From A to Z to Narnia with C.S. Lewis Quotes

“Narnia, held captive by the “post-Christian” Telmarines, cannot be rescued and renewed until Peter and Edmund exercise their masculine gifts to defeat the Telmarine army while Susan and Lucy exercise their feminine gifts to wake up the trees from their deep slumber.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Yes, Lewis concludes, God may at times treat us harshly, but he has never treated us with contempt.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“the reason God tells us not to judge is that we do not know the raw material that other people are struggling with.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Yes, our world is real, but its temporal reality offers us but a glimpse, a faint foreshadowing of the greater reality that is to come.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Lewis was no fan of war, but he was unashamed to champion the beauty of the knight, of the medieval Crusader, of the “Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Rather than actively love our neighbor, we unselfishly allow him to live whatever way he wants to, even if his life choices are self-destructive.  Had Lewis lived today, I think he would have said that the reigning virtue is not unselfishness but tolerance—a pseudo-virtue that also manifests itself, not in active charity, but in a negative acquiescence to the “rights” of others.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Lewis closes his book, The Abolition of Man, with these prophetic words: “You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. . . . If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.  But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.  To see through all things is the same as not to see.” ”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“No longer do our beliefs point back to a divine law code or an essential, in-built sense of good and evil; they exist only and solely in the eye of the beholder.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Zeitgeist is a German word that means “spirit of the age.”  The zeitgeist of Periclean Athens was self-knowledge (supremely embodied in the thought of Socrates), while that of the Middle Ages and Victorianism was hierarchy (Dante) and progress (Tennyson), respectively.  As for the darker zeitgeist of modernism, marked by relativism and subjectivism, though Lewis did not embody it, he understood it better than many of its most ardent supporters.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“The success of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings helped restore the reputation of these discredited genres, thus enabling moderns to draw on their innocent wisdom.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“reducing human love, joy, religion, and art to a product of unconscious urges, or economic forces, or the struggle for survival and reproduction, the theories of Freud, Marx, and Darwin have emptied humanity of its freedom, its dignity, and its purpose.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Actually, if truth be told, love and unselfishness are also received in a radically different way by the object of the proffered charity.  In the former case, the recipient is assured that another human being cares deeply about him; in the latter, he feel manipulated and used.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“And that is why Lewis concludes that we can shut Jesus up as a lunatic, kill him as a devil, or fall at his feet in worship—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.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Hell is a state of mind . . .  And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind—is, in the end, Hell.  But Heaven is not a state of mind.  Heaven is reality itself.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“We are half-hearted creatures,” writes Lewis, “fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased.”  Heaven promises a purification, not a mortification, of our deepest desires.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis