C. S. Lewis and the Materialist
Menace
John
G. West
July 15, 1996
The following is edited from an
address delivered on July 15, 1996 as part of the annual C. S. Lewis Institute
at
During the summer of 1932,
Lewis initially had tried to tell his story in verse. He
struggled with the poem for several months before giving up on it as a failure,
which is perhaps just as well. Lewis's first two books--both poetry--had been
commercial flops (his last volume had sold only 126 copies in the first three
months after publication).2 Now Lewis decided to start his allegory afresh by
writing it in prose. Lewis eventually titled his work The Pilgrim's Regress,
and as the title suggests, the work consciously echoed Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress. In fact, Lewis later described his own allegory as "Bunyan
up to date."3
Like the pilgrim Christian in Bunyan's tale, the pilgrim
in Lewis's story also seeks the celestial city. He just does not realize that
fact for most of the book. In the process of seeking personal fulfillment, he
stumbles into all kinds of intellectual, spiritual, and moral errors.
Lewis wanted his story to satirize the false ideologies
and "isms" then rampant in western culture, especially the ideology
of materialism.4 The reigning philosophy of twentieth century science and
culture, materialism decreed that everything--animals, human beings, moral
beliefs, even reason itself--could be explained as the result of purely
physical processes and properties. The roots of materialism reached back into
into aniquity, but the fearsome modern strain was born less than a
century-and-a-half ago with the writings of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund
Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and others.5
Ideas have consequences, and materialism's consequences
for western culture were particularly extensive and particularly poisonous--as
the world was finding out even while Lewis started to write his book.
More than a thousand miles away from where Lewis was on
vacation, an old man stood weeping at a train station. Desperately clutching
his large sack filled with bread, he pleaded with the station-master to let him
on the train.
"You can go on the next train," the official
told the man, "but not your bundle. Law is law--no bread can be
transported without a license."
"But how can I return to the village with empty
hands?" cried the man. "How shall I face the village? They await my
return and their bellies are empty."7
The place was the
The ruthless utopianism exhibited by Stalin was a natural
outgrowth of the materialist understanding of human nature. So were the
policies of the new regime rising in
Nor was the United States immune from the corrosive
effects of materialism. In 1932, Americans elected a buoyant new President who
declared in his subsequent inaugural address that "There is nothing to
fear but fear itself." In the same inaugural speech, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt asked Congress to grant him extensive new executive powers and warned
that if Congress did not, he would unilaterally take the powers upon himself.
FDR's subsequent "New Deal" gave hope to millions of Americans
suffering during the Great Depression, but it also layed the foundation for a
mammoth welfare state administered by experts from the social sciences--experts
who were increasingly dismissive of both moral absolutes and personal
responsibility. The impatience of social scientists with traditional morality
could be seen in the work of anthropologists like Margaret Mead, who had
already published her (now discredited) study of sexual mores in Samoa.12 The
denial of personal responsibility among social scientists was perhaps most
notable in the field of criminology. One criminology textbook published in 1932
baldly stated: "Man is no more responsible' for becoming wilful and
committing a crime than the flower for becoming red and fragrant. In both
instances the end products are predetermined by the nature of the protoplasm
and the chance of circumstances."13
Lewis's attack on materialism thus came at a critical
juncture in world history. The time was ripe for someone to challenge the
materialist menace. Amazingly, Lewis finished a draft of The Pilgrim's
Regress by the end of his two-week vacation. It was finally published in
May 1933, the same month Hitler held a midnight bonfire in Germany for 20,000
books that went against the Nazi party line.14 It is unlikely that Lewis's book
was among the books burned, but not because Hitler would not have found it
offensive. The Nazis show up in Pilgrim's Regress as dwarves who are
vassals of Mr. Savage, a Nietzschean superman who sits on a high chair
"dressed in [animal] skins" and who wears "an iron helmet on his
head with horns stuck in it."15 That this was an unflattering portrait of
national socialism is undeniable, but the Nazis first had to know about Lewis's
book before they could burn it, and I doubt they even had heard of it. Only
1,500 copies of Lewis's Pilgrim's Regress had been printed, and alas,
even these did not sell very well. A few weeks after the book's publication,
Lewis joked to Arthur Greeves that he expected Pilgrim's Regress
"to be at least as big a failure" as his last book of poetry.16 After
three successive flops, Lewis must have wondered about his future career as a
writer.
Yet he kept writing. Eventually, he even became
successful at it, and he became one of the twentieth century's most powerful
and prophetic voices on behalf of cultural sanity. Like Winston Churchill, who
stood alone against the Nazis when many turned a blind eye to their evil, Lewis
was one of a handful of voices in the wilderness to mount a credible defense
against the materialist onslaught during the first half of our century. The argument
he began in Pilgrim's Regress he continued in such books as That
Hideous Strength, The Abolition of Man, and Miracles, as well
as in essays such as "Behind the Scenes," "The Poison of
Subjectivism," "Bulverism," "Transposition," and
"Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State." The
observations made in these writings are as relevant for us today as when they
were first written. Hitler and Stalin may be dead, but the materialist
philosophy that gave birth to them and their regimes is not. Indeed, western
society is still in the grip of at least four of materialism's most damning
cultural legacies: the rejection of reason and objective truth, the debunking
of objective morality, the denial of personal responsibility, and the
encouragement of coercive utopianism. Lewis has something to tell us about all
four.
The Rejection of Reason and Objective Truth
Materialism's first deadly legacy is the rejection of
reason and objective truth. Nineteenth-century materialists depicted our
thoughts as the irrational products of environment or heredity or brain
chemistry. As a consequence, the intellectual classes became convinced that
only the reality was material, and thus the only true explanations were
reductive. If you wanted to explain a flower, you described its cell structure,
not its beauty. If you wanted to explain human beings, you looked not to their
greatest achievements, but to the raw materials that made them up. As Leo
Strauss put it, modern thought tried to "understand the higher in terms of
the lower: the human in terms of the subhuman, the rational in terms of the
subrational..."17
One possible result of the denial of reason is that
people will become so skeptical that they will believe in nothing. But most
people cannot live without something to give meaning to their lives. Thus, the
ultimate consequence of denying reason is not nihilism but a leap into
irrationality. The philosopher Nietzsche foresaw this at the end of the last
century. If objective truth was dead, the only thing that could save us from
the abyss according to Nietzsche was to create our own meaning by a sheer act
of willpower. We will ourselves into believing something that will give us
meaning.
In the Nietzschean cosmos, what is prized is not truth,
but creativity, freshness, and power: Whoever is strong enough or creative
enough to impose his vision on other people is the hero. In many respects, we
live in Nietzsche's universe. The highest praise of a work of art or a piece of
scholarship in today's society is not that it is true, but that it is
"fresh" or "original." When one looks at what passes for
scholarship today--the paradigm approach in the sciences, deconstruction in
literature, and the more extreme forms of ethnic and gender studies--it becomes
readily apparent that most scholars have given up even the pretense of seeking
objective truth. What they are concerned about is power--how long their
particular ideology will control the terms of debate.
The first step to extricating ourselves from this morass
is to understand the fallacies of the materialistic reductionism led to it, and
Lewis can help us do this.
Lewis's first sustained attack on reductionism came in The
Pilgrim's Regress. The core of his critique comes in book three,
"Through Darkest Zeitgeistheim," which literally means "through
the darkest abode of the Spirit of the Age." In the book, John--the name
of Lewis's pilgrim--is arrested by the flunkies of a giant who symbolizes the
materialistic reductionism that was the Spirit of the Age. John is subsequently
jailed, leading to a nightmarish sequence. Lewis relates that the eyes of the
giant had the property of making whatever they looked on transparent:
"Consequently, when John looked around into the dungeon he retreated from
his fellow prisoners in terror, for the place seemed to be thronged with
demons. A woman was seated near him, but he did not know it was a woman,
because, through the face, he saw the skull and through that the brains and the
passages of the nose, and the larynx, and the saliva moving in the glands and
the blood in the veins... And when he averted his eyes from her they fell on an
old man, and this was worse for the old man had a cancer. And when John sat
down and drooped his head, not to see the horrors, he saw only the working of
his own inwards... and suddenly he fell on his face and thrust his hands into
his eyes and cried out, It is the black hole... I am mad. I am dead. I am in
hell for ever.'"18
John is ultimately rescued from this dungeon by a
towering woman in blue--Lady Reason, who slays the materialist giant with her
sword. Lady Reason tells John that the giant had deceived him about the real
nature of human beings: "He showed you by a trick what our inwards would
look like if they were visible... But in the real world our inwards are
invisible. They are not colored shapes at all, they are feelings. The warmth in
your limbs at this moment, the sweetness of your breath as you draw it in, the
comfort in your belly because we breakfasted well, and your hunger for the next
meal--these are the reality; all the sponges and tubes that you saw in the
dungeon are the lie."
"But if I cut a man open I should see them in
him," replied John.
"A man cut open," returned the Lady, "is,
so far, not a man: and if you did not sew him up speedily you would be seeing
not organs, but death. I am not denying that death is ugly: but the giant made
you believe that life is ugly."19
Lewis's point was that reductionism really doesn't
explain that which is human at all. In fact, in the name of explaining man,
reductionism explains him away. As Lewis later wrote: "You cannot go on
eseeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something
is to see something through it... If you see through everything, then
everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible
world. To esee through' all things is the same as not to see."20
In a wonderful 1956 essay titled "Behind the
Scenes," Lewis articulated his own view of the proper relation between man
and his material components. He likened life to a stage play. In one sense,
nothing in the play is real. It is all imaginery. It is not really set in the
countryside, the people on stage are not really who they pretend to be. The
only "realities" are the physical sets and costumes and lighting. The
play is "appearance" and the sets are "reality." Yet, as
Lewis points out, "in the theatre of course the play, ethe appearance', is
the thing. All the backstage erealities' exist only for its sake and are
valuable only in so far as they promote it."21
Lewis here was calling us back to a teleological view of
the universe of the sort offered by Aristotle. According to Aristotle, you
understand something not by what it came from, but by what it has become. We
understand what an oak trees is not by dissecting an acorn but by examining a
fully grown oak tree. Similarly, we understand human beings by who they are as
an integrated whole, not by trying to break them down into their material or
psychological building blocks. When we do look at the subrational, we ought to
judge it in light of the overall purpose of a whole human being.
The materialist may scoff at this approach, but as Lewis
relished in pointing out, the materialist has his own problems: For the
materialist who debunks everyone else's ideas as the subrational products of
their brain chemistry or environment cannot avoid being debunked himself. If he
is honest, says Lewis, the materialist will have to admit that his own ideas
are merely the "epiphenomenon which accompanies chemical or electrical
events in a cortex which is itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary
process."22 The point Lewis is driving at is that if all thoughts are
merely the products of non-rational causes, this includes the materialist's own
thoughts. In other words, there is no reason according to materialism for
materialism itself to be regarded as true.
Even people who try to water down their materialism by
granting that reason can be a valid way to truth have a problem, according to
Lewis. For if the universe is how the materialist describes it, it is not at
all likely that reason should have ever developed. "People who take [the
materialist view]," explained Lewis, "think that matter and space
just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the
matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just happened, by sort of a fluke,
to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think. By one chance in a
thousand something hit our sun and made it produce the planets; and by another
thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for life, and the right temperature,
occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the matter on this earth came
alive; and then, by a very long series of chances, the living creatures
developed into things like us."23
In sum, materialists have no ground to stand on if they
deny the reality of reason outright, and very little ground to stand on if they
claim to accept reason in part.
The Debunking of Objective Morality
Closely related to materialism's attack on reason is its
debunking of objective morality, which is its second sorry legacy. Materialists
early in our century denied the existence of objective standards binding on all
cultures, claiming that environment dictated our moral beliefs. Such relativism
was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still
undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology, and
sociology. In the words of a college sociology text popular in the 1980s,
"We must recognize that judgments about good and bad, moral and immoral,
depend very much on who is doing the judging; there is no universal standard to
appeal to."24
The triumph of moral relativism has been particularly
evident in our colleges and universities, many of which are populated by social
scientists who berate us for our rampaging "ethnocentrism," our
unmitigated arrogance in believing that our "values" might somehow be
"right."
Gone is the old undergraduate curriculum with its heaping
doses of the Bible, of Plutarch's Lives and Aristotle's Ethics; in its
place is an unrelenting parade of the horrors culled from the cultures of
barbarians. Students used to study the great moments in the history of Western
civilization; now they learn about the cannibalism of tribes in
Exposed to this message for four years, even the most
sturdy students are apt to become infected. And those who do not succumb from
the disease will likely find themselves incapacitated. I recall having
breakfast with a friend who was about to obtain a degree in one of the social
sciences from a large secular university. Our discussion was wide ranging, but
when the subject of morality came up she became curiously bewildered. Taught
for years that moral beliefs are a function of culture and personal
predilections, she maintained that there were no objective grounds to justify
moral judgments against other cultures.
"What about the Nazis?" I asked. "Surely
we have an objective basis to condemn what they did?" She thought a
moment, looked more bewildered than ever, and then answered to the effect that
she was personally revolted by what the Nazis did--but she could still find no
objective basis for her revulsion.
Lewis attacked moral relativism in his opening chapters
of Mere Christianity, where he pointed out that all people--even
criminals--appeal to a universal standard when trying to excuse their own
behavior. And even those who claim that right and wrong are mere conventions
will hotly protest when someone wrongs them! Lewis's line of argument here is
similar to that presented by Augustine in his Expositions on the Book of
Psalms.25 However, Lewis's most sustained assault on moral relativism comes
not in Mere Christianity but in The Abolition of Man, a small
incisive volume based on lectures he delivered at the
In Abolition of Man, Lewis pointed out that we
cannot escape making moral judgments. Every action presupposes a goal toward
which the actor acts, and the goal (no matter how clinically it is expressed)
represents a judgment of value. We cannot exist without making moral judgments,
argued Lewis. The only question is what those judgments will be. Speaking
within the western natural law tradition, Lewis proposed that at the foundation
of all moral judgments is one set of ethical first principles shared by all
human beings. These first principles include obligations to treat other people
justly and to keep one's promises. It from these first principles that all
other moral judgments and ethical systems are derived. Strictly speaking, these
first principles cannot be demonstrated themselves, for they are the first
principles from which everything else is demonstrated. One recognizes them in
the same way that one intuitively knows that 2+2=4, or that if a=b, and b=c,
then a=c.
But what about the social scientists' claim that
different cultures have had radically different moral codes? In the face of
these differences, how can Lewis maintain that human beings have access to a
moral common ground? Lewis responds with typical candor in an essay titled
"The Poison of Subjectivism":
The answer [to the claim that cultures radically differ
on their moral codes] is that this is a lie--a good, solid, resounding lie. If
a man will go into a library and spend a few days with the Encyclopedia of
Religion and Ethics he will soon discover the massive unanimity of the
practical reason in man. From the Babylonian Hymn to Samos, from
the Laws of Manu, the Book of the Dead, the Analects, the
Stoics, the Platonists, from Austrialism aborigines... he will collect the same
triumphantly monotonous denunciations of oppression, murder, treachery, and
falsehood, the same injunctions of kindness to the aged, the young, and the
weak, of almsgiving and impartiality and honesty... There are, of course,
differences. There are even blindnesses in particular cultures--just as there
are savages who cannot count up to twenty. But the pretence that we are
presented with a mere chaos--though no outline of universally accepted value
shows through--is simply false...26
Those who want to explore this topic further can read the
appendix to The Abolition of Man, where Lewis has helpfully compiled
many of the common moral maxims held across cultures and across history.
The Denial of Personal Responsibility
If materialism has been hard on reason and morality, it
has been equally destructive of personal responsibility, which is its third
poisonous legacy. By claiming that human thoughts and actions are dictated by
our biology and environment, materialism undermined personal responsibility.
The results can be seen in our criminal justice system, our civil justice
system, and even our welfare system. Ever since sin entered the world, human
beings have sought excuses for their behavior, but materialism handed us an
inexhaustible supply of excuses. No matter what we do, it can be attributed to
a cause other than our own choices: our social environment, our subconscious
drives, our brain chemistry. An article a few years ago titled "Roots of
Crime" told about a researcher who was testing juvenile delinquents' hair
in order to prove that their violent behavior was the result of vitamin
deficiencies.27 In this new scheme of things, even Hitler can be excused for
his crimes, for in the words of one historian, he "was a prisoner of his
pathological unconscious drives."28
Against this modern ethic that no one is responsible,
Lewis strove to make people aware of just how responsible they really are.
Lewis's defense of personal responsibility was undergirded by his commitment to
Christianity. The Christian gospel proclaims salvation only to those who
recognize themselves as guilty people in need of divine forgiveness. But
materialism offers modern man a whole slew of methods to avoid facing our
guilt. If nothing is our fault, then what is there to be guilty about? Lewis
countered this mentality not so much by direct disputation, but by trying to
place a miror in front of us that would cause us to recognize the evil in our
own souls. This is most apparent in his fictional works, where there are key
moments of self-revelation when major characters realize that they are really
to blame for the fix they are in.
In the novel That Hideous Strength, Mark Studdock
is a young sociologist who has spent his life cravenly currying favor with
others in order to promote himself. When he subsequently finds himself in the
middle of a totalitarian conspiracy, he first wonders what bad luck put him
there. "Why had he such a rotten heredity?" he whined to himself. "Why
had his education been so ineffective? Why was the system of society so
irrational? Why was his luck so bad?"29 Finally hitting bottom, he
suddenly sees with brutal clarity who he really is and how his own choices led
him to the mess he was in.
One cannot read Lewis's fiction without being convicted
of the fact that we are more accountable than we would like to think. Lewis
calls us to responsibility by reminding us that every action has a consequence,
and that no wrong choice--however small--is insignificant. As Uncle Screwtape
tells his demon nephew Wormwood in The Screwtape Letters: "The
safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot,
without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."30
The Proliferation of Coercive Utopianism
The fourth legacy of materialism is coercive utopianism.
Although the belief that all thought and behavior are predetermined by material
causes would seem to deny the power of human beings to reshape their world,
materialism in fact inspired a fierce strain of coercive utopianism. Claiming
either that they were merely the servants of the forces of materialism--or with
Nietzsche, that they could overcome materialism by a sheer act of
will--materialist reformers tried to create secular utopias in
The coercive utopians in
But fascism and communism were far from the only forms of
coercive utopianism about which Lewis was concerned. Tyranny comes in many
forms, most of which are more subtle than Stalin's gulag or Hitler's death
camps. Lewis knew this, and his most compelling writings for us today focus on
these more subtle forms of oppression. In particular, Lewis feared that the
modern welfare state would become ever more intrusive as government planners allied
themselves with the tools of materialist social science.
If people act because of environmental and biological
necessities, as the materialists claim, the government no longer need deal with
them as free moral agents. Under the new system, preemption replaces punishment
as the preferred method of social control. Instead of punishing you for making
the wrong choice (which was the traditional method), the state simply
eliminates your choice. Instead of laws telling us to wear seat-belts, we have
passive restraints that automatically strap us into the car seat. Instead of
simply being told to pay our taxes, our taxes are automatically deducted from
our paychecks. Instead of holding us responsible for the correct use of any
number of helpful--but potentially hazardous--products, the government simply
prevents those products from reaching the market. In the hands of the social
planners, the nation is their laboratory.
Lewis's painted a grim portrait of this kind of despotism
in his novel That Hideous Strength. There the spirit of modern social
science becomes incarnate in something called the National Institute for
Coordinated Experiments--NICE, for short. Of course, there is nothing nice
about NICE; its social scientists are exactly the type of technocrats that
Lewis feared. In the name of science and humanity, they claimed the right to
remake society without bothering to obtain society's consent--let alone the
consent of the individuals involved.
While we are a long way off from the nightmare vision depicted
by Lewis in That Hideous Strength, we certainly should be able to
understand some of what he's getting at. For public policy decisions in our
country are increasingly made precisely by the type of unelected experts that
Lewis talked about. During the past three decades our legislators have
transferred much of their authority to a vast array of independent regulatory
agencies staffed by unelected experts who are largely unaccountable to average
citizens. Environmental policy is a good example. Decisions about how--and
whether--to save certain endangered species are made not by elected officials,
but by government biologists and bureaucrats. Decisions about whether we can
have fires in our fireplaces are made not by elected officials but by
professional bureaucrats specializing in air quality. Now some of these
decisions we may well applaud; some we may not. But the fact remains that
we--and those we elect--have very little to say in the matter.
But, you may ask, what's wrong with that? Surely it is better
for experts to make decisions about these things than the average voter or
politician? After all, don't today's increasingly complicated problems demand
that we hand over the reins of power to the experts?
Lewis didn't think so. He did not dispute that
technocrats have plenty of knowledge; this knowledge may even be necessary for
good public policy. But it is not sufficient for good public policy. Political
problems are preeminently moral problems, according to Lewis, and technocrats
are not equipped to function as moralists. "I dread specialists in
power," he said, "because they are specialists speaking outside their
special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government
involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are
worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man's
opinion no added value."32
Conclusion
More than five decades after the publication of That
Hideous Strength, more than six decades after the publication of Pilgrim's
Regress, and more than thirty years after C. S. Lewis's death, we still
live in the shadow of what George Gilder calls "the materialist
superstition."33 Lewis was a prophet, but it takes more than a prophet to
make a revolution. Yet a prophet can prepare the way for a revolution, and
Lewis helped do that.
At the end of The Abolition of Man, Lewis called
for a new natural philosophy that would understand human beings as they really
are, not try to reduce them to automatons or guinea pigs. "When it explained,"
said Lewis, "it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it
would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin
Buber calls the Thou."34
Lewis was not quite sure what he was asking for,
and--being a realist--he certainly was not convinced that the revolution would
actually come about. Yet during the next decade it just might. We live during
an era of tremendous and tumultuous change, and nowhere is the tumult more
evident than in the sciences. Recent developments in biology, physics, and
cognitive science are raising serious doubts about the most fundamental
assumptions of materialism. In biology, scientists are discovering such
irreducible complexity in biological systems that the only reasonable
explanation seems to be a non-material designer. In physics, our understanding
of matter is becoming increasingly non-material. In cognitive science, efforts
to reduce mind to the physical processes of the brain have failed repeatedly.
Even in social sciences such as psychology researchers are beginning to
question their materialist assumptions and rebuild their disciplines on
foundations more conducive to human dignity and personal responsibility.35
In other words, for perhaps the first time since the
materialist onslaught we have an opportunity to bring about the collapse of
materialism and to re-found the sciences along the lines envisioned by C. S.
Lewis more than half-a-century ago. For the sake of cultural sanity -- and
survival -- let us hope that we succeed.
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NOTES
1 For a detailed account of how Lewis came to write The
Pilgrim's Regress, see Lindskoog, Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to
C. S. Lewis's Pilgrim's Regress (Chicago: Cornerstone Press, 1995).
2 William
3 Lewis to Pocock, January -- , 1933. Marion Wade
Collection,
4 Lewis was not the first to use Bunyan's tale as a
springboard for satirizing contemporary errors. Nearly a century earlier,
Nathaniel Hawthorne had written "The Celestial Railroad," a take-off
on Bunyan that lampooned transcendentalism and other intellectual currents
prevalent in the first half of the nineteenth century. See "The Celestial
Railroad," in
5 Key materialist works include The Descent of Man
by Darwin, The German Ideology: Part I by Karl Marx, and Twilight of
the Idols and The Anti-Christ by Nietzsche.
6 Gertrude Himmelfarb,
7 This account is adapted from Eugene Lyons, Assignment
in Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937), 488-489.
8 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 306.
9 Conquest, 265-266.
10 Norman Baynes, editor, The Speeches of Adolf
Hitler, April 1922-August 1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942),
I: 363.
11 Leo Alexander, "Medicial Science Under
Dictatorship,"
12 See Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and
13 Nathaniel Cantor, Crime: Criminals and Criminal
Justice (New York: Henry Holt,1932), 266.
14 William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 241.
15 C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress (New York:
Bantam Books, 1981), 101-103.
16 Quoted in Lindskoog, xxviii.
17 Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern,
207.
18 Lewis, Pilgrim's Regress, 48-49.
19 Lewis, Pilgrim's Regress, 61-62.
20 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York:
Macmillan, 1947), 91.
21 "Behind the Scenes," in God in the Dock:
Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans Publishing, 1970), 248.
22 C. S. Lewis, "The Poison of Subjectivism," Christian
Reflections, edited by Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 72.
23 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York:
Macmillan, 1943),
24 Ian Robertson, Sociology (New York: Worth,
1981), 68.
25 Quoted in The Political Writings of
26 "The Poison of Subjectivism," 77.
27 "Roots of Crime," American Bar
Association Journal, December 1983, 1814-1815.
28 Quoted in Ron Rosenbaum, "Staring Into the Hear
of the Heart of Darkness," The New York Times Magazine, June 4,
1995, 39.
29 C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength: A Modern
Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1965), 224.
30 The Screwtape Letters, rev. edition (New York:
Macmillan, 1982), letter XII, 56.
31 See C.S. Lewis, "To the Author of Flowering
Rifle," in Poems of C. S. Lewis, 65.
32 Lewis, "Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of
the Welfare State," God in the Dock, 315.
33 George Gilder, "The Materialist
Superstition," The Intercollegiate Review, Spring 1996, 6-14.
34 Lewis, Abolition of Man, 90.
35 See "The Death of Materialism and the Renewal of
Culture: A Symposium," The Intercollegiate Review, spring 1996.
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Adapted from http://www.discovery.org/a/458
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Gemma Verdú Trescolí
vertres@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press