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 ::
:: 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.
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