Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation! Every Friday at Noon EST (Join here), Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for Reading & the Good Life, a space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living! This week begins our exploration of the writing and wisdom of C.S. Lewis (through his short book — The Abolition of Man).
Check out our bookshelf below for previous and future reading!
Who is C.S. Lewis?
Clive Staples Lewis was one of the most influential writers of the 20th Century. A brilliant and imaginative thinker, Lewis was a scholar and professor of English literature with positions at Oxford and Cambridge. Yet he became best known for his famous works of children’s fantasy and his writings and talks on the Christian faith. His BBC radio broadcasts during World War Two gained widespread acclaim in England as Lewis explored “Right and Wrong, a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.”
Once an avowed atheist, Lewis’s own intellectual and spiritual journey led him to the God of the Bible and ultimately to Christ. While he seldom spoke of his beliefs during university lectures, His Christian faith profoundly influenced his writing. C.S. Lewis wrote over thirty books, including The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, Mere Christianity, Miracles, Surprised by Joy, The Screwtape Letters, and The Problem of Pain. […]
Learn more: https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/
The Abolition of Man
The Abolition of Man is a book on education and moral values (published in 1943). The book originated from three lectures delivered at the University of Durham in February 1943. Many people regard this as Lewis’s most important book. Lewis argues that education, both at home and in schools, needs to be conducted in the context of moral law and objective values.
Throughout the book, Lewis argues for an objectivist position in aesthetics and morality, contending that qualities and values inhere in things and positions and are not just projected onto them. Two objectivists may disagree about whether a work of art or a human act is good or not, but both believe there are agreed-upon standards by which the work or act is to be judged. The doctrine of objective values, which Lewis calls the Tao, is “the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” Lewis uses the Chinese term Tao for what he elsewhere refers to as “Natural Law or Traditional Morality” to emphasize the universality of traditional values. […]
Learn more: https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Abolition-of-Man
Selected Passages
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head. […]
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
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