Monday, October 19, 2009

the present or eternity but not the future

In letter 15, Screwtape urges his nephew to focus his subject's thoughts on the future. He notes,

The humans live in time but our enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them...Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present...It is far better to make them live in the Future...We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.


C S Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, pp.75ff

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