Thomas Howard Quotes

When I walk into an Orthodox Church ... one is immediately aware that one has stepped into the presence of what St. Paul would call the whole family in heaven and earth. You have stepped into the precincts of heaven!

The incarnation took all that properly belongs to our humanity and delivered it back to us, redeemed. All of our inclinations and appetites and capacities and yearnings are purified and gathered up and glorified by Christ. He did not come to thin out human life; He came to set it free. All the dancing and feasting and processing and singing and building and sculpting and baking and merrymaking that belong to us, and that were stolen away into the service of false gods, are returned to us in the gospel.

My life for yours: it may mean three seconds of my time to redeem some thoughtless bit of self-indulgence on the part of someone else, or it may mean, or did mean, Golgotha, where My Life for Yours was supremely dramatized and entails our eternal joy.

Its [Narnia's] fabric is shot through with glory. There is no peak, no valley, no sea or forest, but bears the weight of this glory, no law of the land that does not mirror the exact pattern of this glory, no spell or incantation or taboo that does not reach through the veil that protects the mundane and the obvious from the great glories and mysteries that press upon them. No creature - no faun, dryad, star, or winged horse - that does not bear about and exhibit in its own form some bit of the shape of that glory. And, alas, there is no evil that does not turn out to be fraud, parody, or counterfeit of that glory.

That religious earnestness forever tends toward fright and hence towards brittleness and inquisition is clear enough in mythology and history.

But evil is always illusion. It insists on the lie that we can have something for ourselves. This is the sole principle at work in hell. Lucifer chose to believe it; or, since it is unimaginable that he actually could have believed it, then we may say that he chose to pretend it might be. Very well, says Truth, you may pretend this. But the pretense will be, literally, your undoing. It will unmake you. You will have opted for something that is not, namely, a lie. Hell is built of lies.