A Lecture Series on C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man by Dr. Scott Masson

The Abolition of Man

C.S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, was a very prolific writer. One of those books, The Abolition of Man, is the subject of a lecture series by Dr. Scott Masson. He reached out to us to see if we would be willing to share the lecture with all of you. If you read Narnia, but haven’t read any of Lewis’ other books, there’s no better time to start!

Here’s the description of this video:

C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man is a prophetic text. It speaks of the unique educational perspective of his time, which has continued to our day.

For me, this lecture is illustrative of one of the main ways of framing the entirety of Lewis’s life as a scholar, novelist, critic, and Christian apologist.

Lewis frames the character of the dominant educational model of his day by its rejection of what has been variously described by the moral law, or ‘the law of human nature.’ This is not an incidental rejection. It thereby jettisons the essential character of education as understood by both pagans and Christians (and, as he will show in Ch 2, of all major religions).

What it thereby does is to deny the assessment of human nature that the Apostle Paul describes in Romans 1 and 2, the revelation of God by what later Protestant writers ascribe to common grace.