The Screwtape Letters: Preface and the First Five Letters

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2018. The sched­ule is online.

This week we begin our final sum­mer bookk, The Screw­tape Let­ters. Before I give some thoughts on this week’s read­ing, I have some gen­er­al obser­va­tions.

• The let­ters were orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished as a week­ly ser­i­al, one let­ter at at time, in a church mag­a­zine.
• The full text of The Screw­tape Let­ters is avail­able online at http://www.truechristianity.info/en/the_screwtape_letters.php
• The Screw­tape Let­ters is also avail­able as an audio­book read by John Cleese(!) — check it out on YouTube.

On to the main course:

Demon­ic cor­re­spon­dence in a hell­ish bureau­cra­cy is a genius idea for a book and I assumed it would have been fun to write, but Lewis said “Of all my books, there was only one I did not take plea­sure in writ­ing.” The Screw­tape Let­ters “were dry and grit­ty going. At the time, I was think­ing of objec­tions to the Chris­t­ian life, and decid­ed to put them into the form, ‘That’s what the dev­il would say.’ But mak­ing goods ‘bad’ and bads ‘good’ gets to be fatigu­ing.” (source)

I’m glad Lewis put up with the fatigue. The result is tremen­dous. Let me begin with one of my favorite quotes from the book (from the pref­ace):

There are two equal and oppo­site errors into which our race can fall about the dev­ils. One is to dis­be­lieve in their exis­tence. The oth­er is to believe, and to feel an exces­sive and unhealthy inter­est in them. They them­selves are equal­ly pleased by both errors and hail a mate­ri­al­ist or a magi­cian with the same delight.

This para­graph has spe­cial mean­ing to me as a Pen­te­costal. Some cor­ners of the Pen­te­costal world seem to believe there is a demon behind every headache and traf­fic jam. But much of our soci­ety has a hard time acknowl­edg­ing that there is any­thing demon­ic about some­thing as overt as Satan wor­ship. There is a more sen­si­ble posi­tion which Lewis here describes and which the Apos­tle Paul mod­eled: Paul was com­fort­able with the spir­it realm and demons rec­og­nized that he was a force to be reck­oned with (Acts 19:11–16), but he did not obsess over it. He was not an easy man to dis­tract. Once a demon was harass­ing him, but it took sev­er­al days before it got on Paul’s nerves enough for him to respond to it (Acts 16:16–18). Strive to be like Paul — deal with the demon­ic realm with­out becom­ing con­sumed by the demon­ic realm.

In the first let­ter, Screw­tape writes to Worm­wood about how mod­ern trends have made demon­ic work eas­i­er:

Your man has been accus­tomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incom­pat­i­ble philoso­phies danc­ing about togeth­er inside his head. He does­n’t think of doc­trines as pri­mar­i­ly “true” or “false”, but as “aca­d­e­m­ic” or “prac­ti­cal”, “out­worn” or “con­tem­po­rary”, “con­ven­tion­al” or “ruth­less”. Jar­gon, not argu­ment, is your best ally in keep­ing him from the Church. Don’t waste time try­ing to make him think that mate­ri­al­ism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the phi­los­o­phy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

Read­ing this para­graph remind­ed me of the Prime Min­is­ter of Cana­da, Justin Trudeau. He once famous­ly answered a ques­tion about his cab­i­net com­po­si­tion by say­ing, “Because it’s 2015!” This is the kind of thing Screw­tape is talk­ing about. It’s the kind of answer we have been con­di­tioned to respond to, and so it’s the kind of answer a skill­ful politi­cian gives.

Lat­er in the same let­ter, Screw­tape makes a good point about sci­ence:

Above all, do not attempt to use sci­ence (I mean, the real sci­ences) as a defence against Chris­tian­i­ty. They will pos­i­tive­ly encour­age him to think about real­i­ties he can’t touch and see. There have been sad cas­es among the mod­ern physi­cists. If he must dab­ble in sci­ence, keep him on eco­nom­ics and soci­ol­o­gy; don’t let him get away from that invalu­able “real life”. But the best of all is to let him read no sci­ence but to give him a grand gen­er­al idea that he knows it all and that every­thing he hap­pens to have picked up in casu­al talk and read­ing is “the results of modem inves­ti­ga­tion”.

I’ve min­is­tered at Stan­ford since 2002, and in my expe­ri­ence math­e­mati­cians and stu­dents of the hard sci­ences have an eas­i­er time embrac­ing the gospel than do stu­dents of the social sci­ences or the human­i­ties. In part, it seems to me, it is because social sci­en­tists tend to look for answers that “explain away” where­as hard sci­en­tists tend to look for expla­na­tions. 

The final sen­tence, though, is the real kick­er. We assume some­thing is true because a lot of peo­ple keep say­ing it and there­by mis­take rep­e­ti­tion for rea­son. When some­one tells me “the Bible is full of con­tra­dic­tions” I often dis­cov­er they don’t have any to offer. They’re not lying — they are mere­ly repeat­ing some­thing they have heard so often that they assume it must have a sol­id foun­da­tion.  Some­times there’s more cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance, such as when some­one assumes the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion has been a net pos­i­tive for soci­ety. In that case my inter­locu­tor is usu­al­ly ignor­ing or dis­count­ing evi­dence they have per­son­al­ly observed. But again, they’re not con­scious­ly lying. The sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion is near­ly always pre­sent­ed as progress, and peo­ple assume that there must be some­thing to that since it keeps get­ting repeat­ed.

I am not say­ing we should mis­trust the con­sen­sus of experts who are speak­ing to us about some­thing we have no knowl­edge of. Defer­ring to expert con­sen­sus is an excel­lent heuris­tic, except when the con­sen­sus con­flicts with some­thing we know. In that case we humbly return to the evi­dence and think things through again, with open­ness to the idea that we might be wrong but so might the experts. Here’s the rub: when it comes to things like moral­i­ty and reli­gion we will almost always have some direct knowl­edge which we need to con­sid­er. And espe­cial­ly with sub­jects like moral­i­ty and reli­gion we need to remem­ber that both the experts as well as our­selves have pow­er­ful motives to not think things through all the way. All that to say: trust the experts, but not too much. Fur­ther­more, don’t assume our cul­tur­al con­sen­sus is the same thing as the expert con­sen­sus. If that was always the case, we would­n’t need experts!

I’ll con­tent myself with shar­ing one final quote from the read­ing, this one from Let­ter Four:

It is fun­ny how mor­tals always pic­ture us as putting things into their minds: in real­i­ty our best work is done by keep­ing things out.

Dis­trac­tion is one of the chief ene­mies of spir­i­tu­al growth, and we live in an age that is full of it. Sus­tained and slow thought is one of the chief instru­ments in our trans­for­ma­tion. If Lewis is right and one of the infer­nal legion’s goals is to keep you dis­tract­ed and pre­vent you from focus­ing, let that inform your use of apps and the inter­net. Just a thought.