Quotes from Jocelyn Gibb

His conversion to Christianity seems to have come about largely by thinking...It did not come by sudden intuition, or overwhelming vision, or even by the more usual path of conviction of sin calling for repentance and atonement.

Fine scholar though he was, he was an even better teacher; and it may truly be said of him...that in turning men's minds to the Middle Ages he 'stimulated their mental thirst...silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles'.

His Christianity, so important to him personally, was also important professionally, for it enabled him to enter into fuller imaginative sympathy with the Middle Ages and Renaissance...and give spiritual substance to his life's work in those fields, so penetrated by Christian thought.

No one knew better than he how an understanding of poetry depends on an understanding of the poet's universe.

I believe Williams was the only one of us, except perhaps Ronald Tolkien, from whom Lewis learnt any of his thinking. It was Charles Williams who expounded to him the doctrine of co-inherence and the idea that one had power to accept into one's own body the pain of someone else, through Christian love. This was a power...he had been allowed to use to ease the suffering of his wife, a cancer victim

life-giving generosity was another depth in Lewis's nature that was part of his greatness

he almost never spoke about himself, in my hearing at least: though once, shortly after his marriage, when he brought his wife to lunch with me, he said...looking at her across the grassy quadrangle, 'I never expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in my twenties.

The gift of phrase was instantaneous in him, and that must partly account for his huge output; but there was a plentitude of mind as well as a swiftness of phrase to help him; he never put a nib wrong.

As he claimed the right to enjoy the literature of any period for the joy that was in it, so he claimed the liberty to profit from the insights of every generation open to his study. He would have been ashamed to know nothing of what was being said, written or done in his own day; but he felt under no obligation to find it better than the products of previous time, and especially than those which had passed the sieve of old oblivion.

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

He was never quite at home in what we may call our post-positivist era

he remained enthralled by the sublimely ordered Ptolemaic cosmos in which 'we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, the army of unalterable law but rather the revelry of insatiable love.' He conceded that it was not 'true'; but in his last, perhaps his most provocative, pages, claimed that all 'models' of the universe reflect as much the psychology of an age as the current state of knowledge.

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.

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.

His sentences are in homely English, and yet there is something Roman in the easy handling of clauses, and something Greek in their ascent from analogy to idea.

He often expressed his amazement...at the power of theatre to transfigure a play, and inject it with significances he could never have imagined without it: yet for all that, he did not change custom or become a theatregoer, and this...was a part of the price he had to pay for a habit of Protestantism.

God's goodness will not mean a spoiling indulgence; [H]is aim need not be our ease so much as our perfection.

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?

What will has caused, will must be brought to correct.

I prefer my first word, 'formidable.' But this was softened by joviality in youth and kindliness in maturity. Genius is formidable and so is goodness; he had both. It is useful in a picture sometimes to introduce a balancing figure to give scale, and I would choose the figure of W. H. Auden as one of comparable impressiveness and goodness, felt as formidable and friendly.

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.

a favourite couplet of Dunbar's sums up his view of the whole duty and delight of Man: Man, please thy Maker and be merry And give not for this world a cherry.

It is one thing to understand the doctrine, and quite another to be masters of the controversy.' Lewis's ambition was of course to know the doctrine and to be master of the controversy.

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.