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C.S. Lewis Quotes
Quotes on Goodness, Truth and Beauty
Quotes by C.S. Lewis and other Notable
Christian Writers on Goodness, Truth and Beauty |
CS Lewis Quotes
Quotes
on Goodness, Truth and Beauty
Then you
will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
John 8:32
"I believe in Christianity as
I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it,
but because by it I see everything else".
C. S. Lewis
Truth is truth, whether it's
spoken by the lips of Jesus or Balaam's donkey. George
Macdonald
"It costs
God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but
to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion."
C. S. Lewis, Surprised
by Joy
If God exists and we are made
in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real
knowledge through what he has communicated to us.
Francis Schaeffer
One might ask,
"Well, then, how do skeptical scholars explain the
facts of the resurrection appearances, the empty tomb, and
the origin of the Christian faith?" The fact of the matter
is, they don't. Modern scholarship recognizes no
plausible explanatory alternative to the resurrection of Jesus.
Those who refuse to accept the resurrection as a fact of history
are simply self-confessedly left without an explanation.
These three
great facts--the resurrection appearances, the empty tomb,
and the origin of the Christian faith--all point unavoidably
to one conclusion: The resurrection of Jesus. Today the rational
man can hardly be blamed if he believes that on that first
Easter morning a divine miracle occurred.
William Lane Craig
It seems to
me …that the lesson to be learned from the classical debate
over miracles, a lesson that has been reinforced by contemporary
scientific and philosophical thought, is that the presupposition
of the impossibility of miracles should, contrary to the assumption
of nineteenth and for the most part twentieth century biblical
criticism, play no role in determining the historicity of
any event. While many scholars still operate under such an
assumption, there seems now to be a growing recognition that
such a presupposition is illegitimate. The presupposition
against the possibility of miracles survives in theology only
as a hangover from an earlier Deist age and ought to be once
for all abandoned.
William Lane Craig
[William Craig
in response to a question from Lee Strobel] “I would argue
that the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead is
not at all improbable. In fact, based on the evidence, it’s
the best explanation for what happened. What is improbable
is the hypothesis that Jesus rose naturally from the dead.
That, I would agree, is outlandish. Any hypothesis would be
more probable than saying the corpse of Jesus spontaneously
came back to life.”
“But the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead doesn’t
contradict or any known facts of experience. All it requires
is the hypothesis that God exists, and I think there are good
independent reasons for believing that he does.”
With that, Craig added this clincher: “As long as the existence
of God is even possible, it’s possible that he acted in history
by raising Jesus from the dead.”
Lee Strobel, The Case for Easter
In the Incarnation,
God the Son takes the body and human soul of Jesus, and, through
that, the whole environment of Nature, all the creaturely
predicament, into His own being. So that ‘He came down from
Heaven’ can almost be transposed into ‘Heaven drew earth up
into it’, and locality, limitation, sleep, sweat, footsore
weariness, frustration, pain, doubt, and death, are, from
before all worlds, known by God from within. The pure light
walks the earth; the darkness, received into the heart of
Deity, is there swallowed up. Where, except in uncreated light,
can the darkness be drowned?
C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
Every generation
of Christians has this problem of learning how to speak meaningfully
to its own age. It cannot be solved without an understanding
of the changing existential situation which it faces. If we
are to communicate the Christian faith effectively, therefore,
we must know and understand the thought forms of our own generation.
Francis A. Schaeffer, Escape From Reason
Christianity
is the greatest intellectual system the mind of man has ever
touched.
Francis Schaeffer, Letter, March 2, 1959
Christianity believes that God has created
an external world that is really there; and because He is
a reasonable God, one can expect to be able to find the order
of the universe by reason.
Francis A. Schaeffer, Pollution
and the Death of Man
A lie travels
round the world, while Truth is putting on her boots.
Charles H. Spurgeon
"A great many
of those who 'debunk' traditional...values have in the background
values of their own which they believe to be immune from the
debunking process."
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
"Whenever you
find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and
Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment
later."
C.S. Lewis,
The Case for Christianity
The Christian
is the real radical of our generation, for he stands against
the monolithic, modern concept of truth as relative. But too
often, instead of being the radical, standing against the
shifting sands of relativism, he subsides into merely maintaining
the status quo. If it is true that evil is evil, that God
hates it to the point of the cross, and that there is a moral
law fixed in what God is in Himself, then Christians should
be the first into the field against what is wrong.
Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who is There
The biblical
and continuing vision of Jesus was of one who made all of
created reality and kept it working, literally “holding it
together” (Col. 1:17). And today we think people are smart
who make light bulbs and computer chips and rockets out of
“stuff” already provided! He made “the stuff”.
Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy
"Truth, even crucified and buried, still has
a way of rising faith out of the grave, reasserting itself
and challenging people to repentance and change."
Naim Stifan Ateek, Palestinian canon of St. George's Cathedral,
Jerusalem
The proper question to be asked about any creed
is not 'Is it pleasant?' but 'Is it true?'"
Dorothy Sayers
Understanding
is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that
thou mayest believe, but believe that thou mayest understand.
Augustine, On the Gospel of
St.
John
A thing is not necessarily true
because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.
Saint Augustine
The emotional quality of what
we moderns call our thought produces an extreme violence of
conviction combined with extreme incoherence in our arguments.
Jacques Ellul
I aim tonight only at reversing
the popular belief that reality is totally alien to our minds.
My answer to that view consists simply restating it in the
form: ‘Our minds are totally alien to reality.’ Put that way,
it reveals itself as a self-contradiction. For if our minds
are totally alien to reality than all our thoughts, including
this thought, are worthless. We must, then, grant logic to
the reality; we must, if we are to have any moral standards,
grant it moral standards too. And there is really no reason
why we should not do the same about standards of beauty. There
is no reason why our reaction to a beautiful landscape should
not be the response, however humanly blurred and partial,
to a something that is really there. The idea of a wholly
mindless and valueless universe has to be abandoned at one
point-i.e. as regards logic: after that, there is no telling
at how many other points it will be defeated nor how great
the reversal of our nineteenth century philosophy must finally
be.
C.S. Lewis, De Futilitate; in Christian Reflections
The simple step of a courageous
individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth
outweighs the world.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The individual
needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in
the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is
not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual
being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of
his Creator and subject to Him
Peter Drucker-- Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the
New 'Post-Modern' World (1959)
It becomes
Christians to pray for peace and quiet, but not to abandon
steadfast faith and truth, even at the peril of death.
Ambrose of Milan
Was not Jesus an extremist for
love-Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for
them that despitefully use you. Was not Amos an extremist
for justice-Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness
like a mighty stream. Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel
of Jesus Christ-I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus…So
the question is not whether we will be extremist but what
kind of extremist will we be…In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s
hill, three men were crucified. We must not forget that all
three were crucified for the same crime-the crime of extremism.
Two were extremists for immorality, and thusly fell below
their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist
for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment.
Dr. Martin Luther king, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
We are not taught much today
that honestly means to seek truth in an absolute, fanatical
way. Truth is no longer absolute, but is soft, squishy, and
negotiable. Most Christians still do believe in an objective
truth but don't see it as something to which we must be conformed.
Truth has become merely one of the ingredients in their experience,
one of the things they can use to obtain happiness.
Peter Kreeft
The closer we are to God, to
divine attributes-such as absolute truth, goodness, and beauty-the
more we wonder. When we separate ourselves from truth, goodness,
and beauty, we lose wonder and become cynical. The Enlightenment
was basically the narrowing of our vision to a purely scientific,
empirical, rationalistic worldview, screwing down the manhole
covers on us so we became squinting underground creatures.
Peter Kreeft
"No man knows how bad he is
till he has tried very hard to be good."
C.S. Lewis
"Badness is
only spoiled goodness."
C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity
"Bad cannot
succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all
Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of yon
wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed
up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into
that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself
is only a molecule."
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
No man or woman of the humblest sort can really
be strong, gentle, pure and good without the world being better
for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the
very existence of that goodness.
Phillips Brooks
"God is all that is good, as I see it—and
the goodness that all things have, it is He."
Julian Of Norwich
What doth
it profit thee to enter into deep discussions concerning the
Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility, and be thus displeasing
to the Trinity? For verily it is not deep words that make
a man holy and upright; it is a good life which maketh a man
dear to God. I had rather feel contrition than be skillful
in the definition thereof. If thou knewest the whole Bible,
and the sayings of all the philosophers, what should this
profit thee without the love and grace of God? Thomas à
Kempis
The first
question which the priest and the Levite asked was: "If I
stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But... the
good Samaritan reversed the question: "If I do not stop to
help this man, what will happen to him?"
Martin Luther King, Jr.
We are looking
for our own virtue, our own piety, our own goodness, and so
live on and in our own poverty and weakness -today pleased
and comforted with the seeming firmness and strength of our
own pious tempers and fancying ourselves to be somewhat. Tomorrow,
fallen into our own mire, we are dejected, but not humbled;
we grieve,
but it is
only the grief of pride at the seeing our perfection not to
be such as we had vainly imagined. And thus it will be, till
the whole turn of our minds be so changed that we as fully
see and know our inability to have any goodness of our own
as to have a life of our own.
William Law
"Creator"–why did God create?
He needed nothing, being perfect and eternal. There is only
one possible motive: altruistic love, sheer generosity, the
desire to share His goodness and glory with others.
Peter Kreeft
I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts,
then there is no hurt, but only more love.
Mother Teresa, The Simple Path
God has been very good to me, for I never dwell upon anything
wrong which a person has done, so as to remember it afterwards.
If I do remember it, I always see some other virtue in that
person.
Saint Teresa of Avila
Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In
all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the
times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever
you can.
John Wesley
The essence
of the Christian faith…is that Jesus frees us from the “curse
of the law.” We are forgiven and accepted just as we are,
no longer burdened by an impossible weight of duty. But since
we have been loved at such great cost, (“God so loved the
world that he gave his only begotten Son that all who believe
I Him should not perish but have everlasting life,: John 3:16),
we respond with grateful love in turn. Now we do our best
to keep God’s law, because we are irresistibly drawn nearer
his beauty and perfection.
Frederica Mathewes Green,
At The Corner of East and Now
"That is one of the functions
of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical
perspectives of real life exclude."
C. S. Lewis
We are hurt;
we are lonely; and we turn to music or words, and as compensation
beyond all price we are given glimpses of the world on the
other side of time and space. We all have glimpses of glory
as children, and as we grow up we forget them, or are taught
to think we made them up; they couldn't possibly have been
real, because to most of us who are grown up, reality is like
radium, and can be borne only in very small quantities. But
we are meant to be real, and to see and recognize the real.
We are all more than we know, and that wondrous reality, that
wholeness, holiness, is there for all of us, not the qualified
only.
Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water
Beauty is indeed a good gift
of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God
dispenses it even to the wicked.
Saint Augustine
Since love
grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty
of the soul.
Saint Augustine
"The simple
act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies,
not to support false actions! His rule: let that come
into the world, let it even reign supreme--only not through
me. But it is within the power of writers and artists to do
much more: to defeat the lie! For in the struggle with
lies art has always triumphed and shall always triumph! Visibly,
irrefutably for all! Lies can prevail against much in this
world, but never against art."
Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn
"The only really effective apologia
for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the
saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown
in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor
of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of
believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has
come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so
frequent in the Church's human history. If the Church is to
continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she
dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is
so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection?
No. Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must
make their Church into a place where beauty--and hence truth--is
at home. Without this the world will become the first circle
of Hell."
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) with
Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report
The arts help us to perceive
and/or build connections everywhere. By so doing, they
allow us: a) to rebuild the sympathetic universe that the
medievals saw and that Dante embodied most fully; 2) to see
that Christ fulfills not only the Jewish Law/Prophets but
all the deepest philosophical, theological, and aesthetic
yearnings of mankind; 3) to be better evangelists and apologists
through an ability to re-incarnate the Gospel in a variety
of different cultures; 4) to praise God through a symphony
of voices.
Louis Markos, Cornerstone Magazine, The Importance of the
Arts to Christianity, posted June 25, 2003
The arts alone
give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education--or
worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments--is antieducational
obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs
of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance
fit only for slaves...-
Peter Drucker-- Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the
New 'Post-Modern' World (1959)
What C.S. Lewis called joy in
this life is an image of heaven. Joy is the experience of
wonder and love and longing for something that can't be defined,
but which we can experience right now and find wonderfully
fulfilling. Yet, by definition, it is a longing for more.
Peter Kreeft
We've reduced
mystery to a temporary problem that can be solved by reason.
The ancient mind that produced myth, and the medieval mind
that produced both a Dante and an Aquinas, combined mystery
and order. They combined the conviction that the universe
can be understood at least partly by human reason, and that
the universe itself and the ultimate reality behind it is
endlessly mysterious. They combined that, but we separate
them. Some philosophers are rationalists, saying we
can understand it all, and thus, there's no mystery. Some
are irrationalists, saying it's all mystery. Those two halves
of the human spirit haven't changed, but their relationship
has. They have become disintegrated. Sometimes it's cynical
and nihilistic, sometimes it's optimistic and romantic, sometimes
it's just passionately existential-or something like that.
What is often called the culture and the counterculture, and
the classical versus romantic dualism of the nineteenth century,
are all versions of that fundamental split.
Peter Kreeft
If Christianity
is really true, then it involves the whole man, including
his intellect and creativeness. Christianity is not just "dogmatically"
true or "doctrinally" true. Rather, it is true to what is
there, true in the whole area of the whole man in all of life.
Francis Schaeffer, Art and
the Bible
The Christian
is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.
Francis Schaeffer, Art
and the Bible
The arts
and the sciences do have a place in the Christian life --
they are not peripheral. For a Christian, redeemed by the
work of Christ and living within the norms of Scripture and
under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, the Lordship of Christ
should include an interest in the arts. A Christian should
use these arts to the glory of God -- not just as tracts,
but as things of beauty to the praise of God. And art work
can be a doxology in itself.
Francis Schaeffer, Art
and the Bible
"The thought pierced him that in the end the
Shadow was a small and passing thing: there was Light
and High Beauty forever beyond its reach."
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord
of the Rings
…What is human
work but a participation in divine creation? What is leisure
but an anticipation of the unlabored life of heaven? What
does the artist do but restore creation to its divine origin
and end? Beauty in all its material and practical expressions
exists to draw humanity into the redeeming beauty of God.
This is surely what Dostoevsky had in mind when one of his
characters in The Idiot declares that "beauty will
save the world."
…The Church
today can play a role in bringing the arts back from alienation
from the transcendent—an alienation that has led the arts
themselves into severe disorientation and crisis. Church art
programs can elevate and ennoble what beauty exists in the
human city and among its artists and poets.
Monsignor M. Francis Mannion, The Church and The City,
First Things, February 2000
I have learnt to love you late,
Beauty at once so ancient and so new!
Saint Augustine
Love is the beauty of the soul.
Saint Augustine
What makes for
a good, Christian movie? In brief, a good, Christian movie
is one that is well-crafted and true. A film that does
not strive for artistic and aesthetic excellence cannot be
a good film. It will be a shoddy or uneven film, making whatever
story or message is being told almost impossible to digest,
no matter how biblically sound it is. Likewise, a film that
does not bear allusive witness to the truth cannot be a good
film. This phrase "allusive witness" is intentional, for we
are not suggesting the evangelistic film. We're suggesting
rather the film that witnesses allusively, obliquely, to the
splendor of goodness, the shabbiness of sin, the hunger to
be forgiven, the yearning for the divine, the playfulness
of creation—all things true—in films such as
Dead Man Walking, Glory,
To Kill a Mockingbird, Blade Runner, Babette's Feast, Henry
V, and
Chariots of Fire.
W. David O. Taylor, Christianity Today, What Is
a Good Christian Movie, Anyway?, posted 7/13/04
Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is
terrible because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us
nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions
exist side by side.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The awful thing
is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and
the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart
of man.
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov
"One
thing have I asked of the LORD,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
and to inquire in his temple.
A Psalm of David
By a curious blend of these
currents of religious faith and scholarship with the no less
powerful influences of skepticism and religious relativism,
the universality-with-particularity of Jesus has thus become
an issue not only for Christians in the 20th century, but
for humanity. As respect for the organized church has declined,
reverence for Jesus has grown. For the unity and variety of
the portraits of "Jesus through the centuries’’ has demonstrated
that there is more in him than is dreamt of in the philosophy
and Christology of the theologians. Within the church, but
also far beyond its walls, his person and message are, in
the phrase of Augustine, a "beauty ever ancient, ever new,"
and now he belongs to the world.
Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries
"It was when
I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in
all my life has been the longing...to find the place where
all the beauty came from."
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
If God counts the hairs of each
of their heads, if none are excluded from the salvation the
Crucifixion offers, who will venture to exclude them from
earthly blessings and esteem; pronounce this life unnecessary,
that one better terminated or never begun? I never experienced
so perfect a sense of human equality as with Mother Teresa
among her poor. Her love for them, reflecting God's love,
makes them equal, as brothers and sisters within a family
are equal, however widely they differ in intellectual and
other attainments, in physical beauty and grace.
Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful
for God
Imagination disposes of everything;
it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything
in this world.
Blaise Pascal
"By the words 'Christian Art'
I do not mean Church art...I mean Christian art in the sense
of art which bears within it the character of Christianity...It
is the art of redeemed humanity."
--Jacques Maritain, "Christian Art," Art & Scholasticism
Liturgy is like a strong tree whose beauty
is derived from the continuous renewal of its leaves, but
whose strength comes from the old trunk, with solid roots
in the ground.
Pope Paul VI
1Then the angel showed
me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing
from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2down the middle of
the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood
the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding
its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for
the healing of the nations. 3No longer will there be any curse.
The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and
his servants will serve him. 4They will see his face, and
his name will be on their foreheads. 5There will be no more
night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light
of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they
will reign for ever and ever. 6The angel said to me, "These
words are trustworthy and true. The Lord, the God of the spirits
of the prophets, sent his angel to show his servants the things
that must soon take place."
Revelation 22
C.S.
Lewis Quotes
The Chinese
also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the
Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss
that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the
Way, the Road... It is also the Way which every man should
tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression,
conforming all activities to that great exemplar.
'In ritual,' say the Analects,
'it is harmony
with Nature that is prized.' The ancient Jews likewise praise
the Law as being
'true'.
This conception
in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelean, Christian, and Oriental
alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as 'the
Tao'. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to
many of you as merely quaint or even magical. But what is
common to them all…is the doctrine of objective value, the
belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others
are really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and
the kind of things we are.
The Abolition of Man
(New York:
Macmillan, 1955), p. 28-29.
The idea . . . that Christianity brought a new ethical code
into the world is a grave error. If it had done so, then we
should have to conclude that all who first preached it wholly
misunderstood their own message: for all of them, its Founder,
His precursor, His apostles, came demanding repentance and
offering forgiveness, a demand and an offer both meaningless
except on the assumption of a moral law already known and
already broken.
"On Ethics," Christian
Reflections,
ed.
Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967),
p. 46.
At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer
or a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder
of systems. He wanted "a place for everything and everything
in the right place". Distinction, definition, tabulation were
his delight . . . Highly original and soaring philosophical
speculation squeezes itself into a rigid dialectical pattern
copied from Aristotle. Studies like Law and Moral Theology,
which demand the ordering of very diverse particulars, especially
flourish . . . There was nothing which medieval people liked
better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up . .
. The perfect examples are the
Summa of Aquinas
and Dante's Divine Comedy;
as unified and ordered as the Parthenon or the Oedipus Rex,
as crowded and varied as a London terminus on a bank holiday.
The Discarded
Image
(New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1964),
p. 10.
The Christin religion…does not begin in comfort; it begins
in…dismay.…In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort
is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you
look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: If you look
for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only
soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end,
despair.
Mere Christianity
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 39.
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have
found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no
light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes,
we should never know it was dark. Dark would
be without meaning.
Mere Christianity
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 46.
"Pleasure,
money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good
things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong
method, or in the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean, of
course, that the people who do this are not desperately wicked.
I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out
to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be
good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for
the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you
are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply
because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action
simply because cruelty is wrong--only because cruelty was
pleasant or useful to him. In other words badness cannot succeed
even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good.
Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled
goodness. And there must be something good first before it
can be spoiled. We called sadism a sexual perversion; but
you must first have the idea of a normal sexuality before
you can talk of its being perverted; and you can see which
is the perversion, because you can explain the perverted from
the normal, and cannot explain the normal from the perverted."
Mere Christianity
(New York: McMillan, 1952), pp. 49-50.
…God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself
is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food
our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. .
. . God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself,
because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Mere Christianity
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 54.
"I am trying
to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people
often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great
moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That
is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man
and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great
moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with
the man who says he is a poached egg or else he would be
the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this
man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something
worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him
and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call
Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing
nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not
left that open to us. He did not intend to."
Mere Christianity
(New York: McMillan, 1952), pp. 55-56.
…Faith,
in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art
of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in
spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever
view your reason takes. I know that by experience."
Mere Christianity
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 123.
It cost God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things:
but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.
Mere Christianity
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 179.
…the question whether miracles occur can never be answered
simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be
a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our
senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted.
And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary
seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been
the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which
excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.
What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy
we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal
to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the
philosophical question.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 3.
Thus no thoroughgoing Naturalist believes in free will: for
free will would mean that human beings have the power of independent
action, the power of doing something more or other than what
was involved by the total series of events. And any such separate
power of originating events is what the Naturalist denies.
Spontaneity, originality, action 'on its own', is a privilege
reserved for 'the whole show', which he calls
Nature.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 7.
The difference between Naturalism and Supernaturalism is not
exactly the same as the difference between belief in a God
and disbelief. Naturalism, without ceasing to be itself, could
admit a certain kind of God. The great interlocking event
called Nature might be such as to produce at some stage a
great cosmic consciousness, an indwelling 'God' arising from
the whole process as human mind arises (according to the Naturalists)
from human organisms. A Naturalist would not object to that
sort of God. ..Such a God would not stand outside Nature or
the total system, would not be existing “on his own.” …What
Naturalism cannot accept is the idea of a God who stands outside
Nature and made it.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), pp. 8-9.
It follows
that no account of the universe can be true unless that account
leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight.
A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe
but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking
was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory
would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking
is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.
It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an
argument which proved that no argument was sound--a proof
that there are no such things as proofs--which is nonsense.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), pp. 14-15.
Thus strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given
long ago by Professor Haldane: “If my mental processes are
determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have
no reason to believe my beliefss are true…and hence I have
no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
“
(Possible Worlds, p. 209)
Naturalism…seems to me to invole the same difficulty. It discredits
our process of reasoning or at least reduces their credit
to such a humble level that it can no longer support Naturalism
itself.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 15.
Bacon warned us long ago that 'the human understanding is
of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order
and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there
be many things which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises
for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not
exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in
perfect circles' (Novum Organum, I. 45). I think Bacon was
right. Science itself has already made reality appear less
homogeneous than we expected it to be: Newtonian atomism was
much more the sort of thing we expected (and desired) than
Quantum physics.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 27.
Human minds, then, are not the only supernatural entities
that exist. They do not come from nowhere. Each has come into
Nature from Supernature: each has its tap-root in an eternal,
self-existent, rational Being, whom we call God. Each is an
offshoot, or spearhead, or incursion of that Supernatural
reality into Nature.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 28.
The various and complex conditions under which Reason and
Morality appear are the twists and turns of the frontier between
Nature and Supernature. That is why, if you wish, you can
always ignore Supernature and treat the phenomena purely from
the Natural side; just as a man studying on a map the boundaries
of Cornwall and Devonshire can always say, 'What you call
a bulge in Devonshire is really a dent in Cornwall'. And in
a sense you can't refute him. What we call a bulge in Devonshire
always is
a dent in Cornwall. What we call rational thought in a man
always involves a state of the brain, in the long run a relation
of atoms. But
Devonshire
is none the less something more than 'where
Cornwall
ends', and Reason is something more than cerebral bio-chemistry.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 40.
A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live:
a society where all were seers could live even more fully.
But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers
are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality,
baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back
we must go; to stay here is death.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 43.
Our question could, if you liked, be put in the form, 'Does
Supernature ever produce particular results in space and time
except through
the instrumentality of human brains acting on human nerves
and muscles'.
I have said “particular
results” because, on our view, Nature as a whole is herself
one huge result of the Supernatural: God created her. God
pierces her wherever there is a human mind. God presumably
maintains her in existence. The question is whether He ever
does anything else to her. Does He, besides all this, ever
introduce into her events of which it would not be true to
say, 'This is simply the working out of the general character
which He gave to Nature as a whole in creating her'? Such
events are what are popularly called Miracles: and it will
be in this sense only that the word Miracle will be used for
the rest of the book.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), pp. 43-44.
All records of miracles teach the same thing. In such stories
the miracles excite fear and wonder (that is what the very
word miracle
implies) among the spectators, and are taken as evidence of
supernatural power. If they were not known to be contrary
to the laws of nature how could they suggest the presence
of the supernatural? How could they be surprising unless they
were seen to be exceptions to the rules? And how can anything
be seen to be an exception till the rules are known? If there
ever were men who did not know the laws of nature
at all, they
would have no idea of a miracle and feel no particular interest
in one if it were performed before them. Nothing can seem
extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 47.
If it is maintained that anything so small as the Earth must,
in any event, be too unimportant to merit the love of the
Creator, we reply that no Christian ever supposed we did merit
it. Christ did not die for men because they were intrinsically
worth dying for, but because He is intrinsically love, and
therefore loves infinitely. And what, after all, does the
size of
a world or a creature tell us about its 'importance' or value?Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 52.
The divine art of miracles is not an art of suspending the
pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events
into that pattern.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 60.
To find that all the woods, and small streams in the middle
of the woods, and odd corners of mountain valleys, and the
wind and the grass were only a sort of
scenery, only
backcloths for some kind of play, and that play perhaps one
with a moral--what flatness, what an anticlimax, what an unendurable
bore! [p. 78] 64
We have now three guiding principles before us. (1) That thought
is distinct from the imagination which accompanies it. (2)
That thought may be in the main sound even when the false
images that accompany it are mistaken by the thinker for true
ones. (3) That anyone who talks about things that cannot be
seen, or touched, or heard, or the like, must inevitably talk
as if they could be
seen or touched or heard (e.g. must talk of 'complexes' and
'repressions' as if
desires could really be tied up in bundles or shoved back;
of 'growth' and 'development'
as if institution
could really grow like trees or unfold like flowers; of energy
being 'released' as
if it where an animal let out of a cage).
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 73.
God is basic
Fact or Actuality, the source of all other facthood. At all
costs therefore He must not be thought of as a featureless
generality. If He exists at all, He is the most concrete thing
there is, the most individual, “organised and minutely articulated.”
He is unspeakable not by being indefinite but by being too
definite for the unavoidable vagueness of language. The words
incorporeal and
impersonal are misleading, because they suggest that He
lacks some reality which we posses. It would be safer to call
His trans-corporeal,
trans-personal.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 91.
If the ultimate Fact is not an abstraction but the living
God, opaque by the very fulness of His blinding actuality,
then He might do things. He might work miracles. But would
He? Many people of sincere piety feel that He would not. They
think it unworthy of Him. It is petty and capricious tyrants
who break their own laws: good and wise kinds obey them. Only
an incompetent workman will produce work which needs to be
interfered with. And people who believe in this way
are not satisfied by the assurances given in Chapter VIII
that miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature...
This feeling springs from deep and noble sources in the mind
and must always be treated with respect. Yet it is, I believe
, founded on an error.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 95.
To be sure, God might be expected to make a better story than
my friend. But it is a very
long story,
with a complicated plot; and we are not, perhaps, very attentive
readers.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 99.
In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes
down . . . down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature
He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring
the whole ruined world up with Him.
Miracles
(New York: McMillan, 1952), p. 111.
The doctrine of the Incarnation …digs beneath the surface,
works through the rest of our knowledge by unexpected channels,
harmonises best with our deepest apprehensions and our “second
thoughts”. . . illuminates and orders all other phenomena,
explains both our laughter and our logic, our fear of the
dead and our knowledge that it is somehow good to die, and
which at one stroke covers what multitudes of separate theories
will hardly cover for us if this is rejected.
Miracles
(New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 131.
The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon
reported in Acts. The Resurrection, and its consequences,
were the “gospel” or good news which the Christians brought:
what we call the “gospels,” the narratives of our Lord’s live
and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who
had already accepted the gospel.
Miracles
(New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 143-144.
…I think our present outlook might be like that of a small
boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest
bodily pleasure should immediately ask whether you ate chocolates
at the same time. On receiving the answer 'No', he might regard
absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality.
In vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their
carnal raptures don't bother about chocolates is that they
have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate:
he does not know the positive thing that excludes it. We are
in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know,
except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will
leave no room for it.
Miracles
(New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 160.
Most of our prayers, if fully analysed, ask either for a miracle
or an event whose foundations will have to have been laid
before I was born, indeed, laid when the universe began. But
then to God (though not to me) I and the prayer I make in
1945 were just as much present at the creation of the world
as they are now and will be a million years hence. God’s creative
act is timeless…
Miracles
(New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 178.
Chronicles of Narnia
"And may
I ask, O Lucy, Daughter of Eve," said Mr. Tumnus, "how you
have come into Narnia?"
"Narnia? What's that?" said Lucy.
"This is the land of Narnia," said the Faun, "where we are
now; all that lies between the lamppost and the great castle
of Cair Paravel on the Eastern Sea."
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
(New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 10.
"There are
only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies,
or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn't
tell lies and it is obvious she is not mad. For the moment
then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume
she is telling the truth."
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
(New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 45.
“Who is
Aslan?” asked Susan.
“Aslan?”
said Mr. Beaver. Why don’t you know? He’s the King. He’s the
Lord of the whole wood…
“Is he a
man?” asked Lucy.
“Aslan a
man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you
he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea.
Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion-the
Lion, the great Lion.”…
“Then he
isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?”
said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you?
Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s
good. He’s the King, I tell you.
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
(New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 74-76.
"'…when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was
killed in a traitor's stead, the table would crack and Death
itself would start working backwards.
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
(New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 160.
“Why have
all your follower drawn their swords, may I ask?’ said
Aslan.
“May it
please your high majesty,: said the second mouse, whose name
was Peepiceek, “we are all waiting to cut off our tails if
our Chief must go without his. We will not bear the shame
of wearing an honour which is denied to the High Mouse.”
“Ah” roared
Aslan,”you have conquered me. You have great hearts. Not for
the sake of your dignity, Reepicheep, but for the love that
is between you and your people, and still more for the kindness
your people showed me long ago when you ate away the cords
that bound me on the stone table (and it was then, though
you have long forgotten, that you became talking mice) you
shall have your tail again.”
Prince Caspian
(New York:
Macmillan, 1970), p. 203.
"'You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” said Aslan.
“And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest
beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest
emperor in earth.”
Prince Caspian
(New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 211-212.
“The King who owned this island,” said Caspian slowly, and
his face flushed as he spoke, “would soon be the richest of
all kings in the world. I claim this land forever as a Narnian
possession. It shall be called
Goldwater
Island. And I bind all you to secrecy. No one must know of
this. Not even Drinian-on pain of death, do your hear?”
“Who are you talking to?” said Edmund. “I’m no subject of yours.
If anything it’s the other way around. I am one of the four
ancient sovereigns of Narnia and you are under allegiance
to the High King my brother.”
“So it has come to that, King Edmund, has it?” said Caspian,
laying his hand on his sword-hilt…
“Sire,” said Reepicheep, “this is a place with a curse on it.
Let us get back on board at once. And if I ever have the honour
of naming this island, I should call it Deathwater.”
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
(New York:
Macmillan, 1952), pp. 105-106.
“Supposing I told
you I’d been in a place where animals can talk and where there
are—er—enchantments and dragons—and, well, all sorts of things
you have in fairy tales.” Scrubb felt terribly awkward as
he said this and got red in the face.
“How do you get there?” said Jill. She also felt curiously
shy.
“The only way you can—by Magic,” said Eustace almost in a
whisper.
The Silver Chair (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 5.
Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those
things-- trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan
himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that
case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than
the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours
is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty
poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think
of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right.
But four babies playing a game can make a play world, which
licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand
by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side, even if there isn't
any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian
as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.
The Silver Chair (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p.
159.
But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either;
he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to
him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh Adam’s
sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that
might do you good! But I will give him the only gift he is
still able to receive.”
He bowed his great head rather sadly, and breathed into the Magician’s terrified
face. “Sleep,” he said. “Sleep and be separated for some few
hours from all the torments you have devised for yourself.”
Uncle Andrew immediately rolled over with closed eyes and
began breathing peacefully.
The Magician’s
Nephew
(New York:
Macmillan, 1970), p. 185.
"'When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant
the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real
Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow
or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been there and
always will be there: just as our own world,
England
and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan's
real world. You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the
old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been
drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course
it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow
or as waking life is from a dream.'"
The Last
Battle
(New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 169-170.
“I have come home at last! This is my real country. I belong
here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life,
though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the
old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a bit like this…’
The Last
Battle
(New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 171.
Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex.
Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of
a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings.
Perelandra ( New York: Macmillan, 1943),
p. 200.
The reason for not living on the Fixed Land is now so plain.
How could I wish to live there except because it was Fixed?
And why should I desire the fixed except to make sure –to
be able to command one day where I would be the next and what
should happen to me? It was to reject the wave-to draw my
hands out of Maledil’s, to say to Him, ‘Not thus, but thus’-to
put in our own power what times should roll toward us…as if
you gathered fruits togethe to-dayfor tomorrow’s eating instead
of taking what came. That would have been cold love and feeble
trust. And out of it how could we ever have climbed back into
love and trust again?”
Perelandra (
New York: Macmillan, 1943), p. 208.
A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity.
Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really
feel this assumption of His we are part of the world He came
to save…
The Problem of Pain,
(New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 57.
...it is...a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to
offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If
God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but
He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even
though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him,
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