Quotes by C. S. Ward

“It all brought to mind the words of C. S. Lewis: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.””

“Religion comes from a Latin root meaning “to bind,” referring to the bond of obedience that characterizes the life of a member of a religious order. By extension, religion can be thought of as a bond of unity, as a process that “re-ligaments” or “re-ligatures,” tying disparate things back together into one, integrating diverse viewpoints.””

“In his essay “Equality” (1943), Lewis advises: “Watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers.” In other words, those who debunk tend not to be straightforwardly critical, but usually have “an agenda” (as we now say); the opposition that debunkers have to things is not honest and reasonable but tainted by an inferiority complex, or small-mindedness, or some other intellectual defect.””

“Even the chess piece discovered at the start of the story is a chess-knight.””

“In London, Henry Adams cheered the Union triumph, but also saw in it an ominous portent: About a week ago [the British] discovered that their whole wooden navy was useless.… These are great times.… Man has mounted science, and is now run away with.… Before many centuries more … science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world. Even with the menace of the Merrimack now behind him, Lincoln’s blockade of southern ports was easier to declare than enforce. The Confederate coastline, broken by numberless inlets and 189 rivers, stretched from the Potomac to the Rio Grande”

“However politically desirable a republic might be, it remains unable to compete imaginatively with monarchy because monarchy in principle more completely mirrors the nature of divine authority. One of the great imaginative advantages of the genre of fairy-tale or romance is to allow for the presentation of such a principle. In fairy-tale the author can leave behind the shallows of the ‘realistic’ novel, and is free to show the reader something better than mundane norms. What might it be like if human kings really did exhibit perfect kingship? The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe attempts an answer.””

“However, when value is recognised as objective, individual preference (though it need not be utterly eradicated) is relativised, one’s private perspective is shown to be relative to the real value of beautiful things, and therefore one’s appreciation of beauty can be more or less intelligent, more or less attuned to the structures that inhere in nature and that can even sometimes be mathematically discerned (revealing the presence of such measurables as Pi, the Golden Ratio, and the Fibonacci Sequence).””

“According to Lewis, imagination was “the organ of meaning,” while reason was “the natural organ of truth,” and it was always his aim in his writing to combine the two organs as fully and naturally as possible, whatever the communicative task in hand. Works of philosophy, no less than works of creative fiction, required the marriage of fertile imagination and penetrating reason.””