“The Undignified Vices”
“Milton was right,” said my teacher. “The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy – that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper that say it was sorry and be friends. Ye call it the Sulks. But in adult life it has a hundred fine names – Achilles wrath and Coriolanus’ grandeur, Revenge and Injured Merit and Self Respect and Tragic Greatness, and Proper Pride.”
“Then there is no one lost through the undignified vices, Sir? Through mere sensuality?”
“Some are no doubt. The sensualist, I’ll allow ye, begins by pursuing a real pleasure, though a small one. His sin is less. But the time comes on when, though the pleasure becomes less and less and the craving fiercer and fiercer, and though he knows that joy can never come that way, yet he prefers to joy the mere fondling of unappeasable lust and would not have it taken from him. He’d fight to the death to keep it. He’d like well to be able to scratch: but even when he can scratch no more he’d rather itch than not.”
- excerpt from the The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
