PART FIVE: Lessons from Reality and the Imagination
PART FIVE
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.
Is Theology Poetry?
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
Mere Christianity
Reality is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.
Mere Christianity
Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can't see it. So quietly submit to be painted—i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone. You are in the right way. Walk—don't keep on looking at it.
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis
As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.
Till We Have Faces
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.
The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves
For the first time, there burst upon me the idea that there might be real marvels all about us, that the visible world might be only a curtain to conceal huge realms uncharted by my very simple theology. And that started in me something with which, on and off, I have had plenty of trouble since—the desire for the preternatural, simply as such, the passion for the Occult. Not everyone has this disease; those who have will know what I mean. I once tried to describe it in a novel. It is a spiritual lust; and like the lust of the body it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while it lasts. It is probably this passion, more even than the desire for power, which makes magicians.
Surprised by Joy
The greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects, we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.
Surprised by Joy
Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.
The Great Divorce
For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.
‘Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare’
in Rehabilitations
Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.
Surprised by Joy
Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.
The Screwtape Letters
I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion … was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this… . Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not ‘a religion,’ nor ‘a philosophy.’ It is the summing up and actuality of them all.
Surprised by Joy
My own eyes are not enough for me. I will see through those of others. Reality even seen through the eyes of many is not enough. I will see what others have invented … Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality … In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself … [Without this exposure to other views of the world through literature, one may be] full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison.
An Experiment in Criticism
There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.
That Hideous Strength
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
God in the Dock
What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is).
God in the Dock
Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.
Till We Have Faces
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths.
God in the Dock
Such, then, was the state of my imaginative life; over against it stood the life of my intellect. The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism’. Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.
Surprised by Joy
What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.
The Magician's Nephew
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
The Abolition of Man
As to … old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought, and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.
Surprised by Joy
I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.
From the dedication in
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves … We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own … We demand windows.
An Experiment in Criticism