‘Men Without Chests’: Teaching as an Art

This essay by C.S. Lewis illustrates the meaning and mandate of education.

Principled educators need to educate students to discern relativistic thought, according to the first chapter of C.S. Lewis's essay "The Abolition of Man." wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock

C.S. Lewis’s trailblazing three-chapter essay “The Abolition of Man” uses fictitious figures with the Greek-Latin names of Gaius and Titius to skewer moral relativists of his day. His scathing critique unmasks their manifesto on morality as no more than a canon of convenience.

In the first chapter, “Men Without Chests,” Lewis likens a man’s chest to his morality, his belly to his passions, and his head to his intellect. It is morality—the chest—that gives nobility to man’s intellect, action, or labor, just as immorality or amorality give him notoriety.

“The head rules the belly through the chest,” he wrote.

“It is by this middle element that man is man. ... By his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite, mere animal.”

Lewis’s essay isn’t, as its title suggests, a treatise on men. It’s about humans. His reference to boys and men isn’t, as a new-age Gaius and Titius might protest, a slight against girls and women. Instead, he speaks to a broader reality, to what sets humans apart from animals and why they should resist temptations to be dehumanized. Man is more than a “trousered ape,” or more than a mere, albeit dapper, refinement of an animal.

“The Green Book” (Lewis’s epithet for books by moral relativists) is aimed at enfeebling impressionable minds. Lewis declared that “The Green Book” produces “men without chests.”

Shaping Minds

Lewis’s concern isn’t about biological evolution—it’s about growing up. That theme informed how his nonfiction molded adult minds and how his fiction shaped children’s minds. His essay’s “reflections on education” show how minds should—and shouldn’t—be shaped.

Again, Lewis spoke not only to the “educator” but also to the broader society, to those shaping minds, bodies, and souls: scientists, clergymen, jurists, politicians, and businessmen. Why? To him, “ethics, theology and politics are all at stake.”

To Lewis, classical education “initiated” people into morality, while contemporary education, which he implied is immoral or amoral education, like propaganda, merely “conditions.” True education is more than teaching or training; it leads learners out of ignorance. But into an understanding of what? Lewis contended that it’s an understanding of morality and moral values. Anything else, however vital, should still be secondary.

Sadly, much of what today passes for education is moral relativism in disguise. It’s why Lewis’s starting point is the impressionable minds of children. Teachers have a sacred duty to teach what is right. But how will they, if they can’t—or worse, won’t—tell right from wrong?

Adults aren’t merely grown-up (or oversized) children. They’re different from and even superior to children in how they see and respond to the world. Adulthood can usually include the childlike, but childhood can’t include the adultlike. Adults can genuinely possess childlike adaptability, wonder, trust, playfulness, humility, vulnerability. Children can playact but can only rarely genuinely possess adultlike knowledge, reason, discernment, and wisdom from informed experience.

Physically, emotionally, and intellectually, children can almost never approach the power adults have to change their world, for better or worse.

Educators and their kind must help children journey to adulthood, not pretend to journey while staying put.

Art Versus Artifice

The artifice of teaching shouldn’t replace its art. Sadly, some people mistake atheistic, immoral contrarianism for spiritually inspired or values-based original thinking.

When societies start treating children as adults, requiring adultlike decisions of them or their “consent” for decisions that should rest with parents, they start treating adults as children. That inverts the Tao, rendering common sense nonsense, portraying long-held values as heresy, and conjuring new values that are anything but.

Lewis prefaced his essay with a quote from Confucius: “He who sets to work on a different strand destroys the whole fabric.” He was critiquing those who pervert childlike individuality until it’s no more than childish individualism.

To use a celestial analogy, Lewis saw this thinking resembling the unseeing rebellion of fallen angels, who found God’s truth, beauty, and goodness anathema merely because these were handed down to them and weren’t their own. Its ideological, earthly cousin is atheism. This is expressed in self-destructive “isms,” such as communism, for which rebellion (or revolution) is not a means but an end in itself. It’s a deathless upending of unity and order for its own sake, by its own rules.

Assault on Morality

Who needs war when a ceaseless, divisive assault on morality represents a violence all its own?

Swaths of contemporary society revel in this perversion, through the nihilistic toolkit of historical, socio-cultural revisionism. To them, values are subjective and mere expressions of emotion and therefore ungrounded by reason. Worse, because they see values as flowing from ephemeral emotions, they decry values as fleeting, unreal, and untrue. They pretend to deify truth while denouncing it.

“The Green Book” reasoning—that long-held sacred values are mere sentiment or imagination—has nothing to do with reason. Put simply, it’s nonsense.

For brevity’s sake, Lewis pooled a range of traditional moral thought (Platonic, Stoic, Confucian, Christian, or Jewish) into what he called “the Tao,” or “doctrine of objective value”; it is belief that certain attitudes are true, others false.

He likened it to the sacred imprint of truth or correctness on the mind, body, and soul of man. This is one that guides man, even “before he is of an age to reason,” so that “when Reason ... comes ... bred as he has been,” he’ll welcome it as an ally, not an adversary.

‘Shoulds’ and ‘Wants’

Left to themselves, pupils will like and dislike what they want. To Aristotle, it is educators who must make them like and dislike what they should. St. Augustine went further, prioritizing a higher goodness, truth, and beauty above the lesser. Not every “should,” Augustine said, is equal.

Parents have that responsibility toward children, imbuing them with a sense of hierarchical good–bad and right–wrong, even before the legalese of lawful–unlawful enters discussion. That’s initiation into morality. Schools, colleges, churches, even governments should refine, not replace, this initiation into morality. To Lewis, society preempts false sentiments by inculcating just sentiments.

He warned, “By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist.”

Those who reject the Tao envisage facts devoid of value and feelings devoid of truth–falsehood and justice–injustice. Worse, they persuade others that the Tao doesn’t exist. They denounce patriotic courage as fiction, mere sentiment.

But Lewis cautioned that we can’t expect men to be martyred for their country if we undermine the meaning of martyrdom in the first place: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors. ... We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Ironically, many new-age “Green Book” ideologs lionize emotion. They elevate feelings to the level of fact and dumb down almost everything else, especially reason and responsibility, to the level of fiction.

Consider mobs indoctrinating children into believing that boys can be girls or climate alarmists embellishing, and therefore falsifying, facts. Witness radical feminists enshrining their “rights” to stifle unborn children, pretending they’re life’s creators rather than its custodians, or DEI demagogues deeming nearly everything “systemic” and therefore sinful.

It is to these demagogues, undermining uniquely human traditions of religion, marriage, and family, that Lewis speaks loudest. Like fallen angels, they see any order as oppressive because it’s inherited. But men forfeiting their chests aren’t men any more than fallen angels, forfeiting their wings, are still angels.

In his second chapter, Lewis broadened his examination beyond educators and education to show how the Tao towers above everything and must be met on its own terms.

What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to [email protected].

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.