Michael Ward > Quotes

“One of his closest friends, Owen Barfield, once said of Lewis that “what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.”12”
― Michael Ward, The Narnia Code: C. S. Lewis and the Secret of the Seven Heavens

“No doubt chivalry is a failure, but it is not such a failure as pacifism. Wars (even just wars) inevitably involve evil, but not so much evil as is involved in passively allowing aggressors to have their way.”
― Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis

“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.”
― Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

“Even the chess piece discovered at the start of the story is a chess-knight.”
― Michael Ward, The Narnia Code: C. S. Lewis and the Secret of the Seven Heavens

“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.”
― Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis

“In his essay “Is History Bunk?” (1957), Lewis writes, “There will always be those who, on discovering that history cannot really be turned to much practical account, will pronounce history to be Bunk. Aristotle would have called this servile or banausic; we, more civilly, may christen it Fordism.” In other words, Ford’s description of history as bunk betrays a utilitarian mindset that is unworthy of a person of liberal education; Ford does not know from the inside the thing he is disparaging. For more on this tendency to debunk things prematurely from an external perspective, see Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed” (1945). ‡”
― Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

“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).”
― Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

“power is better understood as an energy continually surging back and forth between two parties, not as a weapon brandished over the heads of underlings by a despotic ruler.”
― Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

“Since God is the Father of lights, even the dim and guttering lights of paganism could be ascribed ultimately to Him. Christians should feel no obligation to quench the smouldering flax burning in pagan myths: on the contrary, they should do their best to fan it into flame.”
― Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis

“As is proper in romance, the inner meaning is carefully hidden.”
― Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis

“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.”
― Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

“It is through hearing about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings… that children learn or mislearn what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.’2”
― Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis