Escaping Eschropolis: Masculinity and Femininity on the Silent Planet

C.S. Lewis was arguably one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, and he bequeathed on the world a great literary treasury.^[1] Many readers first encounter Lewis the Christian apologist through his inimitable work Mere Christianity. Others discover Lewis the children’s author in his enchanting Narnia series. These two projects often act for the adventurous reader as a kind of wardrobe into Lewis’s vast bibliography, a journey that rewards any who take the time to explore this wonderfully rich world. But readers who spend any sustained time ruminating on this great mind are sometimes surprised to encounter Lewis the “complementarian.”

The claim that Lewis was a “complementarian” is obviously anachronistic, because the term itself was coined by conservative evangelicals in the 1980’s, decades after Lewis’s death. The term was coined to describe a movement that defines itself over against another movement known as “egalitarianism,” which has intellectual headwaters that were active in Lewis’s day. The simplest definition of a complementarian is one who believes men and women are created equal by God in His image, yet with important differences that make a difference for how we live. Specifically, complementarians believe that God’s good design for us as male and female informs the Bible’s instructions regarding leadership in the home and the church, and to defy either is to defy the created order, or what Lewis refers to as the Tao (more on this below). Gender egalitarians, on the other hand, tend to downplay and flatten male-female differences, to the point that these differences have little bearing on how we live at home, in the church, and in society. In a word, egalitarians believe men and women are socially interchangeable — a concept that Lewis himself vehemently opposed in his lifetime. This theme shows up in a surprising number of places across his literary corpus.

To put a fine point on it, Lewis believed that men and women are wonderfully equal yet beautifully distinct, and he had a lot to say about God’s design for men and women. He also had a lot to say about how we should live according to and not contrary to God’s good design. Hence, Lewis the “complementarian.”

What was it that Lewis encountered in the early-twentieth century that made him so attuned to this theme? In short, he was alarmed by the rapid erosion of true masculinity and femininity in modernity. While it is impossible to reconstruct in this space the exact cultural and ideological currents he observed, it does seem that Lewis was responding to a burgeoning feminism that was affecting traditional norms in society and even in the Church of England. He also understood some forms of feminism’s connection to social and political Marxism, which was making inroads on the continent and even in his own Great Britain. Whatever he encountered, he prophetically addressed many of these cultural trends in his writing — at times even presciently in light of just how far off the rails things have gone today. But even Lewis could not have anticipated the gender confusion facing the West today downstream of the very confusion he encountered in his day.

Escaping Eschropolis

Only the most diehard Lewis devotees will likely recognize the allusion embedded in the title of this essay. It is drawn from Lewis’s first book as a Christian believer, The Pilgrim’s Regress, which is an allegory of Lewis’s own intellectual pilgrimage to the faith in the same vein as Buyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.^[2] Toward the beginning of the book, John, the main character, who is an autobiographical representation of Lewis, finds himself in the city of Eschropolis, a name that literally means something like the “city of filth and obscenity.” In the subtitle of this section of the book, Lewis breaks the allegorical fourth wall when he describes the setting, “The Poetry of the Silly Twenties.” This subtitle helps orient the reader to what Lewis had in his sights for critique. But what is it about Eschropolis that deserves such an ugly name? Lewis describes Eschropolis as a city inhabited by “the Clevers,” who sit around all day consulting together and performing increasingly obscene and absurd routines for one another. These acts scandalize John, but after each performance the “Clevers” respond positively to the performances, exclaiming, “Priceless!” The last of these routines witnessed by John is performed by one named “Glugly” who, to quote from the book,

“. . . waddled to and fro with her toes pointing in. After that she twisted herself to make it look as if her hip bone was out of joint. Finally she made some grunts, and said:

“‘Globol obol oogl ogle globol gloogle gloo,’ and ended by pursing up her lips and making a vulgar noise such as children make in their nurseries.”

Understandably confused, John confesses to the Clevers that he doesn’t understand any of it. Revealingly, one of them replies snidely to him, “that is because you are looking for beauty.” Another chimes in, “It is the expression of a savage disillusionment.” And still another provides a more meta reflection: “Reality has broken down.”

All of this causes John, who is on a journey to find out what will fulfill his innate eternal longing, to object, knowing what he seeks cannot be this. His objection elicits accusations from the Clevers, “Puritanian! Bourgeois!” (an overt dig by Lewis at Marxism). Others scream back at John, “We are the new movement; we are the revolt! We have got over humanitarianism! And prudery!”

At this, John gets up to run away, and Lewis concludes scene:

And all the dogs of Eschropolis joined in the chase as he ran along the street, and all the people followed pelting him with ordure, and crying: “Puritanian! Bourgeois! Prurient!”

This last epitaph is especially humorous considering it is obvious his opponents who are the ones obsessed with sexual matters, not John.

In sum, Eschropolis is a decadent place full of disillusioned ne’er-do-wells who have sworn off beauty and even reality itself. But what is most interesting for the purposes of this essay is how Lewis describes the inhabitants of Eschropolis at the beginning of this scene:

 the girls had short hair and flat breasts and flat buttocks so that they looked like boys: but the boys had pale, egg-shaped faces and slender waists and big hips so that they looked like girls.

In a word, the ugly city of Eschropolis is full of girls who look like boys, and boys who look like girls. Androgynous interchangeability is what is en vogue, and Pilgrim John had enough sense to run far away.

At one level, this seems to be how Lewis intended much of what he wrote on the topic of maleness and femaleness to be read: as a roadmap to escape the ugly, androgynous city of Eschropolis. All around him, Lewis saw the budding cultural rejection of true masculinity and femininity, and he wanted to lead the counter-rebellion.

Following Lewis, careful readers are led to escape ugly Eschropolis by embracing the distinctive goods of masculinity, femininity, and marriage. Toward that end, readers must gain a vision for at least three themes in Lewis’s writing: (1) A vision for God’s created order, or what Lewis called the Tao; (2) A vision for a distinct masculinity and femininity; and (3) A vision for how the created order and our givenness as male and female should inform how we live together in community.

God’s Created Order

When it comes to morality, there are ready pitfalls one can fall into on either side of the road. The first is to equate “is-ness” with “ought-ness” — that is, to sanction whatever happens to be as the way it always should have been, and should be. This is the error deterministic naturalists make, and the consequences of this view of the world are easy to spot. Thankfully, as Lewis points out in Mere Christianity, mankind has an in-born sense of rightness and wrongness that doesn’t always square with the way the world is. This sense drives us to search for a moral system grounded outside of simply what we apprehend with the senses.

But the other error is equally dangerous, and that is to conclude from this premise that nothing is the way it should be, and that all perceived reality is teaching us the wrong way. If true, everything that is must be rejected for some other way that it should be. This error is often associated with Gnosticism, which seeks a platonic spiritualism that transcends the embodied, materialistic world.

Related to the question at hand, the Lord Jesus was presented with this is-ness versus ought-ness dilemma in a famous episode from the gospel of Matthew when the Pharisees tried to trap him with a question. In Matthew 19, his opponents ask Jesus, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” The dilemma that Jesus faced was whether he would contradict Moses and the Scriptures, or the religious leaders of the day, in either forbidding divorce altogether or endorsing the prevailing libertine attitude that permitted divorce for any reason.

The purpose of appealing to this passage here is not to weigh in on the question of divorce, but instead to learn from the reasoning in Jesus’s response. Jesus says in Matthew 19:4–6:

Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, ⁵ and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? ⁶ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.

Where does Jesus turn to ground his ethical approach to the question of marriage? In this passage, he quotes from Genesis 1 and 2 to cast a vision for what God intends. The Pharisees are right to recognize the distance between this vision and the way the world is — even in what was permitted under Moses’s administration in the Scriptures when they ask him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” But Jesus is ready for the question when he replies, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.”

In Jesus’s response is a whole world of ethical reasoning, reasoning Lewis himself understood and employed. Here it is in brief: We live in a post-Genesis 3 world, where sin has corrupted and marred and effaced — but not erased — God’s design, including creating us male and female in his image. But, “from the beginning it was not so,” which means we ought to appeal to the “beginning,” to God’s original creation, in order to ground “ought-ness” in the original “is-ness.”

In a 1945 essay, “Membership,” Lewis challenges both individualistic and collectivist approaches to society by going back to the beginning of creation: “I do not believe God created an egalitarian world.” It could be argued that this sentence goes a long way toward summarizing Lewis’s position on a good many topics. Here we find two commitments. First is his deference to original design, to the way it should be according to God’s creation. And second is his understanding that built into creation is not egalitarianism, but differentiation. Here is the full quote:

I do not believe God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple, to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe that if we had not fallen, patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful form of government.^[3]

That last sentence will make Americans squirm and humor their British cousins, but there is surely something in this paragraph that makes everyone a little uncomfortable. Why? Because we live in an egalitarian age. We have been catechized from the moment of birth to spot inequalities and then immediately challenge them without first asking if they are natural or imposed, just or unjust. In the wake of such an impulse is the collapse of not just gender norms, but traditional society itself. This impulse to eradicate “inequality” underlies the erasure of male- and female-only spaces, the push to break the “glass ceiling” everywhere, and the problematization of any conventional hierarchy, whether in economics, politics, immigration, or business. This principle’s extreme application aims at eradicating every inequality, downplaying and erasing any difference at all — even to the point of absurdity, where relating to one’s own wife or children in a way that is distinct from the way one relates to others is suspect at best, or downright evil at worst.

But isn’t the push to erase inequality, in some ways, at the root of the original rebellion recorded in Genesis 3? The temptation that came from the serpent was to treat all trees the same, equally, as trees that are permitted to eat from — no distinction. Why? So that they could be like God — no distinction. In many ways, Romans chapter 1 teaches us that the failure to maintain the Creator-creature distinction works its way out in the collapse of other distinctions built into creation as well.

First comes the collapse of the distinction between the animal world and the unique status of mankind created in God’s image: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools,  and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” And then comes the collapse in the distinction between male and female: “For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.” Note carefully Paul’s use of the word “nature” here. It partakes in the same appeal Jesus makes in Matthew 19 when he said, “from the beginning it was not so.” And it is the same appeal Lewis makes when he citing what God created in the beginning as not “egalitarian.”

In other places, Lewis calls this reality, what we might call the substrate of creation designed by God which he called good, the Tao. For instance, Lewis described the Tao in the Abolition of Man this way:

The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.^[4]

In other words, what do we set our moral compass by? What do we judge our ethical systems by, our morality? Christian theologians often speak of two books of God’s revelation: there is the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. It is this latter “book,” the Tao, that the Book of Scripture infallibly interprets and never contradicts or effaces. And it is through a close reading of both that we can catch a vision for our second concern, masculinity and femininity.

The Meaning of Masculinity and Femininity

Male-female differentiation is built into the created order. What is more, it is so deeply embedded in the world that it informs not just who we are and who we should be as men and women, but how we ought to see the world. This is the argument Lewis makes in his science fiction trilogy in the middle of his second book, Perelandra. The protagonist Ransom sees two angelic beings named Malacandra and Perelandra, who rule Mars and Venus — masculinity and femininity — respectively. What strikes Ransom most about these two beings, though, is the evident difference — distinction — between them, even though they exhibit no obvious sex characteristics:

But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try — Ransom has tried a hundred times — to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre.

At this point, the reader realizes that Lewis has set this scene to make a deeper, philosophical point about masculinity and femininity:

[W]hat Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex.^[5]

Here, in the middle of Lewis’s Ransom trilogy, one discovers the true depths of his understanding of complementarity. Complementarity, and by extension sex, is not merely accidental, or even incidental in creation. It is hardwired into the world. The polarity is the point, and it is reflected in all of creation : Mars and Venus, sun and moon, day and night, land and sea; “Male and female he created them.”

In this way, Lewis’s concept of complementarity is related to his concept of the Tao. Our world is infused with objective meaning, including complementarity. And all of it demands a certain value response. Whether or not we act accordingly, there are ways of living and moving and having our being in the world that are fitting, and there are many ways that are not. When we downplay or ignore the Tao, or in this case the differences between male and female, we hinder ourselves and limit our true potential as created beings. Our differences aren’t just roles, or masks that can be put on or put off. They are part and parcel with reality.

One of the besetting sins Lewis observed and frequently addressed in his writing was the slow yet steady push toward male-female interchangeability, a trend that has only accelerated since. I think Lewis intuitively understood that a society’s failure to maintain and celebrate distinctions in the sexes paves the way for civilizational collapse.

A strange ideological bedfellow made this same point decades later. Feminist Camille Paglia’s 1990 Yale dissertation-turned-book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, examines historical movements toward androgyny.^[6] And at a Battle of Ideas forum, she gave a talk titled, “Lesson from History: Transgender Mania is Sign of Cultural Collapse” in which she made this point: “The movement towards androgyny occurs in late phases of culture, as a civilization is starting to unravel. You can find it again and again and again through history.”

Lewis understood this intuitively, and he wielded his pen to try and turn back the unravelling. Will we listen? Perhaps we are convinced about the ought-ness that exists in God creating us male and female. Perhaps we are convinced of the problem confronting us in the push toward androgyny and male-female interchangeability. But what would it look like for men to lean into their masculinity, and women to lean into their femininity, and for there to be mutual appreciation of the differences, instead of either dismissive denigration (misogyny) or unnatural envy (feminism, transgenderism, homosexuality, etc.)?

In other words, what does a healthy masculinity and femininity look like? One can almost hear Lewis’s struggle to concretely define masculinity and femininity in Ransom’s words quoted above, where he assigns impressions to Malacandra and Perelenadra: rhythm vs. melody, quantitative vs. accentual, etc. In fact, this may be one of the reasons Lewis chose the structure and setting of the Ransom trilogy, to “show” rather than “tell” via literary expression more masculine and feminine forms.

Masculinity and femininity are notoriously hard to define. They are easier to recognize than to prescribe, and they are often recognized in relief to each other — you could even say in complement to the other. But just because they are hard to define doesn’t mean they aren’t important. G. K. Chesterton, for instance, insists that words that are hard to define are not necessarily vague or unimportant, but perhaps some of the most important words we use. As Chesterton argues in his biography of Charles Dickens,

Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word ‘indefinable’ with the word ‘vague.’ If someone speaks of a spiritual fact as ‘indefinable’ we promptly picture something misty, a cloud with indeterminate edges. But this is an error even in commonplace logic. The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact. . . . The indefinable is the indisputable. . . . There are popular expressions which everyone uses and no one can explain; which the wise man will accept and reverence, as he reverence desire or darkness or any elemental thing. The prigs of the debating club will demand that he should define his terms. And, being a wise man, he will flatly refuse. This first inexplicable term is the most important term of all. The word that has no definition is the word that has no substitute. If a man falls back again and again on some such word as ‘vulgar’ or ‘manly,’ do not suppose that the word means nothing because he cannot say what it means.^[7]

Ransom himself experiences something similar when he attempts to describe his voyage to Venus, which Lewis describes as “rather too vague… to put into words.” Ransom reflects, “On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too definite for language”

Perhaps this is God’s design for masculinity and femininity, that they may only be truly appreciated alongside their complement. To fully know the meaning of masculine, one must have a concept of feminine. To know “hard,” one must be able to comprehend “soft.” After all, how can “day” be understood without “night”? “Land” without “sea”? It is no accident that we arrive back at the roots of the created order. “Male and female he created them,” after the pattern of the rest of creation — heaven and earth, sun and moon, land and sea, masculine and feminine.

As I write about masculinity in Life on the Silent Planet, an edited volume of essays on Lewis’s Ransom trilogy, I think its complement in femininity can be inferred:

An exact definition of masculinity is elusive for another reason: masculinity is not self-referential. It is outwardly directed. It must be productive, active, oriented to something other than itself for it to bear fruit and to experience meaningful consummation. In many ways the essence of traditional masculine vocation, leadership, is only meaningful in relation to those led, protection to those protected, provision in relation to those provided for.^[8]

Lewis touches on this theme of outwardness in relation to masculinity in his book Mere Christianity when he discusses headship in marriage. Even back in the 1950s, when his radio broadcasts were organized for publication, Lewis acknowledged the unpopularity of the Christian teaching of male headship in marriage. This fact alone should cause us to consider his intentionality in including this unpopular teaching, nevertheless, in his account of a mere Christianity.

In defense of the historic Christian doctrine on marriage, Lewis anticipates two questions: Why does there need to be a “head” in marriage instead of pure equality? And why does it have to be the man?

Lewis’s first answer gets to the nature of the one-flesh union and the necessity of husband and wife staying together — the necessity of permanence — even in the face of deep disagreement. If there are two heads in a marriage, and not one, inevitably there will arise two directions that tend to pull the marriage apart. But when he answers the second question as to why the man must be the head and not the woman, Lewis calls the arrangement “unnatural” when wives rule over their husbands. Why is it unnatural? Lewis writes,

The relations of the family to the outer world — what might be called its foreign policy — must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to outsiders.^[9]

In this, we see Lewis reflecting, probably both consciously and subconsciously, on the connection between masculinity, manhood, and outwardness, as compared to the inwardness of femininity. This difference is rooted in the very nature of the sexes, which can be observed both biologically and temperamentally, and how this difference is expressed linguistically.

Consider how our bodies are differently organized for sexual reproduction. Men reproduce externally, women internally. The Designer is not arbitrary. God creates the man from the ground to work and keep the ground; he builds the woman from the side of the man to help the man and to “house” future men and women. Externality and internality are not accidental to male and female. Form and function are mutually illuminating — even the sexless oyarsa that Ransom sees on Perelandra exhibit forms that hint at their differences. Malacandra wields a spear, and Perelandra has open palms. Prominence and receptivity, respectively.

We are not here attempting a definite definition of masculinity and femininity — just the opposite. Instead, with Lewis, we are merely commending them as good, as recognizable, and as necessary to embrace as males and females created in God’s image wanting to live in line with God’s creation.

If we gain a vision for God’s created order, and a vision for masculinity and femininity, we will be ready to live out this vision in community.

Life in Community

As Professor Michael Ward points out, the three books in Lewis’s Ransom trilogy play out over a meta-structure of dramatized masculinity in book one, femininity in book two, and matrimony — not an exact synonym of marriage, but related — in book three.^[10] This structure is beautiful and fitting with God’s design — our maleness and femaleness, after all, as Jesus teaches in Matthew 19, bear witness to God’s institution of marriage. And ultimately marriage, according to the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 5, points in mystery to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and his love for the church.

Single or married, we are all called to esteem marriage for just this reason, as the author of the Book of Hebrews commands. But a closer look at the third book in the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, reveals complementary arcs in the marriage of the two main characters, Mark and Jane. As the book progresses, each bends away from stunted versions of masculinity and femininity toward a full embrace of complementarity. Mark, who is previously an unassertive workaholic, learns to shun passivity toward his wife and to live out self-sacrificial leadership. Jane, a feminist careerist, learns to joyfully submit to her husband and embrace her natural femininity. Along the way, Lewis makes sure the reader does not mistake him for promoting degenerate stereotypes, as hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity are lampooned in the story’s villains.

The turning point for Jane’s character is especially instructive. It comes in a conversation with Ransom, who is now the Director at St. Anne’s. Jane is speaking to Ransom about her own marriage to Mark. “I thought love meant equality,” she says to him, “and free companionship.”

“Ah, equality!” replies the Director. “We must talk of that some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”

What is deeper than equality? Lewis has already given us the answer in the trilogy’s very structure: complementarity. In the same conversation, the Director gives Jane marital advice. She admits to him that she doesn’t share his view of marriage. Ransom’s response is striking: “[I]t is not a question of how you or I look on marriage but how my Masters look on it”^[11]

Even still, Jane is hampered by her feminism, fixated with tunnel vision on equality. This fixation makes the Director’s advice to her all the more jarring. Obedience, he recommends to her. Obedience and humility.

At this point in the book, the reader can almost hear the last gasp of feminism leave Jane, while something deeper and primal begins to stir in her. Lewis, in his own creative way, has simply exegeted in narrative form the Bible’s own teaching and rationale on marriage and complementarity, which itself is rooted in God’s original design for male and female in Genesis 1 and 2. It is not a question of how you or I look on it, but how the Master does. And the Master has told us in Scripture how he views the husband and wife in marriage. He is the one who made them male and female, after all.

Further Up and Further In

At heart, Lewis was a conservative and a traditionalist, an old soul and a “dinosaur,” as he once referred to himself. But he wasn’t a reactionary. He didn’t define his position over against the “progress” of his day, although functionally that’s where he often found himself. Instead, he saw himself as holding onto the good, true, and beautiful, because that is what God revealed.

To take a step away from what has been revealed by God in Scripture and nature has unintended consequences, especially when it comes to marriage and how we live as male and female. Lewis telegraphed where the sexual progressives of his day were headed in his essay “Priestesses in the Church,” where he stridently opposed female ordination to the priesthood in his beloved Anglican church:

The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purpose of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters.^[12]

Neuters. Androgyny. Non-binary. This is where Lewis knew we would land if we pursued the path of interchangeability. As we look around today, we can’t help but admit he was right. But this doesn’t mean we can’t still return. We should heed Lewis’s concluding words in this essay:

We cannot shuffle or tamper so much. With the Church, we are farther in: for there we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us.^[13]

Further up and further in. This is how we escape Eschropolis on this our Silent Planet. As we press into God and his revelation, we find the meaning of masculinity and femininity, as well as the meaning of marriage.

Like Lewis, I don’t believe God created an egalitarian world. But I do believe the world God created is good. And we would do well to receive and celebrate it as such, including the differences between men and women, and stop shuffling and tampering so much.

^[1] This essay is adapted from a lecture originally delivered to the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society in Oxford, England at the invitation of Dr. Michael Ward.

^[2] C.S. Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress, Wade Annotated Edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 41.

^[3] C. S. Lewis, “Membership,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), 114–15.

^[4] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947), 43–44.

^[5] C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1943), 171–72.

^[6] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

^[7] G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (London: Methuen, 1906), 1–2.

^[8] Colin J. Smothers, “Men Are From Mars: Masculinity in Out of the Silent Planet,” in Life on the Silent Planet: Essays on Christian Living from C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, ed. Rhys Laverty (Whitefish, MT: Davenant Press, 2024).

^[9] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952), 63.

^[10] Michael Ward, “Selling the Well and the Wood: That Hideous Strength and the Abolition of Matrimony” in Life on the Silent Planet: Essays on Christian Living from C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, ed. Rhys Laverty (Whitefish, MT: Davenant Press, 2024).

^[11] C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1945), 148–49.

^[12] C. S. Lewis, “Priestesses in the Church?,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970), 236.

^[13] Ibid.