Tuesday, March 8, 2011

He Loves Us

An excerpt of a letter from the Devil's right hand man to one of his newest students in temptation:

"Now it may surprise you in his efforts to get possession of a soul...To us, a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. The obedience which the Enemy demands of men is a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men and His service being perfect freedom, is not [...] mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself-- creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in; He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct"

-C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters

4 comments:

Andrew said...

The Screwtape Letters pretty much rock. And so does C.S. Lewis.

Catie said...

Agreed. Bishop Benfell totally quoted from The Chronicles of Narnia in his lesson on Sunday! So prime! I love how he also says something about how when we give ourselves to Christ he makes us more ourselves than ever.
Bronwen are you just loving the Screwtape Letters?

Bronwen said...

I'm actually not reading it right now. I read it for last term's independent reading. But I was thinking about how excellent it is last night and thought I'd share a little bit of the joy.

Catie said...

Hey I read it for that too! Sweet, there was some definite joy involved there.