Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
C.S. Lewis on ‘men without chests’ (and what that means)
C.S. Lewis on ‘men without chests’ (and what that means)
Dec 12, 2025 11:18 PM

“Men Without Chests” is the curious title of the first chapter of C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. In the book, Lewis explains that the “The Chest” is one of the “indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.” Without “Chests” we are unable to have confidence that we can grasp objective reality and objective truth.

The result of such chest-less education, as Lewis warns, is a dystopian future. “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise,” says Lewis. “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

A YouTube channel called CSLewisDoodle contains a number of videos that illustrate some of Lewis’s selected essays to make them easier to understand. This videocontains theessay on “”Men Without Chests.” (Because the essay contains a number of obscure literary references, CSLewisDoodle has put together a PDF with the text and explanatory notes.)

Previous Article：An introduction to the Solow Model Next Article：Explainer: Congress rolls back regulations on banks and financial institutions
Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Stan Druckenmiller on Intergenerational Theft
In a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, billionaire Stan Druckenmiller discusses his recent university tour sounding the alarm on intergenerational theft. The article paraphrases his case: [W]hile today’s 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans. It goes on: When the former money manager visited Stanford University, the audience included older folks as well as students....
The Evangelical Work Ethic
Forget Max Weber and his Protestant work ethic, says Greg Forster. We don’t need social science to know that God cares about our work: Nothing shows the difficulty of understanding the relationship between work and faith more than our continued insistence on framing this issue as a debate over Max Weber’s long-discredited theory of the Protestant work ethic. Weber argued that Protestants value work because they think prosperity is proof that you’re saved; as anyone who knows anything about church...
Now Available from CLP: ‘Exodus’ by Cornelis Vonk
Christian’s Library Press has now releasedExodus, the second primer in its Opening the Scripturesseries.Written by Dutch Reformed pastor and preacher Cornelis Vonk, and translated by Theodore Plantinga and Nelson Kloosterman, the volume provides an introduction to the book of Exodus. Like others in the series, it is neither a mentary nor a sermon, but rather an accessible primer for the average churchgoer, walking readers through the “immense building” of Scripture while “tracing the unfolding” of God’s ultimate plan. Much of...
Entrepreneurs, the Working Class, and the Mosaic of Culture
In an essay for AEI’s The American, Henry Olsen does a deep dive on the white working class, a group that Republicans have won by significant margins in recent years. (HT) Yet upon reviewing evidence in a new book by Andrew Levison, The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think, and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support, Olsen concludes that “conservatives, not progressives, are the ones in need of an electoral strategy to capture this key segment...
‘A Flight From Human Intimacy’
Japan is a nation going under, demographically speaking. It is estimated that Japan will lose 10 million people in population over the next ten years. Like many nations, Japan is not having babies fast enough to keep its population stable. One reason: what the Japanese are calling “sekkusu shinai shokogun, or ‘celibacy syndrome.'” Young people don’t want to date, be intimate, get married, have sex. There are pelling reasons for this. The first is the Japanese culture’s saturation in social...
Health Care Sharing Ministries: ‘Faith, Liberty, and Charity’ in Health Care
While many Americans are struggling to navigate healthcare.gov and some are fighting against the Affordable Care Act’s threat to religious liberty, an estimated 100,000 people are exempt from the legislation as members of a health care sharing ministry (HCSM); these organizations offer the opportunity for individuals with similar beliefs to share their health care costs. HCSMs are not panies, but nonprofit religious organizations that receive no government funding. Andrea Miller, the medical director for Medi-Share, one HCSM in the U.S.,...
License For Evil
No, that’s not the name of a new James Bond movie. Rather, it’s a Public Discourse post by Anthony Esolen that discusses society’s ability (and disability) to get a handle on evil actions and morality. The cry, “You can’t legislate morality” is, of course, false. That is exactly what law does, as Esolen points out. All laws bear some relation, however distant, to a moral evaluation of good and bad. We cannot escape making moral distinctions. One man’s theft is...
Oliver O’Donovan in Conversation
Earlier this month, Christian’s Library Press co-sponsored a discussion between Ken Myers, Matthew Lee Anderson, and British moral philosopher Oliver O’Donovan. Held a few blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., the conversation addressed questions and themes of political theology and was loosely centered around O’Donovan’s 1996 book The Desire of the Nations. Click here to listen to an audio of the conversation on the website of Mars Hill Audio Journal. ...
Fleeing France’s Failing Economy
For those of us on this side of the pond, France conjures up images of baguettes, beautiful women and lush countryside. For the French, the image conjured up might be taxes, taxes and more taxes. More than 70 per cent of the French feel taxes are “excessive”, and 80 per cent believe the president’s economic policy is “misguided” and “inefficient”. This goes far beyond the tax exiles such as Gérard Depardieu, members of the Peugeot family or Chanel’s owners. Worse,...
How Conservatives Can Become Storytellers
“The plural of anecdote is not data”, claimed toxicologist Frank Kotsonis, in an attempt to correct sloppy thinking. While Kotsonis has provided a useful aphorism, it can obscure the equally interesting fact that the singular of data is anecdote. Consider, for example, the following two stories. The first is the shortest work of fiction ever written by Ernest Hemingway: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. This powerful story is a marvel of economy. In a mere six words and three...
Related Classification
RELIGION & LIBERTY
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
About
Terms and Conditions Privacy policy Cookie Settings Contact Us
Services
Login register
mreligion RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE RELIGION & LIBERTY
Links
zpostcode Recruit weather mreligion Yellowpages sport constellation shopping name game directory literature Word tour furnish Lottery tftnews lyrics News digital car dir Edu Finance
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved