C. S. Lewis is one of my favorite authors. His book, The Abolition of Man, talks about the failure of society in making a “good man” due to fact that we aren’t developing men with “heart.”
(As we are entering the Christmas season, let me point out that The Grinch was said to have a heart two sizes too small!)
It is interesting that Lewis is talking about this 75 years ago, and yet we still have the same problem today. And perhaps it’s even gotten worse.
Lewis indicates that [The heart of man is between one’s mind and one’s gut] “…between cerebral man and visceral man.” And that “by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.” And so we need men with “heart.”
I agree. We need men with a passion for God and a passion for people.
We need people with hearts of love for their fellow man.
His critique is that the way society educates people is by only dealing with their intellect. By doing so, we produce “what may be called Men without Chests.” Men without heart.
Again, I agree. We are not producing people with heart and passion. One of the clearest examples that I regularly encounter is when I hear people speaking about the disappearance of patriotism. I hear people discussing the fact that people used to love this country and volunteer to go off to war because of their heart for this nation. Certainly there are many reasons why this has changed, but it is clearly true that we don’t have the same “heart” and “passion” for this nation as was once found among the people.
We are still teaching math, but we no longer do much teaching in regard to character. We don’t seem to be teaching a love for God nor a love for people.
Lewis indicates that our problem is “not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion.” While it seems to us that their brains are very big which provide them with what seems to us as large heads, in reality, “Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.”
Ha Ha! He is so good with words — pointing out that the reason their heads look so big to us is simply that their chests (their hearts) are so small.
But here is what I think is most important and so very true for us today:
“The tragi-comedy of our situation is that we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible.” Wow. That’s exactly what we were dealing with today. We have comedic movies and TV shows about men who treat women poorly, and then we are surprised when we find Hollywood filled with men who abuse women. We haven’t helped people develop the right heart.
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect them to have virtue and enterprise. We laugh at the idea of honor and then we are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
When we remove God from our midst, when we tell people that character and heart isn’t needed, then we enter a losing battle regarding morality. We have educated people who do not know why they should live in a moral manner.
How well are you developing your heart? What are you doing to improve the size of your emotion, your heart, your chest? My next post will post a bit of instruction on the need for the awe of God to expand our hearts and chests.
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