Men Without Chests
By Rachel Gieger
I just finished reading, much to my dismay, a testimony of a woman describing why she left the Catholic Church. In great detail, with a background of theological study, she argued against many points that the Church considers firm ground to place our weary feet upon: papal infallibility, chastity, the vows of clergy. What struck me wasn’t that this woman questioned these teachings – Don’t we all at some point? – but that she treated her exit from the Catholic Church as some sort of enlightenment.
As a theology graduate myself, it stung to read. The state of my mind is not “unenlightened” (or not “woke,” if you want to speak in cultural terms) because I believe what I have studied to be true. My intellect is not hindered by dogma, doctrine, or objectives. In fact, it relies on them in order to find itself and its purpose. However, the “enlightened” mind is only one of the extremes we face today: either you must “free” your mind by claiming its authority over the life of the soul or allow the stomach – the appetites – to rule.
This thought is not original, it’s been cautioned throughout the centuries, but my best buddy C.S. Lewis hit it home in his work The Abolition of Man. He said the problem of our society is that we have become “men without chests.” What’s gnawing at me from reading this woman’s testimony speaks exactly to that: Without the chest (read: the soul) we have no choice but to become either people of the mind, defined by our intelligence, scientific advances, or philosophical musings with no destination; or we become people of the stomach, ruled by a constant hankering for money, power, sex, drugs, alcohol, anything to fill the desire inherent to us. We treat letting go of the objectivity of the soul as an enlightenment of the mind or taking ownership of that objectivity as a bore, a hindrance to the stomach.
The soul must rule both the mind and stomach; otherwise, the result is a society that looks a heck of a lot like what ours is barrelling towards. Lewis says, “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” The answer to so many of our problems, at the core, is not system reform or the right politicians (though those things help), but remembering that we have a core in the first place. We have souls, given to us by a God who has made Himself our final end; acknowledging this reality is the only way to heal society. Not empty philosophies, not scrolling news feeds, not by shaking our fists in such an angry fashion that we can’t even love our neighbor anymore...but by becoming people with chests, with souls made for the infinite, and acknowledging the truth that everyone else has one too and should be treated that way.
Without the chest, the head plows forward thinking it’s self-sufficient, trying to find answers without the Answer, while the stomach fills itself up over and over only to be emptied out again. In fact, the two enter into a pretty toxic relationship with each other--the mind says it's rational to be so primal, while the appetites make knowledge something only to be devoured but never appreciated. Freedom from the soul – and the Truth that it longs for – is not true freedom, it is not enlightenment. It is severing out the core, the epicenter, the life source of you that guides your mind and lets your stomach know when it’s had enough. And we know, as Catholic women, that the good stuff usually comes in threes.
I don’t have a great conclusion for this musing (partly because I’m trying to avoid entreating you to be “women with chests,” because we all know why THAT doesn’t sound like a rallying battle cry), except to ask you to lead the way. Becoming women who are whole – who know they are comprised of head, chest, and stomach – is perhaps our greatest contribution to the war that rages in our culture. St. Peter tells us plainly, “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope” (1 Peter 3:15). Our Christian hope isn’t naïve, but rather it’s the real enlightenment; because you finally know you have a soul, to Whom it belongs, and where to take both the chaos of your mind and the hunger of your stomach. Please, don’t forget.
