"Men Without Chests" Are Also Men Without Novels
What C.S. Lewis and Charlotte Mason teach us about the necessity of reading living books for our well-being.
When my son was three years old, I set out to teach him to memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Within a few days, he could recite to me, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” I prided myself on this, and began to believe that this simple work each morning would change his heart and mind, and train him to obey me and to love God.
Yet despite memorizing questions one, two, and three, my son didn’t miraculously learn obedience or love for God. Each day, he continued to knock his brothers over, ignore the boundaries we set, and escape from his room in the night to feed his twin brothers ice cream.
One day as I sat down with him to discuss his bad behaviour, I reminded him of the first question he had learned from the catechism. “Don’t you remember? Man’s chief end is to glorify God. You are not glorifying God.”
He tilted his head at me. “What does glorify mean?”
I didn’t realize it, but my desire for hearing the correct answers inadvertently left me forming a young man without a chest—and as I looked at myself, perhaps I had done the same to my own soul.
The term “men without chests” was coined by C. S. Lewis in his little book, The Abolition of Man. In discussing the state of the education system of his time, he said that we were raising people who knew all the facts in their heads, but those facts never reached their hearts. Without building virtue into children as we teach them truth, they can become “clever devils” who have great knowledge but use that knowledge in wicked ways. As Lewis wrote, “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.”1
Lewis wasn’t the only one to hold to this belief. Charlotte Mason, another brilliant Christian educator, likewise said, “Here we have the work of education indicated. There are good and evil tendencies in body and mind, heart and soul; and the hope set before us is that we can foster the good so as to attenuate the evil; that is, on the condition that we put Education in her true place as the handmaid of Religion.”2 Within her twenty principles of education, she declared that all children are born with the capacity for good or evil, and it’s the job of parents and educators to continually draw them toward the good and righteous.
Chesterton shared their concern as well. In his famous book Orthodoxy, he wrote, “Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world.”3 Chesterton described people who sought knowledge without character, which in turn led to them only reflecting the dull light of the world rather than the warming, changing light of the sun.
While I still believe this is a concern for today’s children, I see it on display in the church as well. When it comes to studying theology, it’s easy to become “all moonshine” and “men without chests.” We read theology book after theology book, memorize all the creeds and catechisms, inductively tear apart books of the Bible verse by verse, and lean over several commentaries at once, yet all the while, our hearts are still as darkened and full of vices as when we began.
As we go about life with our hollow chests, we aren’t the only ones who are affected; each person we encounter feels the ragged edges of our heartless chests. The building up of knowledge without the heart leads to a prideful mind and lack of love. Paul wrote this to the Corinthians concerning their debates on eating meat sacrificed to idols; he said that all were free to do as they pleased on this matter, but no one should use their knowledge to harm another believer. “Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that ‘all of us possess knowledge.’ This ‘knowledge’ puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1 ESV; cf. 1 Cor. 13).
This is no different than believers who ridicule other Christians in the name of discernment. They mock and shame fellow siblings in Christ for their differences on secondary or tertiary issues. They are unwilling to have their views challenged. They don’t like to serve with their hands, only teach. They have a persistent, critical spirit toward others. As Lewis might say, these are the moral philosophers who cheat at cards. “I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat,’” Lewis wrote, “than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.”4
I can list all these not because I’m a perfect bystander witnessing all of them, but as one who has committed each of these sins. I let my mind become puffed up with theology books and memorized Scripture, rather than outpouring such knowledge through works of service and love for my brothers and sisters in the body. I wielded knowledge against them and used it to prop up my pride.
For many of us, this lack of chest began as a rebellion against poor theology. We were lured with emotionally-driven theology that stirred us away from Scripture and God. In response, we rejected every emotion in connection with our faith and instead bolstered our minds to guard against ever falling prey to such teachings again. What began as a right desire to guard against false teaching turned into another type of false teaching on its own. Discussing the educators who were creating men without chests, Lewis wrote, “They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda … and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion.”5
But is this solution right? “My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale,” Lewis said. “For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity.”6 Here is Lewis’ answer to our problem: “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”7
Looking to St. Augustine, Plato, and Aristotle, Lewis declared that the best kind of education doesn’t simply add knowledge on top of knowledge, but trains a student to love what is true, good, and beautiful, and reject that which is hateful and disgusting.8 Echoing what Plato wrote in his Laws, “There is one element you could isolate in any account you give [of education], and this is the correct formation of our feelings of pleasure and pain, which makes us hate what we ought to hate from first to last, and love what we ought to love.”9
This is the end of all education—whether we are three-years-old or fifty. Our knowledge should inform our hearts to love the true and the beautiful, and then do good works for our neighbor. As we grow in our knowledge of God and his abounding grace, our response should be grateful obedience to him and grace to our fellow image bearers. As we grow to adore and understand the truth, our hearts should fill with kindness as we express it.
But how do we cultivate this kind of education of virtue and not just dry facts that leave us unchanged? How does the one who loves theology guard against becoming chestless? Perhaps we can return to another educator: Charlotte Mason.
If you’ve encountered the homeschooling world, particularly the Charlotte Mason homeschooling world, you’ve likely heard the term “living books.” Charlotte Mason believed that children are born persons—with the full faculty and desire to learn and know truth—and that education is the science of relations (relating all ideas together and finding their source in God). In light of these primary principles, Mason believed that the predominant way children learn is through living literature.
“The only vital method of education,” Mason wrote, “appears to be that children should read worthy books, many worthy books.”10 This is because the child “resists forcible feeding and loathes predigested food. What suits him best is pabulum presented in the indirect literary form which Our Lord adopts in those wonderful parables … it seems to be necessary to present ideas with a great deal of padding, as they reach us in a novel or poem or history book written with literary power.”11
What if this isn’t just true for children—but true for us as well? What if we likewise need not just expository nonfiction, but also the padding of beautiful literary works in novels, poems, and history books to truly grow in knowledge and character?
Charlotte Mason considered moralizing books to be twaddle, which may come as a surprise. When we think of twaddle, we may think of silly books with no substance to them, but she also put preachy books in this category as well. As she hinted at earlier, children resist this kind of obvious, lecturing, talking-down teaching. They immediately recognize it and resent it—and don’t we as well? Lewis wrote in On Stories:
“... I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. … But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.”12
A story from history, a novel, or a poem can smuggle in virtue, character, and lessons without our realizing it until our hearts are struck with conviction or tears trickle down our cheeks from the image they brought into our minds.
Mason’s other reason for resisting moralizing books is that they presented pre-chewed ideas. Remember, Mason believed that children are born persons (able to learn and understand for themselves) and that education happens through making connections between ideas on our own. What Mason resisted in moralizing books is that they attempted to dumb-down ideas to children and they sought to make all the connections for them, rather than allowing them to relate the ideas to the ones they’ve already learned.
Professor Karen Swallow Prior likewise noted this in an interview on The Faculty Podcast from Reformed Theological Seminary Washington, D.C. She said that we learn and retain ideas better when we are the ones making the discovery, and that a metaphor allows us to make such connections. It points and we look, as opposed to putting it straight in front of us; if someone says something is like something else, we have to stop and discern their meaning for ourselves.13
Karen Glass, an educator and part of the Advisory of Ambleside Online, likewise wrote, “Reading imaginative literature is formative for children. Because the teaching is not didactic but woven into stories that captivate them, lessons of goodness and love and heroism reach their hearts. It is through stories that children learn to love the virtues of truth, justice, perseverance, and service.”14 The same is true for all of us—through metaphor, story, and poetry, our hearts are ignited and inspired towards virtue.
Charlotte Mason saw this trouble in the school systems as well. Rather than giving children a literary feast of the true, good, and beautiful, she saw teachers deadening the affections and boring the minds of the children by drowning good literature in torrents of talk and tedious repetition.15
Adults are no different. Our brains still stow away knowledge the same way as they did when we were children; our memory takes a new piece of information and connects it to another piece that’s already well-established in our brains. However, we need to do the work of making that connection if we want it to stick. Our minds are capable of connecting ideas and applying them to our specific lives. We don’t need to be spoon-fed thoughts that have already been distilled and digested for us. That’s not how we learn; it’s how we grow bored and inattentive.
Children need living books—and so do we. Good, true, and beautiful literature that awakens our hearts to courage, love, faith, and holiness. Education isn’t just a tool for getting ahead in the world or gaining a well-paying job; education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life, as Mason said, that should be ordering our hearts to love what is right and hate what is wrong. Men without chests, those of us who have filled our minds with dry facts of theology without engaging our hearts, can perhaps find our hearts again through worthy literature too.
Clive Staples Lewis, The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2017), 703.
Charlotte M. Mason, A Philosophy of Education (Living Books Press, 2017), 46.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2022), 33.
Lewis, 703–704.
Lewis, 699.
Lewis, 699.
Lewis, 699.
Lewis, 700.
Quoted in Vital Harmony by Karen Glass.
Mason, 12.
Mason, 109.
Clive Staples Lewis, On Stories And Other Essays on Literature (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017), 70.
The Faculty Podcast RTS Washington, Christian Poetics (ft. Karen Swallow Prior), (Washington, D.C.: Reformed Theological Seminary, February 9, 2023), https://soundcloud.com/rtswashington/christian-poetics-ft-karen-swallow-prior?si=8a97e2631bfb488ea41c13525b5c6f38&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing.
Karen Glass, In Vital Harmony (Bolton, ON: Self-published, KDP Amazon, 2019), 129.
Mason, 65.