An Excerpt from Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve by Joshua Herring
The below excerpt comes from the just published Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: C.S. Lewis’s Images of Gender, out now from Davenant Press (link here). Dr. Joshua Herring makes a positive case for the goodness of gender, and thinks that Protestant Christians have an excellent resource for contemplating the goodness of gender in C.S. Lewis. Eighty years ago, Lewis articulated a vision of gender that defangs transgender ideology, celebrates creation, and perceives a clear meaning to being made “male and female” in the divine image. Lewis’s arguments are helpful in the confusion of late modernity. The American Reformer is happy to publish this excerpt in our continuing efforts to resource Protestant social thought.
Gender is the defining issue of the 21st century. Since 2020, Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman?, Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, Abigail Favale’s Genesis of Gender, Mary Harrington’s Feminism against Progress, and Carl Trueman’s The Desecration of Man have all considered the ways in which transgender ideology harms the human person. Each of these texts, however, lacks a positive account of the goodness of gendered humanity. C.S. Lewis fills that gap, and the excerpt below from Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: C.S. Lewis’s Images of Gender celebrates the goodness of being made male and female. When we fail to appreciate the goodness and reality of gender, we miss out on the beautiful complexity of God’s creation.
Consider two examples of complex gender stereotypes from secondary education: powderpuff football1 and the Sadie Hawkins dance. Powderpuff football, where girls play football and boys cheer, turns upon the recognition that normally the opposite pattern exists. In normal circumstances, boys play football, showcasing their strength, strategy, and outward-oriented virility. Girls highlight the emotional connection to the game, building the intensity of group participation in the struggle through the combination of emotional language and erotic display. Reversing roles temporarily only highlights the reality: A boy running around a football field in a tulle tutu is funny precisely because the stereotypes invoked by powderpuff tap into something real. The same reality lies behind the conceit of the Sadie Hawkins dance. The girls ask the boys to the dance; in the absence of cultural norms of masculine leadership and initiation, flipping who leads becomes meaningless. Both of these customs highlight the enduring value of broad gender stereotypes and the humor and sense of play created within the recognition of such stereotypes.
C.S. Lewis provides helpful language for discussing the significance of affirming biological gender, developing language for describing the masculine and feminine, which heightens their complementary nature. The masculine, as Lewis outlines in his essay “Priestesses in the Church?” is an outward orientation, and the feminine is a receptive inwardness. In that sense, Lewis can write that all human beings are feminine towards God. While Lewis writes about these ideas clearly in non-fiction, they receive their fullest treatment in his novels Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, where Lewis presents the masculine and the feminine as perfectable essences that his protagonists encounter and, through imitation, develop within themselves. In That Hideous Strength, Ransom builds a community where each member is becoming more masculine or feminine, culminating in the redemption of marriage between Mark and Jane. Reigning over all of Lewis’s writing is the importance of gratitude: Nature is a wave, and the only right response is to go with the wave. At the same time, nature is a ripe fruit inviting plucking, eating, and enjoying. Through receiving the given and rejoicing in the gift, creation celebrates the goodness of the Creator.
Declaiming against gender ideology is, for the Christian, insufficient. Christians require positive language to proclaim the goodness of gender. Lewis equips his readers to reach that goal. Without getting into the intricacies of a particular marriage, divorce, or situation, Lewis equips readers to perceive the masculine as an outward orientation towards strength, protection, and leadership. The feminine is an inward orientation towards being fluid, creating the conditions of life, and submitting to masculine leadership. Both of these can exist independently, but Lewis’s images consistently show that they are ordered, through erotic desire, to the creation of a home and children. Each of these areas is a positive good alone, and together they contribute to a vision of life restorative for Western civilization. Lewis predicted in That Hideous Strength that Western society would come to rely more and more upon technology for conception; he was right, with the caveat that the looming global population crisis is also a result of changing cultural sexual norms. Technology cannot solve the problem of people choosing not to have children. One of the largest needs for civilizational survival is to persuade children that they should desire to grow up, get married, and have children (in that order). Lewis offers language, plots, and characters highlighting the beauty of complementary genders within marriage. Lewis provides language that helps his readers understand gender as a positive gift and one they should appreciate as part of their lifelong search for happiness.
Lewis helps Christians explain why developing and maintaining a clear and coherent vision of gender is important. In one sense, the libertarian position is the most difficult to respond to: “As an adult, if I want to change my body to match my feelings, why shouldn’t I? Am I not free to live as I see fit?” Lewis resists such a radical individualism, recalling the foundational importance of the doctrine of creation for Christian thought and life. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is where Scripture begins, and it is where Lewis ultimately grounds his understanding of gender. Maleldil created everything within the Fields of Arbol, and thus every part of creation exists within God’s divine order. Humans receive God’s reality as a gift, and like a complex puzzle, it may take weeks or even years to grow in understanding to the point where the gift is fully understood. Framing gender as a problem of gratitude and right response places gender under the primary question of Christian theology: Who is God, and what is the right response to him? In Perelandra, the waves towered above Ransom, and the fruit was more delightful than words could convey; both were gifts that he was called to enjoy. Lewis suggests through these images that all of reality is God’s gift to his image-bearers; we ought to receive the gift and express gratitude through our joy in its goodness. Ultimately, gender is one element of total reality. How people respond to the reality of gender depends on how they respond to God. Lewis suggests that Christians should, for the good of the gender-dysphoric person, invite all people to accept their gender and learn to love the God who made each one male or female in his image.
In his Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis meditates on the beauty and delight the Psalmist describes in the Law. He expresses a modern’s surprise at this delight; should not the law be framed as confining or punitive? How could the Psalmist honestly say he “delights in the Law of the Lord”? In his meditation on Psalm 119, Lewis answers the question he sets forth, and in so doing, he analyzes lawless modernity and points to the joyful certainty found in God’s law.
Their delight in the Law is a delight in having touched firmness; like the pedestrian’s delight in feeling the hard road beneath his feet after a false short cut has long entangled him in muddy fields…. Christians increasingly live on a spiritual island; new and rival ways of life surround it in all directions and their tides come further up on the beach every time. None of these new ways is yet so filthy or cruel as some Semitic Paganism. But many of them ignore all individual rights and are already cruel enough. Some give morality a wholly new meaning which we cannot accept, some deny its possibility. Perhaps we shall all learn, sharply enough, to value the clean air and ‘sweet reasonableness’ of the Christian ethics which in a more Christian age we might have taken for granted.2
The story of Old Testament Israel is one of constant temptation; Israel was surrounded by pagan nations that did not share their God, their laws, or their customs. In such a setting, the moral clarity of the law was a delight. Child sacrifice, temple prostitution, and other heinous acts were culturally accepted in the nations around Israel. Rather than asking if those nations were right, the Psalmist finds moral certainty in the revealed law of the Living God. Lewis looks at his own time, and seeing the growth of post-WWII moral relativism, suggests that modernity may also find certainty and clarity in the law of God. In that law, he argues, lies a touchstone of reality. The law shows humanity how to live, and it highlights the route to happiness. In the absence of such certainty, folly abounds. In this sense, the law is delightful. In The Abolition of Man Lewis points to the Tao as a universal repository of wisdom for humanity. Recovering convictions about the natural law and shaping culture to those norms is the route to civilizational health.
Lewis invites readers to imagine a different way of life: Imagine a United States where schools were dedicated to teaching students to perceive reality and submit their desires and lives to it; this world would have policymakers and legislators who sought to build systems of freedom within an agreed-upon recognition that men and women participate in human nature, and laws should teach that nature and clarify it. A world united on the premise that reality exists and demands our allegiance is a better world. That is the world Edmund Spenser celebrated in The Faerie Queene, and it is the world Lewis seeks to help his reader perceive. In such a world, human excellence is recognizable and can be pursued. As humans make the most of this life under the sun, their hope of reaching happiness depends not on satisfying their personal desires, but on submitting their longings to reality itself.
How reality is perceived is, to some degree, shaped by the mythology people accept. Mainstream Western culture accepts the gender paradigm espoused by Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler; Lewis highlights the need for a different mythology. Combating deeply held convictions about reality does not happen just on a propositional level, but rather occurs in the stories people believe about the world. It is a question of myth, and the task of recovery involves changing the myths people believe. Such is the work of re-enchantment, and Lewis shows how to re-enchant the mind. Through his narratives, Lewis joins Spenser in writing “hymns to life,” and reading Lewis, like reading Spenser, becomes an antidote to nihilism.
In Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis contrasts a modern mythology with an enchanted mythos, showing through the comparison what modernity has lost in the quest for scientific certainty. In so doing, he develops a kindly re-enchantment, highlighting the world as a created mystery abounding in goodness:
A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. [Ransom] had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes – and here, with how many more! No: space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens – the heavens which declared the glory – the
“happy climes that ly
Where day never shuts his eye
Up in the broad fields of the sky.”
He quoted Milton’s words to himself lovingly, at this time and often (34).
Lewis begins with a scientific mindset represented by the word “space” because the term spawns a mythology, a metaphysical story in the reader’s mind. Rather than the living cosmos of the ancient Greeks, “space” connotes death, emptiness on a vast scale, and creates a void in the reader’s imagination. Lewis envisions the same concept represented by the term “heavens.” “Heavens” connotes a realm populated by personal beings, filled with light, and pulsing with joy. Through his adventures on Malacandra (Mars) and Perelandra (Venus), Ransom comes to a greater understanding of the cosmos: Earth is the only planet that sees itself as a contained totality; every other planet hangs in the heavens and participates in the Great Dance of the cosmos before Maleldil.
In the conclusion of Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom reflects on a memory of his time on Mars and, in so doing, ends the novel on a note of re-enchantment. Ransom’s time on Malacandra, experiencing the deep riches of reality, enables him to see reality through different eyes:
Imagine the Milky Way magnified—the Milky Way seen through our largest telescope on the clearest night. And then imagine this, not painted across the zenith, but rising like a constellation behind the mountain tops—a dazzling necklace of lights brilliant as planets, slowly heaving itself up till it fills a fifth of the sky and now leaves a belt of blackness between itself and the horizon. It is too bright to look at for long, but it is only a preparation. Something else is coming . . . And now the true king of the night is set up, and now he is threading his way through that strange western galaxy and making its lights dim by comparison with his own. I turn my eyes away, for the little disk is far brighter than the Moon in her greatest splendor. And now I guess what I have seen—Jupiter rising beyond the Asteroids and forty million miles nearer than he has ever been to earthly eyes.
Lewis depicts Jupiter’s rise from Mars, but he does so with an eye towards replacing a typical scientific view with an enchanted one. Jupiter is not just a planet, but a mover in the great dance. The shift of stars is no mere astronomical phenomenon, but a nightly movement of great beauty. By analogy, gender is not merely the possession of a penis, vagina, or specific chromosomal structure (though it is not less). It is a marvelous dance of principles woven into reality itself. Through recognition of these principles, humanity is invited to step into the dance of creation. Men and women are invited to imagine their Creator through their gender: “Male and female he created them.”
For Lewis, the kindly enchantment begins in the creation of the world by a benevolent God. This God created all things and pronounced them “good” and “very good.” Whatever dreams and nightmares Lewis might devise for his literary efforts remained governed by that initial proclamation of goodness. It is this conviction about the goodness of God and the goodness of the works of man which allows him to weave together pagan gods with medieval correspondences inside a Trinitarian framework; all that is good, true, and beautiful finds its ultimate source in the mind of the God who created all things. Lewis prompts his readers to wonder at how much deeper and more magnificent the stars are than we imagined.
Lewis points his readers to the timeless truths that creation is a good gift given by a loving Creator. While Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve applies Lewis’s principles to questions of gender, his writings resonate because they convey universal truths of human nature. He is one of the best Christian respondents to the questions of gender ideology. But Lewis does far more than merely respond to an errant belief system. He re-enchants the imagination and prompts the reader to appreciate the gift of life. And in doing so, he illuminates the route to ultimate happiness.
