Was Lewis a geeky stoic?
Show Notes
01. “Stephen Kent”
- Beltway Banthas
- How the Force Can Fix the World: Lessons on Life, Liberty, and Happiness from a Galaxy Far, Far Away
- Mere Christianity
- Geeky Stoics YouTube Channel
- Jack vs Rainn Wilson
02. “Stoicism in Lewis”
We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future…. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy.
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter 6)
03. “Finding Stoicism”
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04. “CSL and GKC on Stoicism”
05. “Live Mythically”
- Marcus Aurelius
- Podcast #316: An Introduction to Stoicism
- 5 Ancient Stoic Tactics for Modern Life
- C. S. Lewis — A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet by Alistair McGrath
“Not this. Their evil-doing was vain and ignorant, as all evil deeds are. This is our comfort, that the evil was theirs, not hers. They say there was not a tear in her eye, nor did so much as her hand shake, when they put her to the Tree. Not even when they turned away and left her did she cry out. She died full of all things that are really good; courage, and 94patience, and—and—Aiai! Aiai—oh Psyche, oh my little one——” Then his love got the better of his philosophy and he pulled his mantle over his head and at last, still weeping, left me.
Next day he said, “You saw yesterday, Daughter, how little progress I have made. I began to philosophise too late. You are younger and can go further. To love, and to lose what we love, are equally things appointed for our nature. If we cannot bear the second well, that evil is ours. It did not befall Psyche. If we look at it with reason’s eye and not with our passions, what good that life offers did she not win? Chastity, temperance, prudence, meekness, clemency, valour—and, though fame is froth, yet, if we should reckon it at all, a name that stands with Iphigenia’s and Antigone’s.”
C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part I, Chapter 8)
I loved the Fox, as my father called him, better than anyone I had yet known. You would have thought that a man who had been free in the Greeklands, and then been taken in war and sold far away among the barbarians, would be downcast. And so he was sometimes; possibly more often than I, in my childishness, guessed. But I never heard him complain; and I never heard him boast (as all the other foreign slaves did) about the great man he had been in his own country. He had all sorts of sayings to cheer himself up with: “No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city,” and, “Everything is as good or bad as our opinion makes it.” But I think what really kept him cheerful was his inquisitiveness. I never knew such a man for questions. He wanted to know everything about our country and language and ancestors and gods, and even our plants and flowers.
C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part I, Chapter 1)
I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Chapter 1)
