Tag: The Screwtape Letters

The Screwtape Letters: Twenty-Six Through Thirty

The Screw­tape Let­ters by C.S. Lewis

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!

The Screwtape Letters: Twenty Through Twenty-Five

The Screw­tape Let­ters by C.S. Lewis

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!

The Screwtape Letters: Thirteen Through Nineteen

The Screw­tape Let­ters by C.S. Lewis

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.

Lewis is on such a roll! This week we’re look­ing at let­ters thir­teen through nine­teen, and insights abound. I fear that if I don’t con­strain myself I’ll just cut and paste all of the text.

I’ll lim­it myself to two excerpts from Lewis along with some brief com­men­tary on them.

The great thing is to pre­vent his doing any­thing. As long as he does not con­vert it into action, it does not mat­ter how much he thinks about this new repen­tance. Let the lit­tle brute wal­low in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excel­lent way of ster­il­iz­ing the seeds which the Ene­my plants in a human soul. Let him do any­thing but act. No amount of piety in his imag­i­na­tion and affec­tions will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strength­ened by rep­e­ti­tion but pas­sive ones are weak­ened. The more often he feels with­out act­ing, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel. (Let­ter 13, page 223)

Wow. I had for­got­ten Lewis said this. This is so good! The author to which Screw­tape is allud­ing is Joseph But­ler and you can see the source of the quote at Lewisiana.

Lewis is dri­ving at this: the longer you mean to do some­thing the less like­ly you are to do it. So get off your good inten­tions and do some­thing you know you are sup­posed to do. Obe­di­ence unlocks insight. The more you do the more you will under­stand and then the more oppor­tu­ni­ties for obe­di­ence you will have. It’s a vir­tu­ous cycle.

You must there­fore con­ceal from the patient the true end of Humil­i­ty. Let him think of it not as self-for­get­ful­ness but as a cer­tain kind of opin­ion (name­ly, a low opin­ion) of his own tal­ents and char­ac­ter. Some tal­ents, I gath­er, he real­ly has. Fix in his mind the idea that humil­i­ty con­sists in try­ing to believe those tal­ents to be less valu­able than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valu­able than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him val­ue an opin­ion for some qual­i­ty oth­er than truth, thus intro­duc­ing an ele­ment of dis­hon­esty and make-believe into the heart of what oth­er­wise threat­ens to become a virtue.…  The Ene­my wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own tal­ents as frankly and grate­ful­ly as in his neigh­bor’s talents—or in a sun­rise, an ele­phant, or a water­fall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to rec­og­nize all crea­tures (even him­self) as glo­ri­ous and excel­lent things. (Let­ter 14, page 225)

This reminds me of Romans 12:3, where Paul teach­es us: “Do not think of your­self more high­ly than you ought, but rather think of your­self with sober judg­ment, in accor­dance with the faith God has dis­trib­uted to each of you.”

That verse alone would change Stan­ford if it was tak­en seri­ous­ly. “Do not think of your­self more high­ly than you ought.” Instead, Paul says, think of your­self with sober judg­ment. In oth­er words, self-aware­ness and hon­esty lay the foun­da­tion for humil­i­ty. Don’t over­es­ti­mate your com­pe­tence but also don’t down­play it. And when you eval­u­ate your­self sober­ly, do it “in accor­dance with the faith God has dis­trib­uted to each of you.” I take that to mean that instead of sub­jec­tive­ly com­par­ing our­selves to oth­ers, we should mea­sure our­selves against the objec­tive stan­dards of God’s Word and ulti­mate­ly against the per­son of Jesus. That’s a whole ser­mon, though, and that’s not the point of these updates. I just want to remind you that Lewis has some amaz­ing insights and encour­age you to fin­ish the sum­mer read­ings strong!

The Screwtape Letters: Six Through Twelve

The Screw­tape Let­ters by C.S. Lewis

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’s read­ing (let­ters six through twelve) was simul­ta­ne­ous­ly short and full of insight­ful obser­va­tions.

A few of Lewis’s com­ments stood out to me:

Nev­er for­get that when we are deal­ing with any plea­sure in its healthy and nor­mal and sat­is­fy­ing form, we are, in a sense, on the Ene­my’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through plea­sure. All the same, it is His inven­tion, not ours. He made the plea­sures: all our research so far has not enabled us to pro­duce one. All we can do is to encour­age the humans to take the plea­sures which our Ene­my has pro­duced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has for­bid­den. (Let­ter Nine, page 210)

Lewis is spot-on here. Plea­sure is a gift from God. As James 1:27 reminds us, “every good and per­fect gift is from above.” Tru­ly inter­nal­iz­ing this is trans­for­ma­tive. The plea­sures of God are pre­mi­um, grade A stuff. It is true that Satan is a skill­ful knock­off artist, and this means that the oppor­tu­ni­ties he lures us with can seem as good as (or even supe­ri­or to) God’s plea­sures at first, but at the end of the day they are still knock­offs. The plea­sures they pro­duce don’t last. Hebrews 11:25 calls them “the fleet­ing plea­sures of sin.”

The upshot: few things dis­rupt Satan’s schemes for your life like a fierce love of whole­some plea­sure. One of the best ways to resist temp­ta­tion is to be full of god­ly joy.

Mov­ing on, let­ter ten seems espe­cial­ly help­ful to Stan­ford stu­dents.

[When try­ing to impress new, sophis­ti­cat­ed friends] he will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent. He will assume, at first only by his man­ner, but present­ly by his words, all sorts of cyn­i­cal and scep­ti­cal atti­tudes which are not real­ly his. But if you play him well, they may become his. All mor­tals tend to turn into the thing they are pre­tend­ing to be. This is ele­men­tary. (Let­ter Ten, pages 212–213)

Boom! Not much to add to that except pray for all the frosh head­ing to Stan­ford in a few weeks.

Also of rel­e­vance to the Stan­ford cul­ture:

But flip­pan­cy is the best [source of laugh­ter] of all. In the first place it is very eco­nom­i­cal. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about any­thing else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were fun­ny. Among flip­pant peo­ple the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actu­al­ly makes it; but every seri­ous sub­ject is dis­cussed in a man­ner which implies that they have already found a ridicu­lous side to it. If pro­longed, the habit of Flip­pan­cy builds up around a man the finest armour-plat­ing against the Ene­my that I know, and it is quite free from the dan­gers inher­ent in the oth­er sources of laugh­ter. (Let­ter Eleven, page 217)

Again, lit­tle com­men­tary is need­ed. You will find it worth­while, though, to pay atten­tion to the things that are sim­ply assumed to be false by your com­mu­ni­ty. What Lewis calls flip­pan­cy is an indi­ca­tion that there might not be sol­id argu­ments against the opin­ion being mocked. Inter­net cul­ture is espe­cial­ly prone to this sort of super­fi­cial com­men­tary. Social media, in par­tic­u­lar, incen­tivizes it. There may very well be good rea­sons that your com­mu­ni­ty believes what it does about the good life, the prob­lems fac­ing soci­ety, the true reli­gion, and right-think­ing pol­i­tics… but per­haps there are not. Seek out the non-flip­pant opin­ions before you allow the juve­nile ban­ter to sway you undu­ly.

Any­way, I hope you derived as much ben­e­fit from this week’s read­ing as I did. Enjoy the book!

The Screwtape Letters: Preface and the First Five Letters

The Screw­tape Let­ters by C.S. Lewis

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.