A Paper Presented at the 2024 Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference
Beyond Perelandra, in 1948 when Lewis first published Priestesses in the Church?17 which ends with Lewis contrasting the roles of men and women within the church to their roles in society, he concluded “With the Church, we are farther in18: for there we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us. [emphasis mine]”19. And of course this was written only three years after Lewis had published That Hideous Strength which, if anything, supports and expands this concept of gender as more fundamental, more real, than sex—the thing towards which sex points.As Mary Steward Van Leeuwen puts it:
“The younger Lewis, … argued on behalf of including gender forms, or archetypes, to which women and men were called to conform themselves. ‘Suppose,’ Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength wondered, just after her conversion, “Suppose one were a thing after all … designed by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had regarded as one’s true self?”20.
Neither does Lewis’s approach to sex and gender here seem to have been even a notable departure from the thought of his peers. In The Silmarillion Tolkien comments that
[T]he Valar may walk, if they will, unclad, and then even the Eldar cannot clearly perceive them, though they be present. But when they desire to clothe themselves the Valar take upon them forms some as of male and some as of female; for that difference of temper they had even from their beginning, and it is but bodied forth in the choice of each, not made by the choice, even as with us male and female may be shown by the raiment but is not made thereby."
Here again, we see the idea of gender as a quality of spirit/soul which determines the Valar’s sex when they elect to take a body. Meanwhile Charles Williams’s whole concept of approaching God through the ways of negation and affirmation of images (corresponding roughly to apophatic and cataphatic theology)21 certainly points in a similar direction, being grounded in the idea that we can (imperfectly) use the physical world to gain some degree of understanding about the spiritual, by which it is caused. And of course Barfield’s “Great War” with Lewis over the role of imagination as a mode of divining Truth22 situates Barfield as inclined to place more weight than Lewis on the legitimacy of gender as the unifying meaning of physical/biological sex. As he (arguing for the capacity of poetry to unveil Truth) argues in Poetic Diction
“Mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning. Connections between discrete phenomena, connections which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once only perceived as immediate realities. As such the poet strives, by his own efforts, to see them, and to make others see them, again.”23
Finally, beginning at least as early as 1944 we have manifold evidence that Lewis held to what has been described (and not infrequently criticized) as an overly platonic or sometimes (mis)characterized as a “Cartesian dualist”24 view of reality, and that this platonist influence which understands the physical to be an outflowing of the spiritual, formed a critical part of his overall theology and metaphysics25 writing in the original version of the essay Transposition that:
“Our problem was that in what claims to be our spiritual life all the elements of our natural life recur: and, what is worse, it looks at first glance as if no other elements were present. We now see that if the spiritual is richer than the natural (as no one who believes in its existence would deny) then this is exactly what we should expect.”26
Read the full article: https://billieiswriting.substack.com/p/cs-lewis-and-the-sexgender-distinction
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