Ep 06 | C.S. Lewis, Plutarch, and Dr. Vigen Guroian: Men Without Chests
In this mini-series on virtue, I think it important to consider the miry bog we find ourselves in. We’ve inherited philosophies and practices that make cultivating virtue more difficult than one might imagine. We’re looking for the function of an organ we’ve nearly destroyed.
But, don’t worry. There’s a path out of the bog.
Footnotes for this episode
The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis
Tending the Heart of Virtue, Vigen Guroian
Plutarch’s Lives, Plutarch
The Republic, Plato
The Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
A Philosophy of Education, Charlotte Mason
The Year of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs
“Look to Lucy", Kristen Rudd for CiRCE
The Abolition of Man on The Literary Life Podcast: “Men Without Chests”
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
One of my favorite dystopian novels is The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. It ends like most dystopian reads with the end of the world, or rather, the end of persons. Just no more men. Completely destroyed. You know how it goes.
Except The Abolition of Man isn’t a dystopian novel. It’s a small book of three lectures Lewis gave in 1943 and it’s about education. If you didn’t know, Lewis actually gave it the subtitle “Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of school” so when I say it’s about education, I don’t mean I see some threads we can pull into our conversation about education. I mean, it’s about education.
But it does have a dystopian vibe. And not just because, in the end, there are no more persons.
The thing about dystopian novels is that they require a certain insight into slippery slopes that most people miss at the time but when we, as the readers, follow the story fifty, sixty, seventy years later, we think surely this writer was prophetic. How could they know what we’d be dealing with in our time and place? How could they have seen the seeds of it?
The Abolition of Man is one of those reads and it rattles me every time I read it.
We’ve done exactly what Lewis said we’d do: we dismantled reality, ignored objectivity, disordered ourselves, and marred our souls. We’re dangerously close to destroying what makes us persons and we’ve done it all…at school.
Which means most of us—unless you are one of the lucky ones raised in a classical home—are bringing our inherited Abolition of Man issues into our home education. We want virtue but we’re living in a dystopian story where we lack what’s needed to have it. So, first, we look at our problem.
We’re men without chests.
_____________
We no longer speak about education in terms of loves.
This is, of course, just one thing we’ve lost in the shift between the classical tradition of education and the modern school system. Education is now about information, about social mobility, about job security, about social conditioning.
But it should be about loving.
St. Augustine is not one of our three philosophers in this episode for the virtue mini-series but his ordo amoris is very present in our main text from C.S. Lewis. I usually summarize ordo amoris as we need to learn to love the right things at the right time and in the right way. This is a foundational aim in the classical tradition, the way you could assess the end of an education. It’s what Mason is talking about when she says that at the end of education, the question is not how much the child knows but how much he cares.
Knowing how to love like this is to be an ordered person. And if you’ve been around here for the last two seasons, you know that being ordered—rightly loving—is to become like the Ideal Type, like Christ—which is to become a whole person.
But if you can aim to be an ordered person, then we know there is the danger of being a disordered person and this is what sparked C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man.
Like I said at the top, the book is actually three lectures, and for our main text today, we’ll be working through the first of the lectures entitled, “Men Without Chests”.
Often, when we enter the classical world, it’s because we have a shining image of what could be. We see the sparkle of an otherly education full of truth, goodness, and beauty. It’s lovely and inspiring and we’re certain we want to head down the path and lead our children further up and further in.
But I think it’s important also to understand the miry bog we’re currently in. We have certain inherited philosophies and practices that leave us in a place where something like virtue is almost impossible. We’ve become so disordered that, in the words of Lewis, we’ve become men without chests. We’ve removed the organ of virtue and yet still want the function.
But we’re not without hope. We don’t live in a dystopian novel. That’s not how this story will go, so I will also answer the question on the lips of every mother-teacher: “How do I give my child a chest?”
This question will put Lewis into conversation with our two other educational philosophers: Plutarch and Dr. Vigen Guroian and we’ll actually continue to explore their answer in the next two episodes.
Plutarch was a second-century philosopher, writer, and historian who is now most recognized for his Parallel Lives (or Plutarch’s Lives as the Mason moms know him). Dr. Guorian is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Tending the Heart of Virtue—and yes, you heard me correctly, he is alive. I told you our series would look at educational philosophers spanning more than two thousand years and I meant it.
These two men will give us a way forward through the wardrobe to virtue and Reality, and, we’ll follow, as our guide, none other than Lucy Pevensie—one of my favorite examples of a person with a chest.
But before that, we have to understand our modern problem and it’s fairly simple:
We’ve dismantled reality and disordered ourselves.
There it is. That’s the problem. But how did it happen?
Lewis opens “Men Without Chests” with a description of a common English textbook which he refers to as “the Green Book”. It, like many of our textbooks today, is supposed to be about a certain subject but is actually a quiet lesson in philosophy, epistemology, and theology. Lewis notes that this was most likely done by the authors unintentionally but regardless of their intent, they’ve unjustly presented their work as English grammar studies when in fact it’s not and in doing so, they’ve given unsuspecting schoolchildren harmful assumptions about the world that will shape how they move in years to come. They’re being conditioned but in such a way that they’ll never know or remember how it happened. They were just doing their English homework after all.
Right now, there’s a great deal of chatter about the content in our modern schools. We all know, from listening to parents read selections online, that there should be some serious concern about the vulgar, dehumanizing, and inappropriate selections in some classrooms. But I feel as if I’m walking Lewis’ path when I want to yell from the back: Those might not be the most dangerous books in the classroom.
When children set about their work in the Green Book, they read a well-known passage about an experience at a waterfall. There were two tourists standing at a waterfall. One called it sublime and the other called it pretty. Coleridge, who was featured in the story, approved of sublime and rejected pretty.
The authors of the Green Book explained that this was wrong because when the first tourist called the waterfall sublime, he wasn’t saying anything about the waterfall but about his own feelings. This, they said, is a common confusion in the language we use. It looks like we’re saying something very important about something but actually, we’re only saying something about our own feelings.
So, what did this textbook just do? It made a predicate statement something about one’s own feelings and made feelings unimportant.
Lewis notes that no schoolboy can resist the suggestion of that word only. They’re only saying something about their own feelings and what do those matter? He will quickly begin to apply this to every part of his life without knowing why or how.
This is the first wound.
Later in the Green Book, they give a sample of an advertisement for a little pleasure cruise. It contains all the petty exploitations of emotional awe and pleasure that accompany an adventure. It is, in all respects, bad writing. But rather than show a good piece of writing that also touches on the emotional awe and pleasure that accompany an adventure, the Green Book authors debunk the advertisement. They point out that the boat won’t really sail where Drake of Devon did, they won’t really have adventures like the explorers, and they won’t really bring home any treasure.
From this, the schoolboy learns nothing about literature. This debunking is easily done with all the great books that deal with the same emotions and so we know this can’t be the right response to bad writing. But what the boy does learn is that emotions are contrary to reason and, therefore, contemptible.
You see, a young child doesn’t yet know that there are two ways to be immune to such an ad—the first is to be a man of real sensibility (which we will explore in just a bit) and the second is to be, as Lewis said, “a trousered ape who has never been able to conceive the Atlantic as anything more than so many million tons of cold salt water.”
The ape’s just being rational, after all. Logical. Realistic.
Or is it that he’s been encouraged to reject the lure of the great western ocean so he can prove himself a knowing fellow who can’t be bubbed out of his cash?
Was this the lesson of the day? Lewis’ concern was that the schoolboy learned nothing of his letters but had part of his soul cut out, “long before he was old enough to choose, the possibility of having certain experiences which thinkers of more authority than him have beheld to be generous, fruitful, and humane.”
This is the second wound.
The Green Book shows a shift towards excessive rationalism but also a turn away from objective reality. In the pre-modern world—before the Enlightenment really—there was an understanding that there is an objective Reality outside of us. Truth exists outside of us and the work of a person was to pursue understanding this objective Reality and conform to it.
If you remember, my captain idea for this classical tradition season is another quote from Lewis: “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality”.
We, on our own, are not rightly ordered. We do not love what is right and everyone kind of knew it back in the day. This is why the tradition was so important and received as a gift. We needed to be taught, shown, formed by the wisdom of those who had already worked to conform to Reality. This was the work of education.
This is still the heartbeat of the classical tradition. It’s the path we take when we enter the wardrobe. We leave behind the modern notion that we make our own truth, define our own reality, or dictate from within what is good and beautiful.
But here, in this English grammar book, a child is taught differently.
When the man called the waterfall sublime, it had nothing to do with his feelings. When something is sublime, you feel humbled. Imagine standing at the edge of a cliff, in a field during a heavy wind, on the edge of the rocky coast. You know what it’s like to feel small in the face of something sublime. Something magnificent and a little scary. Something like a waterfall.
And it’s not your feeling that is sublime. It’s the thing.
In an objective Reality, things merit certain responses. A waterfall is sublime, and the only right feeling towards it is a humble one, veneration even. The waterfall demands it by nature of what it is and by nature of what you are. This is right. This is how God designed things in the natural order, but I want to be very clear this is not only a Christian idea.
When Lewis later defends this objective reality in The Abolition of Man, he uses the word Tao and he argues for objective reality without depending on the Christian faith. This is a recognized reality from every time and place until…the modern man.
You know, just so no one ignores this argument on the basis of the Christian faith.
But the Green Book teaches the schoolboy that the waterfall does not demand a response. It goes even further, that any predicate statement is only someone’s own feelings and those feelings do not matter. We should ignore those things, debunking any sentiment and remaining as purely rational as possible.
Now at this point, you’re probably wondering, don’t sentiments matter? At least a little bit? They do. And they’re very needed in cultivating virtue.
Since there is an objective Reality and the things within it do demand certain responses, our feelings—or sentiments—are either in harmony with Reality or out of harmony with Reality. They’re either reasonable sentiments or unreasonable sentiments. Which means yes, sentiments are necessary and good when they are the right responses to Reality.
Since we’re talking about waterfalls, I’ll tell you about this Instagram account of unjust sentiments. I came across it a few years back so I’m not sure if it still exists but it was an account about people’s negative reviews of national parks. Who knew so many people could look at the great wonders of nature and think, “Eh, too many rocks.” One of my favorites was a 1-star review for the Grand Canyon with the comment, “A hole. A very, very large hole.”
We’ll use this review as our example.
If you stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and you feel bored at the sight of a very, very large hole, you must ask yourself, “Is this the right sentiment in response to the Grand Canyon?”
And when you recognize that it is not, you have been made aware that you are still a disordered person.
At least now you know.
But what would the Green Book authors say about this? What would the modern man say?
The Green Book authors would say that your predicate statement that the Grand Canyon is boring is a statement about your feelings and your feelings are unimportant. And the modern man, who has swung on a pendulum, would say your feelings are true for you. We can all feel whatever we want about it and you’re right in your own feels.
And here we find our two ditches. I understand if you’ve been listening and thinking, “Okay Autumn, but our problem is obviously that we put too much of an emphasis on everyone’s personal feelings to the point where they’re defining reality. We don’t think they’re unimportant. We think they’re gods.” I completely agree with you. This is the danger of our time.
But this danger only exists because we dismantled objective reality from the other ditch. Children in Lewis’ day learned that any sentiment was a personal feeling and it didn’t matter. But our generation has swung too far in response and we teach personal feelings matter a great deal…and define reality. The seed problem was the dismantling of reality. We’re just eating a different type of fruit.
So now we know how we’ve dismantled reality for our children but how is this disordering our souls and ruining our hope of virtue?
Well, if there’s no objective reality, we can’t judge our sentiments against any standard. If we can’t judge our sentiments rightly, we can’t work to change them because we don’t know which way is further up and further in.
Being left with unreasonable sentiments shapes what we repeatedly think, love, and do. It’s what shapes a character, makes a man—or doesn’t.
Basically, how can we order something if there isn’t an order?
Do you remember Plato? I know, he keeps popping up. Lewis depends on his tripartite soul to explain how we’ve atrophied what’s needed to be a person. Plato talks about the head, the chest, and the belly. The head is the rational part. The chest is the just sentiment. The belly is the passions. Classically, we believed that the head ruled the belly through the chest. Without a chest, the head cannot rule the belly and so you’re left with a person ruled by their passions and desires.
In our time, this is you do you, my truth.
We are men without chests.
We’ve debunked sentiments. We’ve dismissed sentiments. We’ve worshipped sentiments. And when we dismantled objective Reality, we mutilated the chest and marred the soul. How can we be properly ordered to God’s world when we quietly teach there is no order and therefore nothing to which you can test your own emotions and direct your reason? How can we hope for virtue when we’ve taught it doesn’t exist?
How can we be persons when we fail to rightly respond to God, his world, and one another?
This is how The Abolition of Man ends. Well, Lewis has a few more things to throw out in his latter two essays which you should certainly read and we could spend a whole episode on how Lewis defines rationalism (Clue: it’s medieval, not modern, and Mason would’ve agreed with him), but that is enough of the dystopian for today.
Because you, my fellow mother-teacher, are through the wardrobe already. And while it may be uncomfortable realizing how ill-prepared you might be for this journey, you’re not alone.
We’re inheriting a tradition and a path forward. How does one train the chest?
Through habitual action toward images of the “good life”. And this, as we know, is best done through story.
Which is why, our dear C.S. Lewis began to pivot in his own career around this time. We know of Lewis as the intellectual giant, a gifted apologist, a man who could go toe-to-toe in a debate but there seems to be a shift in his own presentation of ideas around the same time of The Abolition of Man. Rather than telling people what was right and needed, he began to show them. Through story.
Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in The Space Trilogy, was his first successful story. The meetings of the famous Inklings also started in the 1940s. Lewis seemingly realized that the right way to capture the chest of a man, to show just sentiments, to defend objective Reality was to take readers into places where what is true could be Truer than True or Realer than Real. He could lift the veil from our world to the fullness of God’s reality and remind readers of what is etched into our very souls: the imago Dei. The chest is what makes us men. Lewis says that with only the head, we’re mere intellect. With only the belly, we’re mere animal. Only with a chest can we be men.
For most of Lewis’ non-fiction work, there is a corresponding piece of fiction work. The ideas present in The Abolition of Man are clear in The Space Trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia. We see Eustace Scrubb transform from a modern man to a full-chested boy in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Shift, the trousered ape, wreaks havoc in The Last Battle. The witch of The Silver Chair, also known as the Lady of the Green Book, I mean Green Kirtle, puts an evil enchantment on Prince Rillian and holds him in something quite like Plato’s cave, keeping him imprisoned physically and soul-fully. Even Diggory, the boy-who-becomes-the-professor, mutters to himself, “What are they teaching in schools these days?” knowing that everything the Pevensies are asking is can be found in Plato.
But, of course, there is one who begins as a man with a chest, or, rather, a girl with a chest.
When I started thinking through this episode, I couldn’t get Lucy Pevensie out of my head. She is the first Pevensie to enter Narnia—which sounds all delightful but think about it: she went into a wardrobe and found herself standing in a strange, snowy wood. Wouldn’t you just hightail it backward through the wardrobe? Well, not this little lady. She was the one to overlook the offenses of her siblings when they find out Narnia was real. She trusted Aslan and whenever fearful, commanded herself towards courage. She is the compass of the siblings, always pointing north to what is true, good, and beautiful—and she does it all with humility and kindness.
I wondered if anyone else had thought about Lucy and The Abolition of Man, so I decided to do a little searching. If you don’t know, I’m writing all of my episodes out by hand this season and only using my books to craft them; it’s part of my whole humanizing work thing. But this seemed worth the ol’ Google and I’m glad I did.
I came across an article written by Kristen Rudd of CiRCE about the same idea. (You’ll find it in today’s footnotes in your episode notes.) She agrees Lucy is a chested person. One of Kristen’s points, which had not yet occurred to me, is that Lucy is the great Ideal Type we all need. Naturally, Aslan is the Ideal Type of Narnia. He’s the hero, the one we know we ought to be like. But he’s also so wonderful that we know we can’t fully be like him. That can be disheartening whether you’re six or thirty-three. But Lewis gives us hope in the form of the small Lucy. She’s someone we can imitate.
She doesn’t let her fear or anger or pride control her. She doesn’t ignore them as if they’re not revealing something about her soul. Instead, she controls them, putting them back in their rightful places so she can act rightly in Aslan’s world and in our own. She gives us an inspiring, living idea of what it means to be a person.
This, Dr. Guroian, says is what stimulates, instructs, and forms the moral imagination. In his excellent book, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination, Dr. Guroian shows how fairytales offer a child what is tangibly right and meaningful in a form meant for the chest. Didadictic moral instruction—like the kind you find in college ethics courses or an afternoon sermon from mom—does very little to engage the chest and very little to direct just sentiments. To be a virtuous person, to feel rightly, requires not only knowledge about what is objectively right and wrong, but to delight in doing what is right. Learning this requires habitual practices of ideas and actions that have captured the imagination and given children something they can imitate in their own lives.
It’s all very Mason. We must repeatedly give our children stories wherein virtue sparkles and vice is grotesque because it shapes, for the child, the picture of reality that is the good life. These images grow and fill the mind of the child, becoming metaphors used to understand and contemplate their own realities in life. There are dragons in stories but there are dragons in our world. Images that reflect truth, goodness, and beauty shape a child’s understanding, allegiance, and actions—giving them the chest of a person.
Having the image of Lucy Pevensie in her mind and longing to be like her in her heart is what makes my six-year-old whisper to herself, “Have courage,” before striving towards the good.
Lucy Pevensie is both an image of an ideal and a mirror to show the way.
It was Plutarch who first gave me this mirror language for story. We classical Mason moms know him as the author of the Parallel Lives, or Plutarch’s Lives. It’s sometimes this thing that looms in our future home education plans.
Pluuuutarch. That guy we read when our kids are old and we’re very smart and classical.
Plutarch is amazing. A writer and a historian, he brought to life the stories of forty-eight persons, pairing them together to show an overview of their lives focusing in on their virtues, vices, and general moral expressions in commonplace life.
In one of his own introductions, he said that while he began the task of writing the Lives for others, he continued for himself. Each story became a kind of mirror by which he could see his own life more clearly and could make adjustments in order to imitate the virtues of his subjects. I’ve used this mirror language to describe story on the whole: it forces us to reckon with our true selves in the objective Reality in which we are, not just our time and place from which it can be hard to distance ourselves enough to truly see who we are. We need reflecting images of virtue to learn the ordo amoris, to order ourselves rightly. And while we can certainly look at a chart of rules to see the order, we all know nobody likes a rule. Everyone loves a story.
While Plutarch’s work is historical, not fictional, the same principles are used. He invites his readers to spend time in the company of those whose lives were captured. He shares the details that make up a full life: hope, beauty, difficulty, struggle, failure, triumph. He holds up a mirror and forces the reader to ask, What is important about this man’s life? What did he do well? What was the virtue? Can it look differently in another life? How do two men respond differently to the same situation? Who was guided by the head? The belly? The chest?
He invites you to wrestle with the order of your affections. To be inspired and appalled by the ordering of the affections of those about whom he writes.
When Lewis leaves us wondering how we’re to train the chest of our children (and ourselves, if we’re being honest), we’re given a sure answer from Dr. Guroian and Plutarch. Story.
There is a way of experiencing and knowing the world as men with chests and it’s not the modern, rational way of knowing, by which I mean, measuring with the five senses and trusting only what you can determine factually. It’s also not through looking within yourself and thinking, “I feel this so this is right and true. Bow down, peasants.”
Neither of the ditches from The Abolition of Man will do.
What we need is a relational way of knowing the world. Some might even say the science of relations way of knowing the world. And this, as Plutarch and Dr. Guroian both comment on, requires memory and imagination.
My guess is memory means more than just your child’s remembering of their lives and more than just the memory of their time and place.
What a gift to give a child the inherited memory of truth, goodness, and beauty. In the classical tradition, we aim to pass on a treasure of wisdom in religion, literary thought, scientific discovery, poetry, and image—a memory collectively formed by persons for persons.
So give your children a memory worth having and a rich imagination of all that is true, good, and beautiful. Fight against the pull towards rationalism and selfish sentiments. Be wary that logic will solve the problem. Fill the library, the table, and the heart. Their chests depend on it.
The future of man depends on it.
I’ll see you in two weeks.
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