TSL Chapter 21 -- The Patient's Peevishness

Summary

After Glutton, and Lust, Uncle Screwtape addresses Wrath, but not so much fiery anger as "peevishness."

He notes that irritation-induced anger comes, not just from misfortune, but from a perceived injustice and as such, Nephew Wormwood will need to attack something The Patient feels entitled to. Fortunately, that "lever" is readily at hand: "nothing throws [the patient] 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!"

From here, Screwtape launches into an extended discourse on the failed human concept of ownership, which can be summarized as such: Humans think they own stuff, but they (obviously), don't and so taking things away from them

a) Makes them angry and
b) Makes them angry for unjust reasons, making that anger sinful (this isn't explicit, but one presumes just anger would not be a sin)

Nothing is as ridiculous as humans thinking they have any ownership of time, but humans think of themselves as owning a great many things ("my dog, my servant, my wife, my father, my country, and of course 'my God').

In the end, Screwtape notes, everything will be owned, either by God, or by Satan, and that's that.

My Reaction

Lewis is at his best when he's talking about ground level sins -- every-day sins with which most people have intimate and immediate experience. I also suspect that (unlike his treatise on women and love) this chapter is grounded very much in things he has practical, first-hand experience with: getting angry over being interrupted.

Most readers probably don't have dramatic explosions of rage in which the damage and injustice would be extremely visible. In our civilized world, people who get angry control it -- mostly -- and rather than wrathful, act aggrieved, peevish (a great word), or more colloquially, "pissy."

Modern anger in cultured settings is like to be as passive as it is aggressive, and Lewis hits that squarely. I also think he nailed the sense of victimized injustice that accompanies feeling intruded upon. 

At work I get a cascade of calls and emails from vendors who want to sell me something -- or at least have a thirty minute conversation with me about their company. These are people who clearly have no idea what I do and are making some very broad assumptions are are (inevitably) going to waste both of our times.

I ignore their emails, and I don't return their calls. Once in awhile, in a moment of weakness, I'll answer the phone and find myself talking to someone who wants thirty minutes to tell me about their outsourced database administration solution.

I sometimes find myself getting angry (oddly, I'm usually less angry at the people and more angry at the emails that begin with a personal greeting).

I think ignoring emails is a sin (I ought to tell them 'no,' clearly and politely), and I think getting angry about overly personal greetings is a sin (it's not *my* time, after all). The kind of outrage I feel at these annoyances is very much the kind of peevishness that Lewis is talking about here, and I suspect it's even more prevalent in our society than it was in his.

What About The Theology

Prohibitions about feeling ownership of... basically anything are also, to my read, biblically founded -- God lays claim to everything -- although it's clear that we're expected to be good stewards of the gifts he has bestowed on us, and I would think part of that stewardship would be good time management.

So managing time is expected, but getting angry is a sin.

Anger as a Sin

Screwtape spends most of his letter talking about the absurd human ideas around ownership. He doesn't really linger on the concept of anger (maybe he'll return to it), but it's a foundational concept here. I think it's self-evident to most people that anger can have some destructive components (and it's usually ugly at best, scary at worst), but are natural emotions really sinful?

A simplistic answer is that it's okay to get angry so long as you only get angry about actual injustice. The bible tells us God is angry every day. Jesus famously opened the proverbial can of whup-ass on the money changers. So anger by itself isn't problematic -- just unjust anger.

So don't get angry unless you have good, Godly reasons.

There's a problem with this -- and it's not that "it doesn't work that way."

The problem is that the Bible, to my read, doesn't call on us to do that. It calls on us to control our anger, to be careful in our speech. We may be too fallen to avoid feeling unjustified emotions, but we can be expected to control what we do with them.

TSL Chapter 20 -- A Terrestrial and an Infernal Venus

Summary

Having lectured on Love (mortal and divine), Uncle Screwtape turns his baleful eye on the object of that love: Women. He notes that God has prevented Nephew Wormwood's attempts to undermine The Patient's chastity so (sigh), they're going to have to get him married.

Screwtape wants a dossier on each of the young women in the neighborhood (a Binder full of Maidens?) so he can find the right "type" of woman to lead The Patient into damnation.

"Type?" -- Hell sets fashion (who doubted it?), and for each age, they describe a proper "type" of woman who will be trendy and attractive and thus unwomanly -- and therefore leading pious men away from "spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages."

He describes the women of various ages concluding that in the current age (1940's) Hell has deigned that the model woman will be "more boyish than nature allows."

He then describes, in general the two type of women fixed within each man's mind -- the Terrestrial and the Infernal Venus. A man will feel natural, even Godly love toward the Terrestrial Venus. His feelings will be "readily mixed with charity, readily obedient to marriage, colored through with... golden light of reverence and naturalness." The other kind of girl -- the Infernal Venus, the man will desire brutally. She will draw him away from marriage (naturally), but should he somehow marry her, he would treat her as "a slave, an idol, or an accomplice."

Ideally the attraction to the Infernal Venus would lead to a mistress or to whoring, but marrying her would be fine, anyway, because even without fornication sexuality can lead to a man's undoing.

Girls, Girls, Girls...

If writing about love is a minefield of self-exposure for moralizing writers, writing about women is walking into the furnace of sexual-frustrations on parade.

Lewis's are surprisingly by-the-book for a man who was living with, and may have been fornicating with a woman almost three decades his elder, whom he referred to as "mother" when he was writing this.

He hits the classic Madonna-Whore complex dead on, of course, and has a boiler-plate condemnation of fashion. He doesn't go much beyond this though, more or less ending with extremely conventional wisdom.

Where he stops short, though there is something a bit interesting: fornication and solitary vice (The Wanking) are clearly sins -- but he suggests that sex within marriage can be a sin if it's done correctly (wrongly). He implies that the man's MW-complex will keep him from acting appropriately lovingly toward the target of his desire, so maybe that's it: if a man marries a Whore and then treats her as a Whore, it's still a sin, even if they're married before God.

But CSL doesn't tell us much about this -- just that it's possible.

My Reaction

My reaction was more or less "Meh" -- I found Screwtape's advice conventional and dreary but now that I've read up on CSL's "love life" I'm sort of glad he left it that way.

As an anti-sermon, it's lacking in practical advice. I suppose he's saying, "Don't marry the girl you want to fuck! For goodness's sake, marry the girl you view through the Golden Light of reverence and Naturalness! That stroppy temptress at the pub won't make you happy, young man! She won't!"

Meh.

TSL Chapter 19 -- He Cannot Really Love: No One Can

Summary

Oops. In his previous Chapter(s), Screwtape has described God as "really loving" human vermin -- a heresy, to Hell, which believes that disinterested love (love in which you get nothing in return) is impossible.

According to Hell's dogma, God must have mysterious and as-of-yet-not-fathomed designs for mankind which do not involve for-real love.

Screwtape opens his letter with an extant and ever-so-slightly-frantic concern that should someone else see his letters they might conceivably think him a heretic who somehow believes Godly Love is possible. He grovels a bit, explaining that he was never serious about leaving Wormwood to suffer the authorities and that his digs at Slubgob were meant in fond jest.

He then goes on to explain that Hell has a research program not unlike the Manhattan Project to unravel the mysteries of God's profession love (with "richer rewards" for those who make progress and "more and more terrible punishments" for those who fail).

He dismisses the idea that having The Patient be "in love" is really meaningful. It's meaningful so long as it moves him toward or away from God or The Devil, and otherwise not. In other words, whether love is helpful or harmful depends on the human's reaction to it (if he's romantic, then seeking true love will probably lead him away from "casual unchastity" but it might lead him to tragic adulteries ending in murder and suicide!)

He ends with the reminder that "like most of the other things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age and youth, or war and peaces, it is, from the point of view of the spiritual life, mainly raw material."

The Impenetrable Mysteries of God

I think, here in this chapter, we're meant to laugh at the demons that we understand so much better! Of course God loves us! They can't see that because -- as powerful as they are -- they're blinded by their own cosmic limitations!

For once we get to feel just a very little bit superior, as we look down on their scrambling scientific bureaucracy, which we see as foolish on the face of it.

But I wonder if Screwtape's having the last laugh. 

As I've said before, I think God's love is, in fact, incomprehensible from a human standpoint -- the universe he designed is a great torture chamber for uncountable souls for which there is no solace and no mercy, and no end to their torment, ever.

It's a Möbius strip in which we are unable to save ourselves without his help, and yet bear all the responsibility for our own damnation. As the torturer says to his struggling victim as he applies the pliers, "You're Making Me Do This."

And in this vast darkness of never-ending-screaming, a select few are chosen to look down on the writhing, agonized masses from a place of great comfort and peace... and they will find that charming and find the agony of those below them glorifying God with their screams as they glorify God with their songs.

This is not love as we understand it.

I'm interested to see what Hell's scientists come up with.

TSL Chapter 18 -- Being In Love

Summary

Uncle Screwtape ends Chapter 17 -- his opus on Gluttony -- with a teasing discourse on chastity, suggesting that 18 might find him talking about Lust.

No such luck. He dismisses charnel temptation as a matter of "considerable tedium" and then gets down to the business, not of lust, but of love.

Humans are demanded "either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy" by their creator. Hell takes credit for making the first "very difficult" and has been working to undermine the second. How does Hell undermine monogamy? By the "curious" and "usually short-lived" experience of "Being In Love."

By linking love (a somewhat glandular condition) to monogamy, Hell aids and abets human desires to fornicate or to divorce by giving them excuses, either for the fucking ("I luuuuuve her and I am going to marry her!") or for the not-marrying after the fucking ("But I don't love him!")

Screwtape briefly forays into the Philosophy of Hell -- that all things are Zero Sum, and that the transcendental union created by the fucking is no different. There's no such thing as love, really -- since what's good for me, isn't good for you (zero sum).

He also notes that during intercourse, souls are, in fact, joined in a transcendental relationship which must be "eternally enjoyed or eternally endured," and finally finishes by mocking humans for not accepting the true, godly justifications for marriage -- making babies and preserving chastity.

CSL: Not Getting Any?

Philosophers, moralist, and deep thinkers of all stripes often find themselves unable to resist writing about sex -- which is understandable since it plays such a central role in the human experience. However, that jagged trail is not without pitfalls: there may be writers capable of navigating it without performing a distracting self-reveal, but they are few in number.

For example, you can almost always tell when the author in question isn't getting any.

I submit that this was probably the case when CSL wrote chapter 18.

I've avoided researching him and his life for exactly this reason: I don't want my thinking to devolve into a pre-post-modernest psychoanalysis of the author... but if someone's going open his kimono in front of me (to mix some metaphors), I'm going to consider myself invited to speculate.

To the Wikipedias!

:: reads ::

Um... living with Jane Moore... mother of dead friend, referred to as "mother" by CSL... almost thirty years older than him...

:: reads more ::

Okay. It's weirder than I had thought. 

When Screwtape Letters was published in 1942, CSL was living with the mother of his war-time friend Jane Moore -- a woman 26 years older than he was. He never married her, and if they had "relations," it's probably best not to think about it.

He did marry later in life  (1956) -- a civil contract to keep Joy Davidman (a friend -- probably not yet a friend-with-benefits), in the UK. He later married her for-real when she was ill and they had a son.

So Lewis was ~42, living with a 64-year-old woman he publicly referred to as "mother" when he wrote this. Whether he was "getting any" at the time, I'll leave up to the CLS Scholars.

Conclusion and Moral: Whatever you do, do NOT go reading about an author's sex life.

I was going to comment on how someone watching his peers marry off from the sidelines, might be quick to find those choices unwise (with the wisdom of the outside observer) and be highly critical of the foundations of those choices. But I'm done thinking about this for now, On With The Show.

Game Theory

Screwtape's description of the "philosophy" of Hell is fascinating here. Hell -- as one might expect -- runs on a rationalist, game-theory type of philosophy where they flatly state that it's impossible for two things to become one without one consuming the other, and so the kinds of unions caused by godly love (or human fucking) are nonsensical.

I don't have much comment on this, except that I think it's a very well wrought foundation for a logical underpinning for Hell. Lewis often seems to use Screwtape to preach sermons that are ever-so-slightly off coming from a Demon, but here he really gives us a credible, consistent, and deeply realized Screwtape who gives us, further, a fascinating look into the mind of a devil.

Awesome stuff.

Transcendental Relationships

Screwtape, who can see Eternity and lives in the realm of the unmitigated says that when people have sex, they create some kind of eternal union that they have to live with forever after.

And he's not talking about kids. This is a purely spiritual connection that's established.

Words-on-paper, it looks like complete poppycock, and I am hard pressed to provide any justification for literally believing it -- but even if one accepts it as a fictional conceit or (taken as advice in a lecture) a metaphor, I find it remarkably true in my experience.

To make it clear, I grew up in an age far more sexually permissive than CSL did (and anyone reading this, did, too), and further, in an age with reliable birth control that could also prevent infection. The physical, materialist, after-effects of sex were almost all mitigated forty years after Screwtape was published -- but my experience is that even if there's no persistent physical connection the psychological (and I dare say spiritual) implications of having sex remained (for me) lingering.

My experience is that there's not really such a thing as "casual sex" and that even if everyone's pretty casual or drunk about it when it happens, it tends to change the relationship for good and maybe even change the people doing it.

When I was dating in my early 30's I was extremely careful about sex along a number of spectrums and while I didn't worry about the spiritual implications (Screwtape would have been thrilled -- the idea that I was sinning wasn't even on my radar) I recognized that sex implied a connection that was deep, extremely hard to break, and completely impossible to undo.

I recall a specific instance where it was green-lights all the way and I was... not willing to go ahead... with considerable relief. I pretty much knew I wasn't going to marry the girl I was with, and while I liked her a lot (and she was scorching hot), I was unwilling to create a connection that would not follow through.

I would never have put it the way CSL does here, but reading this more than 10 years later, I think... yeah... if I'd had sex with her, that persistent relationship would still be here, even with her a world away in Indonesia and me in NYC, and I'm frankly relieved that it's not -- that's not a connection I could honor.

Anyway, I'm sure that's more than enough of self-disclosure Saturday.

TSL Chapter 17 -- Gluttony

Summary

Another chapter where Wormwood has been asleep at the wheel, failing to exploit weakness for profitable damnation! Uncle Screwtape scolds Worms for being dismissive of the sin of gluttony. Screwtape acknowledges that yes -- humans have been diverted from it, but wants to ensure that demons don't forget its values.

He introduces the state-of-the-art thinking in Demonic gluttonization: the "gluttony of Delicacy" which has surpassed the more normally thought of "gluttony of Excess."

He then launches into several pages where he expounds on this using The Patient's prissy, demanding mother as an example. She is evidently quite particular about what she eats but in no way thinks of herself as a glutton since she eat very, very little.

Screwtape acknowledges that a guy is unlikely to go in for that kind of thing, and so suggests that Wormwood go after his Patient through his vanity -- have him be a connoisseur of food and drink and focus in an overt and ungodly way on those.

Screwtape ends with a segue into lust, which sets up the next chapter.

My Reaction

I'm old school. My gluttony is of the old-fashioned "excess" type. While I appreciate a good steak or a fine craft beer as much as the next guy, I've steadfastly avoided learning anything about wine despite years of Consulting (consultants take people out to drink all the time and tend to know a lot about wine), and I'm pretty much happy with common fare or the good stuff.

Reading the prolonged description of the irritating mother, I found myself wondering if that was someone CSL knew -- and if so, did she recognize herself ("All-I-Want") when the book came out?

If so: Ha-ha.

But I wonder where the line between appreciating fine, worldly things and being a glutton is. Clearly, it's when one's priorities shift so good food (fine food) comes ahead of God. But humans are justification-machines. How would I know?

TSL Chapter 16 -- Party Churches

Summary

Screwtape is annoyed that Wormwood has not exploited The Patient's mild dissatisfaction with his parish church. If Wormwood can't stop him from going all together, he can -- at least -- make the man a church-hopper until he becomes (in Screwtape's words) a "taster" or "connoisseur" of churches.

The purposes of this is manifold: to weaken the physical organization itself, to encourage factionalism, and finally to make the man a "critic" of the word rather than a receptive student.

Uncle Screwtape has even done the legwork for Worms: he's got out the map and checked out the two nearest churches, and both have faults that could be nurtured into full damnation!

Screwtape describes the Vicar who waters down his sermons until they are repetitive, soporific, and only surprise his congregation in how insincere they are. The second church has "Fr. Spike" who is a shock-jock of the pulpit. But Spike "really believes" and so might be dangerous yet.

What it comes down to is that the target should be encouraged to attend a "party church" which is to say one filled with partisan alliances, where "my-teamism" is more important that doctrine. Screwtape reminds Wormwood that without their efforts the Church of England "might have become a positive hotbed of charity and humility."

It's been what? Like a week?

Why did I go a week without writing this up? Well, for one thing I've been busy, but for another thing it didn't upset me -- which is to say, it didn't present any horrifying element of cosmology, but also that it didn't irritate me by tweaking one of my sins.

I find myself more irritated with sermons, in-general, when they seem especially relevant to me. This one didn't so much. I've never been either a church-hopper (I have, for long, long stretches been not-a-church-goer) or a doctrine partisan.

CSL accounts for what might describe me: indifference -- but if I were truly indifferent, I doubt I'd be as troubled by doctrine as I am. So it may be that we've reached a chapter (or a set of chapters -- the next one felt a bit flat to me as well), where I might engage intellectually but not so much emotionally.

Take That, Church of England

My indifference to Chapter 16 might also be that it's a bit of a shot at an organization I don't have any personal connection to. Yes, it's broadly applicable, but CSL has already made it known in earlier chapters that he's mostly unhappy with the quality of preaching and singing in his parish churches and I'm sure that anyone paying attention can find innumerable incidences of hypocrisy in whatever church they might attend.

So, yeah -- I'm sure these are all valid criticisms, but they don't make for a very coherent whole. On one side the Patient is instructed to be an open learner and not a critic, on the other hand, the teachers are revealed to be buffoons. Clearly the lessons both of these men teach should invite valid criticism from their congregation.

I think Lewis undercuts himself by advising us to be receptive students on one hand and then exposing those teaching us as insincere and even (in one case) unbelieving.

Party Church

I think the idea of factionalism "within" a church is much more fertile ground. While I don't have a huge amount of experience with factionalism within a church, I've seen enough Karate schools in my youth to know that schisms within an organization are sources of great drama and can be hugely destructive to the mission (in Karate, it's when a high-placed student goes off to another school). I've never experienced this in Church and I wonder if there are such factions simmering just below the surface in my church (I see no evidence of that), but since we're a human organization, I'd be hard pressed to wonder how we couldn't be.

I suspect that a focus on intra-congregation drama would have been both more meaningful and more engaging, than a shot across the bow at the CoE.