The Art of Manliness - C.S. Lewis on Building Men With Chests

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast now like plato

00:00:11.440 cs lewis believed the human soul was made up of three parts the head which is the rational

00:00:16.560 reason driven part of you the belly which is your appetites and base instincts and the chest

00:00:21.200 the seat of virtue seeking sentiments and well-tuned emotions in order for your head to

00:00:25.760 make your decisions particularly the decision to live a virtuous life rather than your decision

00:00:29.980 is being driven by your belly the head needs the aid of the chest of right feeling a few months ago

00:00:35.700 we had michael ward on the show to talk about why cs lewis felt that modern life was making men

00:00:40.280 without chest today i talked to a guest who can shed some light on what lewis thought was needed

00:00:44.420 to build that chest back up his name is lewis marcos he's a professor of english as well as the

00:00:49.540 lecture of the great courses course the life and writings of cs lewis at the start of our conversation

00:00:54.160 lube gives us some background on lewis's life including his conversion to christianity and

00:00:58.300 how the nature of that conversion influences thinking on how to pursue virtue more broadly

00:01:02.420 we then talk about lewis's philosophical argument for there being a universal moral order and why the

00:01:07.360 chest is so vital for staying grounded in it we spend the rest of our discussion unpacking the three

00:01:12.020 ways lewis believed the chest could be educated reading stories and myths rejecting chronological

00:01:17.540 snobbery to learn from the past and developing friendships that inspire excellence after the

00:01:22.320 show is over check out our show notes at awim.is slash educating the chest

00:01:26.260 all right lou marcos welcome to the show hey thanks for having me on so you are an expert on the life

00:01:46.940 in works of cs lewis you've written several books about his his works you're a professor of english

00:01:52.460 where you teach a lot about cs lewis and tolkien as well you did a great courses lecture about cs lewis

00:01:58.400 that's how i discovered you i'm curious like what drew you to spending your academic career studying

00:02:02.620 the works of cs lewis okay now i gotta tell you brett i'm 57 years old so when i was in you know

00:02:08.680 graduate and undergraduate school there were no classes on lewis or tolkien i mean nobody did that

00:02:13.140 that was just a lifelong love that i had interestingly i grew up and came to know christ in

00:02:18.480 the greek orthodox church but in high school our priest who used the phrase born again christian

00:02:24.080 of himself this is back in the 70s and 80s he actually gave us when we graduated from one level

00:02:30.140 of sunday school to the next a copy of screw tape letters and a copy of mere christianity and so it was

00:02:35.520 always something i was interested in it's something i always read on my own but again nobody offered classes

00:02:41.780 and then the teaching company the great courses brought me out to do a series on literary criticism

00:02:47.700 what what what was called plato to postmodernism and they really liked it and they said we want

00:02:53.820 you to do another series what can you do and i said well what about homer that's already been done

00:02:58.540 what about greek tragedy already been done what about roman history already everything was done and

00:03:02.760 they said well i always like cs lewis and they said do it so i went home and spent an entire year

00:03:09.620 rereading every single thing by cs lewis taking notes all over the place reading secondary so just

00:03:15.720 kind of made myself an expert and then i did the series and it did so well that it led to a cover

00:03:22.100 article in christianity today and that led to my first book lewis agonistis and so i'm just

00:03:27.560 constantly reading and writing book reviews of everything on cs lewis so and i love being a lewis scholar

00:03:33.460 because it means i speak for every denomination out there every kind of group for classical christian

00:03:38.400 schools uh and even though i now am a baptist i would call myself an evangelical i really think

00:03:43.860 of myself as a mere christian uh in in the sort of tradition of cs lewis and you know brett most most

00:03:49.980 strong believers nowadays will tell you that cs lewis is one of their role models but i'm a lucky guy i

00:03:56.340 get to have him as a double role model because i'm an english professor and so he's been my role model

00:04:01.300 as an english professor as well as a christian and an apologist and a lover of literature and so

00:04:07.080 he's influenced me in so many different ways and i've been able to speak in oxford several times

00:04:12.020 publish books and whatnot and it's just the riches of lewis are inexhaustible tomorrow i'm driving up

00:04:19.460 to shreveport louisiana to do an entire weekend on cs lewis for an episcopal church because there's so

00:04:25.680 much richness in here and lewis is not only a great model as a writer but as a person as well and maybe

00:04:32.660 we'll talk about that so i kind of came to it from a different direction but it's been something

00:04:37.120 that's drawn together so much of my faith and my um career and all the things that i do so you

00:04:45.060 mentioned when you were in college there weren't any classes about cs lewis or tolkien has that

00:04:50.160 changed are there now are they taken are they taken seriously now oh yeah people now can get you know

00:04:55.260 phds writing a thesis on cs lewis i hear from a lot of those people all the time okay you know lewis

00:05:01.000 answered every single letter that he was sent and the collected letters of cs lewis is 3500 pages of

00:05:06.800 small print i'm not a snail mail guy but everybody that emails me gets an email back and i do a lot

00:05:12.700 of correspondence and i hear from a lot of people that are taking classes and writing a thesis and

00:05:18.200 the books that are coming out it's just wonderful it's just an embarrassment of riches as they say

00:05:23.320 and of course i myself teach a class in narnia i teach a class in the lord of the rings and i also

00:05:28.580 teach a class on lewis's apologetics we look at his uh you know non-fiction and we study that as well

00:05:34.240 and again there's so much there that we need to hear in our day and age and of course you know a

00:05:41.380 lot of people still you know the the scholars look down on lewis but i'll tell you this brett i'm

00:05:46.360 somebody who teaches the great books from the greeks to today and the more you study the tradition

00:05:52.340 the more you know your homer and virgil and dante and milton and greek tragedy and shakespearean

00:05:57.100 the more you know philosophy the more you will respect cs lewis because he carries the entire

00:06:04.480 judeo-christian greco-roman legacy in his bones and so the more i learn the more i respect lewis and

00:06:12.780 see how much he has synthesized and brought together for us so let's talk about lewis's early life and

00:06:19.280 how it influenced or may have influenced his later thought and work he was born in ireland a lot of

00:06:23.700 people don't know that he was irish in 1898 when he was about nine years old his mother died did this

00:06:30.940 early death of his mother shape lewis's thinking and work later on in his life it was devastating for

00:06:36.860 him and like i said almost everybody takes for granted lewis is you know british or english but he

00:06:40.700 is irish he grew up in belfast now today we call that northern ireland because it's two places right

00:06:46.300 but back then it was still one place but there was lots of civil war going on and the amazing

00:06:52.140 thing about lewis that i respect so much is even though he grew up in the church of england was a

00:06:56.140 protestant you never see any sort of anti-catholicism in his work and that would be easy because he saw

00:07:02.480 the struggles and the fights between protestant and catholic in ireland but he stayed away from that

00:07:07.220 but it's it's important that he grew up in ireland because i think it it increased his imagination

00:07:13.280 he did have a irish nanny who told him stories right his parents were big readers and there were

00:07:20.020 books everywhere and he and his brother warren he was three years older were allowed to read anything

00:07:24.780 they created fantasy worlds but when his mother died he was nine just almost 10 years old it devastated

00:07:30.780 him he was always closer to his mother than his father and you know he he prayed i mean he grew up he

00:07:36.400 was you know in in the anglican church but when his mother died and he prayed and prayed and nobody

00:07:41.880 seemed to hear and then his father sent him off to boarding schools that he absolutely hated one of

00:07:47.360 them was run by a man who later was basically declared insane and incarcerated and all of these

00:07:53.020 things slowly moved lewis away from his early faith until he rejected it altogether and became an atheist

00:08:00.300 and wanted nothing to do with it but the seeds had been planted and they would bear fruit later on in his

00:08:07.700 life okay so he embraced atheism early on in his life and it was basically that experience of losing

00:08:13.000 his mother and just having just experiencing a hard life and not feeling any divinity there also

00:08:19.080 what a lot of people don't know about lewis along with jr tolkien is they both fought in world war one

00:08:24.280 which was a war that made a lot of people jaded and cynical about life how did that experience of

00:08:31.760 fighting in world war one shape lewis's worldview it really did now by the time he went there he was

00:08:37.460 already an atheist and he said with pride even when the fighting was the worst i never deigned to pray

00:08:45.160 by which he was saying there can be atheists in foxholes is what he's sort of saying but there is

00:08:50.500 one thing he did like from the war he didn't like the waste of and all that sort of stuff but it did

00:08:54.960 increase his sense of camaraderie of the importance of male friendship and hopefully we'll talk about this

00:09:00.800 it showed him this idea of sort of we few we happy few against the world now like a lot of people

00:09:09.320 that fought world war one he didn't really talk about it much afterwards but it certainly shaped

00:09:14.640 him he saw the evil that happens how we can lose any sense of a common sense of decency and morality

00:09:23.100 tolkien was the one who fought at the famous battle of the somme lewis was an heiress france which

00:09:28.180 wasn't quite as bloody but still was very bloody lewis probably would have died in the war if he

00:09:33.060 had not been injured by what we call friendly fire and he actually carried shrapnel in his bones from

00:09:38.400 the rest something that people don't know about lewis as an irish citizen lewis could have gotten out of

00:09:43.720 the draft and he was not a manly person in the sense of a soldier and whatnot he was very fumbly

00:09:48.820 he wasn't very good at sports but he felt that it was his duty to be a part of this and so he could

00:09:54.160 have gotten out of it but he went but it's only because he fought in world war one that he got

00:10:00.000 into oxford lewis was absolutely brilliant and anything having to do with literature or philosophy

00:10:05.600 or history but he was terrible at math and terrible with numbers and he never would have passed the sort

00:10:11.940 of british version of the sat but because he was a veteran when he came back they waived the math test

00:10:19.060 and he got into oxford and proved to be one of their best students of all time one what they call

00:10:23.900 a triple first which is very rare and so world war one actually helped to secure him a place in oxford

00:10:31.020 where he went on to learn the things he did and to influence the world what did he study at oxford

00:10:36.420 well what you study this is sort of program that you do there and basically it focuses first on

00:10:43.920 languages so it's very heavily based not only on greco-roman literature but greek and latin and

00:10:50.780 learning you learn old english you learn middle english of course you learn french and whatnot as

00:10:56.160 well but he studied all the ancients he studied ancient and up to modern philosophy and he also

00:11:03.060 studied the literature from chaucer until about the romantics and victorians so he he was well versed in

00:11:09.760 literature and language and philosophy and he almost might have become a philosophy professor

00:11:16.080 but there was a problem with the job and he went back and did another one in literature and thank god

00:11:21.120 he did that because lewis is a literary writer who is sort of informed by philosophy and that's one of

00:11:29.880 the ones things that makes him so great if he had been a philosophy writer informed by literature i don't

00:11:35.520 think he would have had the impact that he had literature really was his first love and he saw

00:11:41.260 the world through that lens but he was grounded enough in philosophy that he could write a book

00:11:47.300 like the abolition of man which is a great philosophical work as well as literary and apologetic when he was

00:11:53.200 at oxford this is when he met tolkien yes yeah when he was there now he had you know he had had a

00:11:58.720 private tutor before a man named kirk patrick he was nicknamed the great knock because he was an

00:12:04.860 atheist and he was what's what's called an empiricist if i can't see it smell it taste it touch it here it

00:12:10.040 doesn't exist all i want is facts all i want is logic he's sort of a modern day david hume now he was

00:12:16.040 an atheist and lewis was an atheist and this guy kirk patrick trained him not only in languages but in

00:12:21.540 logic and he made lewis's mind absolutely systematic and logical but here's the wonderful story brett

00:12:27.980 when later on lewis became a believer he did not throw away what the atheist kirk patrick had taught

00:12:35.440 him instead he took all of that logic and reason and rhetoric and he baptized it and it's one of the

00:12:43.100 reasons why he is such a great apologist and again he was this great person that he was in

00:12:49.340 and teaching at oxford and he met tolkien because he'd been brought over to oxford and both of them

00:12:55.040 were very very committed not only to literature but to language i mean like literally learning greek

00:13:00.380 and latin and old english and all of these things very grounded in that more so than americans are

00:13:04.940 today and they found that even though at this point lewis was still an atheist tolkien was a very

00:13:10.420 committed catholic but they shared a great love for norse literature for the sagas for the heroes

00:13:17.600 all of ragnarok all of that stuff he loved it and tolkien was a great starter of groups he'd been

00:13:25.340 part of a group called the tcbs he always wanted groups of male friends that got together and fought

00:13:30.980 and tried to to bring society up to focus on the good the true and the beautiful and when he met lewis

00:13:37.360 tolkien had already started a club called the cold biters or the cold batars and it was called that

00:13:44.780 because the vikings would sit so close to the fire when they told stories it would be like they were

00:13:49.640 biting the coals in the fire anyway the the role or the reason for being of the cold biters or cold

00:13:55.640 batars was to get together and read all the norse sagas in the original old norse and finally they

00:14:04.500 disbanded the group because they read through all of them but they got together lewis knew a lot of

00:14:09.060 those languages and again there was a sort of love of manly courage of duty of responsibility all of

00:14:17.140 this sort of stuff but with a flair for the literary so these are like whatever literary soldiers if you

00:14:23.980 will and that cemented their friendship but again lewis was still not a believer now slowly through the

00:14:31.360 intervention of a man named owen barfield lewis slowly became a theist a believer in god but he did

00:14:37.980 not yet believe jesus was god what was stopping him well lewis like myself was a lover of mythology

00:14:44.440 i just wrote a book on mythology a lover of all that and he was a big fan of a book called the golden

00:14:49.920 bow by sir james frazier frazier was the joseph campbell of his day a comparative mythologist a

00:14:57.720 comparative anthropologist who would look at all the different stories of all the different tribal

00:15:02.960 groups and try to make comparisons between them and frazier came up with a character who would

00:15:10.100 eventually be known as the corn king and it turns out that throughout sort of ancient cultures and

00:15:15.840 ancient religion there's a certain archetypal character who keeps popping up a sort of son of

00:15:21.860 the god who comes down to earth and you know does these great things and is usually killed violently

00:15:28.740 but returns seasonally now it's not exactly the same thing as the death and resurrection

00:15:33.820 it's more of a seasonal myth he's called the corn king because when a british person says corn he means

00:15:41.580 wheat right because there was no corn corn came from here from the modern the new world but the corn king

00:15:47.620 is a sort of mytho legendary figure whose constant cycle of life and death and rebirth gives fruition

00:15:56.320 to the earth makes the corn grow now if you are a greek you call your corn king adonis or bacchus

00:16:05.160 if you're egyptian you call him osiris if you're babylonian you call him camus that name appears in the bible

00:16:12.880 if you are persian you call him mithras if you are a norseman you call him balder all of these stories

00:16:19.820 now lewis just took for granted that jesus was just the corn king version of the myth that the hebrews

00:16:28.980 had and then one day when lewis was 32 years old right in the middle of his life he had a long night

00:16:35.560 stroll with tolkien another man too named hugo dyson and they were walking along addison's walk if you

00:16:42.500 ever go to oxford visit maudlin college and walk around this beautiful tree-lined walk called addison's

00:16:49.540 walk and as they walked around and around late into the night they were discussing this very issue

00:16:55.140 and you know tolkien is saying jack that was lewis's nickname why is it that you love these stories but

00:17:01.700 when it comes to jesus then you lose interest and well it's just a myth what do i care about some rabbi

00:17:07.920 he died 200 years 2000 years ago and then tolkien said the words that changed lewis's life and i would

00:17:14.160 argue changed the 20th century he said jack did you ever wonder maybe the reason that jesus sounds like

00:17:22.020 a myth is that he was the myth that became fact the myth that became true and that changed lewis's life

00:17:31.780 about a week later lewis embraced jesus as lord and savior because he realized that wait a minute

00:17:39.020 how is it possible that this same myth this same yearning the same desire pops up all over the world

00:17:45.440 it only makes sense that the creator who created all of us put that desire in all of us and if that's

00:17:52.660 true doesn't it make sense that when that god enacts historically his salvation story that he will

00:18:01.480 do it in a way that lines up with the pagan yearning because brett all christians understand

00:18:08.920 that jesus fulfilled the old testament law and prophets but he was more than the jewish messiah

00:18:15.840 he is the savior of the world and so i believe as did lewis and many others that jesus not only

00:18:23.480 fulfilled the law and prophets of the old testament he fulfilled the highest yearnings of the pagans

00:18:31.220 and it's that that beautiful literary moment that not only brought lewis back to faith i mean you

00:18:37.140 know the young faith but really made him a christian it also allowed him to reaccess his love of myth and

00:18:43.280 archetype and legend because you see when he was an atheist he was starting to adopt this modernist view

00:18:48.880 of we got to throw out the middle ages we have to throw out all these myths and legends and fairy

00:18:53.780 tales and be you know rational and logical and so i love this story brett as an english professor

00:19:00.320 because sadly there have been a lot of christians in the 20th century who when they became believers

00:19:05.920 felt they had to throw out all of that magic and fantasy and harry potter stuff not lewis it was his

00:19:13.120 christian faith that allowed him to reaccess his wonder and imagination and love of virtue we're going to

00:19:22.740 take a quick break for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show yeah i want to dig into

00:19:30.200 this idea a little bit more because this idea of embracing myth and story it was important to lewis

00:19:36.400 not only in the christian context but in the more universal context of seeking the virtuous path in

00:19:42.500 general which is lewis called this virtuous path he called it the dow or the tau and we had your

00:19:49.480 colleague michael ward on the podcast a few months ago great to talk about the book where lewis delves

00:19:54.760 into the dow it's called the abolition of man this is a philosophical work it's not fiction it's not

00:20:01.380 apologetics and in the book he's making this universal philosophical case that there's a universal moral

00:20:08.020 order that he calls the dow and he says if we start to step outside this moral order you start to become

00:20:15.800 less human hence the title of the book it's you know the abolition of man right humanity gets

00:20:20.080 abolished does this does this theme of stepping out of the moral order making us less human does this

00:20:27.080 pop up in lewis's stories and fiction it really does but it's in the abolition of man but it's all

00:20:33.020 these different places see lewis understood that there is a universal law code we may want to deny it

00:20:40.220 but we know that what he called the tau the universal moral ethical cross-cultural code it is

00:20:46.760 there and it's written in our conscience and you know what you know again in some ways europe was

00:20:52.760 even more secular liberal in the center in the middle of the 20th century and yet even though so

00:20:58.440 many of them were relativists we still had this thing called the nuremberg trials and that's when

00:21:04.300 they put the nazi war criminals on trial now brett think about this the only way you can have something

00:21:10.400 like the nuremberg trials is if you are accepting whether you realize it or not number one that there

00:21:16.620 is a real good and evil out there that's not just tied to one culture or another that there is a real

00:21:24.700 ethical code of right and wrong number one that you must believe that the nazis knew that code and still

00:21:32.640 broke it anyway now if you could convince me that the nazi criminals did not know they were doing

00:21:39.420 wrong they would not put them in the prison they would have put them in an asylum right you understand

00:21:44.820 they would have been innocent by reason of insanity and they would have been institutionalized it would

00:21:48.900 have been left free right but we need to understand that people know the tau exists here is my simple

00:21:54.620 definition of the tau the tau is the way you expect other people to treat you we all know that it exists

00:22:02.340 but we try to push it away and not listen to it here's the problem as lewis explains it and he's

00:22:08.640 borrowing from plato plato talks about there's three parts to our soul and he links it to our body there is

00:22:15.280 the head there is the chest and there is the belly the head represents rational man the side of reason the

00:22:24.120 side that wants to do what is right the belly is the visceral appetitive side the one the side that says

00:22:31.500 i want i want i want what freud would call the id now in a in a in a direct fight between the head

00:22:39.820 and the belly the belly is going to win every time it will overwhelm the head our lower passions and

00:22:46.920 instincts will overwhelm the head that's why we need the chest for the chest that's where the

00:22:54.340 how is that's where our stories of heroism reside that is the place of virtue the place of manliness

00:23:03.660 and courage if you will and the head can only defeat the belly if the chest comes to the side

00:23:11.100 of the head and fights alongside it right look if i am a soldier and i am at my post and the enemy is

00:23:19.800 coming at me pure logic is not going to keep me at my post the head alone is not going to do it i can

00:23:26.240 run through categorical imperative it's not going to work you know what's going to keep me there it's

00:23:31.480 the chest it is the virtuous action it is the patriotism it is the part that makes us human that

00:23:38.900 is what is going to keep us there and the way we used to build the chest in children was by telling

00:23:44.620 them stories for us stories of abraham lincoln and george washington for the romans the great roman

00:23:50.380 republican heroes like cincinnatus and these other people that fought and died and laid down that gave

00:23:56.640 you know the last bit of honor right for themselves laid it down and you know lewis tries to give us

00:24:03.560 characters in places like narnia who need to learn the importance of courage and fight and by the way

00:24:10.400 while i'm talking i love that i'm talking from the art of manliness you guys are doing a great job

00:24:14.100 uh and my son and his friends listen to your podcast all the time and they're so excited about

00:24:19.140 it they've started their own group called the new knighthood where they get together and call each

00:24:25.100 other to virtuous action so i'll just shout out my son his name is alex and his friends uh garner and

00:24:30.420 his friend josiah and we need this because if we give up on the chest if we just become passive people

00:24:39.160 we are our head is going to be overwhelmed by our belly by our base instincts and lewis teaches us

00:24:47.940 what it means to be a hero when we read especially the chronicles of narnia and see these child heroes

00:24:56.740 i mean it's amazing there's there's one called the magician's nephew where the hero diggory has a

00:25:03.720 mother back home in london who's dying of cancer and diggory basically is the nine-year-old c.s lewis

00:25:09.660 whose mother's dying of cancer and when he comes to narnia he makes a big mistake and he brings evil

00:25:15.560 into narnia and aslan the line gives him a chance to make up for that mistake and he sends him on an

00:25:21.280 incredible quest like for the holy grail you're going to go to this hidden garden and you're going

00:25:25.840 to pluck me an apple and bring it back and we will use this to heal the wounds well he gets there and

00:25:33.220 he plucks an apple and he puts it in his pocket when all of a sudden he meets the character who

00:25:38.240 will become the white witch and she tells him this apple you've plucked is the apple of youth i've eaten

00:25:44.400 it and now i know i will never die or grow old diggory use that apple eat it and you will become like me

00:25:52.400 powerful and we will rule this land but diggory says no i'd rather live a normal life and die and

00:25:58.920 go to heaven he resists that temptation but then the witch says okay if you won't use the apple yourself

00:26:05.640 take it home with you to london and give it to your mother and she will be well again now i'd be hard

00:26:13.240 pressed to read an adult novel where an adult has to make that difficult decision but diggory knows it

00:26:20.300 would be wrong he knows his mother would tell him it's wrong to steal and do that he must do the

00:26:26.800 duty that has been given him and although it pains him he takes the apple back to aslan who uses it to

00:26:33.740 plant a tree of protection that protects narnia for hundreds of hundreds of years and then from the

00:26:41.740 tree aslan plucks an apple gives it to diggory and says bring it home it will not give your mother

00:26:49.040 eternal life but it will heal we need heroes like that who will do what is right not the ends

00:26:57.500 justify the means but will have courage and virtue instilled in them so yeah i mean i think a lot of

00:27:05.620 lewis's fiction was geared towards educating that chest like helping people yeah develop a chest you

00:27:12.300 know have a good response like have the appropriate response when they experience the good the true the

00:27:16.420 beautiful but as you said he chose to do this he could have done just wrote these essays you know

00:27:22.020 non-fiction essays to persuade philosophical essays but instead of doing that he chose you know children

00:27:27.440 stories like narnia sci-fi stories in a space trilogy he embraced nordic i mean so why go that route

00:27:34.440 instead of just being explicit and saying here's what you're supposed to do and sort of fill some sort

00:27:39.280 philosophical treatise because throughout history and including the bible stories have been used to

00:27:48.680 instill virtues we all love story the meta narratives they call the great story we have you know creation

00:27:54.640 fall redemption reconciliation and glorification and lewis understood that when you use a story

00:28:02.240 you are speaking to the whole man you need the whole person rational and emotional logical and intuitive

00:28:12.460 we we i mean jesus taught by telling stories what we call the parables because we identify with the

00:28:20.720 story and we live in the story and it becomes a life lesson that is incarnated in us you know what a lot

00:28:29.520 of homeschoolers use a book called the book of virtues by william bennett used to be the the head of the

00:28:35.580 secretary of education and that was a great book the book of virtues but the funny thing is if bennett

00:28:40.900 had written that book a hundred years ago people would have been like duh we know but no by the time we

00:28:46.560 get to bill bennett our civilization has forgotten that you build up a chest by telling stories and so he

00:28:53.460 wrote that book and he took the virtues like courage and he tells stories some from greek and roman

00:28:58.940 mythology some from the old and new testament some from ancient history rome some from american history

00:29:03.840 some from legends and because it's through the stories we not only learn how to embrace virtue but

00:29:11.740 it also teaches us how to avoid vice brett the best way to teach your children the dangers of lying you can

00:29:20.420 give them a philosophical treatise on lying or you can tell them the story of the boy who cried wolf

00:29:27.460 i told my son that story many times and i remember that story being told to me and that story has taught

00:29:34.760 me the danger of lying more than anything else because it's in a story with real characters it's

00:29:41.420 not just an esoteric abstract thing lewis is making it real and making it concrete and something people

00:29:52.660 don't often don't appreciate about lewis and tolkien is that these guys they sort of rehabilitated

00:29:58.480 children's literature before that time children's literature was looked down upon as sort of lowbrow

00:30:03.580 you know dick and jane type stuff right these two made it into a legitimate literary genre they did and

00:30:10.940 it's very important now it's important to realize that when they were born if you go back to you know

00:30:14.740 1890s back then was a golden age of children's literature people did take it serious back then that's the age of

00:30:22.460 roger kipling's the the the jungle book it's the time of beatrix potter it's the time of george

00:30:28.660 mcdonald's beautiful stories it's the time of alice in wonderland it's the time of wind in the willows

00:30:33.900 i mean this was a golden age but once you get to world war one and you kind of mentioned this before

00:30:40.180 but people start becoming jaded and cynical no no no all of that fantasy stuff that's for kids

00:30:47.400 and tolkien had this wonderful line he said that old genres are like old furniture when they go out

00:30:55.460 of style they put them in the nursery and this is what happened suddenly study you know i mean look

00:31:01.440 some of the some of the great literary masterpieces from dante's divine comedy to the fairy queen by edmund

00:31:07.180 spencer to gulliver's travels i mean they're all sort of fantasy and if you want to call it sci-fi

00:31:13.000 but they're also for adults as well as for children a tolkien and lewis said a book only worth reading by

00:31:18.920 a child is probably not worth reading at all but people gave up that's cynical we need to be serious

00:31:24.460 none of this silly play acting lewis and tolkien one day were taking one of their famous walks

00:31:30.660 and they were complaining that nobody was writing the kind of books they like to read that crossed over

00:31:37.660 between adult and child and fancy and then lewis looked and said you know what tallers that was

00:31:42.620 the nickname you know what tallers it looks like we're going to have to write the kinds of books

00:31:47.680 we want to read so they did it okay so storytelling is a for lewis is an important part of educating the

00:31:55.220 chest another an important part of educating the chest is looking to the past and learning how to

00:32:01.280 appreciate it yes and people often forget that besides being a fiction writer and a christian

00:32:06.200 apologist lewis was one of the foremost experts on medieval history how did lewis's deep understanding

00:32:12.660 of particularly medieval history contribute to his idea of educating the chest

00:32:17.280 he liked to call himself a dinosaur an old european who still loved and honored those values again those

00:32:28.940 values of courage and now lewis admits he says you know there are some things that we do better than

00:32:35.400 but if we stop reading the past if we stop learning from the middle ages and even the renaissance and

00:32:43.300 whatnot then we're putting ourselves in a little box but if we can allow the the clean air the breeze

00:32:50.340 the sea breeze he called it that's blowing through all the centuries to learn us then we will allow

00:32:57.140 the middle medieval people to remind us of what we forgot so yes in some ways we're more tolerant than

00:33:05.040 the old time but they were far more courageous they were far more chaste they were they understood duty

00:33:11.340 so yeah there's some good things that we do today but we have we have started to sort of demonize the

00:33:17.480 past and we refuse to learn from them in any way we have what lewis called chronological snobbery this idea

00:33:25.740 that if it's newer it must be better if we don't believe it anymore it must have been disproved and

00:33:31.220 lewis wanted to go back and revive crazy enough chivalry lewis said there was something beautiful

00:33:37.540 about the knight in arms the person who lived by a higher code and lived by a higher standard and tried

00:33:46.720 to be both brave and virtuous and chaste and he saw something of real value from the time when people

00:33:56.140 sort of understood who they were and took glory in that and took glory in the simple things in life

00:34:04.020 when money was not the be-all and end-all of life when they respected traditions when they celebrated

00:34:11.560 the sort of cycles of life this is something we miss at least the catholics and the orthodox as well

00:34:17.940 have you know a sacred year a sacred calendar with you know saint's days and everything but

00:34:23.600 that's even being lost but in the middle ages they had an understanding of the sacred year of the feast

00:34:29.720 and of the fast uh they understood that that time was sacred and you know there was a spec you know it

00:34:36.200 wasn't that long ago that there were certain foods and fruits and vegetables that you could only get

00:34:41.140 at a certain time of year now we can get anything we want anytime we want and we've lost a sense of

00:34:46.660 the specialness and holiness of the seasonal cycle and that's something lewis learned from the medievals

00:34:54.120 as well so lewis found much to emya and one more thing i'll add too in the middle ages they read their

00:35:01.540 own great books going back to the greeks and romans but they read them in order to learn from them

00:35:08.060 in our modern secular universities even some of the christian ones they read ancient books so they

00:35:13.920 can feel superior to them and think how much more enlightened we are no no back then when they read

00:35:20.300 dante or they read virgil or they read homer or they read the bible they were at the feet of it and

00:35:27.260 they tried to learn from it how to be a better person so all of these things lewis kind of learned from

00:35:36.060 the middle ages and wanted to bring into the modern university well and how does he suggest

00:35:42.460 overcoming that chronological snobbery because as you said you know lewis would admit yes there's

00:35:46.320 some things we made progress in so how do you overcome the tendency well we're we're better in

00:35:52.040 this way but still try to learn from the past first of all it takes humility and another way to do it

00:36:00.040 this is how lewis puts it and i love that he says rather than study the medieval knight from some

00:36:08.460 sociological or anthropological perspective won't you try putting on his helmet and look at the world

00:36:16.100 through his visor in other words let's extend our sympathetic imagination and try to see the world

00:36:23.560 from their point of view and we have really lost that today people all they want to do is judge the

00:36:29.680 past and cancel culture and all of that sort of stuff and they refuse to extend any kind of humility

00:36:36.640 or attempt to again see it from their point of view and understand it so this is why we need to

00:36:43.800 read what they wrote and study and not just read about them but go back and read the primary material now

00:36:53.420 most of us don't know latin or greek anymore you can at least get a good english translation

00:36:57.900 and read it okay lewis would have preferred the original language it's okay but that's okay let's

00:37:02.900 read it and discuss and be willing to maybe even change our belief and our activity because of a great

00:37:11.460 book that we've read because screw tape the devil says the what they've done in modern modern world

00:37:17.280 is instilled the historical point of view and what the historical point of view is is when you read

00:37:22.940 any ancient book you ask all sorts of questions about it but you never ask is what the ancient

00:37:29.380 author wrote true so besides looking to the past besides storytelling another way lewis thought you

00:37:36.260 could educate the chest was friendship what role does friendship play in that lewis and tolkien were

00:37:42.540 what i call apologists for friendship lewis wrote a famous book called the four loves and the four loves

00:37:49.160 are eros erotic love philia friendship store gay affection and then agape or caritas you know god's

00:37:55.600 and lewis made a point in that book and tolkien would agree with this that nowadays people talk a

00:38:01.680 lot about store gay or affection because we're all romantics and we love that and a lot of people talk

00:38:07.480 about eros or erotic love because we're all freudians right and we're all into instinct and we're all into

00:38:13.620 you know sentimentality but friendship has been left out and friendship was extremely important

00:38:20.160 to the medieval and ancient people do you know that in aristotle's book nicomachean ethics

00:38:26.700 he devotes two whole chapters to friendship that's more than all the other four classical virtues put

00:38:34.080 together and lewis explained that the ancients and also the medievals they sought friendship as the

00:38:41.620 highest thing it made us like the angels right because eros and store gay affection those are

00:38:48.120 things that that were kind of controlled by our instincts even the animals have that but only human

00:38:53.800 beings have friendship it's something that raises us above the animals makes us almost like that and

00:39:00.580 lewis and tolkien were all they were part of a group called the inklings and they got together and

00:39:05.980 okay the inklings were all christians but it wasn't a bible study it was a literary group where they got

00:39:12.680 together and read out loud the works they were writing things like the space trilogy or or or or the lord

00:39:18.980 the rings and a lot of them like lewis and tolkien were writing genres that were looked down on and so by

00:39:24.960 getting together and reading they were encouraging each other now that doesn't mean they were a mutual

00:39:30.980 congratulations society they were tough critics on each other but that's because they wanted them

00:39:36.160 to to be better and that friendship gave them the courage to stick out in an age that would beat down

00:39:45.340 the things that they believed in so we need friendship we need like my son alex the new knighthood we need

00:39:51.140 groups that will bond together well this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more

00:39:56.420 about your work well the best thing is go to amazon.com and type in my name lewis marcos l-o-u-i-s-m-a-r-k-o-s

00:40:04.520 it's a greek name and go to my amazon author page i've got 22 books on the amazon author page

00:40:09.120 some of the ones but what we're talking about today people will enjoy lewis agonistes how c.s lewis can

00:40:14.620 teach us to wrestle with the modern and postmodern world one that i really enjoy is called on the

00:40:19.200 shoulders of hobbits the road to virtue with tolkien and lewis one of my newest ones is called the myth

00:40:24.820 made fact reading greek and roman mythology through christian eyes but i got a lot of stuff

00:40:29.220 about lewis and tolkien a lot of stuff about literary criticism and literary theory but it's

00:40:33.220 all undergirded by this desire to seek after virtue also if you go to youtube and type in lewis

00:40:40.160 marcos i've got a youtube channel i've got a lot of free videos that i put up there if you want to

00:40:44.620 look for them and uh again we need to we need to take back the culture we need to take back

00:40:53.460 our friendships we need to learn how to be good friends we need to learn what it means to be

00:41:00.140 courageous and we need to not focus everything on presidential politics we need to make changes

00:41:07.940 in our local community and we start by building fellowships that will help be salt and light in

00:41:15.540 the world all right well lou marcos thanks for your time it's been a pleasure thanks so much had a great

00:41:20.180 time my guest today was lewis marcos he's the author of several books on the life and works of c.s lewis

00:41:25.960 he's also the lecturer of the great courses course the life and writings of c.s lewis check that out

00:41:30.580 also check out our show notes at aom.is educating the chest we find links to resources we delve deeper

00:41:35.620 into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out

00:41:46.600 our website at art of manliness.com where you find our podcast archives well as thousands of articles

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00:42:15.760 continues the board until next time this is brett mckay remind you not to listen to the aom podcast

00:42:19.160 but put what you've heard into action

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

C.S. Lewis on Building Men With Chests

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