What C. S. Lewis Actually Believed About Men and Women -- with Joshua Herring

[00:00:00] What did C. S. Lewis think about gender? The answer might surprise you. He had a very nuanced view, but also a very rooted view of gender as part of understanding all of reality as a gift. That gender and sex and being a male or female is something that we receive with gratitude from God. It's not something that we define for ourselves. And the way that Lewis approaches this is very interesting. He uses narrative to draw out that vision of creation as a good thing.

[00:00:29] Something designed by God and something that we do not control, but rather we receive and we give ourselves to. In this episode, I'm interviewing Josh Herring on his new book, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve, which is about C. S. Lewis' vision of gender and especially how that interacts with some feminist theory. Some of the ideas that are really part of a lot of the gender confusion today and a lot of the conflicts about gender today.

[00:00:55] So we're going to look at C. S. Lewis' fiction work, the Chronicles of Narnia, the space trilogy, to really look at how his view of creation as a gift, his view of gender and sex permeates everything that he writes and provides a powerful vision that can be very helpful for us today. Enjoy this episode. You're listening to That'll Preach. We are here with Josh Herring, and he is the director of the Logris Institute.

[00:01:22] And he's got a new book out with Davenant Press called Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, talking about some of C. S. Lewis' ideas regarding gender, especially through his fiction works, which I think will be a really fascinating conversation to have. But Josh, thank you for coming on to the show.

[00:01:42] So excited to be here with you today, Brian. I don't know if this is where your show's title comes from, but I had a seminary professor who I took preaching one and two with him. And if we ever had a good illustration, he would always say, That'll Preach in the best good old boy North Carolina voice that I can't really do. But you've got to imagine him being like, That'll Preach! That's what comes to my mind when I see your titles. I'm excited to be here.

[00:02:07] That's great. Well, that's awesome. And, you know, I think there's a lot that'll preach in this book that you've gotten into, you know, I mean, like you were saying, and it's every kind of homiletics class talks about the power of storytelling, power of imagery, symbolism to just evoke the mind and the heart in so many powerful ways.

[00:02:25] And C.S. Lewis was just a master of that. So what got you interested in studying C.S. Lewis, especially with regard to his view of gender and dynamics of gender? Well, it started in a way, way back when I got into Lewis, not in a scholarly way, but just by reading it, because my mom gave me a set of the Chronicles of Narnia.

[00:02:51] When I read my first sentence, I was I was a homeschool kid. I had done my sing, spell, read and write racetrack thing where I'd moved through the different phonetic symbols. And when I finished that last that first sentence, she just didn't miss a beat, dropped the box set of all seven Chronicles of Narnia on the desk. I devoured those books over the next 15 years and over and over and over. I probably read Narnia, I don't know, 30, 40 times maybe.

[00:03:16] I just love those books. And by the time I got through graduate school and I was trying to finish my coursework at Faulkner University, I was trying to figure out what should I write on. I went through a few ideas that didn't work. I wanted to do something with Arthurian legend and that that didn't work because there's really about 20 people on the planet that want to read monographs about Arthurian legend. And I got kind of bored even talking about my ideas. I was like, well, no, I don't want to spend a year writing about an idea that's already kind of boring.

[00:03:46] And then I set up a tutorial. My program required us to set up tutorials with major professors so we would kind of read towards the dissertation. I hadn't really set up the dissertation topic. I told a guy named Ben Lockard I really wanted to read through almost everything Lewis wrote in a single semester. And he laughed at me and said, sure, go ahead, put it together. So I put together an incredibly ambitious syllabus that listed maybe 40 works that Lewis had written.

[00:04:16] And I think we read about 20 of them over a semester. So we got we made some good progress. And I just got really fascinated with what Lewis is talking about in Paralandra when it comes to gender. And it was this would have been 2021, 2022, somewhere in that academic year. And what today I think folks tend to call peak woke. I don't know if that's accurate, but that's the term I've heard for it lately.

[00:04:40] And Matt Walsh had already come out with what is a woman. Abigail Favale had written her Genesis of Gender. Abigail Schreier had come out with the book on irreversible damage. There just seemed to be all these takes that were really trying to articulate just what was bad on a consequential level with transgender. Well, in that context, I hit Lewis and Lewis talking about gender being more real than sex. And a direct quote from Paralandra. I'm like, what is he doing?

[00:05:09] And he he has Ransom say that he perceived the real meaning of gender. It's like, this is bizarre. And then I kept reading and there's this beautiful passage where Malacandra and Paralandra, the planetary spirit sort of angels incarnate. And they they clearly are kind of the masculine and the feminine. And Lewis is obviously doing a lot with that. And I brought that observation to class. And Dr. Lockard thought, you know, that's interesting.

[00:05:37] Read a lot of stuff other people have written about Lewis. Nobody really talks about this. And that was that's kind of the goal. That's the that's finding gold for a Ph.D. student. Right. We were like, OK, there's something I'm really interested in and an author that I love reading that nobody's written the book on yet. So I kind of went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out where where else does Lewis talk about gender? And it turns out that it's kind of all over the place in his his fiction, his nonfiction, his apologetics.

[00:06:05] And I had to abandon a an ambition of reading through all of his letters to see if he had extra insights in his letters. I'm sure there's stuff that's there. I just I just haven't gotten to it yet. So it really had a lot. I found I had a lot of material to work with and then started kind of working that into a dissertation. And it eventually grew into this book. Well, talk about the title Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve, because I think you're drawing that that's from Narnia.

[00:06:33] And you're talking about reading the Space Trilogy. And there are all these themes that are sort of baked into the way that Lewis tells a story. And that's a huge part of of reading. Well, is is I was going to say unearthed it in the sense of sort of abstract these notions. But really, the way that Lewis approaches, I think there's even a quote that the way that Lewis thought about one thing is way he thought about kind of everything or some some some something along those lines.

[00:07:02] So talk about that title. Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve. What what what why does that grip you? Well, I have to give credit where credit's due. I did not come up with the title. OK, that is that is a Reese Laverty contribution to this book project, I believe. Reese was the initial editor on this project. He accepted the book and I think he came up with the title. At the very least, he informed me that this was going to be the title. It's one of the things I didn't know until I got deeper into writing.

[00:07:30] But in most cases, authors don't get any kind of input into their titles unless they are already kind of a big name and have sort of right. Have a bit more power in negotiation. I'm a new author, so I had none. And but Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve is such a better title than I was going with some horribly academic Lewis, the anti-modernist colon three things Lewis hates about the world today. And it was it was it was a really bad title.

[00:08:00] Reese landed on this, I think, because it just shows up as soon as the Pevensies are in Narnia and the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. So that's like the initial response thing that Mr. Beaver calls them. And even that that Jotus, the White Witch, is worried about a son of Adam. Oh, no, there could be a door, a door to the world of men. This could wreck all, she says. And then it but it just runs straight through.

[00:08:26] It's even a place in the silver chair where it becomes really evident that the progressive education that Jill and Eustace are getting an experiment house is really bad. Because Jill has to ask, what does it mean to be a daughter of Eve? She doesn't know who Adam and Eve are. Lewis gives us a little parenthetical note that at Experiment House, they didn't read those kinds of books. They just would never run into that.

[00:08:50] So Lewis, I think, already has in view two things with that that I want the title to key into, even though I didn't come up with it. The first is that every human is either a son of Adam or a daughter of Eve. So we've already got and Lewis talks in I think this is in Magician's Nephew about how that's enough pride to raise the lowest beggar's head and enough humility to bow the neck of the proudest emperor.

[00:09:15] That we have we have all the glory of being made in the divine image paired with the shame of the fall. All of that belongs to all of us. But it's also a place where Lewis is also hinting at we are heirs of this tradition. And if we don't know this tradition, we really are robbed of something that rightly belongs to us. And he has that in view, I think, even with using that terminology. Maybe we could zoom out a little bit and just talk about the role of narrative.

[00:09:46] Why did you choose narrative to sort of be the thing that you planted your feet in, in terms of elaborating on Lewis's view of gender? Part of that is my own inclination, I suppose. I don't know if this is really a fair caricature and you're a pastor, you're a seminary guy. You may balk at this. I have a lot of seminary friends who don't like this this description.

[00:10:13] I found when I got to Southeastern Seminary that or Southeastern Baptist Seminary, there's a there's another Southeastern seminary that's different. When I got to seminary, I was surrounded by folks who had something of a what struck me as a scholastic orientation to theology. And they just wanted to drill down into the theological principles and vocabulary.

[00:10:36] And they sort of looked down on Joe Average for not being willing to dance in these intricate webs of scholastic theology. Now, these folks are very much on the Protestant side, so they would all balk a lot at being called scholastic. I came out of Hillsdale College not really knowing the language, but I was pretty heavily shaped by a bunch of professors who would call themselves Christian humanists.

[00:11:01] And I got to seminary and found that my my soul was shriveling a little bit because what I was asked to study were kind of the was the modern equivalent of reading Thomas Aquinas with a lot more Bible. But there was nothing to feed the imagination. There's no literature. There was nothing that engaged the imaginative sense, though. Scripture itself is filled with imaginative engagement.

[00:11:24] And then as I got into teaching, I spent 13 years teaching in a classical school context. I spent a lot of time in literature and discovered, actually, I just get really excited about novels and poetry and stories. And for years, I've loved Tolkien's essay on fairy stories.

[00:11:45] I think that's one of the best modern articulations of what exactly stories are doing and why stories tap into something that just didactic statements don't. Stories let us inhabit an imaginative world and they help us experience something without having to actually make those choices and go through those crises or that trauma. We can experience it imaginatively. And that changes us. It shapes us in a profound way.

[00:12:13] Well, I say all that to say I just like narrative and fiction and fantasy far more than I like essays and prose. I can I can work in those areas. I work through a lot of Lewis's nonfiction stuff, but I just get really excited about his fiction. So as I was looking at this and the deeper I got into Lewis, you mentioned the Owen Barfield line earlier that everything Lewis thought is in everything that Lewis wrote.

[00:13:13] I found that to be true. For a dystopian thriller. And that's going to be that hideous strength. And both of them are richer and merit far more study than they appear to on the surface or your first read through. But they they address both sides of this. And you get the same thing where it says essay priestesses on the church is the place where he lays out his approach to gender just with absolute clarity.

[00:13:35] But then he illustrates it by showing you all of that fear, all that theory through the plot of Paralandrum. So I think to really understand Lewis, you've got to know both. But I prefer his his fiction and his fantasy on a personal level. So I hope that answers your question. I may have. Yeah. Well, I mean, I so I went to school to learn filmmaking. And so that's my background of film and art and writing and all these types of things. And so I appreciate your approach.

[00:14:05] And I think sometimes you mentioned the scholastic mind or the seminary mind. There is this fear of, you know, movies or in stories. It's almost like they're just about emotional manipulation. They're not about truth propositions. And I think what you said is actually what great art is. It helps you inhabit something real. Right. It allows you to engage with something substantial in a powerful way that's actually transformative.

[00:14:32] And I do think that in terms of gender, we talk about headship and submission and, you know, do not permit a woman to teach and like the exegesis. And it almost seems like not the exegesis is important, but it almost seems like all those arguments just reduce to just the syntax of those Greek phrases. And I think it can't reduce to that.

[00:14:56] I think those play a role, but it almost makes it just seem like we're just arguing these propositions when I think what you're talking about is the way that we actually come to understand a lot of things is by inhabiting them through our life, through the narrative of our life. And it's almost something as big as gender. It's almost so big that you can't make it into this kind of scholastic syllogism. And there's so much to it that you can only sort of angle at.

[00:15:24] And I think art and narrative and all these kinds of things help us to grasp those realities more profoundly. Why don't we talk about that, though? If I can bounce off that for a second. Yeah. I think part of what Lewis is doing, I mean, he's certainly capable of engaging on the level of debate. Sure. And he could he could throw down and he could make if he were alive today, which is dangerous to say.

[00:15:50] But if he were alive today, I'm sure he could give a beautiful answer to why the Archbishop of Canterbury cannot be a woman. Right. I'm sure he could do that. But that's not what he ends up doing. Like what he does instead. And this is what this is what I figured out by the end of the book. I mean, is it like gender is really important for Lewis, but it's really an example of the broader argument.

[00:16:12] And the broader argument is that all of creation is, in fact, God's design and that we flourish in as much as we live in alignment with God's design. And he's showing us that in all these different ways. Because I think I think at the point where you find yourself in an argument with, say, hypothetically, a feminist scholar who wants to engage about whether or not it is correct for a woman to teach Sunday school in church.

[00:16:40] If that's your argument, I don't know how as a conservative man you end up winning that argument. At best, you kind of debate to a standstill. But what you what Lewis does is take it out of that space and say, well, let's let's not talk about whether or not this woman should teach Sunday school. Let's talk about how God has created all things and whether or not there is an order to the way things are and whether or not we correspond to that order.

[00:17:07] And when we frame it that way, I think Lewis just takes our modernistic like the modern mind wants a simple answer that is a fact, factual principle. And Lewis is going to say, well, hold on, let's let's throw this back to a pre-modern stance. And let's look at this vast cosmos that Maleldil has made. And how do you see the dance of all the different orders in reality? How does that work out?

[00:17:34] And suddenly we're having a far more interesting conversation. We still might not have an answer at the end about whether or not this lady should teach Sunday school. But we're having a far more interesting conversation that's not so likely just to end in deadlock. Yeah, I agree. I agree. It's almost like we have to be even situated to have the conversation correctly or the way that that it deserves. So describe what is Lewis's take on masculine and femininity?

[00:18:03] Now we're just going to get classic and just going to give me a definition, right? But but what is he angling at when he when he's talking about like what's the idea or the reality that he's angling at with his descriptions and his character storytelling of what is masculinity? What is femininity? So the place I want to look at two places to discuss this. I'm going to start with fiction and then we'll back up and go to the nonfiction route.

[00:18:28] But if you go to Paralandrum, second volume in the Ransom trilogy or the Space Trilogy, whichever whichever name you like. But in Paralandrum, we have our protagonist. Elwyn Ransom is on a water world with floating islands. And there he meets the lady. She eventually learns that her name is Tenadryl. And the lady we we the readers quickly become aware she is kind of an Eve figure. She's an unfallen.

[00:18:57] She's going to be the unfallen mother of all future Paralandrians. The tour of the king is off scene. He doesn't show up till the very end. But in his descriptions of Tenadryl, Lewis gives us a lot of deeply feminine characteristics that the mother figure here has. She she knows that she is to have lots of children and she will bring forth life.

[00:19:23] Now, by the end of the novel, we have these two angelic spirits that incarnate. And it's in that context that Lewis really kind of makes clear what he's up to. I say kind of because Lewis occasionally has this mode of writing that is almost mystical. It's almost poetic. It's it's still prose. But you might need to read this section four or five times to to really kind of see it in your head and grasp what he's doing. It's not immediately clear.

[00:19:51] But what's happening there is that the spiritual beings who oversee each of these planets have to take physical form. Malacandra is the governing spirit of the planet Mars in this context called Malacandra. Paralandra is the governing spirit of the planet Paralandra or Venus. I hear you have Mars and Venus as Lewis is being here. Very classical, the quintessential masculine warrior versus the feminine lover.

[00:20:18] And these spirits have to take form and they rotate through a dozen different shapes to try and show Ransom something that will reveal themselves while not being offensive or overpowering to Tor and Tenadril. And it's in that context that all the lines I quoted earlier happen. Ransom says he saw there the real meaning of gender. He saw that gender was more real than sex.

[00:20:45] And that sets up a four, maybe five page section where Lewis is kind of being very poetic. He talks about all of reality is divided between these two polarities, the masculine and the feminine. Well, the masculine, it becomes kind of becomes clear, is an outward orientation for protection and defense of the home.

[00:21:08] You have Malacandra ultimately incarnating as sort of a male form without genitalia. It's really key for the overall argument. Neither of these figures have genitalia. So it's not pure biology. They're not, they wouldn't pass a DNA test to get into the Olympics, either of them. So, but then you have this masculine figure whose eyes are going outward as if looking for an ancient foe. He's looking out towards the horizon.

[00:21:37] But then you have Paralandrum who kind of, she incarnates into this clearly female shape, but again, no genitalia. And her eyes are going inward and they thrum with life. Her eyes are swimming. And you have all of these different adjectives that are attached to each. Malacandra gets a lot of rigid language, a lot of hard language. He's firm.

[00:22:04] Paralandra is moist, is fluid, is soft, is opening, is welcoming, is inviting. What Lewis is doing here. This, this part requires getting out of Paralandra to really trace, but Lewis was a big fan of several of the Florentine Neoplatonists. He was, he thought that he was himself really partial to Plato. If you go back to the abolition of man, he has this great description of the soul. He doesn't footnote it there.

[00:22:31] It's drawn straight from Republic book five. And Lewis doesn't really even textually say that's where it's from. But if you've read the Republic, like, oh, here it is. Lewis was a big fan. The key for, from Plato that comes through to his approach to gender is that for Plato, the idea is more real than the physical expression of the idea. So what Socrates says when he's describing why he's so excited to die, because he will finally get to ultimate reality. And that's where he'll see the forms themselves.

[00:23:01] For Lewis, the masculine is a form that then takes expression in geography and in biology. The feminine is an idea that then takes expression in geography and in biology. So this is why for, this is why you get kind of a general agreement across Western literature. Trees are masculine, big, tall, pointy things. Rocks are generally masculine. Mountains are generally masculine.

[00:23:31] Valleys are generally feminine. The ocean is generally thought to be feminine. Rivers are generally thought to be masculine. And there's obviously some ambiguity in these symbols and how you read them. But that's typically kind of how it goes. Now, that's kind of what Lewis is setting forth. And he then kind of works that way out to present the idea that's in this broader context that all of reality, all of creation is a gift.

[00:24:00] The great temptation that Unmanned, the devil figure, presents to Tenadril, the queen of Paralandra, the Eve figure. He presents her temptation after temptation after temptation to reject her place in Malaldil's divine order, what Al Mohler might call the creational design. She has a particular place. She has a particular place. Her place is subordinate to her husband, Tor.

[00:24:27] And Tor has a particular glory that's different than the particular glory that belongs to Tenadril. The temptation for both is to reject where they have been placed with their glories and their roles and their responsibilities and instead prefer something else. Now, I think what Lewis is doing inside of that broader argument is suggesting that, in fact, the heart of gender is recognizing that God has made men to be a certain kind of thing. We do have certain roles. We do have certain jobs.

[00:24:56] God has made women to be a certain kind of thing. They have certain roles. They have certain jobs. And part of our growing to adulthood is unfolding those responsibilities and learning what those are by through Scripture, through the book of nature, through life, through the combined wisdom of humanity. All of that helps us understand who and what we are. I said 10 minutes ago I was going to back out to Lewis doing this in nonfiction. I want to back to do that now.

[00:25:23] In his essay, Priestesses in the Church, Lewis uses this idea to explain why women can't be priests in the Anglican Church. And he does that by explaining that ultimately the priest is supposed to be a representative of God to the congregation. And God is the ultimate masculine. All being radiates from God and all of creation in this sense is feminine in relation to God. We receive our being from God himself.

[00:25:52] And as such, men are the ones who correspond to God. And Lewis says it is no answer to a bad man to have him be replaced by one who is not a man at all. A woman can't be a priest because she cannot resemble the masculine. Now, a bad man can certainly be a bad priest and still resemble the masculine in that way. This is where Lewis most clearly lays it out.

[00:26:19] The masculine is ultimately these are directional terms in this idea sense where the masculine refers to being proceeding from and the feminine refers to receiving that being. Now, you see those same ideas without getting too crass, but your tagline is somewhat irreverent, I think. And you're go for it. Go for it. I mean, you've got penises are outward and vaginas are inward. And this is literally Lewis's idea.

[00:26:49] It's not that not that creative in one sense. He's literally arguing that the biology follows the idea. And the if we then this is why for Lewis, it does matter that we hold on to that word gender. Last thing I want to say about all of the stuff with Lewis's approach to gender is that he is not super prescriptive in terms of where he thinks this goes.

[00:27:12] I found this really interesting because I kind of expected to have Lewis be the stereotype that feminist critics like to paint him as. We're like Lewis is kind of against women, doesn't want women in scholarship and all that stuff. That's not true at all to start with, but it certainly doesn't even fit with his theory.

[00:27:27] What Lewis's theory leads to is recognizing if these things are true, then there's a seemingly infinite number of ways that people could apply the gender that they're given in the different roles that God has placed them. So it's entirely possible that a woman could say, hey, I have this job opportunity. I feel the calling to provide for my family.

[00:27:52] So I'm taking this job opportunity, not because I was made to be in charge, because this is how I actually care for the little people that God has given me. You could have a you could have a father make the opposite call and say, well, actually, the way I provide and protect for my family is recognizing that my wife is a doctor and my job is to stay home with the kids for these years. It's not it's not as cut and dried as like men should be out in the farm and women should be in the kitchen.

[00:28:19] What I do think it gives rise to is, if this is true, it means that we have to actually wrestle with the fact that this is part of our nature as human beings. And if you have women who actually do have an internal essence that drives them to bring forth life and to care for others, if they ignore that or suppress that, eventually that causes unhappiness.

[00:28:43] You do have men who are called to provide and protect and to be on the lookout for dangers that are threatening the home. But if they don't do that, eventually that will cause unhappiness. Because Lewis's argument is not anything nearly so simple as men should do X and women should do Y. Instead, he's speaking to a truth about our nature as what does it mean to be made in God's image as men and as women. So that's my hopefully not too long explanation.

[00:29:12] No, that's great. I think what's helpful about that is you're almost playing the wrong game if you're always just like, what's exactly what's what's like the building code for this? What are the exact things you can and can, you know, all that stuff? And you're almost adopting a very modern mindset where even just when you talked about gendered things in nature, trees are masculine, you know, and rocks are masculine, all these other things. I think you mentioned ships are feminine, you know, in your book.

[00:29:45] And my modern brain is just like, no, they're just molecules. They're just molecules in a particular shape. And we just project on these ideas, these silly ideas onto the onto this amorphous mass of things that just happen to be collected in this way. And I'm like, wow, that's that's just a very modern programming. And I even think with men and women, they're interchangeable. It's just a different composition of organs and a different composition of things. And as long as they can do the thing, you know, it doesn't matter what they symbol.

[00:30:11] What is even when you said, you know, only male priests can symbolize it, but sort of masculine authority. It's like, well, you honestly think, well, on their CV, they have the same accomplishments and they can be. And it's like we were we don't we think these ideas of symbolism are just magic, fake. You know, the real stuff is just molecules and atoms and and, you know, and I realize like if you just argue of just, well, maybe this is OK, that's not in this and this.

[00:30:40] You're still kind of buying into this very, I don't say scientific, but it's sort of like that. Just a very materialistic mindset that misses stepping back and going. What if there's just like a way that we are and let's get that right. Right. And then we can figure out exceptions in a sense or we can figure out how how things can look a certain way. But I think today there's so much confusion about gender that we're desperately just trying to say, let's just make a rule.

[00:31:06] Let's just say it's this and it's that and it's that because it's much harder to kind of scale back and step back from all of these other things that are forming or thinking about this area. Yeah. One thing I wanted to kind of going off of that, you mentioned the feminist critics of Lewis and what's interesting about your book is you spent a lot of it talking about. I'm going to butcher names. Simone de Beauvoir. Is that is that her last name or the real?

[00:31:32] The real French is Beauvoir. Well, there's there's her and then Judith Butler, who might be a little more well known. But you spent a lot of time talking about them. And I think it's interesting because you you trace out the power of narrative and the way that they lay out their vision of gender and sex. And I think that's an interesting thing where, again, it's it's never narrative versus something else.

[00:31:57] It's that everybody has a mythology, you know, that kind of shapes the way you view the world. And that's no different for some of these radical feminists. And so so talk a little bit about what that the importance of that section and some of the ideas that are important for understanding how they view gender. One piece that I ran into years ago that I had in mind when I wrote that chapter was a presentation by a Heritage Foundation scholar.

[00:32:25] I won't name him because he's a he's a friend and he does good work. But this was this was not a I was one of those grad students in the back thinking, no, you didn't mention the names I wanted you to mention. And this is why your presentation is bad. I'm sure it was better than I remember. But he focused entirely on the downstream effects of transgender surgery without without focusing at all on the fact that we are in a position where,

[00:32:52] as Carl Truman put it, a man can ask can say, I feel like I'm a woman trapped in a man's body and everyone just kind of smiles and nods. But where you can say that without having ever taken a gender theory class. Well, we're in a position that position. From at least 80 years of bad gender theory. And I don't think you can actually just speak to the consequences without really looking at that theory.

[00:33:21] So if I'm going to propose that Lewis is offering us a better way to talk about human nature, specifically in the realm of gender, I wanted to outline. And that's really all it is, because I didn't want to. I've not read everything either of those ladies wrote. I don't really plan to. But I did read one book in full from each of them to be able to write that chapter.

[00:33:41] And I think what they do in that is create an incredibly powerful myth of femininity in particular that has just entered the zeitgeist so much. So I haven't done this, but someday if I ever have time, I would love to kind of go through the early seasons of The Simpsons and pull out all the clips where Lisa Simpson just espouses some piece of feminist theory that then spreads across millions of viewers.

[00:34:10] It's that kind of thing where now if you are the sort of person who would take a woman's studies class, you're definitely going to get to know Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, his names. Most of us are never going to do that, but we're still affected by their ideas. So de Beauvoir was in one sense just a fascinating, interesting lady in a really gross kind of way.

[00:34:32] She had this on again, off again, pluralistic relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre in post-World War II France. She's weird on all kinds of levels. But she wrote the original book of Second Wave Feminism that just took off and has been a foundational work. Somewhere in the book, I footnote the proof that this is still a foundational work for feminist studies because it's just the thing that everybody has read.

[00:35:01] Across 700 pages, de Beauvoir builds an incredibly powerful myth arguing that womanhood is constructed by all the many ways that both women and men oppress girls who are growing into women. And this is something that de Beauvoir is trying to liberate people from. All the old sexual morality codes are some of those forms of oppression. Babies are also a form of oppression.

[00:35:32] By the end of the book, de Beauvoir proposes the idea that for women to have full equality, that full equality has to be sexual and it has to be economic, which is why she argues simultaneously for free and easy access abortion, but also for an equal number of brothels for women made up of male prostitutes. That was interesting. Women can have their fun.

[00:35:58] She literally talks about women should be able to basically have one night stands as easily as men do without any threat of getting pregnant. Yeah. But the other piece of her theory that I think has just permeated the modern mentality is that personhood is defined by your ability to earn a paycheck. And so for women to be full persons, they must be able to earn a paycheck and it must be equal to the paycheck that a man would get. And so she has all kinds of evidence for, well, I say evidence.

[00:36:27] One of the problems of this book is that there are no footnotes. There's no research. There's literally just her assertion. One of my, I quoted one of them in there, but I did. She has, she kind of makes up all of these myths almost as if they're, as if you would think this was coming from some ethnography, from a South Pacific tribe that has some weird story. She tells this myth of a people that believe the vagina will bite the penis in half as it, as a girl is deflowered.

[00:36:56] And that's why she bleeds at first intercourse. But she doesn't tell us where that's from or who's really saying any of these things. Instead, she just asserts that that's the story. She goes through at an incredibly, I mean, just painstakingly ugly detail. She makes the process of growing into a woman and of conceiving a child, of bearing a child, going through menopause. She describes all of these things in the worst light possible. And she does it in a way you finish the book.

[00:37:26] You're like, man, terrible. Yeah. And so that's, that's debouvoir. And she believes that the answer to this is that we need a policy that creates economic equality. And we need technology to basically take over the raising of babies and possibly the having of babies so that women are no longer enslaved by their biology. This is where one of the long-term goals of radical feminism has been the creation of

[00:37:53] creches and government paid daycare so that women can be free to work for the man in the office and so on. And Judith Butler intentionally links her book, Gender Trouble, back to Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex. And she carries that argument forward. I don't spend nearly as much time on Butler because her prose is terrible and her ideas, I don't think, are actually that interesting.

[00:38:20] But she is an incredibly influential voice in graduate studies across the last 25 to 50 years. You just don't really get through grad school in the 21st century without working with Judith Butler if you're in any kind of secular setting. In Gender Trouble, she argues that, in fact, gender is a social construct to the extent that gender is a script. And it's a script we're all handed as if we're actors in a play.

[00:38:48] And if you're going to be a courageous person, you need to reject someone else's script and you need to write your own script. And you enact your personhood through constructing your own identity. This, I'm sure, sounds very familiar because it's the same story we've all heard throughout postmodernity. Judith Butler was writing about this in the early 1990s. So these ideas, I think, just have permeated our... They start in academia.

[00:39:18] They then permeate pop culture. They permeate the publishing field. They permeate film, film criticism. And Lewis is over here, I think, basically erecting a massive shredding device to this idea way before the bad ideas were popular. Because all of this is the result of the modernist assertion that we can make reality conform to our desires.

[00:39:46] And Lewis's big insight, if he's got a singular insight, is that we must conform ourselves to reality. This is what he's doing in the abolition of man. This is what all the heroes and heroines of Narnia are learning and through their adventures. This is what Ransom is doing in the Ransom Trilogy. This is what Lewis himself is doing in Surprised by Joy. And as he's encountering grief and thinking about miracles,

[00:40:08] it's all about him learning to submit to reality and in doing that, finding actual joy and real love in the process. That's a great way of putting it. And that was a huge education for me reading through some of the roots of these ideas, even things like you mentioned abortion. And I mean, that is one thing that comes clearly through Simone's work. Just really doesn't like children. And just like, I mean, just a disdain.

[00:40:37] And I think you see that spirit play out now where, I mean, I think it's just you have this widespread view that children are just always a burden. And even the idea of children as a gift that you can't control has been lost. And, you know, it's so funny because, like you said, a lot of your book is about receiving reality as a gift.

[00:41:04] You know, and that's when we are most human because that's what we are. We're creatures. And you kind of see in the debates about gender today, whether liberal, conservative, however you want to frame it, it's almost like you have this post-modernity, this modernist thinking, all these types of things that have just eradicated this garden. You know, it's just like all the crops are dead and the soil is bad. And the solution is we just start stapling plants into the ground.

[00:41:31] You know, like this is we got to get this back as opposed to being like, we got to like do the hard work of recultivating the soil. That's going to take a while. It's like before we figure out, OK, is daycare always wrong? Is it always right? Is it, you know, it's like stepping back to being like, what are the ideas behind all this? Let's like kind of get our bearings a little bit so we can actually engage this on the on the profoundly deep level it's at. Because people just want quick answers.

[00:41:58] And but then you look at the roots of something like, man, this is pretty insidious stuff. It's coming that is underneath a lot of things that we just say, you know. So, you know, so one thing I wanted to just going along with that. Let's let's go back to to Narnia, because I think what's interesting is one of the points you make because you have this feminist theory that you're kind of elaborating.

[00:42:26] But then, like you mentioned earlier, Lewis kind of he's he's he's dare I say a little more fluid even. And sometimes because you mentioned how some of the characterizations in Narnia, you have essentially feminine characters who they're they're women, they're feminine. Yet they adopt masculine attributes, but in a kind of a without destroying the essence of femininity. So there's again, it's you're not it's not drawing all these hard lines as well. Can you explore that a little bit?

[00:42:55] How does Lewis kind of deal with that tension? Yeah, I think it's one of the way I tend to think about this. I don't have a place where Lewis directly says this. This is my analysis of what Lewis does, particularly in his fiction. I think it's helpful to keep a couple of Aristotelian words in mind. The essence for Aristotle is the is that which makes a thing itself. If you change the essence, you change the thing.

[00:43:21] And but then you have accidents and you have accidental and you also qualities. We're going to skip qualities for simplicity's sake. Accidents for Aristotle are elements of a thing that can change without changing what it is. So, for example, my I have I drive a red Toyota Camry. It would still be a Toyota Camry if it was green. The color is accidental, does not change the essence.

[00:43:46] If you removed the if you remove the engine and turn this into like a Fred Flintstone kind of car where it's driven by foot pedals, that is no longer an automobile, a self-propelling thing. The essence has changed in some way. Now, where you draw the line between essence and accidents and qualities is sometimes a little tricky, but not usually.

[00:44:09] But I think when it comes to Lewis and gender, it's really helpful to keep in mind that Lewis has this view of men and women as in their their essences. There is an essence to the masculine. It has something to do with leadership. It has something to do with service, has something to do with protection.

[00:44:25] And then there is an essence to the feminine, which has something to do with life and protecting life and usually having something being a grace of life, where there's something about the feminine that is not directly related to survival, but somehow beautifying the world on top of mere survival.

[00:44:43] And but then what Lewis then does with a variety of characters is show that they can acquire qualities or accidents that are sometimes attributed to the other sex without changing the essence, which should not be a radical thing to say. And it wasn't until about five minutes ago.

[00:45:01] So what that means is you can have the there's a there are terms for this in older literature where you have effeminate men, where everybody reading an older novel knows, ah, you're talking about the guy who's got kind of soft voiced and maybe not very muscular and is maybe a little bit more inclined towards nicer things. An effeminate man. You could have the quality. You could have the character of a masculine woman and you know exactly what that means.

[00:45:28] Well, Lewis shows that I'll give a couple of Lewis examples maybe to illustrate that. But he's he's showing the play between these and the fact that there can be exchange of qualities without change of essence. So one place where I think this shows up really clearly in a line which in the wardrobe is the father Christmas scene when the kids are talking about their gifts. Edmund is off scene. He's over there in a sleigh with or a sledge with the white witch. So he doesn't get a gift.

[00:45:58] Peter is given a sword and a shield and specifically commanded to use these for the defense. And Father Christmas probably knows that the plan is for Peter to become high king. Peter doesn't know that yet. But then Lucy is or Susan is given her bow, which is a distance weapon. And she's also given her horn, which is there to summon help. But then the real fun of the scene comes with Lucy because Lucy is given a small dagger.

[00:46:26] When Father Christmas tells her this is for defense, I don't mean you to fight and a cordial, which can heal. Well, and Lucy tells Father Christmas, sir, I am. I feel courageous. I think I could fight. And Father Christmas tells her battles are ugly when women fight. This is one of the places that Lewis sometimes gets raked over the coals of somehow being anti-woman. And Lewis was writing this in a day where it was unthinkable to have female combatants in the military.

[00:46:53] But what I think he's getting at there is that actually women are the source of life. To have women deal death is something as profoundly disordered there. So but in contrast, so Lucy is never going to be dealing death. Now, Lucy does show up. She gets the nickname Lucy the Valiant by the end of Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. She shows up in Horse and His Boy amongst the archers. So she is kind of Lewis.

[00:47:20] Lewis doesn't deny her the ability to actually fight as a queen. She's disobeying her brother's commands. And Lewis doesn't make a thing of that. That doesn't really matter. She's a queen on the same level with Edmund the King there. And he tells her to hang back and not fight. She doesn't listen. That's fine. But in contrast, you have Jadis, the White Witch. And part of her evil is that she brings death and rigidity to everybody that she meets in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

[00:47:48] So her magic is not a source of life and blessing and flourishing. Instead, her magic turns creatures to stone. We don't really see her do. We only really see her do, I think, two magical acts in that one. She creates the addictive Turkish delight that enchants Edmund and brings out his worst qualities. So she's decaying him morally. But then otherwise, her only magic power is to turn creatures to stone. And so you see her as this death-dealing creature.

[00:48:20] I mean, one other character I did not work with enough in the book is Queen Orwell in Till We Have Faces. If I were ever doing a second edition, I would love to add a chapter about Till We Have Faces. And where do we see any of this show up there? But Orwell is another character. Like, you see her. I'm not completely convinced that this is a decay of her character. But you see her become, she takes over as Queen of Glom. She learns sword fighting with Bardia.

[00:48:48] Bardia says she's almost as good as a man. And she hardens as a queen. And she's very good. She has to, like, lock away her emotional side and the side of her that is hearing her sister's travails and wails. So you see, Lewis, they're kind of playing with all of that. So that's part of what I see going on in Lewis's play with characters.

[00:49:11] And you can have, he has, there's nothing particularly masculine about Dr. Cornelius and Prince Caspian. He's a rotund half-man, half-dwarf scholar who does not really fight. But he is the one whose scholarly insights explain what's happening and move the plot along. So you have this play back and forth, I think, between characters. I think it's helpful. Again, it helps flesh things out a little bit more.

[00:49:40] And even when, it's almost like when you note that a feminine character is taking on some masculine qualities, and it's not necessarily a bad thing, you automatically assume that there's an essence to contrast that with. So you kind of have to assume the foundation in order to even recognize that. And it's funny, I always think about sort of the, you know, in the Bible jail or Deborah,

[00:50:05] they're kind of the icons of, you know, you think like they're the Marvel feminine hero who's like blowing up everybody and, you know, whatever. And what's funny to me is I'm like, you know what they're being asked to do? They're being asked to kill people. Like that kind of gumption, that kind of, I mean, that's, they're not, you know, being asked to, you know, be a business owner or any kind of like liberating kind of thing.

[00:50:31] It's like this bloody kind of, you know, terrifying, brutal act. And, and that's not really, and so I'm just like, I don't know that that's, and that really is like war is, it requires that kind of rigidity and that kind of masculine kind of boldness. And it's almost like, well, if you want to adopt that, that's not a cute thing. That's like, are you willing to go there?

[00:50:59] Like that's, that takes a very special kind of trait. But I think nature shows it, that men are more built for, you know, to actually kill and to attack and to destroy, you know, the enemies of people would harm, you know? Maybe a less violent metaphor. I mean, I remember as a kid, my dad was a pastor. He was at work at church. We were, me and my brothers were homeschooled.

[00:51:26] And I mean, it just, I think it was about eight, maybe nine when the idea of mom using the spoon no longer motivated me. And instead, like when your father comes home was like, I was like, okay, I'm in trouble now. And like, there was just an obvious naturalness to like, okay, mom's discipline goes so far, but dad's discipline goes to a whole different level. And that's, that's not to get into any of the like, well, what about abusive parents?

[00:51:55] I mean, in a rightly ordered, like well-loving disciplinary home. But like there, there is something natural there about the father's discipline is of a different nature than a mother's discipline. And there, there's a reason why when, uh, to go back a previous generation, when, um, when, uh, when my dad had a motorcycle accident, he wanted to talk to one parent and not the other. He, uh, he's literally like calling home his motorcycles before cell phones.

[00:52:23] And he did not want to talk to, I don't, I think he didn't want to talk to my grandmother. He wanted to talk to his father about like, dad, I wrecked the motorcycle. Yeah. Like there's just, there's, there, there's a, there's a rightness to that, that I think it's, we just drifted so far away from, from even the stereotypes that it's hard for us today to even talk about the masculine nature and the feminine nature without caveating a thousand ways. Right.

[00:52:49] And what, something you bring up in your book is you talk about sort of the telos of marriage with children. And, you know, we, uh, I have a, we got our first child six months ago and, you know, and, and it's kind of, it really has opened up your mind. Cause when you see that sort of quote unquote, you know, I guess you could say masculine courage of the process of giving birth. You're like, that is some pain. And that is, but it's, but it's toward the end of, of giving life, which is something that biologically only a woman can do, which is an incredible thing.

[00:53:19] But then you get this sense of like, when you bring children in the house, you're like, well, of course the man has to protect because your wife is in the most vulnerable physical state she's ever been in, you know? And so reality starts to bear in and call forth these things that you were sort of built towards. And it just struck me how we're sort of like the natural grooves of life are the things that are being denied all the way back to, you know, the, the second wave feminism you're talking about.

[00:53:46] They're just trying to like unmoor us from reality so that we're almost like gaslighting ourselves about like how, how the world actually is. Uh, but I'm getting to one thing that I really, that I want you to talk about a little bit with your book is you talk a lot about. Complementarity and I know complementarianism like TM, that's like its own brand, you know? But, but just the actual function of the word of just like men and women are not enemies that their distinction is glorious and it's meant to bring them together.

[00:54:14] And the union of a man and a woman can bring life. And it's, and the rule of a man and a woman brings life to the kingdom and all these types of things. How does Lewis flesh out the, the life-giving power of rightly ordered masculinity and femininity as they complement one another? Well, let me, let me, I want to back up just a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Go for it. For a second. Cause this was a section that got cut from the book probably rightly. So cause it was, it was last, a last minute edition.

[00:54:43] Uh, our pastor, uh, preached a really good sermon on judges for actually with, uh, Deborah and jail and Barack and sister and all that. And I, I tried to shoehorn that in and Reese was like, no, we're cutting that right out. He was right. But part of the reason I want to shoehorn that in is because complementarianism as a theological position is itself a negative response.

[00:55:07] It's not a positive articulation of the, the goodness of patriarchy. I can hardly even say that without mentally hearing my wife start to object in the background. Like that just, she does not love the patriarchy discussion. Um, but complementarity, complementarian theology arose as a response to feminist theology. I mean, Piper and Grudem are really clear about this in the introduction to recovering biblical manhood and womanhood. And they, they articulate to the best that they can.

[00:55:34] There's, there's a clear articulation about why feminist egalitarianism is wrong, but there's not a real articulation like the positive goodness of God's created order. And so that's where I'm like, I want a new word. I want a new word for a conservative theological vision for that. And hopefully the next generation, somebody will come up with the right term for that. Anyway, to your actual question.

[00:55:57] Um, I think the way that Lewis does that is by situating everyone within a hierarchy. Um, to, I don't think this is oversimplifying modernity versus a pre-modern view, but it does boil it down to a Cartesian plane. The modern perspective wants to locate everyone on an, on a, in a position of equality.

[00:56:22] And argue that all people are interchangeable and that all arrangements that everyone makes are really contractual in nature. And that we can enter those and we can leave those at will as long as we have. And that really we're all seeking mutual self-interest. We're seeking self-interest and mutual benefit. And that's sort of the modern perspective. In that kind of perspective, hierarchy is oppressive because we are not actually, uh, we're, we're, because that destroys the egalitarian frame.

[00:56:50] What Lewis is trying to do and where he situates questions of marriage and questions of relations of the, of the genders together, uh, is in terms of viewing all of creation as hierarchical in nature. And this is where the finale, the final section of, uh, Paralandra becomes really key. Um, and I don't think I got into this as much as I wanted to in the book.

[00:57:13] So I, I have a, uh, I, I did get into this a lot more in my Ciceronian society, um, talk for, uh, this year. It's out on YouTube. So I can, I can send you the link to that if you want to add it to the show notes. But, um, in that, uh, in that poem, uh, Lewis has Tor and Tenedril, uh, the two Oyarsu, uh, Malacandra and Paralandra and Ransom all sort of collectively break into this divinely inspired poetry.

[00:57:41] That is talking about how God is at the center and each phrase ends with blessed be he. Well, it turns out that as you go through the poem, you start to realize that everything is the center. The center is far away. The center is very small. Each grain is at the center. Each star is at the center. Each image bearer is him, him or herself at the center.

[00:58:02] And everything at the center is related hierarchically where everyone is responsible to Maleldil above and everyone is overseeing whoever is below in the hierarchy. And for Lewis, this hierarchical principle resolves the tension because this hierarchy is not something that some power player far away established. It's not something that the board approved or the faculty Senate created out of thin air.

[00:58:29] Instead, the hierarchy is just the way that God has ordered all of creation where everyone is responsible to those above and responsible for those below. And that when we rightly see ourselves in this hierarchy, that the tension sort of dissolve. My responsibility is not actually to pursue sheer equality or to get whatever the other person has. My responsibility is to obey those above and to care for those below.

[00:58:55] And that that's how Lewis then sees he sees these tensions dissolving. And this is introduced at the tail end of Paralandrum, though it's really running all throughout. And then I think it becomes a major theme in the final novel, The Hideous Strength, which is really a novel all about a marriage where Mark and Jane both misconceive their natures. Mark is a bad husband who's always leaving his wife.

[00:59:25] Jane is a bad wife who's really discontent and she's really kind of drawing away from Mark. By the end of the novel, both of them have gone through a variety of adventures that change Mark into a husband who is willing to go into the cottage and wait for Jane. And maybe she'll choose him again. Maybe not. And Jane becomes a wife who sees Mark having carelessly left his jacket on the windowsill. And she'll choose to do the domestic chore of cleaning up after him.

[00:59:54] And she chooses to go into him and they both choose to remain together. And so healing their marriage is really about rightly situating their marriage in relation to God, which then lets their marriage be rightly related to the community around them. So for Lewis, I think all of us, this really is the beauty of complementarity is that the masculine and the feminine both fit together and they relate together within this broader hierarchy.

[01:00:20] And if all you do is zoom in and say, well, Scripture says that women, that the wife must submit to her husband. That's just a bad reading of Scripture because it comes right after the husband is commanded to love his wife as Christ loved the church. And all of this is within the context of a covenantal relationship that is supposed to fit result that mirrors the way Christ relates to his his saved community.

[01:00:44] There's one phrase I think that that Lewis says about how all of us are feminine in relation to God. Explain that a little bit. That was an interesting phrase. It's I mean, it's really that that's not really the phrase. The wording may be unique to Lewis. The idea isn't. I mean, this I know this first bride of Christ, I guess, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And in that sense, which is maybe it's a far better way of explaining it. They're like my teenage brain was like, this is weird.

[01:01:17] Thomas Aquinas, I think, is the first person I know of who talks about God as the source of being and that being is this quality that has we have to have that exist to exist. And he talks about God as the source of being and that God maintaining our maintaining all creation. So there is this perpetual font of being in some way. Lewis, I think, is picking up on that, if not from Aquinas, from a similar source. And to argue that being is all proceeding from God.

[01:01:46] And then we receive that being. So being is not something that we project out of ourselves. It's instead something we have to receive. And it's that it's in that sense that Lewis says all of humanity is feminine in relation. All of creation is feminine in relation to God because we are receiving that being from him. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. I'm curious about this might be shifting a little bit, but so he wrote Narnia in the Ransom Trilogy before he got married.

[01:02:15] Is that right? To Joy David? Yes, he may. I don't remember which year he married Joy, but he finished Narnia in 1957. So he may have just been getting together with Joy as he was wrapping up Narnia, but certainly all the Ransom Trilogy as well before he met Joy. One of the we had Andrew Lazo on.

[01:02:36] He's done a lot of and he he made a he talked about how until we have faces, Joy was a big influence and why that work has a very perceptive view of the of the female psyche, because Joy is kind of helping him get into the psychology. So he kind of made an argument there. And and that was one of the things like, oh, man, I wish there could have been more on to we have faces. Is that that's such a I think Lewis even viewed it as some of his most mature work.

[01:03:07] How do you think his marriage to Joy shifted? Maybe if it even shifted at all or maybe even clarify some of his ideas. Is I'm thinking especially of probably my favorite book from Lewis is a grief observed. It's just gut wrenching.

[01:03:25] But he talks about his life with Joy and even mentions her pushback that there was a kind of she was this opposing force in a healthy way that gave their relationship kind of life. And so I'm just curious your thoughts about how post marriage that maybe affected the way that he viewed his ideas. I think it's certainly deepened his understanding.

[01:03:51] I think that that that that much, I think, is very clear because part of what. Well, I want to answer your question. And I'm also thinking of like that ties in the general objection that people give to Lewis because he gets he gets subject. He gets raked over the coals for not writing very nuanced female characters. But as far as Joy and his marriage, I'll just say this is beyond the scope of my direct research. Sure. Andrew has done far more research until we have faces.

[01:04:21] I know he's working on turning his dissertation into a commentary until we have faces. Michael O'Pizzi is also writing a book on until we have faces. So there's there's a lot of work happening until we have faces. So I don't want to I don't want to try to say anything too definitive about that one. Sure. Except that. I. I don't see nearly as much of joy until we have faces as Andrew does. OK, and these are there a lot.

[01:04:51] I see Lewis kind of putting it. I think Orwell is Lewis and Lewis is actually this is Lewis is clear. It's the clearest attempt of his clearest attempt at telling his own story. So I think that's I think that's what Lewis is doing with Orwell. And I think it's really interesting that he puts it in that frame. But he also to. Now, there's just so much about till we have faces. I'm still I'm still thinking about.

[01:05:18] But there's a there's a tension between the way he writes Orwell and Psyche both having their parallel journeys and carrying each other's burdens. I it would be interesting to kind of look at Lewis and Joy's life and see if there's anything there about them carrying parallel burdens for each other. Joy had her own like family struggles. Lewis had his own family struggles. But this is a this is, I think, a difference in Lewis scholarship.

[01:05:46] I you ask at the at the beginning about why why narrative? This is a place where I diverge from a lot of Lewis scholars. A lot of Lewis scholars love getting into like the details of Lewis's biography and they want to sort of line up like Lewis is thinking this at this day and this place. And he had this conversation with this guy. I just don't do that. But I'm much more interested in looking at the stories that Lewis is telling and what that shows. And so I'm all about talking about till we have faces.

[01:06:16] I think that's all kinds of fun. I don't have a lot of things to offer as far as like the way Lewis's marriage tied in. Yeah, I was just curious about that. You get such a difference, though. I mean, Orwell. So maybe it is just the fact that Lewis is now in this far deeper relationship with one woman. Then he had the perverse relationship with Mrs. Moore. He had his friendship with the sister whose name I'm blanking on.

[01:06:45] He wrote letters in Latin to her. And then he but he had he had Dorothy L. Sayers as an occasional pen pal. He knew different women, but his relationship with Joy was unique. And he does mean Susan and Lucy are both pretty thin characters. Jill Poles, not that much more developed. Jane is Jane is a plot device. She's very helpful as a plot device.

[01:07:12] She's a very good foil, but she's a plot device to let Lewis kind of set up all these different things. Orwell, I think, is the closest that Lewis comes to creating a fully fleshed out character in the modern sense of a character. And it's I don't think it's accidental that that happens as he's in this far deeper relationship with with Joy than he's ever been with a woman before. What would you say to somebody, though, if they take the line, you know, these are these are thin female characters that like,

[01:07:39] well, why are you listening to this guy about gender then if he doesn't understand women? Well, because then it becomes I think you have to ask you have to ask a question that fits what Lewis is doing to really benefit from Lewis. So let me back this up a little bit because it has everything to do. This is the this is the complicated stuff in Chapter two we haven't talked about with like Lewis's dependence on Edmund Spencer and what he's and drawing from from Milton.

[01:08:04] Lewis is not writing a novel in the same way that most contemporary novels are put together. I mean, if if I started reading one of these last week and I gave up because it was it turned woke real fast. But a contemporary novel is really trying to take you into the interior development of a single psyche. And you go through this character with everything he's thinking and experiencing.

[01:08:31] And it's all about tracking that single characters change over time. That's just not what Lewis is doing. What Lewis is doing, very similar to what Edmund Spencer before him was doing, is trying to create images that depict particular ideas. So Diggory's story in Magician's Nephew, in one sense, is very moving. His mother is dying. He's seeking a cure for his mother. He goes to the garden.

[01:08:59] He makes the right moral choice to not steal the apple. He's given the apple instead. His mother is is cured. That's also a very thin. That's a very thin character development. So if you go to Lewis for character development, I just think you're going to Lewis for the wrong thing. Instead, you go to Lewis for a particular instantiation of a universal. That's what he's really, really good at. He's really good at showing us this this picture.

[01:09:26] And so in that sense, his female characters are pictures. They're particular instantiations of a universal, which I think is actually much more what we need. We have a thousand authors who can give us real female characters, strong female leads like we. Those are not hard to find, but it's actually surprisingly difficult to find depictions of sort of the universal type. And I mean, so in Lionel's wardrobe, that's Mrs. Beaver.

[01:09:54] She is the English Yaleman farmer's wife who is putting together dinner and is happy to do so and is going to grab pillows and whiskey for a nighttime hike. That's that's a type. They don't write that anymore. Or in The Hideous Strength, it's Mother Dimble, the childless wife of a university professor who together they are the most parental of figures for college kids who are away from home without their families.

[01:10:24] And Mother Dimble is this sort of priestess of fertility who's inducting women into these rights that she can participate in. But she's never felt the fruit of those rights. Lewis is not going to give us we don't get the deep backstory and trauma of Mother Dimble. Instead, you sort of get the earth goddess fertility as an Anglican woman in the 20th century.

[01:10:49] And it totally works unless you come to Lewis saying you're a bad author unless you give me the modern character type that I've come expecting. Maybe by way of just kind of bringing it all together, just on a personal note, how do you think we can begin to make our way back to being sane about gender without it being this sort of, you know, owning one another and gotchas?

[01:11:16] But just like a fully orbed kind of vision that Lewis is setting. How do we make our way back to that? Well, I actually think it starts with when I'm doing what you're talking about. You said your path involved film school and thinking deeply about story.

[01:11:32] I think that's the best way for people who are deeply concerned about this to think about culture war, not in the sense of there's a little bit of value in the Daily Wire mug. I don't have one of those, but the leftist tears tumbler. There's a little bit of value in that. I do think we need some people who are doing that work of just calling out leftist nonsense.

[01:11:57] The vast majority of work that we actually need as a culture that would bring us back to a position of sanity. Are people who just embrace a calling to the slow, hard work of actually telling stories in and creating channels for cultural creation.

[01:12:17] So and then we'll do that in such a way that it's high caliber that they are telling stories for their own sake, because this is this is possibly a slight tangent. So hopefully we won't I won't stay here too long. But the political right is generally terrible at doing this. We're very good at creating moral fables in a way and getting funding for moral fables.

[01:12:40] We are terrible at creating channels for people to actually go through the formative processes of becoming the people who are telling the stories that everyone wants to hear. And I'll add to the political right that we Protestants are particularly bad at this. The Catholics are quite willing to fund things like the Masters in Fine Arts at the University of St. Thomas.

[01:13:06] Wise Blood, Wise Blood Books is one publisher I've been following that I get a couple of their books each year. Joshua Wren writes is their their editor in chief. He writes a couple of few books for them. They're doing great work on recovering literary theory and then churning out novels that actually are good.

[01:13:27] Some of the people coming out of Moscow, Idaho, and I'm thinking like Nate Wilson and some of the some of the creative efforts that have risen around the community of New St. Andrews. They're they're doing great work. Andrew Peterson is creating good music. I haven't read the Winged Feather Saga. I did invest a tiny amount of money in their their their launch of trying to do a Winged Feather Saga TV show.

[01:13:53] I think we need a thousand more projects like that that are actually like the people who have the right understanding of reality and who understand that the that stories set the ideas that win the hearts and minds of people and they're going to bear fruit 20, 30, 50, 100 years later. And we're now downstream.

[01:14:17] I'm sure you're familiar with the difficulties, Brian, of getting anything published that is actually a work of fiction and is good as far as like quality, but also true in the sense of it's it's it's saying true things about reality through the form of fiction. It's almost impossible to get that published. So we need and I don't know who I don't know who could fund it. It would it would need to be something that will be a loss leader for a long, long time.

[01:14:45] Yeah, we need I think we need a lot of people who are willing to kind of take that on as a cause to fund artists to create good art that is grounded in reality. Another guy who does great work in this space is I'm a butcher his name, but Makuto Fujimura. He does phenomenal, beautiful art and is trying to create a positive piece of positive contribution. I think we need a lot more of that.

[01:15:15] So that's. Maybe one illustration. I caved last week and watched one episode of what I knew was a terrible show. It's the HBO show Euphoria. I watched one episode. I will not watch anymore. It is incredibly compelling storytelling. It is also pornographic storytelling.

[01:15:38] The images, the the vocabulary, the ideas that are conveyed there, they they I found myself praying against the remnants of that that show in my mind. If we could somehow have someone or a team of people, because I'm sure it takes hundreds of people to create even one episode of that TV show to create a show that was equally compelling,

[01:16:01] but compelling towards truth that actually did highlight in a way that was not John Bunyan having like Mr. Man being super masculine and Mrs. Woman being super feminine. Like that's garbage. We don't need any of that. But we need shows about real people living real life and and finding the hope of the gospel in the midst of real life. And that that that would be compelling. And we I think we need that on all forms of media.

[01:16:27] So that's that's where I see the biggest road forward is actually. Nope. Judith Butler is not read by 13 year olds that want to want to chop off their breasts. Instead, the 13 year old is doing something on Tumblr that gets her into a chat group that is filled with people who are downstream by a thousand yards from Judith Butler. We we need to have our own conservative long march through the institutions to recover truth.

[01:16:58] You know, I was thinking about how, you know, there's a I figured who said it is something to the effect of only bad actors lie. You know, only bad actors are just sort of faking these emotions. The best ones, they channel something true to the human experience, the experience of their body. I think there's something to that with good storytelling. Best storytellers, they don't lie. They don't try to manipulate anything. They don't they simply present reality in a compelling way.

[01:17:26] And I think we are the ones who rightly receive reality. You know, we should be telling the best story. So I am. Amen to all the things that you said. I would caveat that I could write, I think, decent literary criticism. I'm pretty terrible at writing fiction, so I can't do the thing I'm asking for other people to do.

[01:17:46] Well, but, you know, I think the stuff you're writing with Lewis, you're sort of showing one, the impact of ideas and when the chapters about ideas having consequences. But also, I think you're showing the power of narrative and how it shapes everything that we understand about the world in a profound way. So really appreciate this conversation. I really do hope you write a sequel looking at two way I faces because I think you're really onto something.

[01:18:16] And I really appreciated this conversation and your work. We're going to put links to the book so you can get it in the show notes along with some other links with some of the things that you're up to. And but, Josh, I appreciate the conversation. Thanks for thanks for coming on. It's been great, Brian. Thanks for the invitation.