Louis A. Markos > Quotes

“Narnia, held captive by the “post-Christian” Telmarines, cannot be rescued and renewed until Peter and Edmund exercise their masculine gifts to defeat the Telmarine army while Susan and Lucy exercise their feminine gifts to wake up the trees from their deep slumber.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. (Acts 17:26-28)”
― Louis Markos, From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics

“Were we not all created in God's image, and though we are all fallen from our original state, does not a spark of divine fire remain in each of us?”
― Louis Markos, From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics

“The Witch's conception of what Narnia should be like is similar to what Sauron desires for Middle-earth (and what Satan desires for our own world) : a barren landscape devoid of life peopled by joyless automatons who neither laugh nor take pleasure in anything. It is Satan, not Christ who is the cosmic killjoy.”
― Louis Markos, On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis

“the reason God tells us not to judge is that we do not know the raw material that other people are struggling with.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Yes, our world is real, but its temporal reality offers us but a glimpse, a faint foreshadowing of the greater reality that is to come.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. (Robert Jastrow, astronomer)”
― Louis Markos, Apologetics for the Twenty-First Century

“Lewis was no fan of war, but he was unashamed to champion the beauty of the knight, of the medieval Crusader, of the “Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Rather than actively love our neighbor, we unselfishly allow him to live whatever way he wants to, even if his life choices are self-destructive.  Had Lewis lived today, I think he would have said that the reigning virtue is not unselfishness but tolerance—a pseudo-virtue that also manifests itself, not in active charity, but in a negative acquiescence to the “rights” of others.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Yes, Lewis concludes, God may at times treat us harshly, but he has never treated us with contempt.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Lewis closes his book, The Abolition of Man, with these prophetic words: “You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. . . . If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.  But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.  To see through all things is the same as not to see.” ”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“The eyes of faith are not always bright. At times they can see only dim shadows, like rough shapes reflected in a worn and dusty mirror. Yet even then, especially then, the faithful are called to trust in the promises of old and to believe that the time and place of their birth are no accident. For faith sees not only that history is meaningful, that it is going someplace, but also understands its own limited role within that history.”
― Louis Markos

“And that is why Lewis concludes that we can shut Jesus up as a lunatic, kill him as a devil, or fall at his feet in worship—but “let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Actually, if truth be told, love and unselfishness are also received in a radically different way by the object of the proffered charity.  In the former case, the recipient is assured that another human being cares deeply about him; in the latter, he feel manipulated and used.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“The success of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings helped restore the reputation of these discredited genres, thus enabling moderns to draw on their innocent wisdom.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Zeitgeist is a German word that means “spirit of the age.”  The zeitgeist of Periclean Athens was self-knowledge (supremely embodied in the thought of Socrates), while that of the Middle Ages and Victorianism was hierarchy (Dante) and progress (Tennyson), respectively.  As for the darker zeitgeist of modernism, marked by relativism and subjectivism, though Lewis did not embody it, he understood it better than many of its most ardent supporters.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“reducing human love, joy, religion, and art to a product of unconscious urges, or economic forces, or the struggle for survival and reproduction, the theories of Freud, Marx, and Darwin have emptied humanity of its freedom, its dignity, and its purpose.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Hell is a state of mind . . .  And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind—is, in the end, Hell.  But Heaven is not a state of mind.  Heaven is reality itself.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“Behind Boromir's testimony lurks something else that our modern world is desperately in need of: a sense that we live in a meaningful universe where nothing is accidental and where an overruling providence moves things forward in accordance with a higher plan. This promises as well that history is not merely a succession of unrelated events ("one darn thing after another"), but that it too is imbued with meaning, purpose, and direction. And if both the universe and history are meaningful, then perhaps we are as well.”
― Louis Markos, On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis

“No longer do our beliefs point back to a divine law code or an essential, in-built sense of good and evil; they exist only and solely in the eye of the beholder.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“In Dublin in 1852, Newman delivered a series of nine discourses intended to set the tone for a proposed Catholic university in Ireland. These discourses represent, to my mind, the finest modern attempt to unite the twin legacies of Athens and Jerusalem. Though the university was never built, the discourses were published as The Idea of a University, and in this form they continue to beckon believers in the Christian revelation to consider the legacy of the ancients.”
― Louis Markos, From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics

“In pointing out this parallel, I do not suggest that Hesiod is somehow the Greek equivalent of Moses or that his Theogony is to be granted the same status as Genesis.”
― Louis Markos, From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics

“In this post-Freudian world in which we live, we have put the phobias and neuroses at the center and pushed “normalcy” out to the margin. More and more, we are doing the same for ugliness: enshrining it at the heart of our culture, while beauty is left to atrophy and decay.”
― Louis A. Markos, Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C.S. Lewis

“salvation is less like a good man becoming a saintly man than it is like a statue coming to life.”
― Louis Markos, Apologetics for the Twenty-First Century

“Lewis was unique in the academia of his day for championing (along with his good friend, J.R.R. Tolkien) children’s literature and fantasy novels as serious genres deserving serious consideration.”
― Louis A. Markos

“We are half-hearted creatures,” writes Lewis, “fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased.”  Heaven promises a purification, not a mortification, of our deepest desires.”
― Louis A. Markos, A to Z with C. S. Lewis

“You [Virgil] were the lamp that led me from that night. You led me forth to drink Parnassian waters;”
― Louis Markos, From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics

“Thomistic synthesis.”
― Louis Markos, From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics