Men with Chests
In the first part of "The Abolition of Man", C.S. Lewis critiques an elementary english textbook, which seems to serve as a symbol for broader cultural issues that have cropped up in the educational system of Lewis's time. The textbook serves as a particular platform for Lewis to make his critiques with concrete examples.
One of the illustrations Lewis portrays in this critique is "men without chests". In this illustration Lewis describes "Man" in three parts
Head - The Seat of Reason
Belly - The Seat of Visceral Man
Chest - The Seat of Trained Sentiments
Lewis diagnoses modern education as creating men without chests, that is men who have the capacity to reason and the capacity to experience visceral emotions, but men who have no way to properly order the two through trained sentiments. Allow Lewis:
Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat', than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism … about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element'. The head rules the belly through the chest— the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal... And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
Recovering trained sentiments is going to be a necessary skill Christians develop in a world that continues to mock Truth and Beauty. We must renew our minds to posses these stable sentiments and we must inculcate these sentiments in our children, by continually exposing them to what is True, Beautiful, Just, Proper etc...
Posts tagged Men With Chests, are my feeble attempts to present works of art that I think will help contribute to developing these stable sentiments. I may present the occasional anti-type as well, in hopes that presenting the disfigurement of lies will recalibrate us to the necessity of holding fast to what is true.
Foot Combat with Awl Pikes, c.1512-1515