The Wizard of Oz and the Removal of Chests

The Wizard of Oz seems to be a fine movie from all I can tell, but the book strikes me as exactly the sort of thing that CS Lewis was talking about when he spoke of making “men without chests.” Chapter XXI is called “The Lion Becomes the King of the Beasts.” After seeing the [...]

Magic, Science, and Man

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how [...]

The Church that Abolished Man

Dr. Richard Gamble spoke at the SCL conference last week about The Abolition of Man. I was pleased to see that someone who has spent a lot of time reading this book and contemplating its message was asked to develop his thoughts on that message. Man, we must understand, has been abolished. The world we [...]

CS Lewis on Nature and Freedom

The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society [...]

What is Literature, Part II: Grammar

Some reflections on what people have meant by the term grammar, from CS Lewis’s The Discarded Image, page 185 ff. in my Canto edition To give an educational curriculum a place in the Model of the universe may at first seem an absurdity; and it would be an absurdity if the medievals had felt about it [...]

Lit Quiz 2: Who said this?

Wisdom must provide counsel that is consistent with the good. Knowledge severed from goodness is too dangerous – and even foolish; almost certainly fake.   Answer below That’s JK Rowling. Yes sirree. These are the words of Albus Dumbledore.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader relaunches

Perhaps you’ve heard Disney dropped the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, choosing rather to panic than to learn their lesson from that mega-disappointment, Prince Caspian (the lesson is, don’t destroy Lewis’s characters and values). However, it has been picked up and will be released in December of 2010. The writer of this article makes a strong [...]

CS Lewis had style

Since I care so much about writing, and since one of the greatest pleasures in life is a well-tempered sentence, I have been reflecting quite a bit lately on what makes for good style. I’ve been asking how to improve my own style as well as reviewing some writers whom I particularly love reading, among whom [...]

A Pretty Relevent Application from the Same Essay

If we believed in the absolute reality of elementary moral platitudes, we should value those who solicit our votes by other standards than have recently been in fashion. While we believe that good is somehting to be invented, we demand of our rulers such qualities as ‘vision’, ‘dynamism’, ‘creativity’, and the like. If we returned [...]

The Poison of Subjectivism

Correct thinking will not make good men of bad ones; but a purely theoretical error may remove ordinary checks to evil and deprive good intentions of their natural support. An error of this sort is abroad at present… I am referring to Subjectivism. After studying his environment man has begun to study himself. Up to [...]