The Screwtape Letters – Part 2
On the Christian Book Club in March we have been reading The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. To me, this is one of those books that you can read over and over again. Each time I read it, I feel like I am able to take something different away from the book. One of the chapters that really caught my attention (there were many of them) was Chapter 15 where the discussion turns to living in the future or living in the present. Screwtape says this on page 76; “In a word, the future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time–for the past is frozen and no longer flows, and the present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
That thought process really seemed to connect with me and the situation we find ourselves in today. Everyone seems so focused on the future, that in order to achieve what they think they want, they will do whatever they think it takes. In the process that have completely sacrificed the present, and they are really no longer living at all.
I hope that you have enjoyed reading the Screwtape Letters on Christian Book Club. As always, I look forward to your comments.
In April our Christian Book Club selection is “The Hobbit” by JRR Tolkien. I am going to put a link to the book in case you need to purchase a copy. After we read the Hobbit we are going to continue the story by reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I look forward to your comments and insight in the weeks ahead.
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The Hobbit By J.R.R. Tolkien / Houghton-mifflin If you care for journeys there and back, out of the comfortable Western world, over the edge of the Wild, and home again, and can take interest in a humble hero (blessed with a little wisdom and a little courage), here is a record of such a journey and such a traveler. The period is the ancient time between the age of Faerie and the dominion of men, when the famous forest of Mirkwood was still standing, and the mountains were full of danger. In following the path of the humble adventurer, you will learn by the way (as he did) – if you do not already know all about these things – much about trolls, goblins, dwarves, and elves, and get some glimpses into the history and politics of a neglected but important period. |
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Category: The Screwtape Letters
After at least a decade and several personal recommendations to read it each year, I finally got around to buying “The Screwtape Letters.” The initial emotion I experienced after reading its introduction was jealously as I could not help but wish that it was I, and not Lewis, who had such an ingenious idea. Once you discover the book’s method, which is of a senior demon writing to his nephew with recommendations on how to steal souls, you’ll be astounded at the wonderful complexity of the author’s mind. His reverse theological technique provided ample opportunity to skewer many of the most powerful members of England’s WWII society. What is most remarkable about the book is that it is even more applicable to our present day world than it was to the author’s era. Moderate and touchy-feely churches are ubiquitous to our landscape and Screwtape undoubtedly would be most pleased with their constant empthasis on social issues rather than the Lord’s Word. The book has tremendous meaning as it difficult to dismiss the possibility that the Devil influences our daily lives and the world around us. One cannot help but wonder if their are Screwtapes and Wormwoods in the air we breath who attempt, with subtle direction, to steer us away from productive activities and into the netherworld of souless entertainment.
“the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” -Screwtape
The Screwtape Letters, originally published in The Guardian in 1941, is an epistolary novel in the form of Letters from the demon Screwtape to his nephew, the apprentice demon Wormwood. Each Letter is a beautifully crafted description of how the forces of evil seek to subvert good men and turn them away from Christianity. Take the following example:
My dear Wormwood, So you “have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away,” have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?
Humans are amphibians–half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
This means that while their spirits can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation–the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.
If you had watched your patient carefully, you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life–his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth, periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.
To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite…. in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.
The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense.
But the obedience the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing…. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself–creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His.
We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.
And that is where the troughs come in…. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo….
Now obviously I like that because it jibes with my view of the Human Dilemma. Even better is this, from Lewis’s Introduction:
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
This metaphor, of course, proved to be more prescient than even Lewis could have forseen. For as the Letters were being published, bureaucrats in Berlin and Moscow were exterminating humans by the millions and the Depression and the War would give rise to increasing huge and intrusive Welfare State bureaucracies, bent on destroying Religion, Family, Community, any institution which could rival the power of the State. All the while, and ever so gradually, citizens were willingly ceding more and more of their autonomy (their hard won Free Will), as we slid into the modern Liberal godless Hell.
To read Lewis now is to realize that things could have been different; that a few voices, crying in the wilderness, warned of the authoritarian netherworld that Western man exiled himself to for much of this Century as he abandoned God and Christianity in favor of the State and statism. We are now in the midst of a twilight struggle that will decide whether we retain sufficient confidence in our ultimate godliness to reclaim our freedom from the grasp of the State, or whether Western man’s crisis of confidence will lead us back to the Garden of Eden, with our needs taken care of and our souls extinguished.
There is no better way to gird yourself for the battle than to read this book.