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Hell’s Hunger
“We must picture Hell as a state where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment….For of course `Dog eat dog’ is the principle of the whole organisation (sic.). Everyone wishes everyone else’s discrediting, demotion, and ruin; everyone is an expert in the confidential report, the pretended allegiance, the stab in the back. Over all this their good manners, their expressions of grave respect, their `tributes’ to one another’s invaluable services form a thin crust. Every now and then it gets punctured, and the scalding lava of their hatred spurts out….Their…motive is a kind of hunger. I feign that [demons] can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another; and us. Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one’s fellow; to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one’s own – to hate one’s hatreds and resent one’s grievances and indulge one’s egoism through him as well as through oneself. In Hell I feign that they recognize it as hunger. But there the hunger is more ravenous, and a fuller satisfaction is possible. There, I suggest, the stronger spirit – there are perhaps no bodies to impede the operation – can really and irrevocably suck the weaker into itself and permanently gorge its own being on the weaker’s outraged individuality. It is (I feign) for this that (demons) desire human souls and the souls of one another. It is for this that Satan desires all his own followers and all the sons of Eve and all the host of Heaven. His dream is of the day when all shall be inside him and all that says `I’ can say it only through him. (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, pp.ix-xii.)
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