The Missing Question of Masculine Morality

I want to offer you one of C. S. Lewis’s analogies to help you see the possibility and the actual work ahead of you as a man. Imagine a fleet of naval ships setting out to traverse an ocean and arriving together at a distant port. The first and arguably most critical decision is to identify their destination. Lewis called this the morality of purpose. But Lewis believed morality was made up of three parts. Knowing the destination isn’t enough to guarantee you’ll arrive there. Two additional questions remain. 

First, the ships must carefully communicate to determine which position they will each take in relationship to the other. They stand little chance of arriving at their destination if they are constantly crashing into one another, each making navigational choices with no regard for the others. Lewis described this risk as when “human individuals drift apart from one another, or else collide with one another and do one another damage.” These are the external responsibilities of each ship.

How should men behave in the workplace and at home? What are their responsibilities to family and community? What role should they play in church and amongst neighbors? But even if we could all agree on the answers to these questions, there is still another.

The ships must be in good enough working condition to carry out the maneuvers and maintain the courses required of them. This is the internal responsibilities of each ship. The captain of the ship may have all of the necessary courses drawn up, but if he helms a ship with a shoddy rudder and an out of balance load, no compass or charted course can help him reach his destination. 

As Lewis wisely recognized, these two questions depend on each other more than we often acknowledge. “You cannot have either of those two things without the other. If the ships keep on having collisions they will not remain seaworthy very long. On the other hand, if their steering gears are out of order they will not be able to avoid collisions.”

We need men to behave better amongst others but we stand little chance of pulling off those maneuvers if they can not maintain and guide the inner workings of their own vessels. We have asked men to set sail on ships they know very little about. We have offered them no course or education on stewarding those ships well.

That is the work long associated with maturing, gaining knowledge and mastery of the ship you’ve been given. Maturity has its aim not on ideals but on practical wisdom. Naming the parts of a man’s soul—halyards and sheets, downhauls and outhauls—learning to trim the sails and scrub the decks—scraping off barnacles, recognizing dangerous weather patterns, and learning when to reef and when you must lie ahull. Each vessel has its quirks and personalities. There is no perfect ship, not for long anyways. What matters most is not the ship you’ve inherited but learning to man it best.

Masculinity is the raw material which men are called to understand and mature into something useful. This is the work of building a chest. Neither indulging nor ignoring our instincts, but instead disciplining them into something useful. Lewis would ultimately conclude, “Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.”