An Overview of CS Lewis

Essay by maddspdCollege, UndergraduateA+, April 2008

download word file, 7 pages 0.0

Downloaded 23 times

C.S. Lewis was a powerful professor at Oxford and Cambridge and one of the most famous converts to Christianity in the 20th century. He had always been an atheist until he turned 33 and converted to Christianity. Ever since then, he devoted the rest of his life to write about faith in general. One of his more popular works was his series of allegorical books known as The Chronicles of Narnia. One of those books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was recently made into a feature film. The book in which I will be examining is known as The Abolition of Man. Written in 1944, this book is actually a series of lectures or essays combined into a single book. There are three essays contained in this book: “Men Without Chests”, “The Way”, and “The Abolition of Man”.

In the first essay, Lewis talks about a book that was used in Britain’s upper form schools that he codenames The Green Book in order to not reveal the true identity of the book.

He goes on to argue that the school children should not be given their feelings to them, but instead should be able to feel on their own. The children should be able to exist in harmony with their feelings. Without this foundation, the child’s sense of right and wrong is at risk. Lewis goes on to explain that a person’s heart is responsible for a person’s sensitivity and that the head or mind is in charge of what is just or fair. The head is higher ranking than the heart. If it is necessary, the head should take precedence over what is in the heart, but at the same time, the feeling should still exist. This first essay or chapter is named “Men Without Chests”. Lewis...