A Church Without a Chest

Mar 12, 2022 by

By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine:

One of the insights of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man is that we are moved not by abstract formulas, by bare concepts, or even by the “facts, facts, facts” that the schoolmaster Gradgrind sought to stuff into his young receptacles, but by visions of beauty and worth. These visions stir what Lewis calls the “chest,” the seat of powerful and almost rational feeling; not the appetite, which is located in the belly, or ratiocination, located in the head.

Lewis contends that the whole thrust of modern education is to make “men without chests,” that is, people who lack any sense of the fitness, the reasonableness, of their passions when they are in the presence of the sublime, the beautiful, the homely, or the slovenly, the ugly, and the perverse. The result is monstrous—a hypertrophied head on a swollen belly, if you have a lot of natural intellectual power, or a withered pinhead on the same, if not; either way, a kind of calculative reduction of reason in the service of an overfed or unnaturally fed appetite….

…Suppose you have a painting by Raphael, a Madonna and child. We do not say, in the first instance, that it is wrong to scrawl a mustache on the Madonna and to draw an obscenity on the child. We allow their beauty to become so present to us, so full in their power, that we treat it as a holy thing not to be tossed about, laid near a fire, exposed to damp and mildew, or left to the spiders and their webs. The beauty is real. It demands by right the concordant response.

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