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.