TSL Chapter 12 -- A dead fire in a cold room

Summary

Wormwood's patient has been drifting "out of his orbit around the Enemy" and slowly heading into the "cold and dark" of "utmost space."

He's carried by his own unawareness that his Christian zeal is fading, even as he takes communion and dutifully attends church. These habits lull him into believing in his salvation, even as he's more and more damned with each passing day.

Screwtape warns Wormwood that he should be careful to keep The Patient from thinking about his relationship with God -- which is enabled because The Patient will naturally avoid things that make him feel convicted. In a best case (worst case) scenario, The Patient will withdraw completely, filling his world with dull, cold, joyless trivia, and finally arrive in Hell having found no pleasure in the world at all.

Screwtape closes with a reminder that small sins will damn a man as finally as big ones, and are safer because they give no outward indication of the man's progress toward the infernal.

My Reaction

Flight from Salvation

As I've already said, I quite believe that people avoid God, and see that in my self. My attempts to pray for "5 minutes" in the morning are an abject failure. I find even five minutes pretty undo-able, and 5 minutes was a compromise from the suggested "30 minutes," which I recognized as intolerable.

Screwtape would be gratified.

Is Disease Sin?

What struck me here, though, was I recognized the phenomena that Screwtape describes as depression. It's not for certain -- maybe what we think of as "clinical depression" is a different kind of thing than the state of being damned... but the internal and external signs are clearly there: a loss of joy in the world, a withdrawal, a sense of being profoundly disconnected.

I'm not depressive and never have been -- so I don't recognize these things from personal experience -- but I know them from people in my life and from reading, and I'm reasonably certain I know depression when I see it in print.

Screwtape, here, implies that depression is a result of a decision to withdraw from God to avoid feeling guilty. In other words, a sin. Today, Western Medicine thinks of depression as a neurological malfunction and something that is (potentially) treatable with medicine.  But back when CSL was writing this, that view of neurology was nascent, if it existed at all (I would categorize the psychoanalytic model as a substantially different model of mental dysfunction).

So what gives? We can be held accountable for decisions made freely, but if there's something wrong with the brain that compromises (or appears to compromise) our free will, what then?

Can we be damned for thoughts or conditions we can't control? There's no way to know. I don't think the bible addresses this at all -- subtle mental illness and any kind of neurological determinism is not really a biblical concept, from what I can see.

Looking at modern writing (that is, anything written in or translated into English), I see two distinct possibilities.

No, of Course Not (The comforting possibility)

From a modern perspective the idea of damning someone because of mental conditions beyond their control is unjust -- c.f. the insanity defense. Since God is just, He would never do such a thing. Q.E.D.

I suspect that if I were a depressed person, that's what I'd be told -- and I'd be reminded that God is capable of curing sicknesses (including, explicitly, in some people's experiences) depression, and invited to pray for deliverance.

Also, children and babies who die before they can accept Jesus are given an exemption and saved from Hell -- because, due to immaturity, it would be unfair to condemn them.

Yes. You're Accountable No Matter What (the scary possibility)

The comforting possibility is the one we dearly hope is true, but it's founded in a human sense of Justice and we know that although our sense of what's Just might emanate from God, it isn't always flawless.

Maybe our 'disease model' is wrong, and depression isn't a physical (neurological) problem, but just a failure to man up and get outside and do something. Maybe (as CSL suggests), it's more a moral failing than a weakness of the flesh -- and something that is best addressed with sincere contrition.

In this view, we shouldn't be comforting a depressed person -- we should be gently telling them to take accountability for their condition and to seek God in the hope that he will help them lift their own spirits and bring them around. Telling depressed people they're responsible for their own numbing sadness is very much out of favor these days, but if that is merely Worldly Wisdom, maybe the mental health community is in league with the Devil.

CSL might well agree with that.

Even Scarier

There's one possibility I've run into that's even worse: If God knows everything, and destiny is pre-determined, then it's quite possible that He simply prevents children who would have grown up to be saved Christians from dying before their baptism, and prevents the Elect from having mental malfunctions that would lead them away from Salvation.

In this view crib death and depression can still be basic physical phenomena and, like the instruction in James, they're just litmus tests for salvation -- if you're depressed (and you don't get better), it's because you're Reprobate, Sinner. Get thee to Hell.

Interestingly, this is exactly the sort of thing people with depression tell themselves. In the 'comforting view' above, it's either a manifestation of the sickness -- or even the whispers of demons trying to make someone miserable and in doubt of their salvation. But what if that was just wishful thinking, and the agony and hopelessness a depressed person feels is exactly what the Depressions claims to be: unvarnished Truth of the sort CSL is trying to give is in his book?

This is absolutely terrifying and horrific, but it's quite nicely aligned certain views of Election that suggests God's love would be manifest as earthly success of practicing Christians.

This is terrifying because it suggests that horrible things quite beyond our control can condemn us -- but it's really just a re-iteration of the idea of Election: our salvation is beyond control; people are condemned because that's what happens. 

If this is not comforting... well, there's not much comfort in our cosmology, is there?

A dead fire in a cold room, indeed