Book Review: Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve
Joshua Herring, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: C.S. Lewis’ Image of Gender. The Davenant Press, 2026. 234 pp.
If a live dinosaur dragged its slow length into the laboratory, would we not all look back as we fled? What a chance to know at last how it really moved and looked and smelled and what noises it made! And if the Neanderthaler could talk, then, though his lecturing technique might leave much to be desired, should we not almost certainly learn from him some things about him that the best modern anthropologist could never have told us? He would tell us without knowing he was telling.
C. S. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 13. Accessed via Archive.org.
In the above passage, C.S. Lewis was, of course, describing himself as the dinosaur and Neanderthal in question. He saw himself as Old Western Man in a new age—not necessarily improved. Though scholars have underexplored this idea, it appears nowhere more clearly than in Lewis’s biblically soaked teaching on gender. His friend Owen Barfield put it well: “Everything Lewis thinks is in everything Lewis says.” Lewis’s mature thought was not always systematic, but it was always consistent. It had so deeply shaped him that he tells us without knowing he tells.
Sponsored
Enter Dr. Joshua Herring, Curriculum Program Manager for the Rafiki Foundation and founder of the Logres Institute for Classical Liberal Studies. In Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: C.S. Lewis’s Images of Gender, Herring opens this cask of Lewis’s thought and sheds light on a culturally shadowed subject. He summarizes the book’s message this way:
“The message of my book is [this]: Lewis believed that every human being is made in the divine image, male or female, as part of the giftedness of creation. That gift is glorious, and complex; the proper response to a glorious, complex gift is to unfold its complexity and grow in appreciation of the gift. There are no takebacks, no exchanges of this gift. Instead, every boy needs to learn what it is to be a man, and every girl what it is to be a woman. We ought not shy away from the fact that there are real differences—instead, we celebrate the beauty of who God has made us to be.”
Nadya Williams, “Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve,” Mere Orthodoxy, March 26, 2026, https://mereorthodoxy.com/sons-of-adam-daughters-of-eve/.
His book celebrates Lewis’s notion of reality’s complex givenness, especially gender. Herring also notes that Christians need more than negative critiques of the modern gender revolution; churches, schools, and society need a positive vision. He aims to give readers “language, models, and images.”
Theories & Influences
Dr. Herring opens by assessing the false gender theories that now shape parts of the cultural landscape, along with their academic champions and myths. He spends significant time with Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler. De Beauvoir authored the influential feminist text The Second Sex (1949), and Butler later extended her ideas in Gender Trouble (1990). Herring frames their influence as a battle of mythologies:
This is, in one sense, a battle of mythologies. [These authors] tell a myth about human nature that has always been compelling; the idea of a plastic self is old as Ovid, and possibly older. To combat a false myth, a more true myth is needed. Lewis combats bad philosophy with excellent literature, and as such is the mythologizer who restores to us a right vision of human nature.
Herring, Sons of Adam, 11
Lewis’s role as a true mythmaker around gender anchors the book. Herring champions Lewis’s approach as fruitful for today. Lewis could, and often did, meet error intellectually, but we remember him for another tactic: in his fiction, he did not attack modernity head-on so much as plant the seeds of its overthrow from within.
Lewis’s Literary Sources
What influenced Lewis? Here Herring makes a distinctive contribution to Lewis studies by tracing links to Edmund Spenser and John Milton. Spenser, best known for The Faerie Queene, drew Lewis’s admiration. Lewis called it “a celebration of life: of order, fertility, spontaneity, and jocundity”—“Spenser’s Hymn to Life.” That celebration of life’s givenness runs through Lewis’s work, from The Chronicles of Narnia to the Ransom Trilogy. In Perelandra, Ransom meets an ocean world whose waves cannot be changed to suit his taste. He must adapt and receive them as strange grace.
John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a classic Lewis loved, also shaped him deeply. Lewis wrote a famous preface to Milton’s work, and Milton’s influence appears throughout the Narniad, especially in Lewis’s own answer to Milton: Perelandra. Both works share a strong, positive sense of God-given hierarchy and order. Perelandra asks what an unfallen world might look like—and what the relationship between man and woman would be. Herring argues that both the content and epic style of Perelandra owe much to Paradise Lost, especially on gender, though Lewis also corrects some of Milton’s mistakes.
Positive & Negative Images
Speaking as a priest and father, I found Herring’s work on the book’s positive and negative images of masculinity and femininity among its most helpful and compelling sections. Here, he most clearly unpacks what lies latent in Lewis. Three examples will suffice.
Eustace and Masculine Transformation
Voyage of the Dawn Treader introduces Eustace Clarence Scrub, a boy who “almost deserved” his name. Herring reads Eustace’s early characterization as a negative image of masculinity. He is withdrawn, unhappy, rude, and unable to receive Narnia as a gift. His encounter with Reepicheep proves especially instructive: a beast must teach the young man manners. When Eustace swings Reepicheep by the tail, he receives both verbal and physical correction:
“[T]ake that,” said Reepicheep, “and that – to teach you manners – and the respect due to a knight – and a Mouse – and a Mouse’s tail -” and with each word he gave Eustace a blow with the side of his rapier, which was thin, fine, dwarf-tempered steel and as supple as a birch rod.
C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Harper Collins, 1980), 36.
The irony is that Eustace must become a beast before he can begin to become a man. His time as a dragon turns him toward a positive image of masculinity. Herring summarizes: “Eustace’s time as a dragon is a time of transformation; one way he changes is in moving outwards towards the group and away from himself; Eustace’s initial selfishness is not feminine interiority, but rather a failure of masculinity” (Sons of Adam, 153).
Jadis and Destructive Femininity
The Narniad’s greatest negative image of femininity is Jadis, the White Witch. She represents feminine abdication and perversion, dealing “death instead of life” (Sons of Adam, 200). Herring reads even her posture and clothing as a repudiation of the feminine. Noting Pauline Baynes’s illustration of Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew, he concludes,
Rather than curves, Baynes’s Jadis is composed of lines. Jadis still has a feminine figure, but the linear elongation mutes her femininity. While a mature woman, Jadis does not appear maternal. Polly calls Jadis a “terrible woman.” She indicts Jadis not just as a person, but as a woman. Jadis’s strength is destructive rather than creative.
Herring, Sons of Adam, 206
Susan, Lucy, and Relational Obedience
Herring highlights a positive image of femininity in Susan and Lucy’s relationship to Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. On the cusp of Aslan’s death, he asks Susan and Lucy to accompany him. Peter must reign; they must walk. Peter and Edmund’s roles are more formal and martial, while Susan and Lucy’s are more organic and relational. Herring connects this pattern to women’s role in the Four Gospels:
Mary, the mother of Jesus, remains with her son as he dies … ; women disciples are also the first to see Jesus after his resurrection. Mary [Magdalene], is the first first to speak with the risen Christ. Lewis follows this pattern by recognizing masculine and feminine modes of following Aslan. Where Peter and Edmund fight evil directly in the battle, Susan and Lucy accompany the source of life as he undoes the Witch’s evil.
Herring, Sons of Adam, 171
A Definition That Holds Together
These examples help Herring define masculinity and femininity through Lewis’s work. Broadly, the masculine “goes outward, leading and/or protecting,” while the feminine “goes inward, creating the conditions for life to flourish” (Sons of Adam, 142). Yet Herring’s definitions are not simplistic or rigid. Masculine and feminine interweave like a dance, borrowing from each other and becoming more in the process. Gender is more than superficial difference. It is not less than biological, but it is more; indeed, gender precedes biological sex. As Lewis argues in “Priestesses in the Church?”:
With the Church, we are farther in: 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.
C.S. Lewis, “Priestesses in the Church?,” in No Other Foundation: Essays on Women’s Ordination in the Anglican Church, ed. Ben Jeffries (The North American Anglican Press, 2021), 49-50.
Timely Takeaways
Herring’s work offers a timely, nuanced account of Lewis’s contribution to a Christian understanding of gender in a post-Christian culture. To reach more readers, he could condense the book into a shorter, punchier version, much as Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self became the half-length Strange New World.
Writing as a priest in the Anglican Church in North America, I note the irony in Herring’s publication: a Christian author from the wider Protestant world has pointed out what a treasure C.S. Lewis—the Anglican’s Anglican—remains for thinking about gender and gender roles. As the ACNA wrestles with Holy Orders, and therefore with gender, we should look to Herring for a compass and a path through the impasse. In Lewis’s words,
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Scribner, 1952), 22.
Sometimes even dinosaurs prove to be the true progressives. In church and culture, Herring’s book shows what true progress would look like: a renewed understanding of the givenness and goodness of gender, to the glory of the God who gave us such gifts.
Image: Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve © 2026 The Davenant Press
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