C.S. Lewis and the Sex/Gender Distinction

A Paper Presented at the 2024 Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference

Be sure they still will make, not being dead,
and poets shall have flames upon their head,

• From Mythopoeia by J.R.R. Tolkien

Context

This is a paper that I presented at the 2024 Undiscovered CS Lewis Conference. It is written to be an academic paper and is therefore somewhat different in tone and scope than my usual fare on Substack. It want to emphasize at the outset that my primary audience for this paper was predominately Christian, cisgender C.S. Lewis scholars. If I had written for a historical, feminist, queer, or gender studies conference the emphasis would have been somewhat different and I would have gone to greater lengths to “shore up” the academic rigor certain portions of the paper which, in this version, are treated (I hope) adequately but with minimal complexity using only a few representative theorists as stand-ins for what is a complex and nuanced conversation.

Further, the bulk of this paper is spent in “laying the necessary groundwork” for any work that might—I fervently hope will—be done exploring Lewis’s metaphysics of gender. I am not myself more than half-way convinced of the validity of his theory though I do make a rough attempt in my closing "Prolegomena to the Development of a “Lewisian Metaphysical Approach” to Sex and Gender” to sketch out my thoughts as to what might be involved in developing his theories into a contemporary working theory of gender. I would appreciate some lively conversation with trans people and other gender theorists as to the plausibility of Lewis’s approach. It would be a total joy to develop that paper some time.

Finally, I want to be clear that I have particular and sharp disagreements with several of the authors I cite in this paper (Preston Sprinkle and Abigale Favale in particular, to say nothing of the odious “Nashville Statement”) and I do not intend this paper to constitute anything like a recommendation of those sources as anything but representative of certain anti-trans and anti-queer viewpoints.

P.S. I hope you will read the footnotes. I had fun writing them.

Introduction

There exist, at present, two popular approaches to the sex/gender distinction which I will call the reductionist approach and the social constructivist approach. Given the suggestion that sex and gender might be differentiated, the reductionsists deny the possibility, insisting that gender is nothing more than, at most, the social/cultural manifestation of sex while the social constructivist approach claims that both sex and gender are related but separable social constructs. Functionally gender reductionism and social constructivism are two poles between which the conversation about gender, sex, and their relation (or lack thereof) to one another generally take place. Most people in the contemporary west (christian or otherwise)¹ generally fall between the two, often without much reflection, based on a sort of intuition about gender, sex, and the nature of reality. 

My contention in this paper is that, prior to the origins and framing of this conversation, first in the western academy, then in popular culture, Lewis developed his own understanding of the sex/gender distinction—an understanding which differs significantly from any of the popular or academic views along the gender reductionist-social constructionist polarity. Lewis’ proposal is “off the page” entirely as it rests on a Christian Platonic or even Lewisian Neo-Platonic² metaphysics which our contemporary gender wars  hardly—if ever—engage³.

The Reductionist and the Social Constructivist Approaches

The contemporary popular Evangelical Reductionist view of the sex/gender distinction is neatly summarized by Preston Sprinkle in his book Embodied:  “[O]ur biological sex determines who we are. Our sexed bodies determine whether we are male, female, or both; and our embodiment is an essential part of how we image God in the world.”⁴ It is represented even more bluntly as Article 5 of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s Nashville Statement “We affirm that the differences between male and female reproductive structures are integral to God’s design for self-conception as male and female. We deny that physical anomalies or psychological conditions nullify the God-appointed link between biological sex and self-conception as male or female”⁵. Abigail Favale, in her book The Genesis of Gender represents a Christian—in Favale’s case Roman Catholic— and more philosophically robust approach to the reductionist view together with her rejection of the social constructionist approach saying:

“Ultimately, the concept of gender has driven a wedge between body and identity. Sex once referred to a bodily given, a fact of nature. In gender-world, the power of the body to constitute identity is diminished. “Woman” no longer refers simply to one’s sex, but rather to one’s gender, which has become an amorphous cultural construction that has a tenuous relationship to bodily sex. Once this distance between bodily sex and identity was enabled via gender, it did not take long—merely a few decades—for gender to shift meanings once again, becoming entirely disconnected from sex, which has paved the way for an even more fragmented and unstable understanding of personhood. Because gender is no longer anchored in bodily realities, it has become a postmodern juggernaut, impossible to capture, impossible to name. Unlike sex, ‘gender’ can be continually altered, and redeployed, and we are witnessing in real time the wild proliferation of its meaning.”⁶

In contrast to the flattening approach of the reductionists, the social constructivist approach views both sex and gender as categories which are historically and culturally contingent attempts to describe and conceptualize reality as we encounter it. Judith Butler is frequently cited as the primary representative of this view. For example in Gender Trouble:

“If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.  

It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established.”⁷

Butler further ambiguates the sex/gender distinction, viewing both categories as inter-informing and mutually constructing in their more recent (and popular level) text Who’s Afraid of Gender saying

“Consider that sex assignment, the complex act by which medical and legal authorities determine the sex we are, foregrounds certain aspects of the body to comply with prevailing criteria that differentiates one sex from another within a binary framework. Can we distinguish between the powers that generally assign sex at the outset of life and the sex itself?  Can we discover what that sex is without criteria of some kind? And if we do need those criteria, it follows that they guide, even limit, what we come to identify as sex. … As long as we agree that the category of sex arrives in our lives with an imaginary, a mandated, a complex frame, an implicit set of criteria, then there is from the start a phantasmatic condition that informs the fact of sex, actualized in its delimitation, and this means that gender is already doing its work.”⁸

In sum, sex  and gender are entalged but distinct social constructs which inform one another in their construction. 

In contrast, Lewis’s approach, let us call it the Lewisian Metaphysical (LM) approach to Gender first caught my attention on a read through Perelandra in the Cosmic Dance scene several years ago. The passage begins with a narration of what Ransom is witnessing regarding the appearances of the Oyarsas Mars and Venus:

Both the bodies [of the Oyarsas] were naked, and both were free from any sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. That, one would have expected. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try—Ransom has tried a hundred times—to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra [the archon of Mars] was like rhythm and Perelandra [the archon of Venus] like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don't know that any of these attempts helped me much.

and then Lewis the narrator interjects a half-paragraph of philosophical musing as a way of unpacking Ransom’s experience:

At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. 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 that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity... he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female).⁹

What stood out to me at the time, and still does, is first the definite existence of a clear and meaningful sex/gender distinction. Perelandra was published in 1943, five years before Lewis wrote Priestesses in the Church? and either one or three years before he wrote the first draft of Transpositions. Quite notably, this predates the contemporary historical consensus for the origins of the sex/gender distinction¹⁰. Simone de Beauvoir only published The Second Sex in 1949; The Second Sex with its central line that “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one” is frequently cited as the origin of the contemporary distinction¹¹. In fact in The Genesis of Gender, Favale highlights De Beauvoir and the way in which her ideas were later developed by Judith Butler as the the source of the social constructivist approach to gender saying

“When de Beauvoir writes that one is not born but becomes a woman, she is driving a wedge between “woman” and “female”, arguing that “woman” is a social and cultural fiction that is layered onto the biological reality of femaleness. She writes this in the 1940’s [The Second Sex was published in 1945], prefiguring the postmodern turn. It didn’t take long for a movement centered on the idea of womanhood to begin, bit by bit, dismantling that very category. Since the 1980’s, much time and ink has been spent on feminist writing that rejects the stable category of “woman”. … In the 1990s, Butler ups the ante, interrogating the concept of “female” as well: “ ‘female’ no longer appears to be a stable notion, its meaning is as troubled and unfixed as ‘woman’”, she writes in Gender Trouble. With this move, Butler extends the feminist flight from essentialism into a new frontier.”¹²

Madison Bentley however should be noted as also having made a distinction between the sex and gender a few years before de Beauvoir in a 1945 paper Sanity and Hazard in Childhood saying: “In the grade-school years, too, gender (which is the socialized obverse of sex) is a fixed line of demarkation, the qualifying terms being ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’”¹³, a quote which also constitutes the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest entry for gender as conceptually separate and sociological/psychological use of the distinction. 

The consequence of Lewis’s earlier use of the distinction is, then, already noteworthy as it suggests the need for a revision of the relevant literature. Beyond this historical, etymological note, however, Lewis’s understanding of the nature of the sex/gender distinction stands out as distinct from the conversation that has developed around these terms in the wake of its second (or third) origin with de Beauvoir. Whereas the contemporary discussion regarding the sex/gender distinction operates between the poles of the reductionist approach and the social constructivist approach, Lewis’s understanding of sex, gender, and their relationship to one another¹⁴ represents a third approach to the question which rises above (or falls below) our contemporary discourse. Rather than seeing gender as less real than sex (the reductionist approach), or seeing both sex and gender as semi-linked constructed categories used to conceptualize our social and physical/biological givenness (the social constructivist approach), Lewis sees gender as more real than sex, as that towards which sex points; for Lewis sex might be called something like “the physicalized obverse of gender”—a formula Bentley inverted two years later—; again: “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.”¹⁵

Of course, worth noting that Perelandra is a work of fiction and is therefore weaker than we might want as evidence of Lewis’ “true views” on the matter. While this concept of gender as “a more fundamental reality than sex” does appear in other works of his, we must remember that Lewis was inclined to use fiction to convey his own theoretical, philosophical, and theological ideas. Further we have to note that the whole section here on sex and gender is something of a superfluity to the story. It adds little to the scene except as part of the larger frame narrative of the Cosmic Trilogy (that of Lewis the professor relating the extraordinary experiences of a colleague). Read as such an aside—really I would argue that the entire frame narrative of the Cosmic Trilogy is at least a justification for Lewis to let his “expository demon”¹⁶ a bit off the leash—there is no reason why Lewis the author would want to distance the views of Lewis the narrator from his own; thus we are justified in a relatively high degree of confidence (even before identifying additional evidentiary material) that Lewis’s explanatory asides throughout the Cosmic Trilogy are representative of his actual views at the time of writing.

Beyond Perelandra, in 1948 when Lewis first published Priestesses in the Church?¹⁷ which ends with Lewis contrasting the roles of men and women within the church to their roles in society, he concluded “With the Church, we are farther in¹⁸: for there 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. Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us. [emphasis mine]”¹⁹. And of course this was written only three years after Lewis had published That Hideous Strength which, if anything, supports and expands this concept of gender as more fundamental, more real, than sex—the thing towards which sex points. As Mary Steward Van Leeuwen puts it: 

“The younger Lewis, … argued on behalf of including gender forms, or archetypes, to which women and men were called to conform themselves. ‘Suppose,’ Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength wondered, just after her conversion,  “Suppose one were a thing after all … designed by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had regarded as one’s true self?”²⁰.

Neither does Lewis’s approach to sex and gender here seem to have been even a notable departure from the thought of his peers. In The Silmarillion Tolkien comments that

[T]he Valar may walk, if they will, unclad, and then even the Eldar cannot clearly perceive them, though they be present. But when they desire to clothe themselves the Valar take upon them forms some as of male and some as of female; for that difference of temper they had even from their beginning, and it is but bodied forth in the choice of each, not made by the choice, even as with us male and female may be shown by the raiment but is not made thereby."

Here again, we see the idea of gender as a quality of spirit/soul which determines the Valar’s sex when they elect to take a body. Meanwhile Charles Williams’s whole concept of approaching God through the ways of negation and affirmation of images (corresponding roughly to apophatic and cataphatic theology)²¹ certainly points in a similar direction, being grounded in the idea that we can (imperfectly) use the physical world to gain some degree of understanding about the spiritual, by which it is caused. And of course Barfield’s “Great War” with Lewis over the role of imagination as a mode of divining Truth²² situates Barfield as inclined to place more weight than Lewis on the legitimacy of gender as the unifying meaning of physical/biological sex. As he (arguing for the capacity of poetry to unveil Truth) argues in Poetic Diction 

“Mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning. Connections between discrete phenomena, connections which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once only perceived as immediate realities. As such the poet strives, by his own efforts, to see them, and to make others see them, again.”²³

Finally, beginning at least as early as 1944 we have manifold evidence that Lewis held to what has been described (and not infrequently criticized) as an overly platonic or sometimes (mis)characterized as a “Cartesian dualist”²⁴ view of reality, and that this platonist influence which understands the physical to be an outflowing of the spiritual, formed a critical part of his overall theology and metaphysics²⁵ writing in the original version of the essay Transposition that:

“Our problem was that in what claims to be our spiritual life all the elements of our natural life recur: and, what is worse, it looks at first glance as if no other elements were present. We now see that if the spiritual is richer than the natural (as no one who believes in its existence would deny) then this is exactly what we should expect.”²⁶

And this theme in Lewis appears throughout his writing, perhaps most well known in The Last Battle²⁷ (1956) and in The Great Divorce (1945)²⁸. Certainly Lewis did not back down on the view as he aged; when the essay Transpositions was republished in 1962, the only significant change²⁹ Lewis made to the essay was the substantial seven paragraph addition containing the fable of the mother and child prisoner and an epistemic bolstering of his thesis through reference to the nature and limitations of both apophatic and cataphatic theology. Lewis’ final paragraph of the extended material in the later version of the essay leaves no doubt that as late as 1962 Lewis still held firmly to the conviction that the spiritual world is more real than the physical and that the physical and spiritual realities hold a transpositional relationship to physical realities. That is to say that physical reality serves both as itself and as the (or at least a) mechanism through which are made aware of spiritual realities a veiw that Grace Tiffany has charmingly and accurately referred to as Lewis’s “Peculiar Platonism”³⁰.

You can put it whichever way you please. You can say that by Transposition our humanity, senses and all, can be made the vehicle of beatitude. Or you can say that the heavenly bounties by Transposition are embodied during this life in our temporal experience. But the second way is the better. It is the present life which is the diminution, the symbol, the etiolated, the (as it were) “vegetarian” substitute. If flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom, that is not because they are too solid, too gross, too distinct, too “illustrious with being”. They are too flimsy, too transitory, too phantasmal. [emphasis mine]”³¹ 

The same theme (at this point I would suggest it might be more accurately understood to be a leitmotif in Lewis’s work and central to his theological metaphysics) appears, and is developed, in Meditations in a Toolshed³² (1945) where Lewis, in his distinction between looking at and looking along a beam of light, explores the mechanism by which we are able to experience spiritual reality by looking along the physical sensations through which we experience them to begin with. Thus in the context of the sex/gender distinction, Lewis would have reasonably identified gender as a spiritual reality that we can apprehend by looking along our physical, biological, psychological, and even social experiences as sexed beings. Lewis expected the phenomena of the physical world to tell him something true about the spiritual, of which it is a transposition, possibly because so much of his own conversion came about on the basis of recognizing the existence of Christian truth within pagan mythology³³.  “When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was—gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.”³⁴

A Note on Lewis’ Developing Epistemic Humility and his Metaphysics

Certainly, and having made frequent reference to it throughout this paper, I am cheerfully obliged to pause and commend to your reading Mary Stuart Van Leeuwen’s A Sword Between the Sexes. Over the course of his life and especially subsequent to his friendship with Dorothy L. Sayers, and his friendship with—followed by marriage to—Joy Davidman, Lewis gained significant humility as to what and how much could be read of the cosmic feminine and masculine (that is to say Gender) by looking along the sexes. The character of Orual³⁵, his lamentation and reflections in A Grief Observed³⁶ as well as his more egalitarian passages in The Four Loves³⁷ all point to a Lewis who was far less confident in his capacity or right to determine much about the nature of the Genders on the basis of his observations of men and women. As he aged and grew in epistemic humility he seems to have become more and more willing to abandon his earlier (not infrequently misogynist and certainly patriarchal) gender based limitations on and of women. But that observation which I both accept and welcome, does not imply that he abandoned his metaphysical understanding of Gender as a Spiritual Reality and sex as a transposition of Gender in the physical world or, going back to Perelandra, of Gender as “a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex”³⁸. Rather what we see is evidence of his accepting his own limited capacity to accurately—much less fully—derive and assert confident truth claims regarding the nature of Venus and Mars on the basis of his experiences of sex simply because, as Stewart Van Leeuwen has ably demonstrated, those experiences demanded a revision of his earlier bachelor conclusions. As she concludes in A Sword Between the Sexes

C.S. Lewis began his academic career as a strict rationalist who claimed that good literature was completely independent of its writer's personality. By the end of his life, he had become a critical realist who wrote that ”no model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the known phenomena … but also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age.” On the personal level, the older Lewis was also ready to admit that the events surrounding his mother’s death had impeded aspects of his own psychological development. And though he never expressly said it, those events may have made it difficult, until much later in life, for him to write about women in ways that were not highly romanticized at one extreme, or bordering on contempt at the other.”³⁹

While maintaining the metaphysical structure on which his previous patriarchal misogyny had been hung, it is abundantly clear that Lewis had, piece by piece, scrubbed away many of his original patriarchal conclusions, beliefs, and assumptions. He has left us the frame, one which invites us into a space of theological and philosophical speculation.

Prolegomena to the Development of a “Lewisian Metaphysical Approach” to Sex and Gender

Lewis’s approach to the sex/gender distinction is certainly platonic in form but not in content and cannot be accurately understood as one that he borrowed from a previous medieval or classical scholar. Indeed, the platonic and neo-platonic streams of thought from which he drank held to the “single sex” view wherein women were understood to be nothing more than flawed or un-developed men. Megan DeFranza summarizes the classical and medieval view in her book Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God saying:

In the classical period, hierarchically ordered substance dualism undergirded a hierarchy of sex in home, church, and society. Substance dualism did not result in sex dualism because both men and women were believed to have bodies and souls, even if the male was more often associated with the soul/mind while the female was more often associated with the body, and eunuchs and hermaphrodites displayed a mixed nature. Rather, the ancients held a view of a single sex, one true human form, the male, against which all other lesser, inverted, misgebotten males were measured. A true sex dualism was yet to come.” ⁴⁰

Given the emergence of the contemporary multi-sex understanding of human sexed-ness, it may have seemed somewhat obvious to Lewis to posit Venus as the archon of the feminine and Mars as the archon of the Masculine corresponding, respectively, to something like feminine and masculine platonic forms, but I have yet to find any specific scholar or thinker from whom Lewis might have got the view that “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.”⁴¹ At present I am inclined to think that it is an idea which likely seemed almost natural or obvious to him given his “Peculiar Platonism”, his relationship to, and appreciation of, Owen Barfield whose doctrine of words, poetry, and philology as mechanisms whereby we can encounter Truth⁴² Lewis had engaged and appreciated, his reading of Jung, and his cultural and historical situation in a world which had abandoned the single sex model. It is an approach to the sex/gender distinction which might have seemed obvious to someone in the early 20th century whose philosophical and theological development had been “from ‘popular realism’ to Philosophical Idealism; from Idealism to Pantheism; from Pantheism to Theism; and from Theism to Christianity”⁴³ but has clearly not had the same purchase with others in the intervening time. 

What, then, would be the characteristics of a Lewisian Metaphysical (LM) approach to the question? Over the course of the 70’s through today the reductionist and social constructivist approaches to gender have become the dominant paradigms through which the sex/gender distinction is understood (and sometimes rejected). Where reductionist approaches see gender as attenuated sex—either less real than sex or as nothing more than sex—and the social constructivist approaches see gender and sex as equally real—while varying significantly as to how real, accessible, meaningful, or even helpful, the two constructs are—a Lewisian metaphysical approach would primarily understand gender as “a more fundamental reality than sex” while, at the same time, holding fast to the Lewisian observation that the substance of the physical world, while pregnant with transposed spiritual reality, is not in itself devoid of meaning or significance. Careful attention to the “Law of first and second things”⁴⁴ will remind us that, once our sights are set on first things (in this case gender), second things (sex) also become attainable. Second things do matter. Thus a Lewisian metaphysical approach to gender and sex must clear the “Gnosticism charge”, not by rejecting the gender/sex distinction or the metaphysical substance dualist framework, but by asserting the value of second things when properly situated in relation to first things.

Secondly, a Lewisian metaphysical approach to the gender/sex distinction would situate our sexes not as the only instantiations of gender in the physical world, but as simply one more set of “blurred” instantiations of those metaphysical principles. Holding firm to Lewis’s claim that “Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others” a Lewisian metaphysical approach would look beyond sex to the natural world, to cultural and historical diversity, and to etymology, philology, poetics, and mythopoeia in order to gain insights into the nature of meaning of the Genders.⁴⁵

Third, a Lewisian metaphysical approach to Gender and sex must remain epistemically humble, keeping in mind Lewis’s progressive abandonment of his early sex-essentialist conclusions regarding the nature of the Genders as well as the expectation (and on occasion the religious imperative) that any given person of a given sex ought to conform themself to those expectations. The evidence of the real gendered people whom we meet, know, and engage with must always be allowed a real voice in shaping and reshaping our (always tentative) conclusions about Gender. Thus from the reductionist approach, a Lewisian metaphysical approach might well borrow the conviction that our sex is real and matters, while (re)positioning it as subsequent to Gender. Meanwhile from the social constructionists, the Lewisian metaphysical (LM) approach will borrow the recognition that our understanding of Gender, being in the LM view always “beyond” our full apprehension, must always be in process—a peculiar platonic principle to which we are forever negotiating our relationship. Returning to Perelandra, it would recognize that “Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity. [emphasis mine]”⁴⁶ never forgetting that what we are observing is a transposition of the greater spiritual Reality (and one which we perceive “in a glass darkly”), at those “gleams of strength and beauty” yes but always and only “falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility”. 

Thus a Lewisian Metaphysical approach to Gender and sex may well find a way to successfully navigate between the Scylla of essentialism and the Charybdis of subjectivist meaning-drain.

Bibliography

Adey, Lionel. C.S. Lewis’s “Great War” with Owen Barfield. Victoria, B.C: University of Victoria, 1978. 

Barfield, Owen. Poetic diction: A study in meaning. Middletown, Conn, Scranton, Pa.: Wesleyan University Press ; Distributed by Harper & Row, 1987.

Bentley, Madison. “Sanity and Hazard in Childhood.” The American Journal of Psychology 58, no. 2 (1945): 212–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/1417846.

Butler, Judith. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Butler, Judith. Who’s Afraid of Gender? New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.

“Nashville Statement.” CBMW. Accessed September 2, 2024. https://cbmw.org/nashville-statement/#articles.  

DeFranza, Megan K. Sex difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015.

Favale, Abigail. The genesis of gender: A Christian theory. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2022.

“Is There Sex in Heaven?” Is There Sex in Heaven? by Peter Kreeft. Accessed September 2, 2024. https://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/sex-in-heaven.htm.  

Lewis, C. S. The Four Loves. New York, New York: Harcourt: Brace, 1960.

Lewis, C.S., and Walter Hooper. God in the dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans, 1970.

Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. New York, New York: Harpercollins Publishers, 2012. 

Lewis, C. S. A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis. New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001.

Lewis, C. S. The Last Battle. New York, New York: HarperCollins e-books, 2010. 

Lewis, C.S. On stories, and other essays on literature. New York, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Lewis, C.S. Perelandra. New York, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1965

Lewis, C. S. The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1983.

Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.

Lewis, C. S. They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses. London: G. Bles, 1962.

Lewis, C. S. That Hideous Strength. New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2012.

Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold,. Orlando, Fla: Harcourt, 1984.

Lewis, C.S. Transposition, and other addresses. London: Guild of Church Braillists, 1950.

Meyerowitz, Joanne Jay. How sex changed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. 

Smilde, Arend. “C. S. Lewis’s ‘Transposition’: Text and Context.” Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal 13 (2019): 29–56. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48579718.

Sprinkle, Preston M. Embodied: Transgender identities, The Church & What the Bible has to say. Colorado Springs, CO: David C Cook, 2021.

SVEINSDÓTTIR, ÁSTA KRISTJANA. “The Social Construction of Human Kinds.” Hypatia 28, no. 4 (2013): 716–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24542082. 

Tiffany, Grace. “C. S. Lewis: The Anti-Platonic Platonist.” Christianity and Literature 63, no. 3 (2014): 357–71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26194758. 

Van Leeuwen, Mary Stewart. A sword between the sexes?: C.S. Lewis and the gender debates. Grand Rapids, Mich: Brazos Press, 2010.

Williams, Charles. The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church. Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2017.

1. Throughout this paper my observations and reflections should be understood to be limited in scope to contemporary “western” culture(s) are are only applicable beyond that insofar as colonial and neo-colonial projects have disseminated said culture(s).

2. For an exploration of what might be involved in a Lewisian Neo-Platonism see Grace Tiffany’s C.S. Lewis: The Anti-Platonic Platonist

3. The one example I have found that does engage a Lewisian neo-Platonic metaphysics of sex and gender is Peter Kreeft's essay Is There Sex in Heaven https://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/sex-in-heaven.htm in which Kreeft relies primarily on Lewis and Jung in his use and understanding of the sex/gender distinction.

4. Sprinkle, Embodied, 151

5. The Nashville Statement https://cbmw.org/nashville-statement/#articles.

6. Favale The Genesis of Gender 131-132

7. Butler Gender Trouble 10

8. Butler Who's Afraid of Gender 184-185

9. Lewis Perelandra 200-201

10. See Meyerowitz How Sex Changed (2002) as a representative example

11. See SVEINSDÓTTIR, ÁSTA KRISTJANA. “The Social Construction of Human Kinds.” Hypatia 28, no. 4 (2013): 716–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24542082. “The sex/gender distinction has its origin in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, where she wrote, “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one” (Beauvoir 1949). Although it is controversial whether she herself held the view attributed to her, the standard interpretation of her is that she held that sex is biologically given whereas gender is the social significance of sex”

12. Favale “The Genesis of Gender” pp. 63-64

13. Bentley, "Sanity and Hazard in Childhood," The American Journal of Psychology 58, no. 2 (1945): 212–46, https://doi.org/10.2307/1417846.

14. I am referring here to Lewis as he represented himself in the 1940s and early 50’s Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, in A Sword Between the Sexes: C.S. Lewis and the Gender Debates, and others have persuasively argued that Lewis’s conceptualization of gender and its import developed and changed significantly over the course of his life, particularly influenced by his interactions with women like Dorothy L. Sayers, Ruth Pitter, Sister Penelope, and—more than anyone else—Joy Davidman.

15. Lewis Perelandra (1943)

16. Lewis On Three Ways of Writing for Children (1952);  Reprinted in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature 31

17. It does, perhaps, support Steward Van Leeuwen’s thesis that this essay was only re-printed with its current title (it originally appeared in Time and Tide vol. XXIX under the title “Notes on the Way” after Lewis’s death).

18. It is probably worth observing Lewis’ use of “farther in” to represent the idea of a deeper, real-er degree of reality, especially given his continued use of it in this mode both in The Last Battle and in The Great Divorce where the concept references the “direction of heaven” and echoes Dante’s famous inversion of Cosmic geography at the end of The Divine Comedy demonstrates Lewis’s dependence on a Platonic metaphor for the geography of the Metaphysical

19. Lewis, Priestesses in the Church? Originally published as “Notes on the Way” (1948) reprinted in God in the Doc. 234

20. Stewart Van Leeuwen, A Sword Between the Sexes .216 Those familiar with the text will recognize that I have cut off the quote part way through and that Steward Van Leeuwen proceeds to contrast this view with a later Lewis. I will have more to say about the complete passage further along in this paper.

21. See Charles Williams Descent of the Dove

22. See Lionel Adey’s C.S. Lewis’s “Great War” with Own Barfield

23. Barfield Poetic Diction .92

24. Stewart Van Leeuwen A Sword Between the Sexes 154

25.  It is a mistake to accuse Lewis of Gnosticism or Neo-Platonism on account of this view, though certainly he was familiar with Plotinus and very fond of Plato; while he continued to develop his metaphysics over the course of his life, Lewis rarely, if ever, showed any evidence of treating material reality as unimportant or irredeemably evil/wicked/broken. To understand physical reality as a less substantial image of spiritual reality is not to say that physical reality is unreal, a view he explicitly rejected as early as The Abolition of Man (see for instance, his discourse on Nature in Book III) and as late as a 1956 Letter to Mary Willis Shelburne saying “I think all that extreme refinement and that spirituality which takes the form of despising matter, is v. like Pythagoras and Plato and Marcus Aurelius. Poor dears: they don’t know about the Sacraments nor the resurrection of the body [emphasis mine]” Collected Letters vol. 3 kindle loc. 46271. Grace Tiffany admirably explores Lewis “peculiar Platonism” in her paper “C.S. Lewis: The Anti-Platonic Platonist” (Christianity and Literature Vol. 63, No. 3 2014) observing that “At numerous points in his essays and letters Lewis takes care to distinguish his Christian faith from Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas. In The Four Loves, he calls St. Augustine’s devaluing of human affections mere “neo-Platonic mysticism” (121). In a letter to a friend dated 1940, Lewis states, “Plato thought ... flesh and grass bad, and ... he was wrong” (Letters, 335). The Platonic illusion Lewis finds most dangerous is the fantasy that Christians can approach the good, which for Lewis is God, by turning away from the flesh and the grass and loving purely charitably— one might say platonically—as though they were not human and therefore by definition low and needy”.

26. Lewis Transposition and Other Addresses 1949

27. Lewis The Last Battle see for instance “‘“Listen, Peter. When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.” His voice stirred everyone like a trumpet as he spoke these words: but when he added under his breath “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!” the older ones laughed.”

28. Lewis The Great Divorce see for instance “Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak.” and" "Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.”

29. All my gratitude to Arend Smilde for his paper C.S. Lewis’s “Transposition”: Text and Context (2019) from which I have drawn the bulk of my understanding of the editorial history of this text. The single insignificant change involved the addition of a comma to the original text.

30. Tiffany’s C.S. Lewis: The Anti-Platonic Platonist

31. Lewis “Transposition” in  They Asked For A Paper

32. Lewis Meditation in a Toolshed in God in the Dock 212

33. See Myth Become Fact in God in the Doc 63-67 and Surprised by Joy

34. Lewis Perelandra

35. Lewis Till We Have Faces

36. Lewis A Grief Observed  “It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry “masculine” when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them  to describe a man’s sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as “feminine.” But also wha poor warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to make the implications of that arrogance plausible. Marriage heals this. Jointly the two become fully human. ‘In the image of God created He them.’ Thus by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes.” pp. 40-41 and “What was [Joy] not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more. If we had never fallen in love we should have none the less been always together, and created a scandal. That’s what I mean when I once praised her for her ‘masculine virtues’. But she soon put a stop to that by asking how I’d like to be praised for my feminine ones. It was a good riposte. Dear. Yet there was something of the Amazon, something of Penthesileia and Camilla. And you, as well as I, were glad it should be there. You were glad I should recognize it” 48

37. Lewis The Four Loves “The sexes will have met one another in Affection and in Eros but not in this love. For they will seldom have had with each other the companionship in common activities which is the matrix of Friendship. Where men are educated and women not, where one sex works and the other is idle, or where they do totally different work, they will usually have nothing to be Friends about. But we can easily see that it is this lack, rather than anything in their natures, which excludes Friendship; for where they can be companions they can also become Friends. Hence in a profession (like my own) where men and women work side by side, or in the mission field, or among authors and artists, such friendship is common.” p. 72

38. Lewis Perelandra

39. Steward Van Leeuwen A Sword Between the Sexes 256

40. DeFranza Sex Difference in Christian Theology Kindle loc. 3266

41. Lewis Perelandra

42. See Barfield Poetic Diction

43. C. S. Lewis, Preface to the Third Edition, in The Pilgrim’s Regress (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1958), 8

44. Lewis, First and Second Things in God in the Dock  278

45. While Lewis references only the two Genders (female and male) in Perelandra there is material in That Hideous Strength which might reasonably support the idea of other genders. That, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, in anticipation of that work I have elected to keep my language open in this work as regards the quantity and variety of genders.

46. Lewis Perelandra