Men without chests
“Men without chests,” is a term that was coined by C.S. Lewis, in his book, “The Abolition of Man.” He was one of the most influential Christian spiritual writers of the 20th Century. He opens his book with this concept that society is forming men without chests, without heart and soul. He saw this phenomenon as one of the greatest detriments to the modern man and even more profound to men who follow Christ.
Most men know the feeling before they have words for it. You can run the meeting, fix the leak, lead the team, and provide for the people who depend on you. Then your son asks you a real question or your wife asks what you are actually feeling. Or maybe you stand at a graveside and wait for something to rise in you and nothing does. It is not coldness exactly, it’s more like an empty room. The place where the right response should live was never furnished.
C.S. Lewis had a name for this. In 1943 he published a short, unsettling book called The Abolition of Man. Its first chapter carries a title that has followed men ever since: "Men Without Chests." More than eighty years later, it reads less like a warning and more like a diagnosis.
A Schoolbook and a Waterfall
Lewis did not begin with a grand theory. He began with an English textbook written for schoolboys. To spare its authors embarrassment, he called it The Green Book and gave the writers the pen names Gaius and Titius. In one passage, the authors retell a story about the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Two tourists stood before a waterfall. One called it sublime. The other called it pretty. Coleridge agreed with the first and dismissed the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius explain to their young readers that the first tourist was not really saying anything about the waterfall at all. He was only describing his own feelings. Beauty, they suggest, is not out there. It is only in here.
Lewis saw what that small grammar lesson would actually teach. A boy would forget the exercise. He would not forget the assumption underneath it. He would quietly learn that every statement of value is just a report on someone's mood. Nothing is truly noble. Nothing is truly shameful. Nothing actually deserves a response from him.
What Lewis Meant by the Chest
To explain what is lost, Lewis reaches back to Plato. The human person, in that older picture, has three parts. The head is reason, the belly is appetite and between them sits the chest.
The chest is not raw emotion. It is emotion that has been trained. It is the seat of what Lewis called settled, well-formed sentiments: honor, loyalty, courage, a sense of shame at cowardice, and real delight in what is good. Lewis argued that reason alone has never been strong enough to rule the appetites. A man who merely knows the right answer will lose that argument to his hungers in the moment of temptation. It is the trained heart that stands between them and holds the line.
This is why Lewis says the chest is what makes a man fully human. Without it, he is a mind attached to a set of cravings, with nothing in the middle to join them. The older teachers Lewis drew on all said something similar. Aristotle taught that the aim of education is to help a young person like and dislike what he ought. Augustine described virtue as rightly ordered love. The point was never to feel more or to feel less. The point was to feel truly. To love what is lovely. To be moved by what is worth being moved by.
The Line That Still Stings
Lewis compressed his whole argument into one sentence: "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise." He went on to name the contradiction. We mock honor and then feel shocked by betrayal. We treat courage as a feeling and then wonder why men will not stand up when it costs them. We strip out the very organ that produces virtue, and then demand the fruit. That is not a problem of information. Most men today have more information than any generation in history. It is a problem of formation.
Two Ways to Empty a Man's Chest
It would be easy to read Lewis and conclude that men simply need to get in touch with their feelings. That misses him entirely. There are two common ways a culture empties a man's chest.
The first says feelings are weakness. Toughen up. Push it down. Don't cry. This produces men who are functional and guarded, but strangely unreachable. They can provide. They cannot be present. The second says feelings are sovereign. Your emotions are your truth. Whatever you feel is valid simply because you feel it. This produces men who are expressive but unanchored. They feel a great deal, and none of it points anywhere.
These look like opposites. They are not. Both deny that a man's heart should answer to something real outside of himself. One silences the heart while the other crowns it. Neither trains it. Lewis made an observation as a teacher that still rings true. He said the students he met were rarely in danger of having too much feeling. Far more often, they had too little. The modern educator's job, he wrote, is not to cut back a jungle but to water a desert. Many men are not overwhelmed, they are simply dry.
The Heart in Scripture
Scripture never asks a man to choose between strength and tenderness. It assumes he will need both. In Hebrew thought, the heart is not just the place of emotion. It is the center of the whole person. Thought, will, and affection all live there. That is why Proverbs says, "Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life" (Proverbs 4:23). A guarded heart is not a closed heart. It is a tended one.
David was a warrior who killed a giant and led armies. He was also a poet who wept, danced, confessed, and wrote songs of longing. Scripture calls him a man after God's own heart. His chest was full. Jesus wept at the tomb of His friend Lazarus, even knowing He was about to raise him. He also overturned tables in the temple. His grief and His anger were not swings of mood. They were right responses to what was in front of Him. That is what a formed heart looks like.
And the promise of the gospel is not that God will remove the chest. It is that He will fill it. "I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26). God is not after men who feel nothing. He is after men whose hearts beat in rhythm with His.
How a Chest Is Formed
You cannot argue a man into a chest. Lewis knew this. A formed heart comes from repeated, attentive encounter with what is true, good, and beautiful, until his responses begin to match what those things deserve. Think again of the waterfall. The question is not whether a man has an opinion about it. The question is whether he will stand there long enough to be undone by it.
This is where the modern man struggles most. He rarely stands anywhere long enough. Every quiet moment is filled. Every pause has a screen in it. He photographs the sunset instead of receiving it. He scrolls past grief instead of letting it land. He consumes beauty in seconds and wonders why it never reaches him.
A chest is formed in attention. And attention is formed in silence. When the noise stops, a man stops performing. He begins, often for the first time in a long time, to respond. He notices what moves him. He notices what doesn't, and he asks why. He reads a psalm slowly enough that it can reach him. He sits with creation until it starts to preach. He lets God look at him without an agenda. Slowly, the empty room gets furnished.
This is not a technique. It is the old way. It is how the saints were formed, and how fathers have always passed on what matters. Not by lecture, but by showing a son what it looks like to stand before something holy and be rightly moved.
Come and Stand Before the Waterfall
The world will keep producing men without chests. It is efficient at it. But a man does not have to accept the version of himself that the noise has shaped.
At Kallah, we believe beauty is a form of theology and silence is where the heart learns to listen again. Our Christian silent retreats give men room to set down the performance, step into creation, and let God do the slow work of forming what the world has left empty.
If something in this stirred you, that stirring matters, explore our upcoming silent retreats across the U.S. For men in a deeper season of calling or transition, our immersive retreats, “Eden Restored,” offer a more focused experience, one focused on women and one on men.