TSL Chapter 8

... sigh... when I started this blog I was all excited about this, and I was like, "I'm gonna write a blog post EVERY DAY!" and all that, and now I'm all, "eh. I've got stuff to do," and it seems like so much effort, and no one's commenting... I guess I just don't feel... inspired.

You know?

Summary

Uncle Screwtape schools Worms on the law (no caps) of Undulation (caps). Apparently humans work in cycles of interest / activity and then disinterest / inertia. Screwtape instructs that these cycles will do no good unless they're properly exploited.

By way of explanation, he expounds significantly Hell's plans for humans as well as Gods: Hell wants cattle. God wants sons. Or more bizarrely: Hell wants all matter in the universe to ultimately be Satan (even Screwtape? Apparently), while Heaven wants to create a huge number of low-fidelity images of God.

Uncle Tape also mentions tactics: God can't coerce. He demands free will, and even abandons (or appears to abandon) his creations so they can find him on their own, without help.

Screwtape, having laid this out, doesn't explain in depth how to exploit the natural troughs in focus and activity -- that comes next-letter.

Literary

lower case laws

So the law of Undulation has no capital L, but a capital U. What's up with that? A quick look at other laws suggests that in English specific laws as in "The Law of X" come with a capital L. Sources like Wikipedia follow this pattern for a variety of laws such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics (capital S, L, and T -- a veritable bonanza of big, bold capitals).

However, when we're talking about a law that belongs to someone (Murphy's), the law itself is not capitalized. And in the case of "laws" such as the 'law of unintended consequences,' capital letters need not apply.

After some consideration and a bit more googling, I could not find anything that explained this to me. I could dismiss it as an error, but I haven't found any similar errors, and Lewis seems a careful writer.

I have another theory:

Slubgob's law

Screwtape introduce the loU with a petty dig at old Slubgob -- the current administrator of the Training College (not "a training college" -- Junior Tempters do not study at technical schools, apparently ruling out the possibility of commercials where a peer tempter damns a dozen souls as a perplexed, astonished friend looks on, and is then told, "I got my degree at Pandaemonium Technical Institute -- you should go! You'll be glad you did!" But I digress).

He says that things have gone "to pieces" since Ol' Slub has taken over.

Note that he did not say, "have gone to Hell" since that would be either vulgar or redundant. He could have said, "Gone to Heaven," but that doesn't seem like a likely idiom given their relationship with the celestial realms. Screwtape, despite his demoniacal nature does not use the scatological which would fit here,  and he doesn't say, "Pear Shaped" which would would have outed him as a brit.

But I digress.

I think that the weird capitalization is a subtle sign from CSL to show us that whoever taught Screwy English did a poor job, and that we shouldn't take his criticisms of academics seriously.

That said,

Infernal Ambitions

The idea that Hell wants to make everyone part of Satan is reasonable and kind of cool. It seems demonic and hungry and empty and gluttonous all at once. I do wonder what happens to an immortal soul that becomes part of the devil. Are you still you, but now you're a tendon? Or is the self dissolved? It sort of implies the later, but that kind of implies an end to suffering -- either oblivion, or something close to it.

Anyway, these end-game visions are pretty good.

I was going to talk about something else, but I think I'll do the Theology.

Theology

I don't know where he gets this Undulation stuff, but it doesn't seem biblical. I don't buy it at all. I'm also not sure about God valuing freedom over everything.

Firstly, God does prime the pump. He's willing to intervene to get things started, but then he wants people to pull themselves along by their own power and -- at least in CSL's theology -- he's willing to watch them end up damned forever if they can't quite make it.

I think absolute dedication to freedom is a valid explanation for letting people be damned -- but what we're seeing here isn't quite absolute.

Of course Lewis's conceit is that he can explain God's objectives and reasons; I think he knows better, but at some level apologism is about explaining God to people, with a fallback that if the person doesn't quite buy my logic, I can always shrug appeal to the infinite unknowability of the maximally-omni and them move in a mysterious way.

Personally I prefer "we have no idea why things are this way" to partial explanations. A friend of mine was shot and killed and his mother (a holidays-and-weddings Catholic) went to a priest to arrange for a service and to seek... some kind of explanation.

The man told her flat out he had nothing, and frankly, I'm not sure anything he could have said to try to explain God's purpose could have made a positive difference. Pain and struggle can be edifying, but they can also be crippling and soul-rending, and explanations that have God wanting us to suffer terrible things to make us better seem a bit horrific to me. 

At the end of the day, I think Lewis is on to something -- we may well be at our best when, during our deep troughs, where we're most discouraged and feel most alone, we seek God because, not because it comforts us, but because it's the right thing to do.

And that may even please God more than our obedience when we're on fire with his presence.

But I am deeply skeptical of anyone who connects this to God's valuation of concepts like free will.