Posts tagged gluttony

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Fast from the gluttony of delicacy.

“The contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of catching souls, in your last letter, only shows your ignorance.

One of the great achievements of the last hundred years has been to deaden the human conscience on that subject, so that by now you will hardly find a sermon preached or a conscious troubled about it in the whole length and breadth of Europe.

This has largely been effected by concentrating all our efforts on gluttony of delicacy, not gluttony of excess.


Your patient’s mother; as I learn from the dossier and you might have learned from Glubose, is a good example.

She would be astonished - one day, I hope, will be - to learn that her whole life is enslaved to this kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that the quantities involved are small.

But what do quantities matter, provided we can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness, and self-concern?


Glubose has this old woman well in hand.

She is a positive terror to hostess and servants.

She is always turning from what has been offered to her to say with a demure little sigh and a smile, ‘Oh please, please…all I want is a cup of teas, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast.’

You see?


Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognizes as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.

At the very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is practicing temperance.

In a crowded restaurant she gives a little scream at the plate which some overworked waitress has set before her and says, ‘Oh that’s far, far too much! Take it away and bring me about a quarter of it.’


If challenged, she would say she was doing this to avoid waste; in reality she does it because the particular shade of delicacy to which we have enslaved her is offended by the sight of more food than she happens to want.”  

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

…how far we fall from all we consider to be “small.”

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to fast from the gluttony of delicacy.