Monday, September 09, 2013

A reminder of C S Lewis' greatness

I found this article aslo over at Catholic Spiritual Direction:  The Authority of C.S. Lewis
I just have to share this:

Here’s an example from the last Screwtape Letter as Screwtape describes the death of the “patient.” He chastises, with lamentation, that his underling devil has let a soul slip through his fingers. “How well I know what happened at the instant when they snatched him from you!,” writes Screwtape. “There was a sudden clearing of his eyes (was there not?) as he saw you for the first time, and recognized the part you had had in him and knew that you had it no longer. Just think (and let it be the beginning of your agony) what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore… as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment.”


Screwtape mourns the relative ease with which the patient died. “Did you mark how naturally — as if he’d been born for it – the earth-born vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous?… The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death.” Then the patient sees the Beings of Heaven and “he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So it was you all the time.’”

Finally, the patient sees Him. “This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him,” Screwtape whines. “What is blinding, suffocating fire to you, is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man.” Everything the patient might have considered important is now “in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door.”
Wonderful stuff.

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