The Screwtape Letters
Book Review (C.S. Lewis)
Well, from that time last year when I'd never read a C.S. Lewis book in English, I'm now up to three. After finishing The Great Divorce I thought I'd tackled The Screwtape Letters, partly because they're letters and I'm in a bit of a letter-reading grove lately, partly because I have distinct memories of people just loving them so much.
If you've been more under a C.S. Lewis rock than even I have, the Screwtape Letters are a series of letters from one demon (Screwtape) to a less experienced demon (Wormwood, his nephew), who is tasked with tempting a 'patient', who has just become a Christian. They are indeed well-written, rather funny, and if I dare say it "devilishly insightful". The humour is definitely a subtle palate, that understated British humour.
The psychological insight on the nature of temptation, penned 'from the other side', is worth the price of admission alone. I think this is why Lewis shines here. He understands well the manifold, and twisting, ways that we can are tempted, succeeding in one area, twisted to another. For example, the section where he talks about gluttony, and how "gluttony of excess" is easily dodged, but "gluttony of delicacy" is far more common and easy to provoke. The attitude of "I don't want much, but I just want things to be small but exactly and precisely how I want them to be".
I will say, though, that there's one section that I think Lewis is dead wrong on. It's Letter 18, and Wormwood is discussing marriage, sex, and 'one flesh':
The Enemy described a married couple as ‘one flesh’. He did not say ‘a happily married couple’ or ‘a couple who married because they were in love’, but you can make the humans ignore that. You can also make them forget that the man they call Paul did not confine it to married couples. Mere copulation, for him, makes ‘one flesh’. You can thus get the humans to accept as rhetorical eulogies of ‘being in love’ what were in fact plain descriptions of the real significance of sexual intercourse. The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.
Here it seems to me that Lewis subscribes to a view of marriage and sex in which sexual intercourse constitutes the act of marriage. I.e. if two unmarried people have sex, they are married because they are, in some ontological way, one. This has become, thankfully, a minority view. It basically views 'one flesh' as creating a kinship relationship that can never be broken, and so divorce is not just not allowed, it's impossible. Perhaps worse, it misinterprets OT laws which generally seek to protect unmarried women against the consequences of sexual violence. Lewis is wrong about this for several reasons, but chief among those are that the texts just won't bear up that sense of marriage. Better, I would argue, to understand marriage as a social institution that involves the voluntary public union of two people in lifelong sexual fidelity. The 'public voluntary union' nature of this means that it's not a private contract, it's attested and ratified by the presence of witnesses.
Anyway, I think I've said enough about that issue. Let me turn to two things I did really appreciate in TSL. The setting is against the background of the 'European War', that is WW2. And the demons evidence a studied disinterest in the course of that war. Why? Because it's mostly immaterial to their agenda. They are interested in the spiritual state of their patients, not who is killing whom. Because all men must die. Letter 28 is incredibly sobering in this regard.
Wormwood tells Screwtape to stop being so happy that humans are dying and that his patient might die. From the demons perspective, a long life is great news because humans find it so hard to persevere. Age, whether it brings adversity or prosperity, has a way of wearing humans down. It's more time to work on them. It is, perversely, the Enemy (that is, God) who allows them so little time to work on humans.
What I found so liberating about this was that it helps dismantle my this-worldliness. The sense that this life is the one in which I need to garner achievements, do "things", leave a legacy, make an impact, and so on. Not, of course, that this means being idle. But simply that a life, however long, however short, is enough. Measured against eternity, the idea that this life is a test and you have to score as high on it as possible, is perverse. Some people have a secular version of that, you know the sorts; but there is a Christianese version too, where the point of life is to rack up more and more brownie points with God, for gospel work, for evangelism, for doing ministry. It's equally nonsense to think of life like this. We are allotted our days, and must live them as best we can, and then be ushered into eternity. This is brought back all the more vividly in letter 31.
My second other thing is from letter 27, and it's about time and prayer. I think Lewis generally has a good angle on time, seeing the paradoxical reality that God is not bounded by time, is outside time and has created time, and yet we are inevitably inside time, bounded by it, and cannot conceive of what it really must be like for God to be outside it.
And so, Wormwood tries to explain to Screwtape exactly how his patient and indeed humans more generally, view time and struggle with the paradoxes with prayer. Does God foresee our prayers and thus predestine our prayers, or his answers, or how does the whole thing work?
creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that 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.
For us, God foresees and predestines, but that is because we are in the flow of time. God sees all things as an "unbounded Now", so that the tapestry of time and space is not experienced as the rush of a unknown series of events to him. I don't really know that I fully agree with how Lewis seeks to reconcile free will and predestination, but he's certainly a lot more perceptive than most of us.
There's a hint of how Lewis resolves the tension, when Lewis writes:
....And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it. It may be replied that some meddlesome human writers, notably Boethius, have let this secret out.
This is drawing on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, book six. There Boethius makes the argument that free will has to be the case, otherwise (a) rewards for good and evil are unjust, (b) God is the cause of evil, and (c) prayer is useless. The argument that he lays out is that God is eternal, and this means that God is present to past, present, and future all at once. It is an eternal, timeless present. What Lewis calls the "unbounded Now". And so where we think in the stream of time, and argue about God pre-seeing, God is outside the stream of time and so in fact just sees.
Lewis is certainly no Calvinist. He's of the school that argues that love is only genuine if freely chosen, and so there must be free will for humans to love God, otherwise the whole game is pointless. That tradition has a long lineage. But that's not all there is to Lewis. Boethius certainly has a much more subtle take on this than most, and his book was one of the most copied, read, and studied works through the medieval period.
Okay, well, that's probably not what you were expecting from a review of Screwtape Letters - sex and providence! Especially since what this book is more famous for is humour and a very shrewd understanding of the intricacies and byways of temptation.
