C.S. Lewis: A Political Primer

The publication last year of Michael Ward’s After Humanity, a painstakingly detailed and authoritative commentary on C.S. Lewis’s 1943 masterpiece The Abolition of Man, reminded all who needed to be reminded that the English don and Christian apologist was a thinker of rigor and depth and a man of the utmost erudition. Ward traces every influence that informed that little book and makes sometimes oblique references and insights manifest to Lewis’s readers. In the process, Ward highlights the sheer wisdom that informs every paragraph of that discerning work. Readers of The Abolition of Man will learn about the precise little Green Book that Lewis had in mind in Part I of Abolition (the grammar book that taught the grossest form of emotivism and subjectivism to young students). They will better appreciate the classical Christian roots of Lewis’s affirmation of the essential connectedness of reason and spiritedness in the governance of the soul (in contrast to the “men without chests” all around us who lack both principles and courage). They will become familiar with the myriad philosophical, ethical, and religious texts that informed Lewis’s account of the Tao or the Way—the cross-cultural first principles of practical reason which are the starting point of all moral judgment—and the rich reflection on the nature of nature and the nightmare entailed in the effort to conquer human nature, which concludes what is Lewis’s undoubtedly most philosophical book.