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CS Lewis' Devil Screwtape describes the evil of today: "Oh, to get one's teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII, or even a Hitler! There was real crackling

CS Lewis' Devil Screwtape describes the evil of today: "Oh, to get one's teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII, or even a Hitler! There was real crackling there; something to crunch; a rage, an egotism, a cruelty only just less robust than our own. It put up a delicious resistance to being devoured. It warmed your inwards when you'd got it down. Instead of this, what have we had tonight? There was a municipal authority with Graft sauce. But personally I could not detect in him the flavour of a really passionate and brutal avarice such as delighted one in the great tycoons of the last century. Was he not unmistakably a Little Man — a creature of the petty rake-off pocketed with a petty joke in private and denied with the stalest platitudes in his public utterances — a grubby little nonentity who had drifted into corruption, only just realizing that he was corrupt, and chiefly be-cause everyone else did it? ..." ... "The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbiness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible. To raise them just enough; but not that fatal millimetre of “too much.”" [1] Which is to say the quality of a "banal evil" is kind of a product of our modern bureaucratic capitalist society. [1] http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/Toast_CSL.pdf http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/Toast_CSL.pdf

sdegutis 7y ago
Reminds me of one of my favorite poems ever, written by a Chaplain during WWI: When Jesus came to Golgotha, they hanged Him on a tree, They drove great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary; They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep, For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap. When Jesus came to Birmingham they simply passed Him by, They never hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die; For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain, They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain. Still Jesus cried, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” And still it rained the wintry rain that drenched Him through and through; The crowds went home, and left the streets without a soul to see, And Jesus crouched against a wall and cried for Calvary.

sdegutis 7y ago

Reminds me of one of my favorite poems ever, written by a Chaplain during WWI: When Jesus came to Golgotha, they hanged Him on a tree, They drove great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary; They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep, For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap. When Jesus came to Birmingham they simply passed Him by, They never hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die; For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain, They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain. Still Jesus cried, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” And still it rained the wintry rain that drenched Him through and through; The crowds went home, and left the streets without a soul to see, And Jesus crouched against a wall and cried for Calvary.