The Eric Metaxas Show - Michael Ward

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Is Morality Objective? A Discussion of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show. Did you ever see the movie The Blobs starring Steve McQueen? The blood-curdling threat of The Blob. Well, way back when, Eric had a small part in that film, but they had to cut his scene because The Blob was supposed to eat him. But he kept spitting him out. Oh, the whole thing was just a disaster. Anyway, here's the guy who's not always that easy to digest.

Eric the Texas! Welcome to Socrates in the studio, Oxford, England, 2024. My guest for this session, I am thrilled to say, is Father Michael Ward. You'll gather from the father that he is now a Catholic priest. I think when I first learned about him, he was not even Catholic, much less a Catholic priest. We could talk about that a little bit. He is a professor of theology here at Oxford University, professor of apologetics at Houston Christian University.

He is famously the author of the best-selling and award-winning book, Planet Narnia, The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis. One of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. We will touch on that. he is well on the 50th anniversary of Lewis's death which was not so long ago Michael Ward unveiled a permanent national memorial to him in the Poets Corner at Westminster Abbey in London today we're going to speak about Lewis's great and prophetic work the abolition of man and to do that I have as my guest Michael Ward Michael welcome thanks very much we have to get the most superficial stuff out of the way. Which Bond film were you in? The world is not enough.

Correct. That was my only simple question. Everything else would be more interesting. But you say a little bit about that, just because it's not typical that a scholar and now a Catholic priest would say that I've been in a James Bond film. How did that happen?

It happened, interestingly, because of my interest in C.S. Louis, indirectly, because in 1993, Richard Attenborough came to Oxford to film Shadowlands, the movie about Lewis and his wife. Okay. And I got into that as an extra. He needed about 1,000 local people to be in that movie. A bits of it were filmed in this very hotel. And having got into Shadowlands, my name then stayed on the books of the age of

that supplied extras to filmmakers whenever they came to Oxford or near Oxford. So this agency would ring me up every six months and say, do you want to be in Inspector Morse? Do you want to be in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet? And then... Now, wait a minute. Did they ask you to be in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet?

Yes, yes. And? I was. You're kidding. No. I've seen the film, and I don't remember you. Were you wearing a doublet and hose, a halberd? I was in the army.

me of Fortinbras as we stormed Elsinor Castle. Weren't we all, Michael. Wow. Yeah, it was good fun. Yeah, that is. But in that movie, I didn't even get to see the stars of the piece, let alone interact with them. But when it came to the James Bond film, I found myself in a scene with just three other people. Pierce Brosnan, as James Bond, Desmond Llewellyn as Q and John Cleese as Q's assistant.

and me. And I had to hand James Bond. So you were in the scene with yourself. I handed him a pair of x-ray spectacles. Yeah. Yeah. That was you. That was me.

It was he. It was I. So John Cleese, yes, we've established that. John Cleese, it's funny because I've been in touch with John Cleese. I interviewed him a couple of years ago, and I've been in touch with him about doing a Socrates in the studio conversation with him. on the question, is silliness necessary? And I think the answer is yes, and I think he'll be able to make the case. Well, let's turn to things theological, Louisiana. Is that the right term? For the American state? No. All right. For things pertaining to CS Lewis. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Sorry,

Yes. Wow, I'm glad I caught you with that. In my conversation with Walter Hooper, to whom you introduced me, I was first exposed to the term Louisiana. It was he who used that term. I should say, before we get into the substance of our conversation on Lewis and his book, The Abel, of man, that that's something for which I can never thank you enough. The three conversations I had with Walter Hooper, for those who don't know, Hooper was Lewis's secretary at the very end of his life, but became much, much more than that after Lewis's death. And I had the privilege of three long conversations with him here in 2015, which, of course, people can see at Socrates in the city. But I have you to thank you. for that introduction. I really can never thank you enough. It's just a, it was a magnificent time with him. Well, let's start at the beginning before even we get into the abolition of man.

What led you to be a CS Lewis scholar? Where did your life take you that you found yourself studying Lewis as you do? It started as I think most people's interest in Lewis starts with having the Narnia books read to me by my parents. Well, I was a very little boy. I and my two older brothers would jump into our parents' bed on a Sunday morning. My mother would read a chapter or two of the latest Narnia Chronicle. Then we'd get up, have breakfast, go to church, and that was a regular feature of my childhood. Sounds like a swell childhood.

It was. Yeah. And that was before I was old enough to read for myself. When I could read for myself, I read. I re-read Narnia, I then got into Lewis's other fiction, his Christian apologetics. I came here to Oxford to do my first degree in English, so I began studying Lewis's academic writings, did a short undergraduate thesis on Lewis, and as a result of that one particular 6,000-word essay as an undergraduate, I was asked to give a one-off lecture on Lewis

after I graduated, and then a short course of tuition, and then a little bit more and a bit of invitation to write about Lewis. And eventually I ended up living in the kilns, Lewis's house here in Oxford. That's a big deal right there. Living at the kilns, those of us who are part of this week here in Oxford, we will be visiting the kilns, I think, tomorrow.

But it's a very special place. You actually lived there and you said were assigned his bedroom. I had his bedroom as my bedroom, his study as my study for three years, which was pretty cool. And where he goes, you shall go? Yeah, his people shall be my people. His people should be your people. His God will be your God.

Wow. And yet you're no longer an Anglican. We don't need to get into that. Actually, it's one of the running jokes, at least for me, I find it to be a joke. But Walter Hooper would always say, and many who swam the Tiber so-called and became Catholics, from the Church of England always say, as Walter Hooper always said, that had Lewis lived, he would eventually have become a Roman Catholic, which I just find funny because we can't know.

But I counter by saying had Flannery O'Connor lived, she would have become a Protestant Pentecostal. I just want to be very clear. So it's an even trade. It's an even trade. We get Flannery. Hey, folks, listeners to my show know I'm passionate about the work of Christian solvers Solidarity International because they protect and free those who are being persecuted and enslaved for their faith.

Thanks to you to date, CSI has freed more than 100,000 people from slavery in Sudan, but the work is not done yet. It's estimated that there are still tens of thousands more still in bondage, and CSI is preparing right now for their final slave liberation of this year. I'm hoping you'll join me and help them liberate another 300 women and children. your gift of just $250 will free a woman in Sudan who has been enslaved for years and provide her with food and other supplies necessary to start her new life. Call 888-253-3522. 888-253-3522. Christian Solidarity International, freeing and healing captives in Jesus' name.

Go to metaxistalk.com. Metaxistalk.com. Click on the Christian Solidarity banner. Metaxistock.com. Or 888-253-2522. you. Okay, every new year, we all spend a few days seriously thinking about what we can do to improve our lives, and usually it revolves around better health, right? Well, I want to strongly encourage you to do what I do, take responsibility for your health by taking balance of nature's

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Discount code Eric to get 35% off their food and veggie supplements plus a free fiber and spice supplement. Okay, ready? Bounceonature.com. Use code Eric. Go. Hey there, folks. My Pillow is excited to announce that their Christmas extravaganza is finally here. Get this season's flannel sheets for as low as 59.99. They won't last long, so get them while you can. They're famous My Slippers. Those haven't been on sale for a long time, regularly priced at 11998 for a limited time now, 5998. And their six-piece towel sets are back in stock with extremely limited quantities, only 2998, with hundreds of My Pillo products. There's something for everyone on your Christmas list for bathrobes, duvets, quilts, down,

comforter, so much more. Go to Mypillow.com or call 800-978 3057. Be sure to use promo code Eric to save on all My Pillar Products. That's promo code Eric. Flannel sheets for as low as 5998, or the six-piece towel sets for just 2998, but that's not all. They're extending their 60-day money-back guarantee till March 1st, plus all orders. $75 or more. Ship absolutely free. MyPillow.com, use code, Eric. So you, the book you wrote about the Narnia Chronicles, if you don't mind, before we get into the really substantive issue of this new book you've written about the abolition of man, can you, can you give a pressee, a very brief description of your book, Planet Narnia? It is very, I think it's hard to do. Whenever I start talking about it, because I talk about you and your book often when I'm given the chance, it's difficult to sum up.

Can you, I mean, if you can sum it up and then people can watch the video, they must watch the video Socrates in the city from 2015. It is one of the greatest conversations I've ever been privileged to have. But if you would, just describe that book, that thesis. Well, in brief summary, there are seven non-year criminal. because there were seven heavens in the medieval cosmos. Seven heavens? Seven heavens, seven planets. Seven planets in the medieval cosmos.

And Lewis being a medievalist, knowing all about medieval cosmology and writing about it extensively in his academic works and describing these seven planets as spiritual symbols of permanent value. Yeah. And weaving them into his earlier fiction, the Ransom Trilogy,

and talking about them in his fiction, in his fiction. When he came to write Narnia, he used these seven spiritual symbols to provide him with the imaginative blueprint of each chronicle of Narnia. Okay, so each one, I cannot imagine that

anybody unfamiliar with the thesis will have understood it from your description because it is so rich, so deep. But what makes it fascinating to me is that no one until you, until you yourself, Michael

Ward, had ever seen this before. It is a kind of miracle. It is one of the great, you unraveled one of the great mysteries of 20th century literature when you stumbled on this. And I think we cover that in our previous conversation, but it's a very big deal. It's an extraordinary thing. And it makes Lewis, who was already as great, at least in my mind, as any literary figure could be, twice as great. It's extraordinary. And let me ask you one question on this. Why do you think this was never discovered until you discovered it? Because it just seems crazy to me that Lewis did not himself talk about this. He seemed content to let this mystery be a mystery. I find that perverse. There were at least three reasons why it wasn't discovered.

First, some people thought, oh, they're just children's books. They can't be very sophisticated. Others who focused on the obvious biblical parallels thought that provides enough complexity to satisfy our interest. And those who were looking for an additional level of significance were probably, I think it's fair to say, predisposed against the idea that Lewis could have been interested in. in astrology, because this is what we're talking about, the planetary influences, which is often thought of as being unchristian or even occult. But of course, it's not. There's a long tradition of Christian astrology. There's astrology in the Bible. You know, the wise men who follow the start of Bethlehem. They're astrologers. Nothing wrong about astrology necessarily.

But they were pagans. They were. Never mind. Don't follow my joke. The heavens are telling the glory of God. Psalm 19 Lewis's favorite Psalm So all of us should study the stars to understand

the significance of them and Lewis followed in that rich tradition Anyway Well my larger question is it strikes me as nothing less than perverse That Lewis

did not broadcast The Key to the seven Narnia books that he was content to have this glorious mystery remain a mystery. Very strange to me. No, no, no, no. Because the whole point of it is that you are meant to sense it, feel it, intuit it, but not recognize it with your intellect.

And that's part of his poetic purpose to provide each Narnia Chronicle with a pervasive flavor or atmosphere, which is summed up in Aslan, the Christ character, which Lewis thought was a good way of reflecting the situation in the real world, where Jesus Christ is the key to the universe. You can sense the word of God in all things, but you see the word spoken most clearly in Jesus. Well, in any case, I still reckon it nothing less than perverse,

but you, by the grace of God, have revealed this, the mystery, and the book, and at least my conversation with you will do it more justice than we can hear. We're here today to talk about your new book, which is called After Humanity, A Guide to C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man. So it's a book about a book, or as the Scots would say, a book, about a bick. And it is really, I will let explain how it is that you came to write a book about the abolition of man? The abolition of man, by the way, is such a very, very brief book. Yes, here is. Look, and it's right here. Little, slim. And the letting is overly generous. There's like hardly anything here, but it's brilliant, and you've written a book about it. So what led you to write a book about

the abolition of man? Well, I have been trying to teach the abolition of man to my students for many years and finding it very difficult to do so because I'm no philosopher, and this is Lewis's most philosophical work, and I had seen how my students struggled with it, just as I struggled with it. So I knew there was a need for such a book. And then when the publisher, Word on Fire, Academic, asked me if I would produce something for them, I was more than happy to do so, especially as Word on Fire produced very handsome books. This is the most attractive book that I've ever had my name on.

It's beautiful. Look at these glorious, full-color pictures. What is the use of a book without pictures? Right, exactly. That's what they say, right. So that's one nice thing about it. And the other is that I was able, as I wrote the book, to, as it were, educate myself in what Lewis was trying to do in the abolition of man and share that with my readers.

and I learnt a huge amount about Lewis as I wrote this book, not least how very central the abolition of man is in his whole worldview and thought and philosophy. He said of the abolition of man that it was almost his favourite among his books. And Walter Hooper, the great late lamented Walter Hooper described it as an all but indispensable introduction to the whole corpus of Louisiana.

Yes. By the way, you remember, Walter used to joke about that. The first time he went into the Bodlin Library here in Oxford. That's really. He went up to the person at the desk and said, could you direct me to Louisiana? And the person behind the desk said, yeah, go down to Mississippi and turn left. Yeah, yeah. Or is it right?

Yeah. Yeah, anyway. And an indispensable introduction to the whole corpus of Louisiana, that is to say, this book, if you want the key to Lewis's writings in general, read this book, but it's difficult. Yeah. It is difficult, even though it's extremely short. And I guess, why don't we start with the title, the abolition of man?

And when I'm thinking about C.S. Lewis, I've had the privilege of hearing his voice. I guess there's a BBC recording, the only one of him speaking. And the way he said man, he says man, man, the abolition of man. He has an interesting way of speaking. But what about this title? abolition of man. If we give up on belief in objective value, we will abolish ourselves as human beings. If we give up our belief in objective value, we will abolish ourselves as human beings.

Now, having read the abolition of man, I know that that's true, but let's spend the next minutes that we have unpacking the idea. Lewis starts the abolition of man, which was published in 43, by shining the light on this idol of subjectivity and feelings that already in a textbook in 1943, or whenever it was published in 39, he sees this stumbling, that people, that people, people are making and he realizes, uh-uh, not good need to talk about this. So, so talk about that. Yeah. He begins the book by talking about the occasion when the poet Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth's great buddy, went to a waterfall in the north of England and overheard two tourists discussing the waterfall, and one called it sublime and the other called it pretty. And Wordsworth endorsed the first verdict and scorned the second.

So this goes all the way back. I'd forgotten. This goes all the way back to Wordsworth. So, okay, so Wordsworth, when, what are we talking, 1798, something around then? Well, he wrote about the French Revolution around about then, and he died in 1950. bending low at the people's feet on the windy corner of the dirty street. Well, I ask him while he shine my shoes, how'd he keep from getting the blues? He grinned as he raised his little head. He popped his shoe shine ragging. And he said, get rhythm.

When you get... Hey, folks, listeners to my show know I'm passionate about the work of Christian Solidarity International because they protect and free those who are being persecuted and enslaved for their faith. Thanks to you to date, CSI has freed more than 100,000 people from slavery in Sudan, but the work is not done yet. It's estimated that there are still tens of thousands more still in bondage, and CSI is preparing right now for their final slave liberation of this year. I'm hoping you'll join me and help them liberate another 300 women and children.

Your gift of just $250 will free a woman in Sudan who has been enslaved for years and provide her with food and other supplies necessary to start her new life. Call 888-253-3522. 888-253-3522, Christian Solidarity International, freeing and healing captives in Jesus' name. Go to metaxistalk.com. Metaxistock.com. Click on the Christian Solidarity banner. Metaxistock.com or 888-253-3522. God bless you. So early in the 19th century, Wordsworth, here's two people talking about a glorious waterfall. One calls it sublime. The other calls it pretty.

Yeah. And it goes way back beyond words. It is really a perennial human problem. It's almost a definition, I think, of sin. Well, before we go there, explicate the difference between describing a waterfall as sublime and describing a waterfall as pretty. In other words, sum that up for people who aren't tracking yet.

Well, what a cholera is, had a problem with the person who described it as pretty because it was so obviously much, much more than merely pretty. Right. It's a little insulting to say that a glorious cataract is pretty. Yeah. Now, it may be in the case of that particular tourist that they just didn't have a very extensive vocabulary and they were reaching for the best word they could find.

And, you know, we shouldn't pay too much attention to this particular example. Lewis just uses it as a kind of springboard into his, major argument about whether what we say about the world out there can be true or false. And can we approximate more nearly to a true description of reality by treating it intelligently and recognizing its own intrinsic value? Some people, certainly today, but already in Lewis's time and already, it seems, in Coleridge's time, don't like to say anything definitive. When one is objective or one is speaking objectively,

maybe people are afraid that they'll be attacked for their position. So they retreat to the subjective. They say, I feel something rather than it is something. Isn't that kind of at the heart of it? Yeah, that's part of it. that we have been trained in, especially in recent centuries, to be very wary of, you know, dogmatic statements. And not without some reason, given, you know, the terrible wars of religion back in the day,

religion can go horribly wrong. But that is not to say that we can't know about reality and speak of it intelligently. And that's part of what it means to be human. This is Lewis's whole point. It's really an anthropological argument that he's making. He's trying to define what it is to be human. And if we don't live up to this definition, then we abolish ourselves. There is so much here.

It's deep, but it's worth the trouble. Because, and correct me if I'm wrong or annotate what I'm saying here, but the larger point that Lewis is making is that people who shrink from saying things objectively, from daring to say things objectively, what they're really doing is retreating from the very idea that there is a reality beyond what we feel or perceive. In large part, yes, but in fact, not absolutely. because ironically, the very reason why they retreat is because other people have told them

that to speak about reality objectively and certainly is wrong. And they believe that as an objective truth. It's very hard to live as a thoroughgoing subjectivist. Let's be honest, it is utterly impossible to live as a subjectivist, as you put it. It's impossible because, because there is a thing called reality, and you're kicking against the goads. There is no way to maintain subjectivity for very long.

No. But people try. They do, and those who try and succeed usually end up in either prison or a lunatic asylum. Right. Yeah. Okay, so Lewis saw this as a sufficient problem in 1943 that he writes this brilliant essay, really, called the abolition of man. So how is it that denying reality or shrinking from objective reality leads to the abolition of man? Read the book. I will try and answer the question,

but it's a very difficult question. And, you know, Lewis spent most of his career tackling this from one perspective or another. But let's first of all just briefly summarize his own model of the human person, which is a tripartite model. We come in three parts. The head,

the chest, and the belly. And they represent our rational selves, our appetitive or sensual selves in the belly, and between them, the chest, which is the liaison officer between our

cerebral selves and our visceral selves. And it's this chest, this ability to liaise between the rational and the sensual that makes us distinctively human because a standard definition of a human being is a rational animal. I almost forgot how much I love to listen to you talk. I've never in my life before heard the adjective, a pettative, until just now. Thank you, Michael. award. You taught me a word just before we began filming. What was it, Fuferal? Fuforah.

Fuforah. Yeah, it's in my Luther book, Fufura. Pious Fuforah. No, but a pedative. It's interesting because I had really forgotten what you described as Lewis's tripartite model of a man. Say it again. So we have the head? The head?

The chest. And the belly. And the belly. So, yeah, the belly, the viscera, you said. that's a pettive. In other words, our desires. The head, obviously, cerebral, or I think you said cerebral, and then the chest. Now, the chest, this is important to me. I've written about this myself, that the heart, the chest. So when he writes within the course of his book, The Abolition of Man, of Men Without Chests, what he means is without heart. There's something

central about that idea, in Lewis's idea about what a man is, and I would say our idea and a biblical idea, and it's simply true. And so he talks about men without chess. When you take out the heart, somehow we lose our humanity. So if you would, talk about what Lewis means by chest and heart, because it's so central in all of his writing. You see it in Narnia, just the lion-heartedness of the heroes, the idea that the lion is the Christ figure. Well, absolutely. And the very idea of the chest as the sort of defining feature of a human being is, at least twice, dropped into Narnia explicitly.

So Peter, Peter Pevensey, in the first book, grows up to be a great chested warrior. And we're not talking about pectorals. Well, we're talking philosophically, not physiologically. Yeah, I want to be clear. But there is an aspect of Lewis's argument which does sort of bleed over into the physical, the material. So the ape shift in the last battle, the final nine year chronicle,

is said to have a very weak chest because he's only an ape. He can imitate what it is to be human, but he's not actually human. Anyway, this is just Lewis tipping the wink, as it were, to his philosophical argument. tipping the wink. Do you have that phrase? No. Nor shall we ever have that phrase. Tipping the wink. Well, but no pun intended, this idea is at the heart of the abolition of man and of Lewis's

whole corpus as you put it. This idea that we, to be men, which is to say to be real human beings, We have to have heart. Yeah, because without that central liaison officer, we are either purely spiritual from the head, from the neck upwards. Yeah, yeah. We share rationality with the angels or from the waist down. We're like the beasts. We have appetites and desires.

But to connect the angel in us and the animals, and the animal in us, we need this central chest, which yokes together the two elements, not like a criminal is handcuffed to a policeman. It's not yoking together with violence. It's more the coming together in love, in the heart, you might say,

of these two very good parts of us. because feelings are good, in essence, that we have been created by God to have desires and appetites and senses. So we shouldn't disparage them, and we shouldn't, as it were, dominate them in some sort of coercive fashion. We should respect them and indeed listen to them at times, but not allow them to, as it were, run the roost. Because the head, Lewis argues, rules the belly through the chest. Part of this, it seems to me, in the abolition of man, the thesis, is Lewis pushing against what is ultimately a Christian heresy, Gnosticism, the idea that we are to be, you know, platonic forms that we're supposed to be spiritual meaning with the wrong definition of spiritual,

but that we're supposed to be not physical. And of course, Lewis makes the case, which of course, the scripture makes the case, that we are meant to be corporeal. I think I'm only using that word because I'm talking to you, corporeal. But that that's central, that Jesus, when he came back from the dead, ate fish and a piece of a honeycomb, that is vitally important. And it's often Christians who forget that and who become so, I don't know, who said it's so spiritually minded that they're no earthly good. They drift off into this platonic false view of what God wishes us to be. Absolutely. It is a heresy. It's sometimes called angelism. Yeah. And yeah, matter is good. God likes matter. C.S. Lewis says in mere Christianity, he invented it.

Right. And we, and he, and he invented us with senses by means of which we could perceive it and interact with it. The body is good. You only need to, and, you know, this is not just a New Testament idea. Just look at the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament, the Song of Songs. A great celebration of physical love. So, of course, it's a part of our nature and ought to be respected. but one of the reasons why Christians sometimes overcorrect,

they react against sensuality, is because, of course, if you indulge it, it leads you terribly astray. Well, again, that's the irony, right? In other words, that if you retreat into the cerebral or into the spiritual, you end up, ironically, or paradoxically, becoming more of an animal than you would have if you had owned your physicality, so to speak.

Yeah. And this is largely what Lewis's novel, That Hidious Strength, is about. I wanted to come to that, and I was just about to bring it up. You did. So the abolition of man, which comes out in 1943, this very slim essay, in some ways is, His last novel in the so-called space trilogy, that hideous strength in seed form on some level. That hideous strength, which is a strange, magnificent book,

is the fictional outworking of the ideas about which he writes in the abolition of man. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that hideous strength. That hideous strength is the third of three novels called the Ransom Trilogy. You must never call it the Space Tritogy. No, I think I said so-called Space Trilogy. Good. You'll remember. I remember.

Yeah. No, because it's not a space trilogy. And, of course, that Hidia Strength, the final book in the Ransom Trilogy, doesn't take place in outer space unless you consider the Earth to be floating in outer space, which I do. But that's another issue. The third book is set on Earth and it's about a young couple, Mark and Jane,

who need to, as it were, live into their masculinity and femininity respectively. Masculinity has been depicted in the first book of the trilogy, which is set on Mars, the masculine planet. The second book is set on Venus, the feminine planet. Now the third book, which is set on. on earth begins, interestingly, with the word matrimony. Mark and Jane are married, but they are unhappily married, because they are not respecting their bodies. But by the end of the novel, they have come to learn to love their bodies, and that's what the novel is about, in brief summary.

Okay, and what you've already done here is you touch on why. the abolition of man is often called a prophetic work. I don't think Lewis would have dared to think of it that way. But when you read it now and you think that it was written in 1943, it points inevitably at exactly where we are today, a kind of a fetishization of subjectivity, the idea that a man is just a construct. there's no such thing as an actual physical man. A woman is an ideological construct. These things, so we kind of float into the world of fantasy

and whatever one thinks he is, that he is. So it's utter, it's the, it's subjectivization of all of reality, which is the demolishing of reality. So it's interesting to me that in that hideous strength, Lewis, unaware that, you know, 80 years hence, we're going to have this argument in the culture about what is a woman. But he sums it up, that we are, God made us male and female. It's inevitable.

It's part of God's intention. And he already, in that hideous strength, points his finger right at this as part of the core of what human physical reality is. Yep. And one of the reasons he does say, I think, because subjectivism has been with us throughout human history. It is, as I say, a kind of definition of sin. But in the 20th century, particularly in the first quarter or the first third of the 20th century, a whole new opportunity for subjectivism was coming in. And this is where Lewis gets very controversial, especially for us now in the 21st century.

in effective contraception. The contraception was a huge issue in the first decades of the 20th century. Everybody was talking about it because it was becoming effective and widespread and available. And so people were beginning to use it. And I think Lewis became interested in this subject because in 1930, the time. Church of England, Lewis's own church, relaxed its teaching on contraception and said, in certain circumstances, contraception's okay for married couples. And this was a huge breach in Christian teaching. Lewis says he would not like to defend contraception in the face of almost unbroken tradition against

it. And so he's glancing there at the 1930 decision of his own church to relax teaching on that subject. Now, what's this got to do with subjectivism? Well, if you can, as it were, say, that by a device or a drug, you can make yourself not masculine but neutered, as it were, or not feminine, but neutered, you're taking a huge step towards the idea that you can make yourself anything you want to be. And, you're... you know, 80, 90 years later, we are seeing the logical outcome of that step.