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Abstract

C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man is ultimately an eschatological work, a vision of the end of history, a warning about the fully conditioned society, an insight into the nature of the universal and homogeneous state, and even a prophecy of Hell on Earth. The end-times significance of the Abolition is perhaps overlooked because it lacks an apocalyptic framing. Lewis presented, rather, a “snug” eschatology.1 There is none of the apocalyptic drama that Lewis crafted in The Last Battle. We do not hear the Lion roar, “Now it is time,” before watching Father Time squeeze the sun in his hand like “an orange,” bringing “total darkness” in an instant.2 Instead, the Conditioners and the cursed inhabitants of the fully conditioned society exist (we can hardly say live) in countless generations “till the moon falls or the sun grows cold.”3 The end times that Lewis discussed in the Abolition may more properly be called the end of an historical epoch, the beginning of a new order, or the “end of homo sapiens” and the beginning of the dreary history of homo technicus, a technologically advanced but amoral race.4 The descendants of human beings, though biologically connected with their ancestors, will not share their ethical, social, political, and religious way of life. Lewis foresaw a future civilization in which applied science could suppress, expel, or kill the “common Reason”—the link between man’s Nature and Supernature5 that sparks his longings for the just, the beautiful, the good, and the eternal.

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