Debates about gender within and without the Church tend to operate on a hidden fear: If gender is real in some way, then that might lead to an artificially rigid understanding of gender roles—for example, women must stay in the kitchen and men must work outside the home, as if every age were the 1950s, complete with Sunbeam Mixmasters and assembly lines.
But if creation is a gift, including gender, then the question becomes, How do we understand God’s gift of gender, and how do we articulate that gift in a world where even the human, let alone the masculine and feminine, is under attack? Logical arguments are important, but they are not enough and will not make sense outside a coherent image. If someone believes a baby is a parasite, merely feeding off a pregnant woman, it is that image that must be replaced with a truer one, such as a mother carrying the flame of life of a beautiful new person, before any logical argument will even begin to make sense.
True understanding, then, must begin with the imagination. And in a confused time, inundated as we are with images such as the Instagram tradwife or the androgynous “birthing person,” we are in desperate need of better images.
In his new book, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: C.S. Lewis’s Images of Gender, Thales College professor of classical education Joshua Herring argues that Lewis’s theory of the givenness of the masculine and feminine, articulated in his philosophical essays but most importantly brought to life in his Cosmic Trilogy and Narniad, can help Christians respond to gender ideology with a better mythology.
This is an especially important book, for our debates about gender, and pretty much everything else, do not lack for words but rather for imagination. By “imagination” I do not mean flights of fancy but rather how Lewis and Tolkien used the word. To truly understand, we do not merely assent to a proposition; we must be able to image the truth and incarnate it. Imagination gives us the story in which we’re working and living in; reason helps us understand how it all fits together. But the story—the image, the myth—comes first, and last.
Herring argues for the importance of imagination. He first recapitulates Max Weber and Charles Taylor on enchantment before reviewing how the counter-myths found in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler have inspired today’s gender ideology. Much ink is being spilt on re-enchantment nowadays, so it’s helpful that Herring turns to the work of Charles Taylor, as enchantment for Taylor does not mean piety or magical thinking but rather the felt experience that meaning exists outside us. The “disenchanted” modern, on the other hand, thinks meaning begins and ends with the self and that there isn’t reality beyond the physical. C.S. Lewis (and the whole Christian tradition) begs to differ: Meaning does exist beyond the self, but for a self that is under the “spell of worldliness” (as Lewis calls it in his essay “The Weight of Glory”), no argument is going to touch it. While “reason is the organ of truth,” Lewis wrote, “imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”
Herring also notes how C.S. Lewis’s essays, such as The Abolition of Man, both anticipate and respond to today’s anti-human mythology. Lewis answers the need for a better mythology by responding to two interwoven strands of modernity—disenchantment and rejection of the gift of creation—that particularly inform modern gender ideology. Lewis, says Herring, combats both strands through right philosophy, arguing that there are objective moral values in the world despite the modernist belief that it is the self that imposes meaning, and better mythology: better images and stories.
Herring then looks at the influence of Spenser and Milton on Lewis’s images of givenness and gender. Spenser’s multifarious Faerie Queene Herring deems especially influential for Lewis in its pageantry: the tableaux of rich images, from the Garden of Adonis to the female Knight of Chastity Britomart and her marriage to Artegall, the Knight of Justice. Milton is important not only as an inspiration for Lewis’s world-building but also as a counterexample of how not to write of Paradise (e.g., Milton’s Adam and God both talk way too much; Lewis’s Aslan and his Adam figure in his science fiction say less and inspire more awe). Of course, the story of Paradise Lost is also a paradigmatic example of what Herring calls rejection of the gift—that is, rejection of God’s creation and the nature which He has given us.
Having established these key influences on Lewis, Herring then outlines how Lewis’s theory of givenness undergirds his ideas of gender in both his nonfiction and his fiction. A key passage of Perelandra articulates the Cosmic Trilogy’s theory of gender and how it is distinct from “mere” sex. Gender is a principle, a metaphysical principle we might say, while sex is a particular example or physical participation in this greater metaphor. As Lewis’s narrator articulates it: “Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless.”
What on earth does this mean? For Lewis, the masculine and feminine are universals that we see imaged in the natural world as well as in God’s story—for example, the masculine, life-giving sun and the feminine, life-bearing earth, as well as the image of Christ the Bridegroom and Lover pursuing His Bride the Church. Sex (i.e., male and female) is “a particular expression” of these principles, such that a husband and a wife are an image of Christ and the Church, as St. Paul says.
So the masculine is distinct from a particular male person. But what is masculinity and femininity, according to Lewis? Herring gives us these images: The masculine is what is “primarily oriented outwards, with a rigid strength and watching eye seeking to defend the home,” while “the feminine is primarily oriented inwards, and is characterized by fluidity and fostering life, symbolized through the creation of a home.” An example of failed masculinity is the unscrupulous magician Uncle Andrew, who manipulates instead of protecting others, and for failed femininity there is the White Witch Jadis, who brings death rather than life.
For Lewis, then, men and women can acquire each other’s traits without losing their essential gender. For example, Lucy Pevensie can be an archer, but there’s no question of her femininity. There’s many a Christian woman who has read Father Christmas saying that “battles are ugly when women fight” and taken offense, wishing that Lucy would have stood up for herself, with a toss of her golden hair perhaps, and said, “I can fight as well as the men!”
This is a wonderful example of missing the point, or more importantly, says Herring, misreading the image. Because women are ordered toward creating life, for a woman (let alone a girl) to be fighting would indeed be ugly. On the other hand, men are ordered toward directly fighting for life and protecting others through their bodies, rather than, say, carrying life within them. It would be like sending nurses, who ought to be tending to children, the sick and elderly, and the wounded, into battle out of some disordered desire for equality. In another image, it would be like sending water to do a stone’s work.
Of course, Father Christmas is responding to Lucy’s own missing of the point, when she says, “I think I could be brave enough.” And this is key, for courage is not a “masculine” virtue but a human one. Lucy and her brothers and sister are all supposed to be courageous. But how they will show that courage will be different depending on the task, but their displays of courage will be no less physically and emotionally demanding.
Lucy will, of course, be known as Lucy the Valiant and will take part in a battle in a later book, The Horse and His Boy. Nevertheless, as an accomplished archer, Lucy keeps her distance and is never engaged in hand-to-hand combat.
The dance is perhaps Lewis’s most powerful image. Men and women “enter the dance of complementarity” and “acquire the traits of the other in concert with their own essence.” The “dance of complementarity” is best illustrated, perhaps, by the band at St. Anne’s and the four Pevensie kings and queens but also by the Great Dance in Perelandra.
Gendered reality points to how all creation is in an intricate dance and a symphony to the glory of its Creator. And to dance highlights the ways we human beings need not only God but each other. But we also need the image of masculine and feminine to understand how the Church itself lives together—in an intricate dance—and how we understand God. God is both King and the tenderest nurturer, but in relation to us He is a masculine lover and lord, and we—men and women—are feminine. “Men are men, but Man is a woman,” says G.K. Chesterton’s narrator in The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Lucy Pevensie is Marian in this sense, since time and again she is the one most open to Aslan’s voice, who follows him even when no one else does. And every human being—man, boy, or otherwise—ought to be a Lucy and, as the Blessed Virgin Mary also instructs, do whatever Christ tells us.
This book is not so much for people not already convinced that gender exists in some real way but rather for those who need more imaginative development of that conviction. Herring intentionally is not writing for those in the “egalitarian” camp of Christian gender wars, hence some statements about hierarchy and about how good leaders help subjects be their best selves are mentioned but underdeveloped. But his book nevertheless is a winsome introduction for those Christians who appreciate C.S. Lewis and who grant that gender is real but struggle to envision a healthy masculinity and femininity.
Herring is to be commended for compiling this pageantry of images from Lewis’s works that bring to life the complex ways in which masculine and feminine principles can play out in practice—and most importantly, what these principles reveal about God and our relationship to Him.
