Few of the volumes of commentary written on the works of Clive Staples Lewis examine his concept of sexuality. Some deal with his views of marriage and sexual morality, but they do not mention the more basic views on which his opinions rest. Yet Lewis’s view of the metaphysical status of sexuality is necessary to support these secondary opinions. Although he does not say a great deal about the matter, it seems certain that he viewed sexuality or gender as a reality that transcends the biological. It has being. In a day of sexual revolution, this view should have major implications for Christians. Open marriage, women’s liberation, and sex therapy should all be evaluated on the basis of a Christian view of sexuality. Lewis provides such a basis.

In two of his three space novels, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, Lewis is bold in expressing the view that sexuality is not merely a biological phenomenon but a transcendent reality. Perhaps he felt safe in promoting this audacious philosophy here because these are works of fiction. Yet there are hints of the view all through his works.

In Perelandra Lewis notes that in most languages, certain inanimate objects are linguistically treated as masculine, while others are treated as feminine. Mountains are masculine, trees feminine. He uses this as a springboard for the assertion that masculinity and femininity are based on distinctions that are more than biological. After physical sensations disappear, sex remains. “In denying that sexual life, as we now understand it, makes any part of the final beautitude, it is not of course necessary to suppose that the distinction of the sexes will disappear. What is no longer needed for biological purposes may be expected to survive for splendour” (Miracles). In Perelandra this splendour is personified in the angels Perelandra and Malacandra. When these gods appear to Ransom, the space traveler around whom the story gravitates, they have no distinguishing structural characteristics; yet Ransom sees them as belonging to two different sexes. At this point, Lewis makes his most obvious statements about the ontological status of sexuality (or gender) through the character of Ransom:

Gender is a reality and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things which has feminine gender; there are many others and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless.… The male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine.… Their reproductive functions, their differences in shape and size partly exhibit, partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity [Perelandra, Macmillan, 1944, p. 200].

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There are fundamental and transcendent characteristics distinguishing the sexes. Sexuality (masculine and feminine) has a mode of being beyond third-dimensional existence. The distinctions and definitions of sexuality become sharper as one ascends the hierarchy of being.

In That Hideous Strength this view is again pressed home. Jane Studdock, the main female figure in the story, suffers from feelings that her sex has been treated unfairly. She believes that females are forced to surrender to males. Marriage is the primary propagator of this atrocity. No one will make Jane surrender. She stands as a soldier guarding her identity against all intrusions, sexual or otherwise. Yet, she is finally forced to come to grips with the meaning inherent in the two sexes. After viewing spiritual life as vague and sexless, she is forced to see the sharp polarity between the sexes that exists in the spiritual realm as well as the biological realm. She contemplates the transcendence of sexuality.

Now the suspicion dawned on her that there might be differences and contrasts all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer at every rung of the ascent … a shocking contrast [in] reality which would have to be repeated—but in larger and more disturbing modes—on the highest level of all [That Hideous Strength, Macmillan, 1946, p. 365],

Jane has rejected her husband because of his masculinity—the conquering and demanding aspects of his being. Yet she cannot go on rejecting masculinity when it is presented to her, not just as a fact of life, but as a fact of all existence here and beyond. Ransom explains to her the meaning of her rebellion. “The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it” (p. 316). Lewis, through Ransom, is suggesting that our images of God as a masculine Being are not the false illusions of a chauvinist imagination; they are inspired. The masculine Being demands man’s surrender. Some “souls can bypass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine, higher up, to which they make a yet deeper surrender.” It is in this demand for obedience that the masculine nature is grounded—the feminine is grounded in obedience.

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Even the Narnia tales for children contain evidences of Lewis’s view of sexuality. Narnia is a land of chivalry where the most valiant knight is a slightly oversized, talking mouse. In Narnia separate codes of conduct distinguish the sexes. In “The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader,’ ” when Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace appear on the ship, Lucy is immediately given the King’s cabin. Eustace, whose women’s liberationist mother has taught him that the sexes must be treated identically, believes that “that sort of thing is really lowering girls.” But the sexes are not identical and must not be treated so. Their differences are not merely biological. In Prince Caspian Lucy describes the trees as masculine and feminine based on non-biological characteristics. The slender, silver, showery birch is a girl, the hard, wizened, hearty oak is a man, and the smooth, stately beech is a lady. There are characteristics in the trees themselves that determine the genders of their human forms. Perhaps they mirror eternal forms of the sexes. Lewis, in The Last Battle, exposes his neo-Platonic thought when he describes Narnia as an imperfect copy of a real Narnia that has no end. It may be supposed that he sees the sexes also as copies of more real, transcendent models.

Lewis further examines the transcendence of sexuality in his non-fiction when he deals with marriage. Here the masculine and feminine roles become symbolic of Christ and the Church—Christ’s demands and the believer’s obedience. As Lewis says in The Four Loves, “Marriage is the mystical image of the union between God and man.” In the sexual act, the man and woman act as representatives of “the masculinity and femininity of the world, all that is assailant and responsive.… The man does play Sky-Father and the woman Earth-Mother; he does play Form … she Matter.” In their nudity all the individual, personal characteristics are stripped off and the “universal He and She are emphasized.” They represent universal male and female. They represent the Church and Christ; the Church and Christ represent femininity and masculinity. In the imagery describing Christ and the Church, says Lewis in his essay “Priestesses in the Church,” “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” (in God in the Dock). Masculinity and femininity are grounded in distinctions far beyond the biological level. They are transcendent realities. Sexuality is grounded in the Being of God and his creation. God is ultimately masculine. There can be no female priests because God must be represented by masculinity. The creation is feminine; it is subordinate to God. Although beings in the creation may possess masculine characteristics, all are feminine in relation to God. The distinction is not phenomenal but real.

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Although Lewis is not explicit about the characterisics of masculine and feminine, he yields some hints on what he believes them to be. The personification of the gods in Perelandra is a good starting point. Perelandra, as the feminine deity, is described as warmth, life, and melody. She is introspective. She reminds one of rolling seas, mossy stones, and murmuring winds. She is arc and Malacandra is angle. Likewise, the femininity that Jane is forced to accept in That Hideous Strength is based on more directly sensual characteristics. She is forced to suppose that her virtue lies in sweetness and freshness rather than intellect and accomplishment. Her husband, when tempted by scientific fantasies, is kept in touch with reality not by thinking about her doctoral thesis but by thinking about her vivacity. He thinks of her as “deep wells and knee-deep meadows of happiness, rivers of freshness, enchanted gardens of leisure, which he could not enter, but he could have spoiled.” Her image is opposed to the dry, vague, purely intellectual atmosphere of Belbury; her image is distinct, sensual, and emotional. Grace Ironwood is unappealing because she is merely dry and authoritarian. She is a warden, a policewoman. She is somewhat repulsive because her authority has distorted her femininity (although it need not have). Yet this is not to say that intelligence is unfeminine or that women are illogical. Lewis, in A Grief Observed, describes his own wife in this manner: “Her mind was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard.” If he thought it unfeminine to be so, he would certainly not have said this of his wife.

Femininity is also described in the Narnia tales. The girls in Narnia are more sensitive to violence and less competitive than their male counterparts. In Prince Caspian, Susan shies away from Edmund’s fight with Trumpkin the Dwarf, and both Lucy and Susan leave the ugly job of skinning the bear to the men. When it is Susan’s turn to put the already once-defeated Dwarf in his place, Lewis describes her as being “so tender-hearted that she almost hated to beat someone who’d been eaten already.” Apparently the gentleman’s competition means less to her than to her brothers. In The Last Battle, Jill reveals her feminine dislike for ugliness when she is sickened by the sight of the evil god, Tash. She also exhibits what appears to be a mostly feminine trait of mercy when she protects Puzzle from the punishment he deserves. Although these traits are exhibited by both sexes in degrees, Lewis seems to believe that women are more often warm, soft, and merciful.

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Masculinity, on the other hand, as seen in Perelandra in the character of Malacandra, is cold, hard, and vigilant. Man is watchful for enemies, a warrior and a rock. In That Hideous Strength the masculine in man is demanding, “loud, irruptive, and possessive … the golden lion, the bearded bull.” In Narnia there reigns Aslan, the Golden Lion, who exhibits ultimately masculine characteristics. Aslan is the Christ of Narnia, and his masculinity cannot be doubted. He is strong, stern, and forceful, yet tender and playful. He exhibits both masculine and feminine characteristics, but in degrees appropriate to a masculine being. Whereas Malacandra and Perelandra are purely masculine and purely feminine, Aslan, in his humanity, combines both. The boys in the Narnia stories also exhibit masculine characteristics. Lucy exclaims in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” “That’s the worst of doing anything with boys. You’re all such swaggering, bullying idiots.” This is, of course, masculine aggression seen from a feminine point of view. In The Last Battle, Lewis contrasts masculine matter-of-factness with feminine excitement. Jill’s enthusiasm is squelched by Eustace’s mere factuality. But later Eustace gets his rebuke when he angrily scolds the Dwarfs. “No warrior scolds. Courteous words or else hard knocks are his only language.” This is masculinity in the land of chivalry. Masculinity is nobility, strength. It is not softly affectionate, but stern, yet tender.

NOVEMBER PSALM

The master Metalsmith, it seems,

Forged the autumn woods in hues of bronze

And fashioned leaves

of copper, brass, and finest gold

That clashed like cymbals in the chilly winds.

Then

Tiring of their noise and ruddy glow

the Master

Bid the leaves clatter to the ground

And forged the woods again

of silver silence.

SUSAN M. WOODCOCK

The two sexes meet in the marriage union. There the masculine is given authority over the feminine as Christ has authority over the Church. The male is responsible to love his wife and give himself for her as Christ gave himself for the Church. It is because of this sacrifice that the husband may ask obedience of his wife. The obedience is the humility of the wife and must be matched by the humility of her husband, her lover. The obedience is not a subsuming of the wife’s personality by her husband but a union of both personalities into a new one. In Perelandra the life of an individual is described as “finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated.” In the marriage union the authority is held by the man, but servitude belongs to both. As Christ serves the Church, so the man must serve the woman as she serves him. “Obedience and rule are more like a dance than a drill—specially between man and woman where the roles are always changing” (That Hideous Strength). Both must have humility; both must command and both obey. Yet when a decision must be made between the roles, the authority of the man dominates because the characteristics of the sexes demand it.

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Lewis’s point is that the sexes belong to broad categories of masculine and feminine. Sexuality is grounded in ultimate reality. The creation is ultimately feminine to the ultimate masculinity of Christ. The believers are united to Christ in a marriage union that provides the model for “natural” marriages. Such reality is created by God and is not to be tampered with. Today’s views of sexuality and marriage are based on the belief that sex is merely a biological phenomenon and has little meaning outside its reproductive function. Therefore, divorce or the transfer of sexual characteristics is of little consequence. Lewis would take issue with this. He seems to have viewed sexuality as a metaphysical reality defined by God. Man must not distort God’s created images of sexuality.

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