“The primary function of mental pain, says Lewis, is to force our misdirectedness on our attention. But just as it belongs to our fallen state to be blind to holiness until we suffer the consequences of sin, and blind to a higher good until natural satisfactions are snatched from us; so equally it belongs to our state that we cannot achieve disinterestedness until it costs us pain.”

“Here at last was an Attendant Spirit to liberate us from the spells of Burkhardt or Addington Symonds and challenge the easy antithesis of fantastic and fideistic Middle Ages versus logical and free-thinking Renaissance. And it is a prime justification of medieval studies that if properly pursued they soon dispose of such facile distinctions, and overthrow the barriers of narrow specialism and textbook chronology. In this sense medieval just as much as classical studies make men more humane. It would indeed be hard to separate in Lewis' culture the one from the other: just as hard as it is to understand the Middle Ages themselves without knowing classical literature or the Renaissance without knowing the Middle Ages. This continuity of literature and of learning Lewis not only asserted but embodied.”

“It may be that the Chronicles of Narnia may outlive The Allegory of Love, and Perelandra outlive them both. Few works of learning and criticism survive a hundred years; what it was learned to know in 1950 will be expected of scholarship-candidates in 2000; new things will be discovered, old notions disproved, other critical values asserted; but a piece of genuine imagination in fiction may have a long life.”

“we refer to the Middle Ages as ages of faith; a time in which men believed a heavenly Jerusalem above the sky much as they believed an earthly Sion beyond the sea; when the whole of their thought was of a piece with their theology...those were days when a thoughtful soul here or there could realize some unity of mental vision. The fact should be admitted, however we regard it - whether as the stultifying tyranny of dogma or as an enviable single-mindedness; an ideal too easily realized, no doubt, in a plentiful dearth of empirical knowledge, and yet establishing a standard after which perplexed modernity may strive.”

“Man, to Lewis, is an immortal subject; pains are his moral remedies, salutary disciplines, willing sacrifices, playing their part in a drama of interchange between God and him.”

“The primary function of mental pain, says Lewis, is to force our misdirectedness on our attention. But just as it belongs to our fallen state to be blind to holiness until we suffer the consequences of sin, and blind to a higher good until natural satisfactions are snatched from us; so equally it belongs to our state that we cannot achieve disinterestedness until it costs us pain.”

“Muddled minds read him, and found themselves moving with delight in a world of clarity.”

“Lewis was an apologist from temper, from conviction, and from modesty. From temper, for he loved argument. From conviction, being traditionally orthodox. From modesty, because he laid no claim either to the learning which would have made him a theologian or to the grace which would have made him a spiritual guide.”

“If the requirements of world-structure are so inexorable, what scope is there for a free providence in distributing pleasures and pains? If pains are the natural rubs of a world-structure bearing on sentient creatures, what need have we to view them as instruments of a disciplinary providence?”

“God's 'permission' of evil so multiplied is not simply to be accounted for by his respecting our free will. He takes the harms we mutually inflict and overrules them for our good.”

“Is romantic yearning an appetite for [H]eaven, or is it the ultimate refinement of covetousness?”