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.