When I was a kid, I was in an unfamiliar church with my Dad, and there was a painting on one of the walls of some sort of giant, glistening slug thing moving through the crowd of tortured souls in Hell. I asked my dad what that horrible thing was meant to be and he told me it was Satan. I was very confused, because I was 100% certain that Satan had goat legs and little horns and a pitchfork. Why a pitchfork? I wasn’t sure, but I suspected it was for poking lost souls in the butt, as I had seen many times in Bugs Bunny cartoons.
So much of how a person might think of Satan or demons or devils, or whatever name you might like to use for them, is shaped by our experience of them in our culture. Maybe that’s a musician duking it out with the devil at a crossroads, or cartoon devils standing on people’s shoulders. Or, since the 1940s at least, the urbane demonic bureaucrat who is politely training his under-demons on how to corrupt their assigned “patients.”
It was July 20th, 1940, when C.S. Lewis was sitting in a church service (apparently his mind was wandering a bit), and as he told it:
Before the service was over—one cd. wish these things came more seasonably—I was struck by an idea for a book wh. I think might be both useful and entertaining. It wd. be called As one Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first ‘patient.’ The idea wd. be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view.
He wrote this letter to his brother that day. He started writing short letters from the devil Screwtape to his junior tempter, Wormwood, soon after, and before a year had passed the letters were beginning to be serialized in The Guardian, a weekly Anglican newspaper (not to be confused with the current daily newspaper, which was called The Manchester Guardian until 1959).
Remember, there hadn’t been an approach quite like this at the time, and usually the letter was set in its column without much context or explanation. In fact, there’s at least one minister who canceled his subscription because—not recognizing it as satirical—he found that “much of the advice given in these letters seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical.” (I can personally relate that not much has changed in the 80 years since…my first novel Imaginary Jesus had a cover that was, I thought, really funny. But multiple complaints from serious-minded Christians that an “atheist” book was being sold at Christian book stores led to my publisher wisely repackaging the book with a less hilarious and potentially irreverent cover and the slightly clearer title My Imaginary Jesus. In any case I made a number of atheist friends as a result, and the offended Christians would not have liked the contents better than the title.)
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In any case, the letters became massively popular, and by mid-1941 an editor named Ashley Sampson saw them in The Guardian and convinced Geoffrey Bles to publish them. On Feb 9, 1942, The Screwtape Letters was released in book form and was an immediate hit. There were nine printings before the end of the year, and eighteen printings just in Britain by the end of WWII. By the time of Lewis’s death, it was his most popular book, with over 250,000 copies sold (I have no idea if that still holds true…in 2001 HarperCollins said the Narnia books had lifetime American sales of 18 million copies, which, of course, has only increased in the last 20 years. Perhaps Screwtape has kept pace!)
Lewis was asked many times to write a sequel or more letters, which he consistently refused (though many others have attempted similar epistolary novels, and Lewis’s book has been adapted into comics and stage plays). In 1959 he wrote one more Screwtape piece (originally published in the Saturday Post), in which Screwtape gives a toast at the Tempters’ Training College. Most new editions of Screwtape include it.
In his preface to that piece, Lewis wrote this about The Screwtape Letters:
Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment. … [T]hough it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done.
This book, which came both easily and at cost, was the work that truly catapulted Lewis into public life: it wasn’t long before most people had heard of The Screwtape Letters. And while it’s so well known, I don’t have a lot to say about this one! It’s pretty straightforward. So this will be our one article on the book—I’ll share some key aspects to watch out for, and then open up the discussion in the comments.
Here’s some trivia and things to pay attention to as you read:
- Lewis specifically mentioned two works that had a conscious influence on his writing of this book: The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Womanby Stephen McKenna and Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (the latter being a book that he often mentioned being instrumental to a variety of his own books).
- Lewis refused payment from The Guardian, asking instead that any payment be given to a fund for widows of clergymen.
- Concerned that the typeset for the book could be destroyed in air raids, Lewis sent the original, hand-written manuscript to the nuns at the Community of St. Mary the Virgin at Wantage. When they offered to send it back to him after the war, he told them to sell it and keep the proceeds for the community.
- Lewis toyed with the idea of making The Screwtape Letters part of the Space Trilogy, suggesting in a discarded introduction that Dr. Ransom had found the letters, written in Old Solar, and had passed them on to Lewis. You can read that intro here.
- Charles Williams wrote two reviews of the book, one of them for Time and Tide magazine, in which Williams copied Lewis’s format: the review is a letter between demons. You can read it here if you’re interested!
- Dorothy Sayers wrote a letter to Lewis in which she had a demon talking about his patient (which was Ms. Sayers herself!). You can read that here.
- The book is dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien. There are plenty of rumors that he didn’t love the book, though I can’t find a primary source where he says so. The rumor generally goes that Tolkien thought it dangerous to spend so much attention on the demonic (“it is perilous to study too deeply the arts of the enemy,” as Elrond said), and that he feared Lewis was at real spiritual risk for this writing exercise.
- On the other hand, Lewis agrees with Tolkien. As he says in Screwtape: “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.”
- Lewis specifically says in the introduction that Screwtape is an unreliable narrator of the worst sort, and not to judge the humans in the story purely by Screwtape’s descriptions. Screwtape is a liar, and Lewis tells us that he’s likely not even telling “his side of the story” with honesty.
- Note how often Wormwood’s advice is about deceit, distraction, and propaganda to keep the “patient” from simply embracing what would otherwise be obviously true (even according to Wormwood).
- Pay attention to the description of the “Materialist Magician” who Screwtape hopes one day to create. Sounds like someone may have successfully created a recipe for just the thing by the time we get to That Hideous Strength!
- There’s a lot of talk of the physical vs. the spiritual, a theme that Lewis often returns to. His description of humans as “amphibious” on this topic is interesting and worth keeping in mind when reading his other books.
- I often see the last sentence of this quote passed around, “It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” But I think it’s good to remember it in context, that Lewis is saying the most important thing in spiritual temptation is to keep space between God and the patient. That can often be done more easily with a slow accumulation of small, even dismissible, sins, rather than a clear, obvious transgression.
- Screwtape cares surprisingly little about the Second World War that happens to be going on as he writes. It’s worth paying attention to what he does say about it!
- We still have that trademark Lewis humor popping up here and there. My favorite bit is when the secretary has to take over writing because Screwtape has gone through an unpleasant transformation.
- Nailing down “a theme” in this book isn’t as easy as one might think, other than it being about how waging spiritual battle works and how temptation looks from “the other side.” It allows Lewis to talk about a lot of things that are important to him. So be looking for repeated topics related to love, religion vs. true spirituality, freedom, free will, and how even good things (like courage) can be corrupted into something evil.
- Like any good bureaucracy, it appears a lot gets done because you know the right demons!
Okay, we only have one full Lewis book left to go: Till We Have Faces. This is one that a lot of Lewis fans have missed, which is a shame…it’s one of my favorites. We’ll meet back here shortly to read it together. In the meantime, do your best to make sure that the voices we’re listening to are moving us toward deeper love and kindness, not the neutralized lives that demons like Screwtape prefer!
Matt Mikalatos is the author of the YA fantasy The Crescent Stone. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on Facebook.
This was a brilliant idea straight from the Holy Ghost, IMO. This book influenced me almost more than any other aside from the Bible itself. Years ago, when my beloved church community began an agonizing process of church-split, I wrote—with almost no need to pause for reflection—a short work I titled “Handbook for a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.” This was an “instruction manual” for the respected elder who was nudging those who had doubts to act on them (at a time when patience and unity might have been a better choice). As much as possible, I captured the style and tone of Screwtape Letters.
I read this in high school, and found it to be a very interesting exploration of what, exactly, it meant to be Good for a Christian. Lewis was a very engaging and plausible writer. Screwtape’s reaction to his nephew’s loss of his client’s soul, at the end, was an excellent counterpoint to his mannered tone throughout the rest of the book, and pulled the cover off his true nature.
Screwtape’s line about the implications of a materialist magician presaging the ultimate victory of Hell over Heaven was the theme of James Blish’s Black Easter.
I can see clear connections between Screwtape and That Hideous Strength; it’s too bad Lewis didn’t leave the reference to Ransom explicit in the preface. The gradual descent into sin (“The moment of Mark’s decision has passed by him without his noticing it”), the materialist magician (Frost, if ever a wiz there was), the playing of both ends against the “normal” middle are all clearly demonstrated in THS; and the humor is similar as well.
I’m failing to see any connection between anything Lewis wrote and Voyage to Arcturus, though, aside from the “Weston Rays” as a reference to the “Solar Back Rays”—which don’t anyway seem to be a real thing in Voyage to Arcturus. It’s likely enough I’m just being dense. Could someone enlighten me?
@0/Matt, I thought it was Screwtape that didn’t care about the war while Wormwood’s correspondence (which we don’t see) threatened to be full of it (e.g. the opening of letter V)?
@3/perseant. You’re right! I wrote them backwards!
Just a quick terminological correction; Matt, you write:
“Wormwood cares surprisingly little about the Great War that happens to be going on as he writes.”
“The Great War” is normally used to refer to World War One — it’s what that war was called (in Britain) before anyone knew there was going to be a second one. Screwtape and Wormwood are clearly referring to World War Two (which if I recall correctly, Lewis calls the “European War” in the preface). The references to the Blitz, etc., are all World War Two references, not World War One.
My favorite Lewis.
@5/Elizabeth. Well I did not know that! Thanks for the correction!
I think Lewis made the right decision in seperating this book from the Space Trilogy. Being a seperate novel invites more direct comparison to real life, rather than allowing one to try and incorporate it into the continuity of the Trilogy. After all, while the Trilogy has important things to say, it is at the end of the day a Fairy Tale, meaning some of it’s points can be dismissed by saying “well that’s true in that world, but not in the real one.” Example: there is not (to my knowladge) an Evil organization such as NICE systimatically (if unknowingly) planning humanity’s downfall to actively fight against, and the best course of action to combat such evil is not to try and find a resurrected druid sorcerer to commune with the archangels. Screwtape on the other hand is essentially a warped direct commentary on the Real World. The “patient” is generic enough that he could be anyone of us.
A theme that comes up several times that I particularly love is that of the devils being unable to concieve or understand “The Enemy’s” actions toward His people. Screwtape is convinced there is some ulterior motive that they are on the verge of discovering. This goes to show how truly unworthy we are of God’s mercy, and without an understanding of selfless love, the demons are unable to comprehend it. Screwtape also mentions that Hell has not succeeded in creating a new pleasure, just in corrupting old ones, in line with “every good thing comes from above.”
The Screwtape Letters read by John Cleese is fantastic.
@9,
I agree!
I think, looking at this from a literary angle rather than a theological one, you can draw some fun lines from Milton to Screwtape, and then through Old Harry’s Game on BBC Radio 4 through to, most recently, The Good Place. The Devil and the afterlife as a satirical window on the contemporary.
I was also amused by the way, especially in the later ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’, some of the most infernal temptations of hell transpire to be the personal bugbears of a late middle-aged, grumpy, academic author. I think saying that Lewis’ humour pops up “here and there” is underselling a richly comic work that’s devalued by treating it primarily as a religious manual.
I’ve read the Screwtape Letters several times and saw an incredible stage adaptation of the work. It’s had a big influence on me and I think it’s really well done, but I have some major doubts about some of Lewis’ points.
First of all, this idea of a gradual slide into hell through something like playing cards, without even ever noticing. I find it hard to believe that a loving God – who Lewis himself described as tirelessly pursuing him – would let people just slip away without doing whatever was necessary to shake them up. That view also makes it very easy to consider feelings such as boredom or depression or even the desire for stability to be sins.
I’m also not sure that it’s all that dangerous not to believe in some sort of supernatural rebellion against God with sentient forces of evil actively trying to do harm. Especially if one is relating to Jesus as wisdom teacher rather than as protector from punishment.
@3, 5: We’ve updated the text, thanks!
@12: In another of his books, Mere Christianity, Lewis attempts to explain why seing Jesus as simply a great man or moral teacher doesn’t work. In his words,
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
@12 It’s important to understand that any of the ways we understand God (and devils) relating to us are metaphor, and as such have at once the same power and the same limitations as all other metaphor. Lewis well understood this: we won’t likely get to it in this series since it’s non-fiction, but Transposition (collected in a book of the same name, I believe, in the UK and in The Weight of Glory in the US) is well worth a read if you’re interested in Lewis’s thoughts on the literal representation of spiritual substance in the material world.
My reading of Screwtape‘s preface is not that it’s dangerous not to believe in literal Devils as commonly conceptualized (indeed Screwtape goes out of his way to lambaste the popular conception) but that it is dangerous to disbelieve in evil and temptation, wherever and however they come. It takes quite a bit of care to patch a cracked pitcher so that water won’t leak through, not because water has superior intelligence but because despite being inanimate it takes advantage of every flaw, no matter how tiny. Even as small as a nascent gambling addiction.
#14 — Ah yes, the famous Lewisian trilemma: Lunatic, liar, or Lord.
Unfortunately for Lewis’s neat rhetorical construct, however, it is very far from clear that Jesus ever actually DID claim to be God Incarnate; the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death and many New Testament scholars strongly doubt that he ever claimed to be God. (Bart Ehrman has written very well on this.)
But even if Jesus did believe in his own divinity, Lewis’s trilemma ignores that someone can sincerely believe astonishingly impossible things and remain sane in other aspects of their lives; e.g., most of us would say that people who sincerely believe that they were abducted by space aliens and then returned to earth are, well, mistaken in that belief. But they are often completely competent and sane individuals in other respects. So Jesus could genuinely have believed that he was God (I don’t think he did), but not have been a “lunatic.”
My main problem with the “trilemma”, though, is that it applies equally well to so many other founders of other religions. Mohammed claimed that the Angel Gabriel dictated the Quran to him. Non-Muslims think that this did not, in fact, happen. Must we then say that the Prophet (peace be upon him) was either a lunatic or a liar? I don’t think so. Members of the Church of Latter Day Saints genuinely believe that Joseph Smith found gold tablets with the Book of Mormon inscribed on them, and that the Angel Moroni provided Smith with the means to translate the tablets — which then disappeared shortly afterwards. Those of us who aren’t members of the LDS church do not believe there ever were any such tablets or any such angel. Must we then think that Smith was either a lunatic or a liar? The Dalai Lama sincerely believes that he is the living reincarnation of the previous Lama, and so on back for many, many generations. But those of us who disbelieve in the whole idea of reincarnation are logically bound to say that the Dalai Lama CANNOT be right in this belief, because there is no such thing as reincarnation. Yet none of us are going to pronounce the Dalai Lama a lunatic or a liar. And on, and on, and on . . .
Lewis was far too intelligent a man to think that his “trilemma” really held water, logically speaking. I’ve always wondered why he used it.
One more for the trivia list: Prolific (and notorious) British novelist Jack Trevor Story spent much of his life living in rented bedsits and went bankrupt more than once. In one of his regular articles in The Guardian (the newspaper, not the religious journal) he claimed that one landlady – a vicar’s wife to whom he owed a lot of back rent – had handed him a copy of The Screwtape Letters and said she would forget all his debts if he would just read the book. It must have made some kind of impression as he gave one of his novels the title “Screwrape Lettuce”. Perhaps wisely, his publishers changed the title before going to print.
@16 Elizabeth
Reading chapter X of the Screwtape Letters gives an insight into Lewis’s thoughts on whether someone “far too intelligent” could possibly believe the trilemma
@14 Leaving aside the question of whether one accepts the trilemma, it’s still possible to think of Jesus as divine and as a wisdom teacher. It’s less a question of whether Jesus was God and more a question of what his role as God incarnate was – I’ve been learning that there’s a lot of Christian tradition, just as old as the western substitutionary atonement strain, in which Jesus is one who shows us how to live a new life rather than one who dies in some sort of repayment for our sins. I’ve found that a lot of the New Testament makes just as much sense in this light.
@16, I think the unstated assumption is “taking the Christian gospels as read”. As you explain so well, it doesn’t make sense otherwise.
#20 — You’re right, of course, about the unstated assumption re the Gospels. But, first, since the argument is addressed towards NON-believers (those who have not yet accepted that Christ is in fact God), it doesn’t work to make that unstated assumption. The absolute veracity of the Gospels is part of what the non-believer does not accept, and it’s purely circular reasoning to say ‘We know that the Gospels are true because God inspired them, and we know that God inspired them because we know they are true.” So Lewis’s argument, to be effective, would need some basis other than the assumed truth of the Gospels.
And second, EVEN IF the Gospels are unquestionably true, that still doesn’t account for all the other instances of the “trilemma” that I laid out. EVEN IF Jesus really was/is the Incarnate God, that doesn’t explain how we can look at the Dalai Lama, for instance, and not feel compelled to say “this man is either a lunatic-on-the-level-of-someone-who-thinks-he’s-a-poached-egg, or he is a deliberate and knowing liar, or he REALLY IS the reincarnation of all the previous Lamas.”
In short, the trilemma doesn’t work even if one accepts that Jesus really is/was God. I first noticed the logical flaws of the trilemma when I was a devout Christian; I’m not sure those flaws bother me more, now that I’m an atheist, than they did when I believed.
#18 — Sorry, I don’t see the application. I just reread Chapter X, and while it certainly talks about pride in intellect and the use of supposed intellectualism to look down on others, it in no way undercuts the importance of logic and clear thinking (quite the opposite, I’d say).
The trilemma has glaring logical flaws. It assumes that there are only three possibilities when there is (obviously) at least one other; it assumes the veracity of that which it is attempting to demonstrate (the absolute truth of the Gospels); and so on. Unless, in constructing the trilemma, Lewis was deliberately misusing his rhetorical skills to trick those who were less logically astute than he, and then smugly laughing in his sleeve at them (which I don’t for one minute believe), then I don’t see how Ch. X of Screwtape is relevant.
@21, the context of the trilemma in Mere Christianity is the middle of book II, “What Christians Believe” (end of chapter II.3); so I think it is entirely reasonable to restrict its application to the Church. In that case the acceptance of the Gospels as true eyewitness accounts can be taken as granted.[*]
Of course roughly the same logic applies to any statement of fact made by anyone, though in general it might more properly be phrased this way: either the speaker believes it to be false (fiction, lies, metaphor); believes it to be true (fact, metaphor); or is incapable of distinguishing between true or false (delirium, madness, infancy).
There is of course a further subdivision into statements believed true but factually false. But if the statement is something like “The Father and I are one”, that case is another form of madness, so in the specific case of Jesus you’re looking at a lie, a fact, or madness; or metaphor.
I am perfectly comfortable applying the same logic to the Dalai Lama and Joseph Smith Jr.; I don’t, of course, expect everyone else to agree with my conclusions.
[* – Yes, there are of course people who believe that Jesus is God but who reject the Gospels; I fear those would fall outside of the definition of “Christian” that Lewis is using for “What Christians Believe”.]
#23 — I don’t have a copy of Mere Christianity to hand so I can’t check the context, but the bit quoted in comment 14 is very clearly addressed to those who are not yet believers (as indeed a great deal of the radio series later collected as MC was):
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
“You must make your choice.” Lewis is talking to those who have NOT yet “chosen”, and presents these three and only these three possibilities.
To your main point:
“There is of course a further subdivision into statements believed true but factually false. But if the statement is something like “The Father and I are one”, that case is another form of madness, so in the specific case of Jesus you’re looking at a lie, a fact, or madness; or metaphor.”
Well, I think what we’re knocking up against here is what we mean by “madness.” The option Lewis gives in the trilemma is raving lunacy of the kind that would make it impossible for someone to function on any level of society; if Jesus is really on the level of someone thinks he’s a poached egg, you would have to “shut him up for a fool”, i.e., institutionalize him as unable to care for himself. Very clearly, Jesus, the Dalai Lama, Joseph Smith, the Guru Maharaj Gi, Reverend Sun Myung Moon, etc. etc. etc. were not “mad” in that sense; they weren’t “lunatics.” We are all only too aware of many people who genuinely believe things–about themselves or about others– that are not only false, but are ludicrously, obviously, absurdly false; yet those people hold jobs, raise families, conduct themselves rationally in other aspects of their lives. They are not “lunatics”.
In fact, in the case of Jesus, I think that he never actually said “I and the Father are one”; the Gospel of John is an outlier and, I think, not reliable for his actual words. But of course that’s a different issue from whether Lewis’ trilemma is logically sound.
I really like how Lewis’s ‘gradual slope to hell’ joins neatly with the concept of sin being that which directs us to a lesser good. Any given sin might not be enough on its own to tip the balance, but the seemingly minor little things can build up a habit of choosing the lesser good, so that when the moment to choose between the greatest good of God comes, all the force of years or decades of habit could easily drive one to the wrong choice.
@25: This is another similarity with the works of Charlotte Mason–which doesn’t mean that he read her or anybody she influenced, but suggests to me that there was something in the air. Mason asserted something that has since been borne out by research: that people tend to run on habit. Mason recommends habit training–teaching children to habitually do things that are good for them–as a sound basis for life, because when we are tired or rattled or overwhelmed, we fall back on habit to get us through the afternoon. Lewis argues that harmful habits are just as tenacious and foundational to a different sort of life. I think they are both right.
@25 I would find that idea terrifying to live with with – to not just be supposed to avoid doing intentional harm but also to choose the best good at all times sounds utterly impossible. We also can’t predict the outcomes of our choices beyond maybe a few steps, certainly not any of the “butterfly effect” types of outcomes. On the other hand, that might be exactly the kind of situation that leads one, as described in Mere Christianity, to throw up their hands and put their trust in Christ.
@27 I don’t think the idea necessarily has any practical implications insofar as changing how one should live; we’re called to do God’s will, love Him and our neighbors, and practice the virtues same as always, but it seems to serve as an explanation as to why we are called to be so vigilant in those virtues and the avoidance of even minor sin. Not just out of some hyper-perfectionism, but out of the recognition of the dangers a malformed habit can bring to us.
#26 — This view of habit has its ultimate origin in Aristotle’s writings on ethics; he says that we learn moral virtue not through reasoning but through habit and through practice. The idea (very over-simplified!) is to train ourselves in the habits that will result in virtuous behavior.
@24 The context does illuminate it: see e.g. Mere Christianity on archive.org . Part II opens with the statement, “I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe”, and then he proceeds to do just that. The trilemma is presented in that context. But even within the quotation you give, the statement is
This assumes a common understanding of “the sort of things Jesus said”: the preceding paragraphs of MC discuss some. The other religious leaders you mention never said the sort of things that Lewis quotes Jesus as saying, specifically they never claimed to be the Creator of the Universe, only perhaps that they knew what He wanted. But even without that context, we can’t take “the sort of things Jesus said” to mean “moral teachings generally” because then even Dear Abby would have to be Lady of Heaven, a scoundrel or a madwoman.
While I was writing this I realized that in this thread the trilemma was presented as if it were true in an absolute sense, and from that perspective your #16 is a pretty fair refutation.
@27 Near the end of Screwtape V there is this: “He often makes prizes of humans who have given their lives for causes He thinks bad on the monstrously sophistical ground that the humans thought them good….” If that’s true, butterfly effects wouldn’t even move the needle. Intentionally choosing the lesser good, though, would.
@26 Perhaps both Mason and Lewis had read Augustine’s Confessions.
@29 I think it has everything to do with how we’re called to live, specifically because of that idea of vigilance. Maybe we mean different things by the word. To me, vigilance is an exhausting slog, incompatible with actually living, that takes the joy out of even the most pleasant activity. It means not being able to relax, or feel safe, or behave naturally. Constant vigilance is like being always at work and never with one’s family or friends. I think you must mean something else by the word because a deity that would create a mind/spirit like mine (and I imagine most people’s) and then demand that of me can only be cruel.
@31 I still maintain that the greater or lesser good is not always easy to identify. It can easily be interpreted as meaning to always put your needs last, and my experience is that that doesn’t work.
As much as we appreciate the thoughtful discussion here, we want to avoid pronouncements that involve passing personal value judgements on one system of belief or that appear to be comparing the legitimacy of one religion over another (and particularly if the comment isn’t directly engaging with The Screwtape Letters, the focus of this week’s discussion). Even when it’s clear there’s no intention to offend, those waters get murky very quickly, and might be better explored elsewhere.
@32 that sounds both completely horrible and at odds with what Lewis was trying to convey (he often speaks of joy, and never of terror, as being the fruit of good habit). I think the modern usage of the word “intentional” is closer to the mark than “vigilant”, certainly the type of terrified vigilance that you describe.
@36 That makes a lot more sense. I can be on board with intentionality and can even hold a kind of relaxed intentionality, where relaxed vigilance just doesn’t make sense to me. I will certainly concede, though, that this is a semantic distinction and not important to the larger questions of how one ought to live.
@34 regarding putting one’s own needs last, Screwtape Letters XIV covers this explicitly. Most of that letter applies, but for example:
(emphasis mine). Lewis does focus more on selfishness as an issue than on excess of self-deprecation; elsewhere he concedes the latter but only if that’s the best one can manage.
#31, Perseant — I had a long answer to your comment, but the Moderator removed it (see their comment in #35), and I do see their point. I’ll just say, therefore, that I understand completely that by “the sort of things Jesus said” CSL was referring to the claims of divinity, and not just to “moral teachings”; that was the whole point. But alas, I can say no more here!
@39, Elizabeth: I think that if you have a login on the site we can message one another (the black names are links to user profiles), though I’ve never tried it. The discussion so far has been illuminating for me, thank you (I didn’t fully appreciate the implication of “poached egg”, for example) but the moderators have indeed been putting the brakes on, and I can see how discussion of the fine points of statements made in Mere Christianity is tangential to the discussion of The Screwtape Letters and may not be of general interest.
I may be knocking on the door of an empty thread at this point, but I wanted to chime in and mention that the parts about humankind’s “amphibious” nature are among the most interesting for me. Screwtape comments that Satan’s rebellion was prompted in part by God’s determination “to produce such revolting hybrids”. The idea that demons are motivated by spiritual pride is interesting and, I think, under-explored in fiction.
Many modern knockoffs of Screwtape take his urbane intelligence but leave out his frothing hatred for biology, humor, and in fact all human joy. We get the image of devils as wealthy playboys obsessed with fun and sensual indulgence – our vices personified.
Lewis hints at a vision of them as something like religious fanatics, determined to protect the purity of the spiritual world from the taint of matter. Or the members of a stuffy, austere, upper-crust secret society, so focused on preserving their dignity that they’ve forgotten how to enjoy life. His demons may occasionally use sensual pleasure as a weapon, but ultimately they detest it.
@42: This is an excellent point. Screwtape admits that eons of research have failed to produce one genuine pleasure: the best they can do is steal pleasure from “the Enemy” and taint it. His final rant includes a sneering description of Wormwood’s escaped victim as “this animal, this thing begotten in a bed,” who, Screwtape says enviously, can nevertheless “look upon Him.”
Regarding “Remember, there hadn’t been an approach quite like this at the time, and usually the letter was set in its column without much context or explanation.”
Not quite like, perhaps, but something fairly similar that at least some of Lewis’ contemporaries must have been familiar with came out the year before:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_the_Earth
Ah! I see now the actual publication date was 1962. It was stopped from publication in 1939. A few Twain scholars might have known of its existence and the controversy at that time. Hm! I always thought it came out sooner, having been written so long ago.