C.S. Lewis on the True Nature of Morality and the Sexes

Editor’s Note: The following article appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Eikon.

In Book I of Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that moral/ethical standards are not arbitrary but connected to a universal moral/ethical code. Since that code transcends any given time or place, it must have an origin that is supernatural and meta-physical. If it were a product of nature, it could not stand outside and above it; if it were man-made, it would not possess the cross-cultural binding power it does.

All people know this standard exists, for it defines the way we expect other people to treat us, even if we do not reciprocate in kind. If this universal, cross-cultural code did not not exist, or were it not engraved in the conscience of all men, then the Nuremberg Trials, during which Nazi war criminals were tried for crimes against humanity, could not have taken place.

Many European philosophers had long prior embraced naturalism, relativism, and nihilism, but when Europe mounted the trials, they proclaimed to the world their belief in three things: 1) there are actions that are objectively wrong; 2) the Nazis knew such actions were wrong; 3) they did those actions anyway. Of course, the Nazis could have claimed that they did not know that what they were doing was wrong. Had they done that, however, the court would not have let them go. They would have taken their ignorance of right and wrong as proof that they were sociopaths and put them in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Many in Lewis’s day, as well as many today, claimed that this universal moral/ethical law code is neither divine nor transcendent, but a product of natural instincts we share with the animal kingdom. Lewis concedes that we all possess, and are driven by, natural instincts, but that is not the whole story: “If two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature’s mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses. You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same.”^[1]

And do not think, Lewis adds, that the fact that we must teach this Moral Law to our children proves it to be a creation of man’s design rather than a given — something we argue from rather than for. Those who think “the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education…are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. But, of course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it.”^[2] It is true that prophets and holy men often play a major role in formulating and passing down the Moral Law to the next generation, but they no more invent it than do teachers and parents. If they did, they would be false prophets.

In the second chapter of The Abolition of Man, Lewis gives a name to this Moral Law that often confuses Christian readers, especially evangelicals. Lewis dubs it the Tao, a word he borrows from the ancient Chinese philosophy/religion of Taoism, known in the West by its iconic use of yin and yang. Why would Lewis use a word from an Eastern school of thought that does not think in theistic, much less monotheistic, terms? To show that the Moral Law written in our hearts is indeed universal, crossing barriers of East and West, as well as non-theism and theism.

Knowledge, both intuitive and intellectual, of the Tao is a defining element of being human. The fact that there exist sociopaths who lack it is the exception that proves the rule. We immediately recognize the sociopath, as we do the cripple, as a person who lacks a mechanism (conscience; working legs) that is the natural possession of all human beings. We could not measure, or recognize, brokenness, disease, or injustice if the standard for wholeness, health, and justice were not engraved in our conscience. The ancient Taoists themselves understood this. Though yin and yang do not embody a universal, divinely-delivered moral code like the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, the Taoists perceived behind yin-yang a shadowy Way (the meaning of the word Tao) that transcended both.

To ensure his readers understand what he means by Tao, Lewis helpfully provides a list of synonyms: “This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and 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.”^[3] Lewis’s Tao is not a hidden, esoteric system of morality or code of ethics. It is simply that system and code that has always been recognized under various names.

In “The Poison of Subjectivism” (anthologized in Christian Reflections), Lewis offers two propositions to explain the nature of the traditional values that rest on, and flow from, the Tao:

• The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary colour in the spectrum.
• Every attempt to do so consists in arbitrarily selecting some one maxim of traditional morality, isolating it from the rest, and erecting it into an unum necessarium [Latin for “one thing needful”; see Luke 10:42].^[4]

The Tao is our sole and final source of transcendent values, binding codes, and fixed standards. And yet, history, especially modern history, is replete with ideologies (utilitarianism, Marxism, fascism, consumerism) that claim to have invented a new and better Tao. How can that be?

Lewis’s second proposition explains how: the “inventors” of those new ideologies simply removed one virtue or principle or dictum from the Tao and expanded it into a pseudo-Tao. The utilitarians did this with utility (the greatest good for the greatest number), the Marxists with equality, the fascists with national pride, and the consumerists with happiness. Tragically, in their pursuit of that isolated virtue, they were willing to break every other part of the Tao to achieve the triumph of utility, equality, national pride, or happiness. In modern America, such fragments from the Tao as patriotism, freedom, and individualism (on the right) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (on the left) continually threaten to unweave the unitary force of the Tao.

The importance of the Tao in reviving true (traditional, perennial, Judeo-Christian) morality in our country should be obvious. But does it have any bearing on one of the most contested areas of the church: the essential, God-given differences between the sexes? It does. For Lewis, the Tao is more than a list of dos and don’ts. It is a statement about the nature of reality. As such, it is more akin to gravity, the rotation of the earth, and the laws of thermodynamics than it is to fashionable political causes, the effects of socialization, or the laws of propriety. Of course, individuals and groups can marshal sociopolitical forces to refuse the “patriarchal tyranny” of “gender gravity,” but they will lose in the end — and they will do a lot of damage along the way.

We can no more invent a new Tao than we can redefine the nature and function of the sexes. God made us male and female (Gen 1:27) and decreed we should join in the complementary union of marriage (Gen 2:24). That these two statements from the opening chapters of the Bible are statements about reality is made clear by the stunning fact that Jesus directly quotes both when he is questioned about marriage (Matt 19:4-6). Jesus does not reference the social customs or sexual mores of first-century Palestine, but God-created realities about men and women.

That Lewis would agree with what I am here arguing is made clear in one of the most remarkable and beautiful passages in all his writings. In his novel Perelandra, Lewis takes us on a journey to Venus where he is vouchsafed a vision of the true and essential nature of masculinity and femininity as he gazes on the guardian spirits of Mars (Malacandra) and Venus (Perelandra).  

Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. 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. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity…. The two white creatures were sexless. But he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female). Malacandra seemed to him to have the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance, his eyes ever roaming the earth-ward horizon whence his danger came long ago…. But the eyes of Perelandra opened, as it were, inward, as if they were the curtained gateway to a world of waves and murmurings and wandering airs, of life that rocked in winds and splashed on mossy stones and descended as the dew and arose sunward in thin spun delicacy of mist.^[5]

Masculinity and femininity, far from social constructs or categories of oppression, are written into the very weave and fabric of reality. They are real, concrete, elemental things, not arbitrary accretions or frivolous window dressing. Masculinity and femininity run through every aspect of God’s good creation and do not confine themselves to male and female bodies.

Had Lewis written this passage today, he would have had to alter his word choice, since the word “gender” has been hijacked by those bent on emptying masculinity and femininity of their essential meaning and nature. The reason Lewis uses “gender” here is to try to find a way of expressing a deeper dichotomy that transcends even our biological differences. Masculine and feminine are fundamental, God-fashioned things that meet us on many levels, including the sexual distinctiveness of men and women.  

Sadly, the same kind of forces that have sought to fashion new-fangled Taos out of fragments of the old have attempted to do the same to the natural complementarity of the sexes. Removing from the Tao the virtue of equality (expressed in its fullest form in Gal 3:28), the would-be re-makers of essential masculinity and femininity have expanded it into the idol of egalitarianism and then, in the name of that idol, deconstructed all that is most real and essential about our God-given sexual nature. They are doomed to fail in their project, but not before causing serious damage to men and women, marriage and family, church and society, politics and economics.

Lewis and the Tao would beckon us back to reality — and sanity!

[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 22.

[2] Ibid., 24.

[3] C. S.  Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 56.

[4] C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, edited by Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), 75.

[5] C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 200-201.