By DONALD DeMARCO
C.S. Lewis received a complimentary copy of a textbook intended for “boys and girls in the upper forms of school.” He was grateful for the gift but found the philosophy contained therein sufficiently unsound and potentially damaging to students that he wrote The Abolition of Man as a corrective.
The egregious error that the authors made is that they denied man’s natural and spontaneous response to a world they did not create. For example, they state that when a person refers to a beautiful waterfall as sublime, he is not making a remark about the waterfall, but only his own feelings — “I have sublime feelings.” In this way, the authors deny the human capacity to make realistic comments about the outside world. We are thereby isolated in our own feelings and are unable to describe anything outside of ourselves with any degree of objectivity.
For Lewis, it is an outrage that the authors of what he calls The Green Book can consider themselves as educators. If we lose the power to describe a beautiful waterfall as sublime, how can we proceed to say anything more about the real world? Lewis regards this amputation of a basic faculty as being of dire importance. “We remove the organ and demand the function,” he writes. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the gelding to be fruitful.”
In 1947, when Lewis penned his mini-classic. He probably did not think that the withdrawal from reality he describes would lead to the inability to recognize that there are two sexes, male and female. His thinking, however, was on the mark, and the process of eating away at objective reality has continued apace.
Jorge Cardinal Medina Estevez comes with impressive credentials. He served as prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, was a peritus at the Second Vatican Council, and has been a professor of theology and metaphysics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He begins his most timely book, Male and Female He Created Them, with simplicity and eloquence: “No human institution is so deeply rooted in nature and in the heart of man and of woman as marriage and the family. Prior to any philosophical reasoning, men and women know that they are made for each other, that they need each other, and that there exists between them a relationship that is different from all other relationships found in human society.”
What I want to call particular attention is the phrase, “prior to any philosophical reasoning.” We do not begin with reason. Reason comes later. Our ability to respond to the wonders of creation and perceive particular realities and relationships is spontaneous. We are rooted in nature and respond to it naturally. We enjoy a kinship or affinity with nature. We are not alien beings.
St. Thomas Aquinas referred to this spontaneous response and the knowledge so derived as “knowledge through inclination” (S.T. I-II, 94, 2). Before we can stand back and figure things out, our natural inclination grasps things spontaneously. We are inclined to the good. We respond to beauty prior to examining it rationally.
Jacques Maritain elaborates on this point when he states that this “kind of knowledge is not clear knowledge through concepts and conceptual judgments; it is obscure, unsystematic, vital knowledge by connaturality or congeniality, in which the intellect, in order to bear judgment, consults and listens to the inner melody that the vibrating strings of abiding tendencies make present in the subject” (Man and the State).
The words inclination, tendency, congeniality, and connaturality all indicate a primary and intimate relationship between man and nature. By denying this natural relationship man is left without a starting point. As a consequence, he no longer sees the natural difference between the sexes thereby, in effect, deconstructing its binary quality. He begins his understanding of the sexes on the plane of his own subjectivity. Therefore, sex and gender become whatever he wants it to become.
A United Nations agency has proposed doing away with the words “woman,” “feminine,” and “man,” which it now regards as superannuated. It is a supreme irony that feminism, which sought to improve the lives of women, has been marching toward the extinction of the very terms that originally described them. The UN, however, is just one example of cutting human beings off at the roots and attempting to transplant them in an ideological vacuum.
Man is no longer attentive to the “vibrating strings” that are attuned to the natural world. He believes he has gained a new freedom by being emancipated from them. But he is now placed in a moral vacuum and what he believes to be his new freedom is really his doom, for man cannot breathe in a vacuum. Feminists will continue to fight with each other since they have thrown away their common ground. The latest altercation is between feminists who deny that a man can become a woman simply on the basis of an assertion. They call themselves “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists.” They are regarded as “heretics,” by another wing of feminism that includes men who call themselves women and have issued a pamphlet entitled “How to Spot TERF Ideology” to protect themselves against those whom it views as infidels.
D.H. Lawrence has expressed the matter accurately and poetically: “We are bleeding at the roots,” he states, “because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.”
Life has roots in nature. Nothing grows unless it is properly planted. We transcend nature, but we are nevertheless rooted in it. When we deny our roots, we deny our potential for growth. Without a common ground, the very ground in which we are all rooted, disagreement, demoralization, and division will continue to flourish.
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