IDLEWILD CHURCH ACTIVITIES
Bible Study, History, Art, Literature, Greek Language
C. S. LEWIS and G. K. Chesterton
These are handouts of paired sets of quotations from two of my favorite Christian apologists. I produced these in 2005 in a four part series with the Timothy Class. The first set traces their similar spiritual journeys through agnosticism and back to Christianity. The second, "The Great Debate," shows their common revulsion from the deadly combination of determinism and relativism that often passed--then as now--for science. The third section, "Opinions, Provocative and Provoking," is more of what they would have called a miscellany and contains many of my personal favorites. The fourth section, on "Childhood and Faery" shows the lifelong joy that both men took in ballad, myth and legend as well as giving a few of their views on education and a sample of their own very competent poetry. The main texts for the series were Lewis spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy and Chesterton's offputtingly-titled but delightful small volume Orthodoxy. EGK
I. SPIRITUAL JOURNEYS
“All I had hitherto heard of Christian theology had alienated me from it. I was a pagan at the age of twelve and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter VI, “The Paradoxes of Christianity”
“I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself….The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have someone to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently….And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter IV, “The Ethics of Elfland”
“One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise….The state of the Christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to it and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it….The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians; and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian crimes. What could it all mean?….It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with. Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter VI, “The Paradoxes of Christianity”
“I [believe in Christianity] because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing. All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true." Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter IX, “Authority and the Adventurer”
“I care not if the sceptic says it is a tall story; I cannot see how so toppling a tower could stand so long without a foundation. Still less can I see how it could become, as it has become, the home of man. ….If it were an error, it seems as if the error could hardly have lasted a day. If it were a mere ecstasy, it would seem that such an ecstasy could not endure for an hour. It has endured for nearly two thousand years; and the world within it has been more lucid, more level-headed, more reasonable in its hopes, more healthy in its instincts, more humorous and cheerful in the face of fate and death, than all the world outside.” Chesterton: The Everlasting Man “Conclusion”
********************************************************************* “And so, little by little, with fluctuations which I cannot now trace, I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief ." Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Chapter 4 Joy, LewiSurprised “All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still about to be." Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Chapter V “Renaissance”
“ If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling 'whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious? But then that threw me back into another difficulty. My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?” Lewis: Mere Christianity
“You might sum up the gains of this whole period by saying that henceforward the Flesh and the Devil, though they could still tempt, could no longer offer me the supreme bribe. I had learned that it was not in their gift. And the World had never even pretended to have it.” Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Chapter XI “Check”
“The emotion that went with all this was certainly religious. But this was a religion that cost nothing. We could talk religiously about the Absolute: but there was no danger of Its doing anything about us. It was ‘there’; safely and immovably ‘there.’ It would never come ‘here,’ never (to be blunt) make a nuisance of itself.” Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Chapter XIII “The New Look”
“There could be no question of going back to primitive, untheologised and unmoralised Paganism. The God whom I had at last acknowledged was one and was righteous….I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. …If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this." Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Chapter XV “The Beginning”
“I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion….It was more like when a man after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, realizes that he is now awake.” Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Chapter XV “The Beginning”
II. THE GREAT DEBATE
ON THE UNIQUENESS OF MAN
“We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All others are tame animals.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter IX “Authority and the Adventurer”
“Art is the signature of man….In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone. …This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature.” Chesterton: The Everlasting Man, Part I, Chapter I
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“How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?….Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? If you really are a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don’t feel at home there?" Lewis: Encounter with Light
ON THE UNIQUENESS OF CHRIST
“[Christianity] is nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious maker of the world has visited his world in person….That such a higher personality exists behind all things had always been implied by all the best thinkers, as well as by all the most beautiful legends. But nothing of this sort had ever been implied in any of them. It is simply false to say that other sages and heroes had claimed to be that mysterious master and maker….Its unique character can be used as an argument against it as well as for it. It would be easy to concentrate on it as a case of isolated insanity; but it makes nothing but dust and nonsense of comparative religion.” Chesterton: The Everlasting Man, Conclusion.
“The command of Christ is impossible, but it is not insane; it is rather sanity preached to a planet of lunatics.” Chesterton:Types
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“You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” Lewis: Mere Christianity, Book II, end of chapter 3
He was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three effects—Hatred--Terror—Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval. Lewis: Asking Them Questions, “What are we to make of Jesus Christ?”
“Taken by a literalist, He will always prove the most elusive of teachers. Systems cannot keep up with that darting illumination. No net less wide than a man’s whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish.” Lewis: Reflections on the Psalms, Chapter 1
ON THE UNIQUENESS (AND OBJECTIVITY) OF TRUTH
“What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled on the organ of conviction , where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter III “The Suicide of Thought”
*********************************************************************** “The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard….comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think….If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about.” Lewis: Mere Christianity, Book II, midway in Chapter 2
ON THE QUIRKINESS OF TRUTH
“The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians….Now, this is exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth.” Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter VI “The Paradoxes of Christianity”
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“Reality, in fact is something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have." Lewis: Mere Christianity, Book II, midway in Chapter 2
ON THE SOVEREIGNTY OF REASON
“ ‘You attacked reason,’ said Father Brown. ‘That’s bad theology.’ Chesterton: The Complete Father Brown Mysteries, “The Blue Cross”
“In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter III “The Suicide of Thought”
“If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself, ‘Why should anything go right, even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape.’ The young sceptic says, ‘I have a right to think for myself.’ But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, ‘I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.' " Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter III, “The Suicide of Thought”
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“By thinking at all we have claimed that our thoughts are more than mere natural events. All other propositions must be fitted in as best they can round that primary claim.” Lewis: The Grand Miracle, “Religion Without Dogma”
“Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God….Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.” Lewis: The Problem of Pain, Chapter II
ON FREE WILL
“I found the whole world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter IV, “The Ethics of Elfland”
“The determinists come to bind, not to loose. They may well call their new law the ‘chain’ of causation.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter I, “The Maniac”
“Calvinism took away the freedom from man but left it to God. Scientific materialism binds the Creator Himself….It leaves nothing free in the universe. And those who assist this process are called the ‘liberal theologians.’ ” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter VIII “The Romance of Orthodoxy”
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“We debated whether the future was like a line you can’t see or a line not yet drawn.” Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Chapter XI “Check”
“God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in
“You will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.” Lewis: The Problem of Pain, Chapter 7
“Freedom or necessity? Or do they differ at their maximum? At that maximum a man is what he does. There is nothing of him left over or outside the act.” Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Chapter XV “The Beginning”
ON SCIENCE AND MIRACLES
“Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them." Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter IX “Authority and the Adventurer”
“The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest amount of spiritualism or miracle. Poor Mr. McCabe is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be hiding in a pimpernel.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter II, “The Maniac”
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“Theology says to you in effect, ‘Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.’ The philosophy which forbids you to make uniformity absolute is also the philosophy which offers you solid grounds for believing it in general to be almost absolute….Theology offers a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers." Lewis: Miracles, Chapter 13
“Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, ‘Why is there a universe?’ ‘Why does it go on as it does?’ ‘Has it any meaning?’ would remain just as they were?” Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 1, Chapter 4
III. OPINIONS, PROVOCATIVE AND PROVOKING
ON THE MODERN WORLD
“If the modern man is indeed the heir of all the ages, he is often the kind of heir who tells the family solicitor to sell the whole damned estate, lock, stock, and barrel, and give him a little ready money to throw away at the races or the night-clubs. He is certainly not the kind of heir who ever visits his estate: and, if he really owns all the historic lands of ancient and modern history, he is a very absentee landlord.” Chesterton: Avowals
“If there are songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a boat, why are there not songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a bank?….and the more I thought about the matter the more painfully certain it seemed that all the most important and typical modern things could not be done with a chorus….There is something spiritually suffocating about our life.” Chesterton: Tremendous Trifles
“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, “The Suicide of Thought”
“Men in a state of decadence employ professionals to fight for them, professionals to dance for them, and a professional to rule them.” Chesterton: Five Types
“The chief charm of medieval people was that they never thought about being medieval. It is the chief inferiority of modern people that they do think about being modern.” Chesterton: A Handful of Authors: Essays on Books and Writers
“It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’; aim at earth and you will get neither. Lewis: Mere Christianity: Book III, Chapter 10
“To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.” Lewis: The Four Loves, Chapter IV
“ ‘Old Western Culture’ is practically dead—leaving only a few scattered survivors like myself. Lewis: Speech in 1954 on joining
“Is it still possible amid the ghastly racket of “Xmas” to exchange greetings for the Feast of the Nativity? If so, mine, very warm, to both of you.” Lewis, to Mr. & Mrs.J.R.R.Tolkien, 24 December 1962
ON CHRISTIANITY-AND-WATER
“That Jones shall worship the ‘god within him’ turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon -- anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter V “The Flag of the World”
“Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas….When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism….then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broadminded. Chesterton: Heretics
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“Atheism is too simple. And I will tell you another view that is also too simple. It is the view I call Christianity-and-water, the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right—leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption. Both these are boys’ philosophies.” Lewis: Mere Christianity, Book II, Chapter 2 “The Invasion”
“They rightly think that Christ spoke metaphorically when he told us to carry the cross; they wrongly think that carrying the cross means nothing more than leading a respectable life and subscribing moderately to charities. They reasonably think that hell ‘fire’ is a metaphor—and unwisely conclude that it means nothing more serious than remorse. Lewis: Miracles, Chapter10
“History does not encourage us to expect much invigorating power in a minimal religion….If there is no God, then we have no interest in the minimal religion or any other.” Lewis: The Grand Miracle, “Religion Without Dogma”
“Athenasius stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, ‘whole and undefiled’ when it looked as if all the civilized world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those ‘sensible’ synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen.” Lewis: Introduction to St. Athanasius’ Incarnation of the word of God
ON CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE (AND ITS EFFECTS)
“By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference—
“The complex God of the Athenasian Creed may be an enigma for the intellect; but he is far less likely to gather the mystery and cruelty of a Sultan than the lonely God of Omar or Mahomet. The God who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an Eastern king.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter VIII “The Romance of Orthodoxy”
“The subtle distinctions have made the simple Christians; all the men who think drink right and drunkenness wrong; all the men who think marriage normal and polygamy abnormal; all the men who think it wrong to hit first and right to hit back; all the men who think it right to carve statues and wrong to worship them. These are all, when one comes to think of it, very subtle theological distinctions.” Chesterton:
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“If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lessons you had already decided to learn.” Lewis, The Four Loves, Chapter 2
“A great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today, are simply ones which real theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern
“This is worse than I expected. Do you really think people are penalized for their honest opinions? Even assuming for the sake of argument, that those opinions were mistaken.” “Do you really think that there are no sins of intellect?” Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 5
ON CONTEMPORARY PAGANISM
I have a vision, and I know
The heathen shall return.
They shall not come with warships,
They shall not waste with brands,
But books be all their eating
And ink be on their hands.…………………………………………………………….
They shall come mild as monkish clerks,
With many a scroll and pen;
And backward shall ye turn and gaze,
Desiring one of Alfred’s days,
When pagans still were men.…………………………………………………………….
By this sign ye shall know them,
The breaking of the sword,
And man no more a free knight
That loves or hates his lord.
Yea this shall be the sign of them,
The sign of the dying fire;
And man made like a half-wit
That knows not of his sire.
What though they come with scroll and pen
And grave as shaven clerk,
By this sign ye shall know them,
That they ruin and make dark.
Chesterton: The Ballad of the White Horse, Book VIII
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“When grave persons express their fear that
ON THE ADMIRATION OF COURAGE
“They died to save their country and they only saved the world." Chesterton: Collected Poems “The English
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign
(But Don John of
“Where Lee the last of the heroes came With the Men of the South and a flag like flame And called the land by its lovely name In the unforgotten song.” Chesterton: “Memory”
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“Hand it to me and kneel, Son of Adam,” said Aslan. And when Peter had done so he struck him with the flat of the blade and said, “Rise up, Sir Peter Fenris-Bane. And, whatever happens, never forget to wipe your sword.” Lewis: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Chapter 12
ON THE GLORY OF DEFEAT
That though you hunt the Christian man
Like a hare on the hill-side,
The hare has still more heart to run
Than you have heart to ride." Chesterton: The Ballad of the White Horse, Book III
“[
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“ ‘Most certainly an artistic failure.’ All argument is for that conclusion—until you read or see Hamlet again. And when you do, you are left saying that if this is failure, then failure is better than success.” Lewis: Selected Literary Essays, “Hamlet”
ON TRADITION
“I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time….Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors…. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter IV “The Ethics of Elfland”
“A legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad." Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter IV “The Ethics of Elfland”
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"Chronological snobbery" [is] the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.” Lewis: Surprised by Joy
“Experience beats in vain upon a congenital progressive." Lewis: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, “Introduction”
ON THE "COMMON" MAN
“Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget.
For we are the people of
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,
Our wrath come after
It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest
God’s scorn for all men governing; it may be beer is best.
But we are the people of
Smile at us, pay us, pass us, but do not quite forget." Chesterton: “The Secret People”
“There is one really good defense of the House of Lords, though admirers of the peerage are strangely coy about using it; and that is that the House of Lords, in its full proper strength, consists of stupid men.…To point out that the clever men in the Commons, who owed their power to cleverness, ought in the last resort to be checked by the average men in the Lords, who owed their power to accident. Chesterton: Heretics
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“We must get over the arrogant assumption that it is the masses who can be led by the nose. As far as I can make out, the shoe is on the other foot. The only people who are really the dupes of their favorite newspaper are the intelligentsia.” Lewis: The Spectator, “Private Bates
ON POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
“All good Americans wish to fight the representatives they have chosen. All good Englishmen wish to forget the representatives they have chosen.” Chesterton: What I Saw in
“As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals." Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter IV “The Ethics of Elfland”
“Both Capitalism and Communism rest on the same idea: a centralization of wealth which destroys private property.” Chesterton: The End of the Armistice (1936)
“If Bolshevism really is such a danger, if it is any sort of a danger, then there is no doubt at all about what is the real protection against that danger. It is
“ ‘My country, right or wrong!’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober!' ” Chesterton: The Defendant (1902)
“The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be found with the silver spoons in his pocket.” Chesterton: What’s Wrong with the World (1910)
“Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest.” Chesterton: Fancies Versus Fads
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“My own idea is that modern industry is a radically hopeless system. You can improve wages, hours, conditions, etc., but all that doesn’t cure the deepest trouble: i.e. that numbers of people are kept all their lives doing dull repetition work….How that is to be overcome, I do not know.” Lewis: The Grand Miracle, “Answers to Questions on Christianity”
“I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason….Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.” Lewis: Present Concerns, “Equality”
IV. The Lands of Childhood and Faery
ON CHILDRENS' TALES AND FAIRYLAND
“If you really read the fairy-tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other—the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales”. Chesterton: All Things Considered
“Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery and I have not found any books so sensible since. I left the nurse guardian of tradition and democracy, and I have not found any modern type so sanely radical or so sanely conservative….The fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that the world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness.” Chesterton: Orthodoxy, Chapter IV “The Ethics of Elfland”
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“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so--now that I am 50 I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to appear very grown up. Lewis: “On 3 Ways of Writing for Children
“Then came the Beatrix Potter books, and here at last beauty.” Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Chapter I “The First Years”
“What I had read was the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. What I had seen was one of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to that volume. …Pure “Northernness” engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the
All the world's wiseacres in arms against them Shan’t detach my heart for a single moment From the man-like beasts of the earthy stories— Badger or Moley.
Rat, the oarsman, neat Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle Benjamin, pert Nutkin, or (ages older) Henryson’s shrill Mouse, or the Mice the Frogs once Fought with in Homer. Lewis: Poems, “Impertinence”
ON EDUCATION
“I learnt the large Greek letters as I learnt the large English letters, at home. I was told about them merely for fun while I was still a child; while the others I learnt during the period of what is commonly called education; that is the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did not want to know. Chesterton: Autobiography
“The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions.” Chesterton: All is Grit
“The principle is that without a gentle contempt for education, no gentleman’s education is complete." Chesterton: The Common Man
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“Though he taught geometry cruelly, he taught it well. He forced us to reason, and I have been the better for those geometry lessons all my life.” Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Chapter II “Concentration Camp”
“He first taught me the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured and mouthed in solitude. Of
“In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can do 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." Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Chapter VII “Light and Shade”
“The most significant of all was, ‘I hear you.’ This meant that your remark was significant and only required refutation; it had risen to the dignity of error.” Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Chapter IX “The Great Knock”
“His parents had never appreciated him and none of the five schools at which he had been educated seemed to have made any provision for a talent and temperament such as his. To make matters worse he had been exactly the sort of boy in whose case the examination system works out with a maximum of unfairness and absurdity. ”Lewis: The Great Divorce, Chapter 2
ON FRIENDLY BEASTS
THE NATIVITY
C.S. Lewis
Among the oxen (like an ox I'm slow)
I see a glory in the stable grow
Which with the ox's dullness might at length
Give me an ox's strength.
Among the asses(stubborn I as they)
I see my Saviour where I looked for hay;
So may my beastlike folly learn at least
The patience of a beast.
Among the sheep (I like a sheep have strayed)
I watch the manger where my Lord is layed;
O that my baa-ing nature would win thence
Some wooly innocence.
THE DONKEY
G. K. Chesterton
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings
The devil's walking parody
Of all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
CLASS NOTES
Chesterton and Lewis are both Christian apologists—Lewis perhaps the more formidable because he is a “logic-chopping engine”; (his experience with Kirkpatrick would easily account for that) Chesterton is the more delightful because he enjoys Frost’s freedom to flash off into wild connections. An odd juxtaposition, in light of Narnia, but both were poets in their separate ways.
What is Christian Apologetics? It is not proof of the existence of God much less the creed. (not Anselm or even Spinoza) It is a demonstration that neither science nor anything else disproves His existence. It give us intellectual permission to believe if we can. (See Bishop Bloughrom’s Apology, “What think ye of Christ, friend?’) Mention Lewis’ discussion of medieval astronomy.
A century after Chesterton, we encounter similar but distinct problems: Today we wrestle with a fundamentalism that says, “God has explained everything; we don’t need science.” Chesterton and Lewis were wrestling with a science that said, “Science has explained everything; we don’t need God” (which remains an ongoing delusion.)
They reacted particularly against an inhuman science that was deterministic and reduced man to a will-less creature. See GKC in “the suicide of thought” where he makes the point that the last step of science is to deny the reliability of the very reason on which it is based. (EGK’s own corollary is that the Greeks intuited that the kosmos was a reasonable place, which could be explained by science; the gods themselves are bound by the laws of reason. After two and a half millennia, popular science at least has come full circle to decide that the kosmos is an unreasonable place; our thoughts are a chemical process sliding across an irrational psyche. But if that were true we could not believe the results of our own science that tell us so. We would be living in a dream world where it may only appear that two and two make four. Our own logic has disappeared in the conclusions to which it has led us.)
Contrast Lewis’ belief (see The Problem of Pain ) that even God cannot create a “no-thing” or a logical inconsistency (e.g. a being that had free will but was certain to be obedient—and Chesterton’s comment via Father brown, “You spoke against reason; that’s bad theology.”
