In the modern era, Christianity has been on the decline. There are many reasons for this, but as early as the 1940’s C.S. Lewis saw methods of education as the primary cause of this and saw ways to reverse this. He gave a series of lectures on the subject, summed up in a scholarly book by Steve Turley, PhD as “The Abolition of Sanity”.

I was lucky enough to download the book as a pdf from Steve Turley’s website while it is still free to do so, which it should be for a limited time. In short, C.S. Lewis describes classical ideas about education, that its purpose was to teach morality and character to children. The classical view was that everything had objective character and nature, and that human beings are metaphorically made of three parts, those being the head, representing rationality and our similarity to God, the stomach which represented emotions and instincts that represented our similarity to animals, and the chest which represented the unique nature of humanity created by the head and stomach coming together.

C.S. Lewis saw the public education system as stripping down societies morality by removing all of that in exchange for the idea of utilitarianism, teaching youth solely to think in terms of meaningless facts taught to them for the sole purpose of having control over the world around us, including nature, to our benefit. Before this idea was taught, peoples lives were about pursuing their purpose in life to be happy, but after the whole idea of purpose was removed society slowly started breaking down into morality-less sensation seeking justified by the idea nothing meant anything so why not, and cold unprincipled scientific control of nature which defined humans as nothing more than flesh and therefore nature.

C.S. Lewis stated that to be human is to metaphorically have the three parts of the body the classical world called the head, chest and stomach mentioned above, and human life is supposed to be to orient yourself with a purpose in life tied to positive morality. This was largely removed from society according to Lewis when children were taught to view the world solely in terms of testable and observable amoral facts, thus metaphorically removing what the classical world represented with the stomach, which in turn removes the metaphorical chest as it is the combination of the head and stomach. C.S. Lewis described people like this as no longer human, as two thirds of what constitutes human’s objective nature is repressed under this(and arguably a life of sensation seeking justified by this removes the head as well), and thus C.S. Lewis titled his talks about this “The Abolition of Man”, which is referenced in this books name “The Abolition of Sanity.” Lewis predicted that a society with these values would lead to Man being thought of as simply a part of nature, and thus would be manipulated and changed by those taught to dominate nature in a amoral, principle-less way.

The Abolition of Sanity is a less than 50 page cover to cover scholarly summary of one of the most important and relevant lectures made by C.S. Lewis, one which offers a diagnosis of why Christianity is on the decline and a blueprint for a method of educating youth in a more classical way to give them a mindset that is fully what God created Man to have.