CS Lewis

“For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect love: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself….Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres. After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of ourselves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.”

CS Lewis  |  Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis

Topics: , ,

“Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”

CS Lewis  |  The Four Loves

Topics: , ,

“We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he ‘wants a woman.’ Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).”

CS Lewis  |  The Four Loves

Topics: , , ,

“I cannot myself see why these things (ordinances) should be conductors of the new life. But then, if one did not happen to know, I should never had seen any connection between a particular physical pleasure and the appearance of a new human being in the world. We have to take reality as it comes to us; there is no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or what we should have expected it to be like.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

Topics:

“We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

Topics:

“The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

Topics: , , , ,

“The people never admire a man for doing something he likes; the very words ‘But he likes it’ imply the corollary ‘And therefore it has no merit’. Yet Kant stands the obvious truth, noted by Aristotle, that the more virtuous a man becomes the more he enjoys virtuous actions.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

Topics:

“Think of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the ‘right’ notes and the ‘wrong’ ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The moral law is not any one instinct or set of instincts; it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.”

CS Lewis

Topics: ,

“The difference is that Christianity thinks this dark power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with duelism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war , a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Chrisitanity

Topics:

“Do not think that I am saying anything against science. I am only saying what its job is. If there is something behind, then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing are neither of them statements that science can make.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

Topics: