The Best Defense Is a Good Offense: C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man

Apr 20, 2018 by

by Micah Watson, Public Discourse:

A new critical edition of Lewis’s 1943 classic adds a treasure trove of supplementary material. Lewis’s warnings about the consequences of jettisoning natural law remain as trenchant today as they were when delivered during the Second World War.

Almost twenty years ago Richard John Neuhaus wrote in the pages of First Things that some people can stop reading C.S. Lewis, and some others cannot, and the latter are eventually considered to be Lewis scholars. Yet as anyone who has delved into the thought of a great thinker knows, there are scholars who have published on the subject and there are scholars who almost inhabit the thought of the thinker. These scholars publish works that help us not only understand the life and ideas of a C.S. Lewis, a G.K. Chesterton, or a Thomas More, but also shape the contours of subsequent scholarship, interpreting their accomplishments afresh for a new generation one step further removed from the original context.

Michael Ward is such a scholar, ideally situated to help shepherd Lewis studies from the care of those who may have known Lewis personally to others not yet born when Lewis passed away on November 22, 1963. Educated in English at Oxford, in theology at Cambridge, and in divinity at St. Andrews, Ward lived in Lewis’s home The Kilns as Warden in the late 1990s, is advisor to the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society, author of the remarkable Planet Narnia, co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, and has now provided a new critical edition of one of Lewis’s most important works, The Abolition of Man. Originally delivered as a set of three lectures at the University of Durham in 1943 before being published the next year, Abolition was not initially well received and remains underappreciated by the general public, even as several noteworthy and diverse thinkers—Leon Kass, Joseph Ratzinger, Francis Fukuyama, Wendell Berry, John Finnis—consider the work a classic for its treatment of human nature and natural law.

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