PETER KREEFT

C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium

Six Essays on The Abolition of Man

Cover by Roxanne Mei Lum

© 1994 Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 0-89870-523-1

Library of Congress catalogue number 94-75995

for walter hooper

with gratitude

for giving the world

many of lewis’ precious writings

and much of lewis’ gracious spirit

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. How to Save Western Civilization: C. S. Lewis as Prophet

2. Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of “The Permanent Things”

3. The Goodness of Goodness and the Badness of Badness

4. Can the Natural Law Ever Be Abolished from the Heart of Man?

5. Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Abolition of Man in Late-Night Comedy Format

6. The Joyful Cosmology: Perelandra’s “Great Dance” as an Alternative World View to Modern Reductionism

Conclusion

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

As our senile, toothless, and confused culture stumbles blindly toward the third millennium; as our “century of genocide” comes to an end, having murdered more human beings (born and unborn) in a single century than the total of all men who lived in all previous centuries; as our demonic “culture of death” accelerates its sharklike feeding frenzy of human bodies and souls; and as our arrogant and impenitent planet rushes naked and defenseless through space and time on a collision course with the fearsome heavenly body of the justice of God, we wonder: “What next?”—and even whether there will be a “next”. We look for prophets.

I believe the two most prophetic books of our century are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and C. S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man. If you want to see the third millennium, read these two books.

Lewis has one great advantage over Huxley: he is a Christian. Therefore he holds out hope, appeals to moral choice, and offers a positive alternative, though his jeremiad is no less horrific than Huxley’s scenario of doom. But the hope, the alternative, and the choice are not limited to Christians. The spiritual war of this century is not among different religions but between all religions and none. That is why what is happening in Bosnia and Northern Ireland is not merely wicked, it is hopelessly out-of-date: a civil war breaking out in the ranks during a global and apocalyptic war against Hell. The Abolition of Man appeals to all men of good will and sound mind. So does this book: six essays about The Abolition of Man applied to our time and our future.

The first essay, “How to Save Western Civilization: C. S. Lewis as Prophet”, summarizes Lewis’ philosophy of history.

The second, “Darkness at Noon: The Eclipse of ‘The Permanent Things’ ”, summarizes our era from the standpoint of this philosophy.

The third, “The Goodness of Goodness and the Badness of Badness”, is a defense of the Natural Law, or objective values as the absolute sine qua non for the survival of civilization, and a summary of Lewis’ refutation of twenty alternatives to it.

The fourth, “Can the Natural Law Ever Be Abolished ...