Life's Pleasures Quote by Morris West

Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! lands like a hangover after a long, elegant party: praise and indictment in the same breath. West points to the Greek inheritance not as a museum piece but as a switch that got flipped in the West - rhetoric, philosophy, definitions, systems. The intoxication is pleasurable because it feels like mastery. If you can name a thing cleanly, you can start believing you own it.

The second line turns that pleasure into a charge sheet. A cage with words is a brutally effective metaphor because it concedes what language does best: it contains, classifies, tidies. West is writing from inside a Catholic imaginative world, where God is not merely an idea to be argued but a presence that resists being pinned down. The subtext is that theology, doctrine, and even pious speech can become a technology of control - not maliciously, but out of anxiety. A God who fits neatly into our sentences is safer than a God who interrupts them.

The shove is the ugly verb here. It suggests violence, impatience, the human need to force the infinite into a manageable shape. West’s intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-idolatry: when language stops being a bridge to mystery and becomes a box for it, faith becomes bureaucracy. The Greeks stand in for the origin point of our confidence that the right words can settle ultimate questions; West’s warning is that the most sophisticated vocabulary can still be a spiritual confinement.