Week 6 Notes and Slides

 Letter 25 Notes

Today in Letter 25 we revisit several themes from previous Letters like TIME, PLEASURE, CONFUSION and how to use them to the benefit of effective tempting.  We shall also hear of some new tactics, particularly corrupting CHANGE and PERMANENCE with NOVELTY and the horror of the SAME OLD THING.

First, there are a number of words and phrases that need to be defined.

1.      First is the word “MERE” and the way it is used in the 1^st paragraph in conjunction with Christianity.  You will remember that one of my favorite C. S. Lewis books is Mere Christianity.  When Screwtape uses the words “MERELY” or “MERE” he is referring to the basics or essentials of Christianity.  More on that in a moment.

2.      Hedonist – you will remember from Letter 22 refers to someone devoted to the pursuit of please as an ultimate end.  A Hedonist is obsessed with personal pleasure.

3.      Novelty – is the quality of being new and interesting.

4.      Avarice – another of the “Deadly Sins” it refers to extreme greed – the love of money.

5.      Low-brow and high-brow art – Low-brow art would be like pop art in today’s art culture while high-brow art is anything considered sophisticated or intellectual.

6.      Lasciviousness – lustful or lecherous

7.      Endemic – means occurring regularly.

8.      Gunwale – full to overflowing.

9.      Byronic – dark and romantically brooding.

10. Feckless – feeble or weak.

I am often asked what is the difference in beliefs between one church and another.  Certainly, there are differences, but we have far more in common and that is what brings us together as the Body of Christ.  We should always consider ourselves MERELY or BASICALLY CHRISTIAN.

This is the problem Screwtape sees with the community of Christians the Patient is now worshipping with since his 2^nd conversion and meeting his girlfriend at Church.

They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity.

What the demons want is Christianity defined in terms of some extraneous discipline.  Look and online and you can find Christianity defined by any number of popular movements.  Just as there is pop art, abstract art, Expressionism, Impressionism and on and on, the same is true for Christian belief. 

Screwtape introduces Wormwood to the Horror of the Same Old Thing.  A more contemporary way to put this would be FOMO or the Fear of Missing Out.  What is the latest Christian Fad?   Screwtape tells Wormwood:

The humans live in time, and experience reality successively.  To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change.

I first read this paragraph I was surprised especially when Screwtape says that we humans actually need change and that change is one of those God-given pleasures!  But don’t we come to Church to be changed – for the BETTER.  As I read further, Screwtape’s logic began to make sense. 

Think about how much has changed in just the last 10 years.  The other day, I used my IPhone and artificial intelligence to read the very small print on a medicine bottle.  Phyllis’s car practically drives itself and will even parallel park automatically.  I remember when power windows were a luxury. 

We all want change when we want it and then we need some stability or as Screwtape calls it – some permanence – to get ready for this new way of living.  Lots of things changed because of the Pandemic.  You can now watch our 11:00 am worship service and Rich’s Bible Study online.  You can study The Screwtape Letters online with me.  Zoom Meetings are now a regular option.  My daughter works remotely for a national company who has employees living all over the U.S.  These are all changes that are now just part of everyday life.  Screwtape tells Wormwood that when change and permanence work in harmony then we humans experience a RHYTHM of life. 

This Rhythm is the opportunity for demons to twist and corrupt the pleasure of change.  He says:  “so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty.” 

Lewis uses NOVELTY to mean that we are constantly addicted to more and more new and exciting stuff.  The Patient and all other humans should be addicted to the excitement of continual change so that we are never satisfied.  Whether it is the British game of Conkers popular during WWII or the latest and greatest new online video game, this need for something new is how demons can disrupt and corrupt the RHYTHM of change and permanence.

The way this works is that NOVELTY leads us to always seek the next new thing for the shear pleasure of being the first.  Screwtape uses the newest latest Fashions as a perfect example.  Why else would so many humans tune into see who was wearing WHAT at the Oscars or the Emmys.  Screwtape gives Wormwood a good example:

Thus, by inflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing we have recently made the Arts, for example, less dangerous to us than perhaps, they have ever been, “low-brow” and “high-brow” artists alike being now drawn into fresh and still fresh, excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride.  Finally, the desire for novelty is indispensable if we are to produce Fashions or Vogues.

Screwtape closes his letter with the other side of the coin, reminding Wormwood that the love of stability can also be a good temptation.  In this case, the Patient can refuse to recognize that the world has changed and live solely in the past which is often little more than a figment of our imagination.

 

Letter 26 Notes

Now in letter 26, the primary temptation in play is UNSELFISHNESS.  This may be surprising because we would normally consider unselfishness to be a virtue.  Lewis uses the word CHARITY to describe the virtue of putting another’s needs first.  When we care for someone else out of love for our neighbor, then we are practicing CHARITY.

However, when we do something for someone else as a means of self-righteousness or simply because we want them indebted to us, then we are, according to Screwtape, practicing the vice of UNSELFISHNESS.

Each of The Screwtape Letters highlights a particular virtue and its corresponding vice.  We have gone over this several times and multiple letters will focus on the same virtue and vice. 

Let us remember that only God can create a virtue, and vices are the demons’ way of corrupting that virtue from something good into something bad.  Demons cannot create, they can only twist something good into something bad.

Now if you are ever wondering if you are practicing a virtue or a corresponding vice, check your motivation.  If you are acting out of love for God and your neighbor, it is a virtue.  If it’s all about you, it’s likely a vice. 

Now with all this in mind, Screwtape opens Letter 26 talking about Love and particularly that the Patient and his girlfriend are in love.  Screwtape says to Wormwood: 

Avail yourself of the ambiguity in the word “Love”: let them think they have solved by Love problems they have in fact only waived or postponed under the influence of the enchantment. 

We have all heard the cliché, “Love is blind” and can be when it come to temptation.  One of these ways is through UNSELFISHNESS. 

Note, once again, the admirable work of our Philological Arm in substituting the negative unselfishness for the Enemy’s positive Charity

Philology is the study of language and it appears that the Kingdom Below has a special branch dedicated to taking good words and works and making them bad.  Here they have taken Charity which is about serving others and made it all about the person who ultimately helps others because it makes them feel superior to others.  Plus, if I sacrifice then I can be a martyr in my own mind.  False unselfishness produces those tiresome self-appointed “servants” who seem to drone on and on about how much they are always sacrificing. 

 As Screwtape says: 

Thanks to this you can, from the very outset, teach a man to surrender benefits not that others may be happy in having them but he may be unselfish in forgoing them.  That is a great point gained.

Now an important lesson found in this Letter for us is the idea that genuine CHARITY and LOVE do not have to mandated, because as we grow into the image of Christ, we genuinely do desire the best for others;  Justice, Mercy, and Compassion come from God working in us rather than us having to make a personal sacrifice to do them. ¹

But back to temptation, Screwtape gives Wormwood several good examples of how this false unselfishness often works out in the lives of humans.  He describes what he calls the Generous Conflict illusion that we have all seen played out at one time or another.  

Screwtape uses Tea in the Garden as the setting for one or more family members taking up the martyr role and the others doing their best to please this unhappy person at the expense of their own happiness: 

He insists on doing “what the others want”.  They insist on doing what he wants.  Passions are roused.  Soon someone is saying “Very well then, I won’t have any tea at all!”, and a real quarrel ensues with bitter resentment on both sides.

Screwtape emphasizes that the best work of a demon is often done by starting small and allowing that annoying little thing in someone else’s behavior to grow bigger and bigger over time.  Much more damage to the soul can be done that way than depending on one supposedly big event that occurs just once. 

 

Letter 27 Notes

We start this week with a Letter once again on prayer – a subject Screwtape finds rather painful when the prayers are sincere and offered in faith. 

On the other hand, and you will remember from an earlier Letter that prayers offered in a rote and perfunctory manner that we memorized in childhood and now pray in order to say that we have prayed are a most useful temptation tool for an alert demon. 

The problem is that the Patient is actually praying to God about his struggles with prayer – the distractions that are challenging his desire to follow Christ.  Such prayers offered means that Wormwood has “largely failed.” 

There are any number of prayers that I can offer from memory, but the real question is – do I know what it is that I am praying for.  Screwtape extols the value of purely petitionary prayer.  I can repeat the Lord’s Prayer without a second thought, but if I really look at what I am saying, this prayer can become a guide for my daily devotions.  It includes everything I need for that day – which is exactly what God wants – according to Screwtape – but not our Father Below. 

Screwtape tells Wormwood:

Now is the time for raising intellectual difficulties about prayer of that sort.  False spirituality is always to be encouraged.

Lewis goes into the false spirituality that thinks only pure adoration is the proper way to pray.  Again, the Lord’s Prayer reminds us that petitionary prayer or prayers for our daily needs and the needs of others are both necessary and important to proper spirituality. 

However, it is essential to recognize that when we pray we are acknowledging our complete dependence on God.  God acts in God’s time and God’s way as opposed to ours.  Screwtape points out the importance of the “heads I win, tails you lose” argument that dismisses prayer both as merely coincidence and/or a predetermined result as something God would have done anyway.

From here Screwtape goes into “the terrible habit of obedience.”  Throughout the scriptures we are called to “obey” God.  And it is important for us to understand what we mean when we talk about obedience to God.  C. S. Lewis wrote extensively on obedience to God, emphasizing it as a necessary aspect for faith, surrender, and transformation.  Obedience is not just following rules but is aligning our will with God’s.  

In his book, Mere Christianity, Lewis suggests that obedience to God does not enslave us but rather frees us to become what we are truly meant to be.  He frequently contrasts pride and obedience warning that pride is the desire to be our own master – the great sin that leads us away from God – whereas humble obedience allows us to be reshaped in his image. 

In one of my favorite books, The Great Divorce, Lewis illustrates the choice between obedience to God and clinging to doing it ourselves:

There are only two kinds of people in the end:  those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and whose to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’  All that are in Hell, choose it.  Without that self-choice, there could no Hell.

Screwtape spends quite a bit of time in this Letter on the difference between how we humans and God experience time.  As we saw in a previous letter, we go through time in a linear fashion – moment by moment.  God acts in time but is not limited by it.  For God, we cannot think in terms of cause and effect.  Instead, God hears all of our prayers offered in all of creation and God’s actions are GOOD – which means they are for our GOOD.   Remember, God acts in God’s time and in God’s way which is the Way of Love.

I thoroughly enjoyed the last part of this Letter on the Historical Point of View.  The school of Historicism is a philosophical, literary, and cultural approach emphasizing the importance of the historical context in shaping ideas, events, and the way things are set up like government. 

It suggests that human thought, practices, and values are products of their specific historical circumstances rather than universal or absolute truths. 

In Letter 27, Screwtape points out that followers of this Historical Point of View ask every question about what may be considered a traditional interpretation except, “Is it true?”  This leads to the belief that new ideas are always better than old ones which distorts the certainty of an absolute truth.  And we have talked about several times, demons do not like absolute truth.  Remember, the more confused we are the easier we are to tempt.

Letter 28 Notes

Letter 28 begins with the obvious.  If the Patient is living the Christian life, now is not the time for him to die in the war!  Screwtape notes:

He has escaped the worldly friends with whom you tried to entangle him; he has “fallen in love” with a very Christian woman and is temporarily immune from your attacks on his chastity; and the various methods of corrupting his spiritual life which we have been trying are so far unsuccessful.

Clearly, if the Patient were to die today, he would certainly go to heaven and be lost to the demons and their Father below forever.

Apparently the war has resumed in full force and the Patient is once again faced with the possibility of military service. 

You will remember that C. S. Lewis served in World War I in the trenches and was wounded. 

He also volunteered to serve in World War II and was turned down for active duty because of his age and health but was put to work in the Cambridge volunteer militia and for the BBC.  His book, Mere Christianity began as a radio broadcast designed to give the people hope during the bombing of London.

Now Screwtape wants Wormwood to focus his efforts both on keeping his Patient alive and tempting him with the fears and emotions of the possibilities of what might happen. 

They, of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good.  But that is because we have taught them to do so.  Do not let us be infected by our propaganda.

Even Screwtape recognizes the eternal truth of Paul’s teaching in Philippians 1:21, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” 

He reminds Wormwood, “If he dies now, you lose him.  If he survives the war, there is always hope.”

Screwtape says about we humans that “…it is so hard for these creatures to persevere.”  It seems that after a while the youthful loves and hopes, give way to the quiet despair that comes with growing older. 

In our middle years, prosperity takes over and places  us firmly in the world.

His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth which is just what we want.  You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old.

By 70 years old, an effective demon can unravel the soul and firmly root them in continuing to live in this world for as long as possible.  And as long as they live in the world they are subject to temptation by their demon.

Screwtape points out to Wormwood that it is quite possible to teach the aging human that there is great value in Experience which seems to bring a false assurance that Heaven can actually be found in this world if the correct combination of science, politics, and psychology can be put to good use. 

Screwtape tells Wormwood

A great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where Virtue is concerned, “Experience is the mother of illusion”; but thanks to a change in Fashion, and also, of course, to the Historical Point of View, we have largely rendered his book innocuous.

That great human philosopher was Immanuel Kant who wrote in this book, “Critique of Pure Reason” that experience is the source of truth for nature, but the mother of illusion for moral laws.  I find it rather interesting that demons know and quote moral philosophy.

There are 2 pieces of good news for us in Screwtape’s last paragraph.  First, as we have said before, even Screwtape admits that ultimately God wins.  Demons only get to work on us for the few years we can be tempted in this life.  Life eternal is off limits. 

And Second, life expectancy has now increased since people are living significantly longer than the 60 or 70 years Screwtape expects.  He tells his nephew: 

Apparently He (meaning God) wants some – but only a very few of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years.

Given we have a blueprint now for disrupting Screwtape and Wormwood’s temptations thanks to his Letters, we will still have to resist but know we know God’s power and the demons’ secrets.

 

Letter 29 Notes

The Germans are bombing London and the area where the Patient is living so he is faced with the very real possibility that he will be killed. 

With this in mind, Screwtape now questions his nephew on the approach he will take with his temptations.

In this letter we will see Virtues, vices, and emotions coming into play and how each can affect the other. 

The first question is whether to aim for cowardice or at courage with the resulting pride or hatred of the Germans. 

Courage is a Virtue so not something a demon can create in the Patient.  Rather, if the Patient has courage, then it must be twisted and corrupted. 

As Screwtape tells Wormwood, “To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue.”   

Good men chose to follow Attila the Hun and wasn’t because they were impressed with his wickedness. 

Shylock is a fictional character in William Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice.  A Venetian Jewish moneylender, Shylock is the principal villain and his downfall and forced conversion to Christianity are the climax of the story. 

Having never seen the play, I’m not really sure which virtue is corrupted, but it sounds like his demon figured it out.

The problem for the demons is that the existence of some virtue keeps them from taking full control of even the most wicked of villains.  In other words, there is always the opportunity for repentance and forgiveness.

Hatred brings together both the vice and extreme emotion.  You will remember from previous letters that demons can do a lot of bad through the emotions.  Couple war, hatred, and the tension of human nerves and “… it is only a question of guiding the susceptibility into the right channels.”

Hatred combines with fear to most effectively corrupt humans.  As Screwtape points out

The more he fears, the more he will hate.  And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame.  Tom make a deep wound in his charity, you should therefore first defeat his courage. 

Now as Screwtape tells Wormwood, great care must be taken to not allow the Patient to look within when confronting his own cowardice. 

As he tells his nephew,

The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients , therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing with consequent repentance and humility….  It is there possible to lose as much as we gain by making your man a coward; he may learn too much about himself.

Whenever we are considering the moral life, it is tempting to view ethical questions as black or white and virtues and vices as an either/or proposition. 

There are certainly absolute truths as we have studied in earlier letters and we might also consider the idea that there are actions that are always wrong. 

However, there are many more moral and ethical questions that fall in what we can call a gray area.  In other words there are elements of good and bad present. 

This is the point where we need to ask ourselves “Where and how is the greater GOOD done?”

I can tell you from my time serving in the Air Force that there were times when I was afraid. 

There were, no doubt, times when Lewis, serving in the trenches in WWI, was undoubtedly afraid.  

Courage and fear would seem to naturally go together. 

But I think there is also on the battlefield elements of both courage and cowardice.  The question is which will win the day? 

The same is true in ethics.  An example, if someone comes to me for the Sacrament of Confession, whatever is said is protected by the Seal of the Confessional. 

But if someone confesses murder (which has never happened) do I report it to the authorities? 

The person is protected by the moral absolute of the Sanctity of the Confessional.  However, the Sanctity of Life is also a moral absolute.  You can see the ethical problems here.

Now obviously Screwtape and Wormwood have NO interest in ethics or morality, but you get my point. 

However, Lewis wants to point out that there are multiple considerations and ultimately it is the promise of God that prevails.  Even in the moment of our greatest weakness, God gives us the strength to go forward even when we are afraid.

 

Letter 30 Notes

We open Letter 30 with the good news that the Patient has proven himself in the bombings of his village and has not given in to the temptations of Wormwood. 

In fact, Screwtape is now quite disappointed in his nephew and tells him so.  He says about the Patient that:

He has been very frightened and thinks himself a great coward and therefore feels no pride; but he has done everything his duty demanded and perhaps a bit more. 

We can assume given what we learned in letter 29, that while the Patient thinks he is a coward, he has not given into the vice of hatred for the enemy. 

However, he also has not given into pride which can come as the result of feeling overly courageous.

We hear the word courage thrown around way too much these days.  A football player is said to have courage when he pulls off a good play.  He may be a good athlete, but I don’t believe we can compare running a football to serving in a war zone. 

Webster’s Dictionary defines COURAGE as the mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty. 

I think what Screwtape is saying to Wormwood is that while the Patient thinks he is coward, he actually showed courage and did not allow himself to be proud of it.  Courage and fear are certainly not mutually exclusive. 

Certainly there are any number of stories of courage and faith in the scriptures.  Noah and the ark, Daniel and the lion’s den, and St. Stephen – the first deacon and martyr of the early Church are some of my personal favorites.  You can read all about them in the Bible. 

We have an excellent example from right here in Alabama.  Jonathan Myrick Daniels was an Episcopal seminarian from New Hampshire who came to Alabama in 1965 to work in the Civil Rights Movement. 

On August 14, 1965, Daniels was one of 29 civil rights workers who were arrested in Fort Deposit, Alabama while picketing its “Whites-only” stores.  They were held in the Hayneville jail for 6 days before they were released. 

While others called for transportation, Daniels and 3 of his colleagues – a white Catholic priest and 2 black female civil rights workers – walked to buy a soft drink at Varner’s Cash Store, one of the few local places that served non-whites. 

Barring the door was Tom Coleman, an unpaid sheriffs deputy.  He threatened the group with a shotgun. 

Daniels pushed Ruby Sales out of the way and caught the full blast from the shotgun.  He was killed instantly.  Coleman then shot the Catholic priest, severely wounding him.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called Daniel’s act, “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry.”  Jonathan Myrick Daniels is recognized as a martyr and Saint by the Episcopal Church and we celebrate his feast day on August 14.

Now if we have learned anything about demons in these Letters, it is that they are persistent in the face of failure.  If temptation fails the first time, then demons are more than ready to try, try again. 

And so Screwtape turns now to the Patient’s fatigue and the opportunities for temptation from his weakened physical condition.  And it certainly makes sense.  Resisting temptation normally is hard but when you are worn out and tired it is extra hard.

Screwtape tells his nephew:

The paradoxical thing is that moderate fatigue is a better soil for peevishness than absolute exhaustion….  It is not fatigue simply as such that produces anger, but unexpected demands on a man already tired.

Now you will remember that the word “Peevishness” is another way of describing us when we are grumpy and bad tempered.  And if you were wondering about “Irremediable” it refers to something that is impossible to cure or fix.

So basically what Screwtape is advising Wormwood to do is to feed him with false hopes.  We’ve already in a previous letter heard that false unselfishness counters Christian charity and now it is basically Irremediable Peevishness that will build false hope and counter courage and humility in war time.

Finally, Screwtape suggests abandoning any intellectual attack on the Patient’s faith and going for the emotions. 

You will remember that demons love to play with our emotions so that we begin to feel sorry for ourselves and ignore God and the needs of others. 

He tells Wormwood to return to the confusion from earlier letters over what is the REAL world.  If demons can create an illusion of what is real verses what is spiritual, then everything about Faith and God can be questioned.  Screwtape says:

But there is a sort of attack on the emotions which can still be tried.  It turns on making him feel, when first he sees human remains plastered on a wall, that is “what the world is really like” and that all his religion has been a fantasy.

The point C. S. Lewis is trying to make is that What is REAL in the Christian life is accepted on faith.  We know God is with us because we believe.  Screwtape and Wormwood use emotion and confusion so that we may be tempted to dismiss hope as nothing more than a good feeling.=

Letter 31 Notes

We have reached the end – Letter 31 and the first thing you should notice is that Screwtape addresses Wormwood in a whole new way. 

We have gone from MY DEAR WORMWOOD to an added MY VERY DEAR and he now calls him MY POPPET - which in England is a term of affection for a sweet or pretty child – and MY PIGSNIE which is another British term of endearment – sort of like sweetheart.

And if you think he might be using just a bit of sarcasm, you would be right.  Wormwood has lost the Patient forever.   He was killed in a bombing and is now in heaven. 

And as promised by his uncle in previous letters, for demons it is either bring a soul to the Kingdom Below to be consumed or THAT demon becomes food.  As we have said before on several occasions, love is beyond the understanding of demons.

Screwtape’s RANTS against his nephew, tell us several important things about death and resurrection.

Death is a moment of release.  Screwtape tells Wormwood,

“How well I know what happened at the instant when they snatched him from you!  There was a sudden clearing of his eyes (was there not?) as he saw you for the first time and recognized the part you had had in him and knew that you had it no longer.” 

Screwtape compares it to a scab falling off an old sore.  The Patient is now healed of his demon and knows it.

Death is a relative thing – rather than something horrible.  Screwtape calls it sheer, instantaneous liberation. 

I particularly like the statement from Screwtape to Wormwood where he says “How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous!” 

I will never forget standing in a hospital with a woman who was a member of one of the previous parishes where I served.  Her husband had just passed away after a long struggle. 

We stood in silence.  There really was nothing I could say.  Then she smiled and said, “Now he knows for sure, what I still have to just believe in.”

Death is the doorway to life eternal where there is no pain or suffering.

Death is a moment of coming home when we are reunited and where we come face to face with the Love of God and the love we shared all through our life on earth. 

Screwtape tells Wormwood,

But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not “Who are you?” but “So it was you all the time.”

Just as we know our demons at that moment of death and know that we are now free from their temptation, we will also know in all certainty our guardian angels who were with us all through life.

As Screwtape also notes, we will see God in all of His Glory and it will be a feeling of love and joy.  We will no longer be finite human beings trying to comprehend an infinite God.  We will know God. 

Screwtape tells Worwood:

He saw not only Them; he saw Him.  This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him.  What is blinding, suffocating fire to you, is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man.

We have lots of experience with death but no experience with RESURRECTION other than through faith.  We need to believe that heaven is real and love is eternal and we will come to know both in all their eternal fullness.

The last Letter ends with one final point of how love is such a mystery to Screwtape, Wormwood, and all who do not believe in the possibility of God’s Grace.  For such people the law of hell reigns, “Bring us back food or be food yourself.” 

God does not have to consign those persons to hell; they simply choose it, make it, and inhabit it daily.