Matilda
Roald Dahl
“I liked The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” Matilda said. “I think Mr. C.S. Lewis is a very good writer. But he has one failing. There are no funny bits in his books.”
“You are right there,” Miss Honey said.
“There aren’t many funny bits in Mr. Tolkien either,” Matilda said.
“Do you think all children’s books ought to have funny bits in them?” Miss Honey asked.
“I do,” Matilda said. “Children are not so serious as grown-ups and they love to laugh.”
C.S. Lewis
If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or, if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (“How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!”) In Heaven’s name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something about us which is not temporal.
C.S. Lewis
Alister McGrath
We are, Lewis suggested, like a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming.
C.S. Lewis
Alister McGrath
These evocative stories [the Chronicles of Narnia] affirm that it is possible for the weak and foolish to have a noble calling in a dark world; that our deepest intuitions point us to the true meaning of things; that there is indeed something beautiful and wonderful at the heart of the universe, and that this may be found, embraced, and adored.
C.S. Lewis
Alister McGrath
For Lewis, the true mark of the primacy of humans over animals is “acknowledging duties to them which they do not acknowledge to us.”
C.S. Lewis: A Life
Alister McGrath
Perhaps the most important feature of this work [The Great Divorce], however, is Lewis’s demonstration–by art of narrative rather than by force of argument–that people easily become trapped in a way of thinking from which they cannot break free. Those in hell, on exploring heaven, turn out to be so comfortable with their distorted view of reality that they choose not to embrace truth on encountering it.
C.S. Lewis
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
Alister McGrath
Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. When some argue that humanity must embrace a synthesis of contemporary science and social attitudes as “the truth”–to be contrasted with the “superstitions” of the past–Lewis declares that this simply leads to humanity becoming a byproduct of its age, shaped by its predominant cultural moods and intellectual convictions. We must, Lewis argues, break free from the shallow complacency of “chronological snobbery,” and realize that we can learn from the past precisely because it liberates us from the tyranny of the contemporaneous…
We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.
C.S. Lewis: A Life
Alister McGrath
Lewis explained that his difficulty had been that he could not see “how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now.” …
Tolkien helped Lewis realize 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…
As Lewis expressed in his second letter to Greeves, “The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.” …
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…
Christianity tells a true story about humanity, which makes sense of all the stories that humanity tells about itself.
Christless Christianity
Michael Horton
C.S. Lewis once observed, “I haven’t always been a Christian. I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” In another essay, he wrote,
We are defending Christianity; not “my religion.”…The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort. Now a clearly maintained distinction between what the Faith actually says and what you would like it to have said or what you understand or what you personally find helpful or think probable, forces your audience to realize that you are tied to your data just as the scientist is tied by the results of the experiments; that you are not just saying what you like. This immediately helps them to realize that what is being discussed is a question about objective fact–not gas about ideals and points of view.
The Alpha Project 