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 continues 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. Throughout the book, Lewis argues for an objectivist position in aesthetics and morality, contending that qualities and values are inherent 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
The Law of Human Nature
We have all heard of the law of gravity. But what about the law of human nature? Lewis argues that morality is not something people invented. It is objective and universal—much like scientific claims about the material world. Lewis rejects the notion that morals are something we decide for ourselves.
In his classic, Mere Christianity, Lewis explained,
Now, this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the "laws of nature," we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong "the Law of Nature," they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law—with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
Lewis argues that morality is universal by pointing out that every culture has a standard of conduct that members expect others to uphold. While specific morals may change between cultures, having morals does not. By comparing the moral teachings of the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, we discover how similar they are to each other and to our own.
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