C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), the Anglican author of The Chronicles of Narnia and classics such as The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity, is widely considered to be the best defender of the Christian faith in the 20th century. These quotations are drawn from The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931-1949, and Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963, both edited by Walter Hooper and published by HarperSanFrancisco in 2004 and 2007.
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1) Paganism and Christianity
I think the thrill of the Pagan stories and of the romance may be due to the fact that they are mere beginnings – the first, faint whisper of the wind from beyond the world – while Christianity is the thing itself: and no thing, when you have really started on it, can have for you then and there just the same thrill as the first hint. (Nov. 8, 1931)
2) Early Christians and Ecclesiology
We should be glad that the early Christians expected the second coming and the end of the world quite soon: for if they had known that they were founding an organization for centuries they would certainly have organized it to death: believing that they were merely making provisional arrangements for a year or so, they left it free to live. (Christmas Day, 1931)
3) Reading
I think re-reading old favourites . . . is one of my greatest pleasures: indeed I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once. (Feb. 1932)
4) God’s Will and Our Lives
Just because God wants for us what we really want and knows the only way to get it, therefore He must, in a sense, be quite ruthless towards sin. He is not like a human authority who can be begged off or caught in an indulgent mood. The more He loves you the more determined He must be to pull you back from your way which leads nowhere into His way which leads you where you want to go. (Sep. 12, 1933)
5) Evil
The truth is that evil is not a real thing at all, like God. It is simply good spoiled. That is why I say there can be good without evil, but no evil without good. You know what the biologists mean by a parasite – an animal that lives on another animal. Evil is a parasite. It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse. (Sep. 12, 1933)
6) Friends
Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’ I know I am very fortunate in that respect . . . (Dec. 29, 1935)
7) Nature Mysticism and Romanticism
What indeed can we imagine Heaven to be but unimpeded obedience. I think this is one of the causes of our love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful: and though their kind of obedience is infinitely lower than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and water. The Pantheistic conclusions they sometimes drew are false: but their feeling was just and we can safely allow it in ourselves now that we know the real reason. (Jan. 8, 1936)
8) Philosophy
I must have expressed myself very badly if you thought I held that one system of philosophy was as good as another or that pure reason was mutable. All I meant was that no philosophy is perfect: nor can be, since, whatever is true of Reason herself, in the human process of reasoning there is always error and even what is right, in solving one problem, always poses another. . . . The dominance (and revival) of particular philosophy does seem to me to have historical causes. In any age, foolish men want that philosophy whose truths they least need and whose errors are most dangerous to them: and wise men want the opposite. In the next age neither fools nor wise want the same. . . . Reason, no doubt, is always on the side of Christianity: but that amount and kind of human reasoning which gives an age its dominant intellectual tone, is surely sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other. (April 24, 1936)
9) Jesus, Poetry, and Philosophy
Surely the ‘type of mind’ represented in the human nature of Christ . . . stands at just about the same distance from the poetic as from the philosopher. The overwhelming majority of His utterances are in fact addressed neither to thought nor to the imagination, but to the ‘heart’ – i.e., to the will and the affections . . . The parables approach poetry just about as much [as] His argumentative utterances approach philosophy . . . how full of argument, of repartee, even of irony, He is. The passage about the denarius (‘whose image and superscription’ [Mt 22:20]); the dilemma about John’s baptism [Mt 21:25]; the argument against the Sadducees from the words ‘I am the God of Jacob etc’ [Mt 22:32]; the terrible, yet almost humorous, trap laid for his Pharisaic host (‘Simon, I have something to say to you’ [Lk 7:40]); the repeated use of the a forteriori (‘If . . ., how much more’ [Mt 6:30; Lk 12:28]); and the appeals to our reason (‘Why do not ye of yourselves judge what is right? [Lk 12:56-57]) – surely in all these we recognize as the human and natural vehicle of the Word’s incarnation and mental complexion in which a keen-eyed peasant shrewdness is just as noticeable as an imaginative quality – something in other words quite as close (on the natural level) to Socrates as to Aeschylus. (May 23, 1936)
10) The Psalms
My enjoyment of the Psalms has been greatly increased lately. . . . what an admirable thing it is in the Divine economy that the sacred literature of the world should have been entrusted to a people whose poetry, depending largely on parallelism, should remain poetry in any language you translate it into. (July 16, 1940)
11) Poetry, Mythology, Religion, and Reality
Poetry ‘creates life’ in the sense of producing life-like fictions, and the world of fictions I call the ‘spiritual world’ . . . Poets ‘proclaim the mystery’ in the sense that they remind us we don’t know what the real universe is like . . . Oddly enough they also produce the illusion of penetrating the mystery . . . Mythologies and religions are products of the imagination in the sense that their content is imaginative. The more imaginative ones are ‘nearer the mark’ in the sense that they communicate more Reality to us. Poetry ‘creates life’ in the sense that its products are something more than fictions occurring in human minds, mere psychological phenomena, and can therefore be described as inhabiting a ‘spiritual world.’ Poets ‘proclaim the mystery’ in the sense that they somehow convey to us an inkling of supersensual and super-intellectual Reality . . . which transcends our common modes of perception. (Sep. 25, 1940)
12) Agnostics
A pure agnostic is a fine thing. I have known only one and he was the man who taught me to think. . . . one of the most dangerous things about the modern world seems to me the fact that most of those who call themselves agnostics have not really got rid of religion but merely exchanged civilized religion for barbarous religion – worship of sex, or the State, . . . or the dead, or Mystery as such. (Sep. 25, 1940)
13) Christian Apologetics
Many laymen who believe the Christian doctrines desire to hear them supported and expounded from the pulpit, and are disappointed when they hear only moral exhortation. I do not think this desire is confined to educated laymen, for I have ben present when an airman who had heard a lecture on the historicity of the Gospels exclaimed, ‘This is the first time I’ve heard anyone advance a reason for believing the Bible might be true.’ In my experience we laymen are often more easily shocked than our clergy by clerical disbelief or neglect of doctrine. (Dec. 11, 1942)
14) Original Sin
It is to me inconceivable that Nature as we see it is either what God intended or merely evil: it looks like a good thing spoiled. The doctrine of the Fall (both of man and of . . . ‘angels’) is the only satisfactory explanation. Evil begins, in a universe where all was good, from free will, which was permitted because it makes possible the greatest good of all. The corruption of the first sinner consists not in choosing some evil thing (there are no evil things for him to choose) but in preferring a lesser good (himself) before a greater (God). The Fall is, in fact, Pride. The possibility of this wrong preference is inherent in the very fact of having, or being, a self at all. But though freedom is real it is not infinite. Every choice reduces a little one’s freedom to choose the next time. There therefore comes a time when the creature is fully built, irrevocably attached either to God or to itself. This irrevocableness is what we call Heaven or Hell. Every conscious agent is finally committed in the long run: i.e. it rises above freedom into willed, but henceforth unalterable, union with God, or else sinks below freedom into the black fire of self-imprisonment. (July 20, 1943)
15) Suffering
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. (Dec. 20, 1943)
16) Accents
The first time I heard my voice on a record I didn’t recognize it and was shocked. Moral: A. No man knows what his own accent is like. B. No man’s accent is there because he has chosen it. C. It may not be the accent he likes. (March 13, 1944)
17) Loving God
Certainly I cannot love my neighbour properly till I love God. . . . On the other hand we have no power to make ourselves love God. The only way is absolute obedience to Him, total surrender. He will give us the ‘feeling’ if He pleases. But both when He does and when He does not, we shall gradually learn that feeling is not the important thing. There is something in us deeper than feeling, deeper even than conscious will. It is rather being. When we are quite empty of self we shall be filled with Him . . . (May 23, 1944)
18) God’s Grace and Our Pride
Of course it is good . . . to ‘realise’ that the source of all our good feelings is God. That is the right way to deal with pride: not to depreciate the good thing we are tempted to be proud of but to remember where it comes from. (May 23, 1944)
19) Christian Witness
The only hope lies in you and in any other Christian friends she has. It is in so far as you succeed in representing Christ to her by all your actions and words that she may, even unconsciously, cone to know Him. (June 7, 1945)
20) Crying
We don’t cry enough nowadays, that’s one of the things that is wrong with us. Achilles cried, Roland cried, Lancelot cried. It’s in Shakespeare that characters first start apologizing for tears. (c. Nov. 8, 1945)
21) Lewis’ Agnosticism and Return to Christianity
My Christian faith was first undermined by the attitude taken towards Pagan religion in the notes of modern editors of Latin & Greek poets at school. They always assumed that the ancient religion was pure error: hence, in my mind, the obvious question ‘Why shouldn’t ours be equally false?’ . . . I abandoned all belief in Christianity at about the age of 14 . . . My beliefs continued to be agnostic, with fluctuation towards pantheism and various other sub-Christian beliefs, till I was about 29. I was brought back (a.) By philosophy. . . . (b.) By increasing knowledge of medieval literature. It became harder & harder to think that all those great poets & philosophers were wrong. (c.) By the strong influence of two writers, the Presbyterian George Macdonald & the R.C., G. K. Chesterton. (Feb. 15, 1946)
22) Hell
About Hell. All I have ever said is that the N.T. plainly implies the possibility of some being finally left in ‘the outer darkness.’ Whether this means (horror of horror) being left to a purely mental existence, left with nothing at all but one’s own envy, prurience, resentment, loneliness & self-conceit, or whether there is still some sort of environment, something you could call a world or a reality, I would never pretend to know. But I wouldn’t put the question in the form ‘do I believe in an actual Hell’. One’s own mind is actual enough . . . when there is nothing for you but your own mind (no body to go to sleep, no books or landscape, no sounds, no drugs) it will be as actual as . . . a coffin is actual to a man buried alive. (May 13, 1946)
23) Self-Sacrifice
You can keep forever only what you give up: beginning with the thing it is hardest to give up – one’s self. What you grab you lose: what you offer freely and patiently to God or your neighbour, you will have. (June 30 [Lewis wrote “31”], 1947)
24) God’s Providence
I am sure God has not forced B to give A the job. God’s action would consist, I believe, in arranging all the circumstances so that A came at the right moment etc – i.e. in presenting B with the situation, on which then his free will worked. Ordinary people regard life as a mixture of ‘luck’ and free will. It is the part usually called ‘luck’ by which. On my view, God answers prayers. (Sep. 9, 1947)
25) Prayer
Prayer is a species of request: and the essence of request, whether to God or to a human superior, is that it may or may not be granted, and the essence of faithful and humble Christian prayer is that the petitioner is willing that it should not be granted (‘Nevertheless not as I will but as Thou wilt’ [Mt 26:39]) (March 25, 1948)
26) Timeless God
I firmly believe that God’s life is non temporal. Time is a defect of reality since by its very nature any temporal being loses each moment of its life to get the next – the moments run through us as if we were sieves! God forbid that we should think God to be like that. (February 4, 1949)
27) Sin
Sin is the turning away of the will from God. But the experience of sin will differ in different people: e.g. to an uninstructed person it may appear in consciousness merely as disobeying human authority, or taking a legitimate indulgence. That sin-as-it-really-is is ever fully present to human (as opposed to diabolical) consciousness at the moment of commission, I doubt. The rebellion of the will is nearly always accompanied with some fogging of the intelligence. (March 28, 1949)
28) The Lord’s Prayer
We make a great mistake by quoting ‘thy will be done’ without the rest of the sentence ‘on earth as it is in Heaven’ [Mt 6:10]. That is the real point, isn’t it? Not merely submission but a prayer that we may be enabled to do God’s will as (in the same way as) angels and blessed human spirits do it, with alacrity & delight like players in an orchestra responding spontaneously to the conductor. (July 27, 1949)
29) Praising the Lord
In so far as a creature sees God it cannot help in some way (not of course necessarily by words) telling Him what it sees (silence might be one way). Its ‘praise’ is a necessary reaction: the divine light sent back to its Source from the creature which has become its mirror. The sun is not brighter because a mirror reflects it: but the mirror is brighter because it reflects the sun. (August 17, 1949)
30) Communal Christianity / Going to Church
The New Testament does not envisage solitary religion: some kind of regular assembly for worship and instruction is everywhere taken for granted in the Epistles. So we must be regular practicing members of the Church. Of course we differ in temperament. Some (like you – and me) find it more natural to approach God in solitude: but we must go to church as well. For the Church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ in which all members however different . . . must share the common life, complementing and helping and receiving one another precisely by their differences. . . . If people like you and me find much that we don’t naturally like in the public & corporate side of Christianity all the better for us: it will teach us humility and charity towards simple low-brow people who may be better Christians than ourselves. (Dec. 7, 1950)
31) Learning
Unless one has to qualify oneself for a job . . . the only sensible reason for studying anything is that one has a strong curiosity about it. And if one has, one can’t help studying it. . . . I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! . . . one usually learns more from a book than from a lecture. (March 17, 1951)
32) Formal Liturgy and Prayer
The advantage of a fixed form of service is that we know what is coming. Ex tempore public prayer has this difficulty: we don’t know whether we can mentally join in it until we’ve heard it – it might be phoney or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a critical and a devotional activity at the same moment: two things hardly compatible. In a fixed form we ought to have ‘gone through the motions’ before in our private prayers: the rigid form really sets our devotions free. I also find the more rigid it is, the easier it is to keep one’s thoughts from straying. Also it prevents any service getting too completely eaten up by whatever happens to be the pre-occupation of the moment (a war, an election, or what not). The permanent shape of Christianity shows through. I don’t see how the ex tempore method can help becoming provincial & I think it has a great tendency to direct attention to the minister rather than to God. (April 1, 1952)
33) Salvation of Non-Christians
I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god or to a very imperfectly conceived true God, is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him. For He is (dimly) present in the good side of the inferior teachers they follow. (Nov. 8, 1952)
34) Abuse of Bible Verses in “Prooftexting”
We must not use the Bible . . . as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read with attention to the whole nature & purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons. (Nov. 8, 1952)
35) Ghosts
Everyone fears lest he should meet a ghost, but there seems to be some ground for supposing that those who really meet them are often quite unafraid. (Dec. 11, 1952)
36) Television
We haven’t got a set, and don’t propose to get one; it is I think a very bad habit to develop. People who have sets seem to do nothing but go into a huddle over them every evening of their lives, instead of being out walking, or in their gardens. And of course, like all things which begin as luxuries, they end up being necessities . . . (July 17, 1953)
37) Emotions and Spirituality
It is a great joy to be able to ‘feel’ God’s love as a reality, and one must give thanks for it and use it. But you must be prepared for the feeling dying away again, for feelings are by nature impermanent. The great thing is to continue to believe when the feeling is absent: & these periods do quite as much for one as those when the feeling is present. (July 23, 1953)
38) Holy People
I am so glad you gave me an account of the lovely priest. How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing (and perhaps, like you, I have met it only once) it is irresistible. If even 10% of the world’s population had it, would not the whole world be converted and happy before a year’s end? (August 1, 1953)
39) Hard Sayings in the Bible
You experience in listening to those philosophers gives you the technique one needs for dealing with the dark places in the Bible. When one of the philosophers, one whom you know on other grounds to be a sane and decent man, said something you didn’t understand, you did not at once conclude that he had gone off his head. You assumed you’d missed the point. Same here. . . . Behind that apparently shocking passage, be sure, there lurks some great truth which you don’t understand. If one ever does come to understand it, one will see that [He] is good and just and gracious in ways we never dreamed of. . . . But why are baffling passages left in at all? Oh, because God speaks not only for us little ones but for the great sages and mystics who experience what we only read about, and to whom all the words have therefore different (richer) contents. Would not a revelation which contained nothing that you and I did not understand, be for that very reason rather suspect? To a child it would seem a contradiction to say both that his parents made him and that God made him, yet we see both can be true. (August 8, 1953)
40) Cultural Apostasy
I feel that very grave dangers hang over us. This results from the apostasy of the great part of Europe from the Christian faith. Hence a worse state than the one we were in before we received the Faith. For no one returns from Christianity to the same state he was in before Christianity but into a worse state: the difference between a pagan and an apostate is the difference between an unmarried woman and an adulteress. For faith perfects nature but faith lost corrupts nature. Therefore many men of our time have lost not only the supernatural light but also the natural light which pagans possessed. (Sep. 15, 1953)
41) Christmas Commercialism
I feel exactly as you do about the horrid commercial racket they have made out of Christmas. I send no cards and give no presents except to children. (Nov. 27, 1953)
42) Vocations and Monasticism
Most spiritual writers distinguish two vocations for Christians. (i.) The monastic or contemplative life. (ii) The secular or active life. All Christians are called to abandon the ‘World’ (sense ii) in spirit, i.e. to reject as strongly as they possibly can its standards, motives, and prized. But some are called to ‘come out of it’ [Rev 18:4] as far as possible by renouncing private property, marriage, their professions etc: others have to remain ‘in it’ but not ‘of it’. (Dec. 1, 1953)
43) God’s Mercy and Forgiveness
I fully agree with you about the difference between a doctrine merely accepted by the intellect and one (as Keats says) ‘proved in the pulses’ so that [it] is solid and palpable. . . . About two years ago I made a similar progress from mere intellectual acceptance of, to realization of, the doctrine that our sins are forgiven. That is perhaps the most blessed thing that ever happened to me. (Feb. 5, 1954)
44) Faith
Two men had to cross a dangerous bridge, The first convinced himself that it would bear them, and called this conviction Faith. The second said, ‘Whether it breaks or holds, whether I die here or somewhere else, I am equally in God’s good hands.’ And the bridge did break and they were both killed: and the second man’s Faith was not disappointed and the first man’s was. (March 26, 1954)
45) Meditating on the Passion of Christ
And of course you are doing the very best thing in meditating on the sufferings of Our Lord. (Sep. 19, 1954)
46) “Cookie Cutter” Salvation
It is right and inevitable that we should be much concerned about the salvation of those we love. But we must be careful not to expect or demand that their salvation should conform to some ready-made pattern of our own. Some Protestant sects have gone very wrong about this. They have a whole programme of ‘conviction’, ‘conversion’ etc. marked out, the same for everyone, & will not believe that anyone can be saved who doesn’t go through it ‘just so’. . . . What we practice, not (save at rare intervals) what we preach is usually our great contribution to the conversion of others. (March 2, 1955)
47) Heaven
The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven. (Aug. 7, 1956)
48) Traveling by Car or Train
The real trouble about motoring, however, is not that you don’t see little things close up. You do: and too many. Nature allows us to see either a few things close up (when we walk) or many things far off (when we look down from a hill-top). But trains and cars give you many things, each close up in its turn and therefore each soliciting the attention which the speed does not allow you to give. . . . like walking in a crowd where you see face after face: which as someone said is like being forced to read the first page, and no more, of a hundred books in rapid succession. (Oct. 3, 1956)
49) Satan and Our Sins
One must come down to brass tacks. If there is a particular sin on your conscience, repent & confess it. If there isn’t, tell the despondent devil not to be silly. You can’t help hearing his voice (the odious inner radio) but you must treat it merely like a buzzing in your ears or any other irrational nuisance. . . . one must always get back to the practical and definite. What the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption. (July 21, 1958)
50) Disputation
We could show our juniors – what they increasingly need to be shown – that disputation is not the same as quarrelling. (Aug. 22, 1959)
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