Lewis’s Perelandra is a profound work that speaks deeply to our modern ills. In it, Lewis posits something that at first glance sounds like it was lifted from a gender studies course: gender is more real than sex.
But Lewis meant the exact opposite of what the modern ear hears. He was not saying your body is an accident and your inner sense of self is the truth. He was saying the masculine and the feminine are real things that exist in the mind of God, and that male and female bodies are how those realities show up in the flesh.
That is a much bigger claim than anything you’ll hear from a gender studies professor. It means gender is not something you construct, and not something your culture assigned you. It is something that was there before you, that you receive as a gift from the Lord.
Josh Herring’s book Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve is the fullest treatment of this in Lewis’s corpus. In the sixteenth century, “sex” meant male and female. “Gender” meant kind, from the same root as generation. Then in the early twentieth century “sex” started to mean intercourse, and “gender” filled in the gap as a construction of identity. A hundred years later the words have drifted so far apart that a man who has never taken a gender studies course can say he is trapped in the wrong body.
At the same time, the modern project had already made its own promise. Josh dates it to 1789 and the French Revolution: the conviction that through science and technique we can bend reality to fit what we want. Simone de Beauvoir applied that to womanhood (woman is made, not born) and argued that female personhood required economic equality and sexual equality, which meant the workplace and the pill.
The cost has been fewer marriages, later marriages, more women than men in higher education and in Fortune 500 leadership, a doubling of unmarried men in a decade, and an economy restructured so that a single income no longer runs a household. Lewis’s counter-thesis is that we cannot construct reality. Instead, we can only receive it and then live in accordance with it.
Josh and I don’t agree on everything here, and I think that is the most interesting part of the episode. He asked me a diagnostic question: Plato or Aristotle? I said Aristotle. That is exactly where we split. Lewis is a Platonist, so for him the idea of the masculine comes first and the male body follows. I want to start with the biology God actually gave and reason up from there.
Josh joined me on Episode 202 of Full Proof Theology to walk through Lewis, the waves of feminism, what evangelical men’s ministry keeps getting wrong, and what any of this looks like on the other side of the resurrection.
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Pick up your copy of Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve here.