in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. (31 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 162 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, R. Jared Staudt, Paul Weston, William C. Hackett, Hans Boersma, and David Paul Baird
  • Early evangelical response to C. S. Lewis — Historian Mark Noll discusses the reasons why American evangelicals were initially slow to warm to Lewis. (15 minutes)
  • “A state of divine carelessness” —
    FROM VOL. 121
    Daniel Gabelman attempts to correct the notion that George MacDonald prizes seriousness and sobriety. (20 minutes)
  • “Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
  • On The Abolition of Man —
    FROM VOL. 154
    Michael Ward explains why The Abolition of Man is one of Lewis’s most important but also most difficult books. (36 minutes)
  • Seeking control, in white magic and The Green Book — Alan Jacobs on C. S. Lewis’s critique of the modern pursuit of god-like control
  • Education, reason, and the Good — Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson on C. S. Lewis’s argument about natural law
  • Orienting reason and passions — In an essay titled “The Abolition of Mania” (Modern Age, Spring 2022), Michael Ward applies C. S. Lewis’s insights to the polarization that afflicts modern societies. (16 minutes)
  • Ward, Michael — FROM THE GUEST PAGE: Michael Ward is an Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford, Professor of Apologetics at Houston Christian University, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Hillsdale College.
  • An unlikely trio in life (and in death) —
    FROM VOL. 1
    Philosopher Peter Kreeft was interviewed in 1982 by Ken Myers about his book, Between Heaven and Hell. In 1992, that interview was featured on the pilot cassette tape which became the Mars Hill Tapes. (10 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 155 — FEATURED GUESTS: Donald Kraybill, Thaddeus Kozinski, David Bentley Hart, Nigel Biggar, Ravi Scott Jain, and Jason Baxter
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
  • MYST and mythic guests — Game designers Rand and Robyn Miller explain how their game’s creation was influenced by their love for the fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. (13 minutes)
  • Sneaking past watchful dragons — Junius Johnson describes how Hans Urs von Balthasar’s understanding of Creation resonates with that of C. S. Lewis and Bonaventure, all three of whom served as mentors in his thinking about beauty. (18 minutes)
  • Becoming a serious and receptive reader — David Lyle Jeffrey offers a thoughtful reading of C. S. Lewis’s account of thoughtful reading
  • Walter Hooper, R.I.P., and Christina Rossetti’s Advent poems — Walter Hooper (1931-2020) describes his first meeting with C. S. Lewis, a man he so admired and long served. In a second chapter in today’s Feature, Emma Mason explains how Christina Rossetti’s hopeful eschatological beliefs influenced the poems she wrote about the season of Advent. (21 minutes)
  • Erotic love (allegedly) conquers all — C. S. Lewis on why the “right to sexual happiness” makes totalitarian demands
  • The correspondence between Lewis and Sayers — Gina Dalfonzo chronicles the encouragement and occasional spats documented in letters between C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers, two very different but nonetheless mutually sympathetic Christians. (24 minutes)
  • Thomas Howard, R.I.P. — Thomas Howard encouraged in many students and readers an imaginative appropriation of faith and truth. This interview — released at the time of his death in 2020 — includes his discussion of C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. (55 minutes)
  • The sins of the fathers . . . and ours — Eighty years ago, C. S. Lewis warned against surrogate contrition
  • Spirits in Bondage: Lewis’s early poetry — Karen Swallow Prior and Don W. King discuss C. S. Lewis’s early poetry and the evidence therein of a “frustrated dualism.” (23 minutes)
  • Three books by Peter Kreeft — In excerpts from three interviews, Peter Kreeft discusses our “brave new world”; the importance of integrity in “creed, code, and cult”; and the reality of transcendence in our human story. (36 minutes)
  • Thomas Howard: “The ‘Moral Mythology’ of C. S. Lewis” — Thomas Howard describes C. S. Lewis’s fictional works in terms of a mythological re-presentation of the Christian and pre-modern moral and cosmic vision. (41 minutes)
  • Alison Milbank: Imaginative Apologetics beyond C. S. Lewis — Alison Milbank offers an approach to defending the Christian faith that restores the imagination as a faculty inseparable from reason. (61 minutes)
  • The genius, rhetoric, and humanity of C. S. Lewis — James Como and Walter Hooper examine the greatness of C. S. Lewis — his multifaceted genius as well as his humanity and humor. (21 minutes)
  • Further up and further in: understanding Narnia — Joseph Pearce explains how fairy stories can open our eyes to the depths of reality if we read them with the virtue of humility. (15 minutes)
  • C. S. Lewis on communities of thought — Alan Jacobs talks about C. S. Lewis’s two essays, “The Inner Ring” and “Membership” and how they explore the fact that all of our thinking is situated within relationships. (19 minutes)
  • Paul Tyson: Escaping the Silver Chair — With the help of C. S. Lewis’s story The Silver Chair, Paul Tyson explains how identifying and then escaping the ways in which we are bewitched about what is “really real” is no easy task. (68 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 134 — FEATURED GUESTS: Chris Armstrong, Grevel Lindop, Michael Martin, William T. Cavanaugh, Philip Turner, and Gisela Kreglinger
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 133 — FEATURED GUESTS: Darío Fernández-Morera, Francis Oakley, Oliver O’Donovan, Thomas Storck, John Safranek, Brian Brock, and George Marsden
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 126 — FEATURED GUESTS: James W. Skillen, Christian Smith, B. W. Powe, David Downing, Roger Scruton, and Jonathan Arnold
  • Irrigating deserts — C. S. Lewis on why teachers must train the sentiments
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 100 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jennifer Burns, Christian Smith, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, P. D. James, James Davison Hunter, Paul McHugh, Ted Prescott, Ed Knippers, Martha Bayles, Dominic Aquila, Gilbert Meilaender, Neil Postman, and Alan Jacobs
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 90 — FEATURED GUESTS: J. Mark Bertrand, Michael P. Schutt, Michael Ward, Dana Gioia, Makoto Fujimura, Gregory Edward Reynolds, Catherine Prescott, and Eugene Peterson
  • The Heav’ns and All the Powers Therein — Michael Ward makes a compelling case that the qualities attributed to the seven planets in the cosmology of antiquity and the Middle Ages are embodied in C. S. Lewis‘s seven books about Narnia. (68 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
  • Alan Jacobs on The Narnian — Alan Jacobs discusses C. S. Lewis’s view of the imagination and his deep conviction that the shaping of the conscience requires the training of the imagination. (53 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 77 — FEATURED GUESTS: Eric Miller, Lisa de Boer, Peter J. Schakel, and Alan Jacobs
  • The arts and public funding — Ken Myers answers a letter from a high school student asking about whether Christians should support the idea of federal funding for the arts.
  • The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis — Interviews about Lewis with Clyde Kilby, Michael Aeschliman, James Como, Bruce L. Edwards, Thomas Howard, and Gilbert Meilaender. Plus a reading by Alan Jacobs. (73 minutes)
  • Till We Have Faces and the Meaning of Myth — Literary critic Thomas Howard explains why C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is best understood not as a novel or fantasy but as a myth. (49 minutes)
Tags: