Marriage Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis is doing a neat bit of theological judo: he takes the activities polite culture prizes (Bach, Plato) and flips them under a standard polite culture would rather not discuss - the posture of the soul. The provocation lands because he pairs the supposedly lofty with the conspicuously domestic and bodily: eating, sex, sleep. He is puncturing the instinct to confuse refinement with righteousness, a confusion especially tempting to educated Christians who can smuggle vanity in under the cloak of “good taste.”

The intent is not anti-intellectualism; Lewis loved Plato and admired great music. It is anti-pride. In Christian moral psychology, pride isn’t just another vice, it’s the vice that colonizes all the others, turning even virtue into self-worship. Bach can become a mirror; Plato can become a badge. The subtext is a warning about spiritual drag: cultural excellence, pursued as identity, inflates the ego and quietly displaces gratitude.

Context matters: Lewis is writing into mid-century British Christianity, where class, cultivation, and moral seriousness often traveled together. His claim detonates that social arrangement. He also makes “state” the key word: not what you do, but the inner orientation while doing it. Ordinary life done with humility and temperance becomes sacramental; high culture done with pride becomes, in his view, spiritually corrosive. It’s a deliberately abrasive reminder that Christianity’s hierarchy of value is less about taste and more about surrender.