The Screwtape Letters: Twenty-Six Through Thirty

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.

We’re almost done. Next week’s read­ings will be very short indeed. You might even want to fin­ish them off now — they will take you a few extra min­utes at most.

These pas­sages caught my eye this week:

In let­ter 27, the demon says of humans

…their kind of con­scious­ness forces them to encounter the whole, self-con­sis­tent cre­ative act as a series of suc­ces­sive events. Why that cre­ative act leaves room for their free will is the prob­lem of prob­lems, the secret behind the Ene­my’s non­sense about “Love”. How it does so is no prob­lem at all; for the Ene­my does not fore­see the humans mak­ing their free con­tri­bu­tions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbound­ed Now. And obvi­ous­ly to watch a man doing some­thing is not to make him do it. (Let­ter 27, pages 264–265)

I like this, but I’m not sure I agree with it com­plete­ly. The last half I’m def­i­nite­ly on board with. The first half makes me hes­i­tant. God rest­ed on the sev­enth day, but Lewis makes the demon say that all of human his­to­ry is the con­tin­u­a­tion of the act of cre­ation. There’s a beau­ti­ful insight hid­den in there, but I think the way Lewis word­ed it falls out­side the bounds that Scrip­ture per­mits. I’d be more com­fort­able with some­thing along these lines, “Of course they can find an unbro­ken series of caus­es lead­ing up to the con­di­tion they desired — the Ene­my saw their request being made simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with His answer to their prayer man­i­fest­ing two weeks lat­er even as He began form­ing the con­di­tions that would lead to its answer a month before they even became aware of their need. There is a sense in which it is all Now to Him.”

Now that I’ve offered some writ­ing advice to Lewis, I’m off to give some invest­ing advice to War­ren Buf­fet. But first, the next mis­sive (let­ter 28).

Lewis has Screw­tape offer a com­plaint about humans and time.

How valu­able time is to us may be gauged by the fact that the Ene­my allows us so lit­tle of it. The major­i­ty of the human race dies in infan­cy; of the sur­vivors, a good many die in youth. It is obvi­ous that to Him human birth is impor­tant chiefly as the qual­i­fi­ca­tion for human death, and death sole­ly as the gate to that oth­er kind of life. We are allowed to work only on a select­ed minor­i­ty of the race, for what humans call a “nor­mal life” is the excep­tion. Appar­ent­ly He 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. Well, there is our oppor­tu­ni­ty. The small­er it is, the bet­ter we must use it. (Let­ter 28, page 268)

Clear­ly, Lewis believes that infants and chil­dren go to heav­en. I share this belief. As David said of his dead son in 2 Samuel 2:23, “I will go to him, but he will not return to me.”

Else­where in the let­ter we see that this tick­et to heav­en for the young is so frus­trat­ing to demons that they some­times endeav­or to keep us alive, but I think that’s not quite right. After all, John 10:10 informs us that the ene­my comes to steal, kill and destroy. Nonethe­less, Lewis is on to some­thing here.

This last excerpt (from let­ter 29) is my favorite for the week.

This, indeed, is prob­a­bly one of the Ene­my’s motives for cre­at­ing a dan­ger­ous world—a world in which moral issues real­ly come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not sim­ply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the test­ing point, which means, at the point of high­est real­i­ty. A chasti­ty or hon­esty, or mer­cy, which yields to dan­ger will be chaste or hon­est or mer­ci­ful only on con­di­tions. Pilate was mer­ci­ful till it became risky. (Let­ter 29, page 270)

This, this, a thou­sand times this. Act with courage. It takes courage to stand for Christ at Stan­ford. It takes courage to for­go a plea­sure and risk giv­ing offense because of a deep con­vic­tion. It takes courage to tell your friends cer­tain truths.

Some­thing that encour­ages me (lit­er­al­ly encour­ages me — puts courage into me) is to reflect on this: Rev­e­la­tion 21:8 tells us that the cow­ard­ly are the first group thrown into hell. It’s a sober­ing thought.

And this relat­ed point at the end of the let­ter speaks direct­ly to what I see as one of the chief fail­ings in mod­ern cul­ture:

For remem­ber, the act of cow­ardice is all that mat­ters; the emo­tion of fear is, in itself, no sin and, though we enjoy it, does us no good. (Let­ter 29, page 271)

So many peo­ple today con­fuse feel­ings with action. For instance, they often seem to believe that feel­ing bad about some­thing is the same thing as oppos­ing it. “I saw those pic­tures of starv­ing chil­dren and I felt bad. I should tweet about how hor­ri­ble hunger is.” Do you know who is actu­al­ly opposed to hunger? The peo­ple who send mon­ey or spend time to com­bat hunger.  On the last day, Jesus is not going to say, “As you felt it for the least of these, so you felt it for me.” Allow your feel­ings to inform your choic­es, but do not con­fuse the two.

Be a per­son of action and hell will hate you.

Enjoy the last lit­tle bit of read­ing!