C. S. Lewis Quotes

“Imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“On Tolkien: "His fussiness threatened to overwhelm his creativity.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“When the old poets made some virtue their theme, they were not teaching but adoring,”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“The imaginative is produced by the human mind as it tries to respond to something greater than itself, struggling to find images adequate to the reality.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“The reading of old books enables us to avoid becoming passive captives of the Spirit of the Age by keeping “the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.”415”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“The study of the past helps us to appreciate that the ideas and values of our own age are just as provisional and transient as those of bygone ages. The intelligent and reflective engagement with the thought of a bygone era ultimately subverts any notion of "chronological snobbery". Reading texts from the past makes it clear that what we now term "the past" was once "the present", which proudly yet falsely regarded itself as having found the right intellectual answers and moral values that had eluded its predecessors.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Lewis's mental map of reality had difficulty accommodating the trauma of the Great War. Like so many, he found the settled way of looking at the world, taken for granted by many in the Edwardian age, to have been shattered by the most brutal and devastating war yet known." (51) Part (McGrath suggests) of Lewis's well-documented search for truth and meaning, that search that ultimately led him to Christianity, emerges from the desire to make sense of his traumatic experience in ways that satisfied him spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Christianity, rather than being one myth alongside many others, is thus the fulfilment of all previous mythological religions. Christianity tells a true story about humanity, which makes sense of all the stories that humanity tells about itself.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Christianity brings to fulfilment and completion imperfect and partial insights about reality, scattered abroad in human culture. Tolkien gave Lewis a lens, a way of seeing things, which”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys “fundamental things”—in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. Myths”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Tolkien helped Lewis to realise that the problem lay not in Lewis’s rational failure to understand the theory, but in his imaginative failure to grasp its significance. The issue was not primarily about truth, but about meaning. When”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Lewis was thus drawn to Christianity not so much by the arguments in its favour, but by its compelling vision of reality, which he could not ignore—and, as events proved, could not resist.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“A Grief Observed engages emotions with a passion and intensity unlike anything else in Lewis’s body of works, past or future. Lewis’s earlier discussion of suffering in The Problem of Pain (1940) tends to treat it as something that can be approached objectively and dispassionately. The existence of pain is presented as an intellectual puzzle which Christian theology is able to frame satisfactorily, if not entirely resolve. Lewis was quite clear about his intentions in writing this earlier work: “The only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering.”[708] Lewis may have faced all the intellectual questions raised by suffering and death before. Yet nothing seems to have prepared him for the emotional firestorm that Davidman’s death precipitated.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“In the months following Davidman’s death, Lewis went through a process of grieving which was harrowing in its emotional intensity, and unrelenting in its intellectual questioning and probing. What Lewis once referred to as his “treaty with reality” was overwhelmed with a tidal wave of raw emotional turmoil. “Reality smashe[d] my dream to bits.”[702] The dam was breached. Invading troops crossed the frontier, securing a temporary occupation of what was meant to be safe territory. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”[703] Like a tempest, unanswered and unanswerable questions surged against Lewis’s faith, forcing him against a wall of doubt and uncertainty.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Joy Davidman died of cancer at the age of forty-five at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, on 13 July 1960, with Lewis at her bedside.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Yet we cannot overlook the fact that Lewis’s entire relationship with Davidman was cloaked with subterfuge, recalling Lewis’s earlier lack of transparency (particularly with his father) about his relationship with Mrs. Moore in 1918–1920. We do not know why Lewis failed to tell his friends the truth about this newer relationship, beginning with the civil marriage of April 1956, and ending with the religious marriage service of March 1957. There is no doubt that some of his closest acquaintances—most notably, Tolkien—were deeply hurt at being excluded from Lewis’s confidence.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Davidman’s serious illness seems to have brought about a change in Lewis’s attitude towards her. The thought of Davidman’s death made Lewis see their relationship in a new way.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“That Lewis saw his marriage to Davidman as a matter of chivalrous generosity, rather than as an exclusive passionate romance, is suggested by the fact that Davidman did not displace Pitter in Lewis’s life. Lewis’s enduring respect and affection for Pitter is obvious from his letter of July 1956—several months after his clandestine marriage—in which he invited her (rather than Davidman) to be his guest at a royal garden party at Buckingham Palace.[678] In the end, Pitter couldn’t make it, so Lewis went on his own. He wrote to Pitter again a week later to tell her that the event was “simply ghastly,” and invited her to lunch with him sometime soon, so that they could catch up with each other.[679] Lewis’s correspondence and his meetings make it clear that Davidman did not dislodge other women who mattered to him.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“On Monday, 23 April 1956, without any fanfare of advance publicity or courtesy of prior announcement, C. S. Lewis married Helen Joy Davidman Gresham, an American divorcée sixteen years his junior, in a civil ceremony at Oxford’s Register Office at St. Giles. The ceremony was witnessed by Lewis’s friends Dr. Robert E. Havard and Austin M. Farrer. Tolkien was not present; in fact, it would be some time before he learned of this development. It was, in Lewis’s view, purely a marriage of convenience, designed to allow Mrs. Gresham and her two sons the legal right to remain in Oxford when their permission to reside in Great Britain expired on 31 May 1956. After the brief ceremony, Lewis caught a train to Cambridge and resumed his normal pattern of weekly lectures. It was as if his marriage had made no difference to him. Lewis’s close circle of friends knew nothing of this development. He had gone behind their backs. Most of them believed that Lewis was reconciled to remaining a bachelor for the rest of his life.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“In the end, Lewis enjoyed a long and productive period at Cambridge, until ill health finally forced him to resign his chair with effect from October 1963. By my reckoning, Lewis wrote thirteen books and forty-four articles during his Cambridge years, not to mention numerous book reviews and several poems, and he edited three collections of essays. There were controversies, of course, perhaps most significantly the 1960 debate with F. R. Leavis and his supporters over the merits of literary criticism. Nevertheless, Lewis’s Cambridge period—while not being anything like Bunyan’s “Plain called Ease”—was certainly an oasis of creativity, resulting in some of his most significant works, including Till We Have Faces (1956), Reflections on the Psalms (1958), The Four Loves (1960), An Experiment in Criticism (1961), and The Discarded Image (published posthumously in 1964). Yet Lewis’s Cambridge period was dominated by an event in his personal life, which had a significant impact on his writings during this time. Lewis found a new—but rather demanding—literary stimulus: Helen Joy Davidman.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Was this move to Cambridge wise? Some certainly doubted it. John Wain, one of Lewis’s former pupils, suggested that it was like “leaving an overblown and neglected rose-garden for a horticultural research station on the plains of Siberia.”[646] Wain’s meaning here was ideological, not meteorological. He was not thinking primarily of the icy east winds from the Urals that can make Cambridge so bitterly cold in winter, but of the clinically cool attitude towards literature that dominated the Cambridge English faculty at this time. Lewis was entering a lion’s den—a faculty which prized “critical theory” and treated texts as “objects” for analytical dissection, rather than for intellectual enjoyment and enlargement.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“There are unquestionably points at which Lewis believes the past to be preferable to the present. For example, Lewis’s battle scenes tend to emphasise the importance of boldness and bravery in personal combat. Battle is about hand-to-hand and face-to-face encounters between noble and dignified foes, in which killing is a regrettable but necessary part of securing victory. This is far removed from the warfare Lewis himself experienced in the fields around Arras in late 1917 and early 1918, where an impersonal technology hurled explosive death from a distance, often destroying friend as well as foe. There was nothing brave or bold about modern artillery or machine guns.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Most readers of this section of the book will smile at this point, realising that a seemingly sophisticated philosophical argument is clearly invalidated by the context within which Lewis sets it. Yet Lewis has borrowed this from Plato—while using Anselm of Canterbury and René Descartes as intermediaries—thus allowing classical wisdom to make an essentially Christian point. Lewis is clearly aware that Plato has been viewed through a series of interpretative lenses—those of Plotinus, Augustine, and the Renaissance being particularly familiar to him. Readers of Lewis’s Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and Spenser’s Images of Life will be aware that Lewis frequently highlights how extensively Plato and later Neoplatonists influenced Christian literary writers of both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Lewis’s achievement is to work Platonic themes and images into children’s literature in such a natural way that few, if any, of its young readers are aware of Narnia’s implicit philosophical tutorials, or its grounding in an earlier world of thought. It is all part of Lewis’s tactic of expanding minds by exposing them to such ideas in a highly accessible and imaginative form.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“If Ward is right, Lewis has crafted each novel in the light of the atmosphere associated with one of the planets in the medieval tradition. This does not necessarily mean that this symbolism determines the plot of each novel, or the overall series; it does, however, help us understand something of the thematic identity and stylistic tone of each individual novel. Ward’s analysis is generally agreed to have opened up important new ways of thinking about the Narnia series, although further discussion and evaluation will probably lead to modification of some of its details. There is clearly more to Lewis’s imaginative genius than his earlier interpreters appreciated. If Ward is right, Lewis has used themes drawn from his own specialist field of medieval and Renaissance literature to ensure the coherency of the Chronicles of Narnia as a whole, while at the same time giving each book its own distinct identity.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Amidst the wreckage of these implausible suggestions, an alternative has recently emerged—that Lewis was shaped by what the great English seventeenth-century poet John Donne called “the Heptarchy, the seven kingdoms of the seven planets.” And amazingly, this one seems to work. The idea was first put forward by Oxford Lewis scholar Michael Ward in 2008.[618] Noting the importance that Lewis assigns to the seven planets in his studies of medieval literature, Ward suggests that the Narnia novels reflect and embody the thematic characteristics associated in the “discarded” medieval worldview with the seven planets. In the pre-Copernican worldview, which dominated the Middle Ages, Earth was understood to be stationary; the seven “planets” revolved around Earth. These medieval planets were the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Lewis does not include Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, since these were only discovered in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, respectively. So what is Lewis doing? Ward is not suggesting that Lewis reverts to a pre-Copernican cosmology, nor that he endorses the arcane world of astrology. His point is much more subtle, and has enormous imaginative potential. For Ward, Lewis regarded the seven planets as being part of a poetically rich and imaginatively satisfying symbolic system. Lewis therefore took the imaginative and emotive characteristics which the Middle Ages associated with each of the seven planets, and attached these to each of the seven novels as follows: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: Jupiter Prince Caspian: Mars The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”: the Sun The Silver Chair: the Moon The Horse and His Boy: Mercury The Magician’s Nephew: Venus The Last Battle: Saturn For example, Ward argues that Prince Caspian shows the thematic influence of Mars.[619] This is seen primarily at two levels. First, Mars was the ancient god of war (Mars Gradivus). This immediately connects to the dominance of military language, imagery, and issues in this novel. The four Pevensie children arrive in Narnia “in the middle of a war”—“the Great War of Deliverance,” as it is referred to later in the series, or the “Civil War” in Lewis’s own “Outline of Narnian History.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“But where do these ideas come from? They are all derived from the writings of the Middle Ages—not works of academic theology, which generally were critical of such highly visual and dramatic approaches, but the popular religious literature of the age, which took pleasure in a powerful narrative of Satan’s being outmanoeuvred and outwitted by Christ.[615] According to these popular atonement theories, Satan had rightful possession over sinful human beings. God was unable to wrest humanity from Satan’s grasp by any legitimate means. Yet what if Satan were to overstep his legitimate authority, and claim the life of a sinless person—such as Jesus Christ, who, as God incarnate, was devoid of sin? The great mystery plays of the Middle Ages—such as the cycle performed at York in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—dramatised the way in which a wily and canny God tricked Satan into overstepping his rights, and thus forfeiting them all. An arrogant Satan received his comeuppance, to howls of approval from the assembled townspeople. A central theme of this great popular approach to atonement was the “Harrowing of Hell”—a dramatic depiction of the risen Christ battering the gates of hell, and setting free all who were imprisoned within its realm.[616] All of humanity were thus liberated by the death and resurrection of Christ. In Narnia, Edmund is the first to be saved by Aslan; the remainder are restored to life later, as Aslan breathes on the stone statues in the Witch’s castle. Lewis’s narrative in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe contains all the main themes of this medieval atonement drama: Satan having rights over sinful humanity; God outwitting Satan because of the sinlessness of Christ; and the breaking down of the gates of Hell, leading to the liberation of its prisoners. The imagery is derived from the great medieval popular religious writings which Lewis so admired and enjoyed.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“But where do these ideas come from? They are all derived from the writings of the Middle Ages—not works of academic theology, which generally were critical of such highly visual and dramatic approaches, but the popular religious literature of the age, which took pleasure in a powerful narrative of Satan’s being outmanoeuvred and outwitted by Christ.[615] According to these popular atonement theories, Satan had rightful possession over sinful human beings. God was unable to wrest humanity from Satan’s grasp by any legitimate means. Yet what if Satan were to overstep his legitimate authority, and claim the life of a sinless person—such as Jesus Christ, who, as God incarnate, was devoid of sin?”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Lewis is here setting out, in a preliminary yet still powerful form, his core theme of Aslan as the heart’s desire. Aslan evokes wonder, awe, and an “unutterable love.” Even the name Aslan speaks to the depths of the soul. What would it be like to meet him? Lewis captures this complex sense of awe mingled with longing in the reaction of Peter to the Beaver’s declarations about this magnificent lion, who is “the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“Otto’s account of numinous experience identifies two distinct themes: a mysterium tremendum, a sense of mystery which evokes fear and trembling; and mysterium fascinans, a mystery which fascinates and attracts. The numinous, for Otto, can thus terrify or energise, giving rise to a sense of either fear or delight, as suggested in Grahame’s dialogue. Other writers reframed the idea in terms of a “nostalgia for paradise,” which evokes an overwhelming sense of belonging elsewhere.”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

“To understand the literary force of Lewis’s depiction of Aslan, we need to appreciate the importance of Lewis’s early reading of Rudolf Otto’s classic religious work The Idea of the Holy (1923). This work, which Lewis first read in 1936 and regularly identified as one of the most important books he had ever read,[596] persuaded him of the importance of the “numinous”—a mysterious and awe-inspiring quality of certain things or beings, real or imagined, which Lewis described as seemingly “lit by a light from beyond the world.”[597]”
― Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet