Tuesday, April 12, 2005

"An Ever Increasing Craving for an Ever Diminishing Pleasure"

In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis has the devil (Screwtape) explain to his nephew (Wormwood) God's program for pleasure and Satan's alternative:

“Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s [God's] ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.”

“He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a facade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are ‘pleasures forevermore’. . . . He’s vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled the world full of pleasures.”

C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, pp. 49, 112.