Posts Tagged ‘C. S. Lewis’

The Christian tradition of the seven deadly sins firmly maintains that pride is the chief of all sins.   The title of the chapter on pride in C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity is “The Great Sin.”  So strongly is the centrality and destructive force of pride felt that it is often listed separately from the seven sins as the source of the others.  Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) states that pride is the “queen of sins,” and that the seven are its “captains.” As pride’s “first progeny,” they “spring … from this poisonous root” (Moralia xxxi:45). Read the rest of this entry »

The lion and the lamb are two of the most important biblical images of Christ.  Obviously, the lion depicts Christ’s power and the lamb his loving sacrifice for us sinners.  Nevertheless, we fail to do justice to these images, if we do not see how the Bible relates them to one another.   Two Christian novelists, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, can help us to grasp the profundity of the biblical portrayal of Christ as both lion and lamb or better be grasped by it.[1] Read the rest of this entry »

A common misconception of the modern world is that one can separate technical training or the mastery of skills from moral formation.[1]  In this essay I will argue that good reading is not just a skill but is a moral or ethical act.  Why that is so will lead us into issues concerning the nature of truth and the existence of God.  Read the rest of this entry »

While mostly everyone will agree that there exist some things that can be described as true or good or at least as false or evil, very few will argue in support of objective beauty.  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is perhaps one of the few absolutes adhered to in our very relativistic age.

According to this popular aphorism, when we state that something or someone is beautiful, it is just an opinion or a way of describing a pleasurable reaction to a person or an object.  Others might disagree, but there are no criteria for judging whether an object itself is beautiful. It is just a matter of taste and thus really doesn’t matter.

In this post I want to demonstrate that it does matter whether beauty is objective. We need to realize the results of contending that beauty is merely a subjective opinion. Here are four negative consequences to denying objective beauty. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year we as a faculty at Cair Paravel Latin School had the enriching pleasure of reading and discussing “The Light Princess,” “The Golden Key” and The Princess and the Goblin, three delightfully profound fairy tales by George MacDonald.  The experience led me to take another whack at MacDonald’s Phantastes, and I’m mostly glad that I did. Read the rest of this entry »