Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on How God Answers)

“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'” —British novelist and religious author C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), A Grief Observed (1961)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on Pride)

"Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, contentment, or even common sense." — British novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Mere Christianity (1952) 

Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on Forgiveness)

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”—British novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (1941)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on Jesus, ‘Inventor of All Loves’ on the Cross)

“God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing - or should we say ‘seeing’? there are no tenses in God—the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a ‘host’ who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and ‘take advantage of’ Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.”—British novelist and religious author C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Four Loves (1960)

(The image accompanying this post is Crucifixion, by German 16th-century painter Peter Gertner.)

Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on Friendship and Survival)

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”—British novelist and religious author C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Four Loves (1960)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on the Psalms as Poems)

“The psalms are poems, and poems intended to be sung: not doctrinal treatises, not even sermons. Those who talk of reading the Bible ‘as literature’ sometimes mean, I think, reading it without attending to the main thing it is about; like reading Burke with no interest in politics, or reading the Aeneid with no interest in Rome. That seems to me to be nonsense. But there is a saner sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are. Most emphatically the Psalms must be read as poems; as lyrics, with all the licenses and all the formalities, the hyperboles, the emotional rather than logical connections, which are proper to lyric poetry. They must be read as poems if they are to be understood . . . Otherwise we will miss what is in them and think we see what is not.”— English novelist, academic, and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Reflections on the Psalms (1958)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on the Proper Place of the Bible)

“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.” —British novelist, academic and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), letter to “Mrs. Johnson,” Nov. 8, 1952, in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950-1963 (2007)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on Friendship as an Instrument of God)

“Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.”—British novelist and religious author C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Four Loves (1960)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on the Soul, ‘Not the Seeker But the Sought’)

“In Christianity, however, the human soul is not the seeker but the sought: it is God who seeks, who descends from the other world to find and heal Man; the parable about the Good Shepherd looking for and finding the lost sheep sums it up.”—British novelist, academic and lay theologian C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), “Edmund Spenser, 1552-99,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1954)

Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on Where Heaven Enters)

“Heaven enters wherever Christ enters, even in this life.” —English novelist, academic, and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Feb. 22, 1944 letter, quoted in The Quotable Lewis, edited by Jerry Root and Wayne Martindale (2012)

Today would have been the 120^th birthday of C.S. Lewis—who, in addition to creating the beloved set of fantasy classics The Chronicles of Narnia, also wrote some of the most persuasive defenses of Christianity published in the last century. (Incidentally, his death would have attracted far more media attention, except that it occurred on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.)

(This post is written for my college friend Greg—who may be an even bigger fan of Lewis than I am.)

Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on God’s Understanding and Love)

“God knows quite well how hard we find it to love Him more than anyone or anything else, and He won't be angry with us as long as we are trying. And He will help us.”— English Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), May 6, 1955 letter to “Mrs. K” about her son Laurence, in C. S. Lewis' Letters to Children, edited by Lyle W. Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead (1996)

This Day in Literary History (Birth of Dorothy L. Sayers, Scholarly Queen of Detective Fiction)

June 13, 1893—Dorothy L. Sayers, who advanced the art of the detective story when she wasn’t blazing a trail as a female Christian intellectual in the first half of the 20^th century, was born in Oxford, England, the only child of an Anglo-Irish minister in the Church of England. Years later, that background would inspire her to write of academe and produce a late-life labor of love—a translation (only two-thirds complete at her death in 1957) of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I was first exposed to Sayers as a teen in the 1970s, when Masterpiece Theatre ran not one, not two, but five adaptations of Sayers mystery novels starring Ian Carmichael as her bon vivant detective, Lord Peter Wimsey— Clouds of Witness, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Murder Must Advertise, Five Red Herrings, and The Nine Tailors. (Edward Petherbridge played the role in the 1980s.) They proved so popular that PBS got the idea to create the long-running Mystery series.

How much that would have pleased Ms. Sayers is an open question. During her lifetime, she angrily rebuffed filmmakers’ attempts to translate to the big screen any of her 11 novels and several short stories revolving around Wimsey. 

Perhaps she thought that a mere two hours would have been nowhere near enough time to do justice to her creation. After all, Ms. Sayers had spent a great deal of time etching his portrait over the years—endowing him not even with a monocle and “what, ho!” expression, but also a background as a PTSD WWI victim, not to mention three centuries of titled background lineage she invented for him.

My own favorite of her Wimsey novels was Murder Must Advertise. It might have been due to my own background right out of college as an advertising copywriter in a publishing house, but I got chuckle after chuckle in reading Sayers’ description of life in the profession, as presented by a practitioner:

“We undermine ’em with one hand and build ’em with the other. The vitamins we destroy in the canning, we restore in Revito, the roughage we remove from Peabody’s Piper Parritch we make up into a package and market as Bunbury’s Breakfast Bran; the stomachs we ruin with Pompayne, we re-line with Peplets to aid digestion. And by forcing the damn-fool public to pay twice over—once to have its food emasculated and once to have the vitality put back again, we keep the wheels of commerce turning and give employment to thousands—including you and me.”

Seven years of slaving away in an advertising firm (she is supposed to have even coined the catchphrase, “It pays to advertise”), even while she was turning out one highly regarded mystery after another, gave Sayers an unequaled chance to describe the milieu surrounding a crime with deep acumen. It also amply fulfilled her hope “to make a detective story a novel of manners rather than crossword puzzle.”

Neither as prolific nor as popular as Agatha Christie, Sayers surpassed her in writing style. Although Christie was content to focus on the mystery novel as puzzle, her contemporary devoted far more time to creating compelling atmosphere and characterization, believing this crucial to success. A great admirer of the Victorian mystery writer Willkie Collins, she served as a bridge to later female British crime novelists who would also be acclaimed for their styles, such as P.D. James and Ruth Rendell.

Key to any detective novel are secrets, and Sayers understood their power because she harbored a few of her own, chiefly involving men:

*One affair with a married man ended with him leaving her;

*A second affair ended with her becoming pregnant, not marrying her lover, and placing her son in the hands of a cousin, who raised him with the public none the wiser while she was alive; and finally,

*Marriage to an alcoholic invalid that became increasingly nightmarish over a quarter century until he died.

One delight that the detective story affords those who dabble in the genre is the chance to vicariously kill people who have mentally wronged them. In Strong Poison, the woman that Wimsey will eventually woo and wed, Harriet Vane, goes on trial for allegedly administering arsenic to her former lover, Philip Boyes--a pretty strong example of wish fulfillment on the part of Sayers.

In the mid-to-late Thirties, Sayers turned away from the mystery genre and began to concentrate on religious writing and translations. In 1916, she graduated from Oxford as the first woman to earn a first-class honors degree in medieval literature, but now she broadened her knowledge of languages to encompass not merely French and German but Italian in order to tackle Dante. Her friend C.S. Lewis particularly admired her series of religious radio plays, Man Born to be King.