The Screwtape Letters: Twenty Through Twenty-Five

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’re look­ing at let­ters 20 to 25. Two pas­sages caught my atten­tion this week.

I was struck by how con­tem­po­rary Lewis’s com­ments on sex­u­al temp­ta­tion in let­ter 20 seem, even though he wrote this book near­ly 80 years ago.

We have engi­neered a great increase in the licence which soci­ety allows to the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the appar­ent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhi­bi­tion on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the fig­ures in the pop­u­lar art are false­ly drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actu­al­ly pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slen­der and more boy­ish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the mod­ern world is taught to believe that it is being “frank” and “healthy” and get­ting back to nature. As a result we are more and more direct­ing the desires of men to some­thing which does not exist—making the role of the eye in sex­u­al­i­ty more and more impor­tant and at the same time mak­ing its demands more and more impos­si­ble. What fol­lows you can eas­i­ly fore­cast! (let­ter 20, page 243)

It was indeed easy to fore­cast, but now we need mere­ly look around. Sex­u­al dys­func­tion plagues our soci­ety. A study that appeared this week (Pornog­ra­phy Use and Mar­riage Entry Dur­ing Ear­ly Adult­hood: Find­ings From a Pan­el Study of Young Amer­i­cans in pre­pub­li­ca­tion) found that “high­er lev­els of pornog­ra­phy use in emerg­ing adult­hood were asso­ci­at­ed with a low­er like­li­hood of mar­riage by the final sur­vey wave for men, but not women.” Lewis called it.

The oth­er pas­sage which stood out to me was from let­ter 21, and I con­fess it struck uncom­fort­ably close to home:

Men are not angered by mere mis­for­tune but by mis­for­tune con­ceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feel­ing that a legit­i­mate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, there­fore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tem­pered. Now you will have noticed that noth­ing throws him into a pas­sion so eas­i­ly as to find a tract of time which he reck­oned on hav­ing at his own dis­pos­al unex­pect­ed­ly tak­en from him. It is the unex­pect­ed vis­i­tor (when he looked for­ward to a qui­et evening), or the friend’s talk­a­tive wife (turn­ing up when he looked for­ward to a tete‑а-tete with the friend), that throw him out of gear.… They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen.… The man can nei­ther make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon his chat­tels. He is also, in the­o­ry, com­mit­ted a total ser­vice of the Ene­my; and if the Ene­my appeared to him in bod­i­ly form and demand­ed that total ser­vice for even one day, he would not refuse.

That is so true. If God asks for fif­teen min­utes, I’ll give it to Him glad­ly regard­less of what I am doing. But if some­one chats with me for fif­teen min­utes while I’m try­ing to get a task done, I become impa­tient and irri­ta­ble. Yet Jesus clear­ly said “what­ev­er you did for one of the least of these broth­ers and sis­ters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40). I need to change.

Any­way, that’s some of what I got from this week’s read­ings. Only two weeks of read­ing remain!