TSL Chapter 27 -- His Unbounded Now

Summary

The Patient is doing a lot of praying -- praying for earthly happiness, it seems, and Screwtape offers some advice on how to mess that up, once again playing on human expectations and perceptions. He suggests the "heads I win, tails you lose" argument to make prayer appear to be ineffectual:

If The Patient prays for something and it doesn't happen, clearly prayer doesn't work. If he prays for something and it does happen, it was obviously going to happen anyway (because the Universe is deterministic, yo), so it wasn't God's work after all.

Screwtape explains that all this isn't obvious because humans don't see time and space the way God does.

This leads to a further digression about how Hell has trained men to think in terms of the Historical Point of View which assumes ancient authors couldn't possibly understand the truth and that pre-modern thought is not especially accurate.

He smugly concludes that Hell's efforts have helpfully confused and cut off the current generation of thinkers, miring mankind in ignorance.

My Thoughts

One of the great strengths of using Screwtape as a mouthpiece is that he can "explain" cosmic things that Wormwood would obviously know, but he can avoid the bane of the Speculative Fiction Writer -- pure exposition -- by flipping things around and explaining, not cosmology to cosmic creatures, but inscrutable humans to his junior demon.

This works brilliantly because it allows Screwtape to expose and expose, without raising questions about why he's saying things his presumed audience ought to be intimately familiar with.

In this chapter, Screwtape addresses several meaty issues including causality, determinism, and predestination. He touches lightly on the solutions -- the eternal Now that God lives in explains why humans are both completely predictable, but not predestined (God sees the future no differently from the present, but humans still make their own self-damning decisions). 

As explanations go, this is a reasonably good one. It doesn't answer basic questions about why things would be set up this way, but it at least squares seeing "future" and free will.

For me, some of the throw-away issues (distraction, "crude" petitionary prayers, and so-on) were more potentially interesting and resonnant, but Lewis is more interested (in this chapter) in cosmic questions and in discrediting the Historical Point of View.

One thing that did bother me a little -- Demons' relationship to Time is never fully explained. The book requires Screwtape and Wormwood to be as blind to the future as men are... or else the tension around the outcome (is he or isn't he damned?) wouldn't exist and Screwtape's intentions and designs would be an open book.