Somehow, it wasn’t until last month that I read The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis (San Francisco: Harper 2001). I found it fascinating.
During the summer and autumn of 1941 (a fascinating time in England; remember, there was a good chance of invasion that summer, and no-one knew if the US would come to its aid), The Guardian published thirty-one letters from an demon called Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, offering advice on his task of tempting his first young man to eternal damnation. Screwtape has retired from active temptation, and like the annoying uncle in the head office he is, can’t help giving stern advice about the way the world really is, and the best way to get a head (sorry about that).
The clever bit, the bit that made everybody read them, and the bit that keeps them in print, is the devil’s advocacy. He defines the things that are liable to lead to damnation, and lauds them. He warns against the positives, and optimistically points out the potential for disaster in the midst of glory. It’s funny, in a Veddy British way. Of course, Your Humble Blogger loves it.
However, the whole entertainment is the sugar to help the theology go down. Well, not theology. Sermons, delivered back to front. He assumes the theology, rather than arguing it. There is nothing in the book to convince an atheist that the Divine exists, nor anything to convince a non-Christian to follow the Church, nor yet a sectarian apology for C-of-E-dom. Its intended audience are confirmed Anglicans who would like to be ‘good Christians’; I ain’t in that group, so a lot of the specifics I shrug right off (or at least, simply say that doesn’t fly in my shul).
Still, there’s a lot in there that strikes me the way it is supposed to. One of the most telling is at the start of letter 16, where Screwtape encourages Wormwood to send the young man to all the churches in the neighborhood to see which suits him best. “If a man can’t be cured of churchgoing,” he says, try to make him “a taster or connoisseur of churches.” He will become a critic, rather than a pupil. Oh, I’ve done that. It’s very difficult, I think, to admit that a good deal of the point of the whole exercise is to adapt yourself to the prayer, rather than to adapt your circumstances to yourself. Not that a person shouldn’t find a good congregation to pray in, and not that I’m willing to accept a shul with a curtain. But it’s easy to get into a frame of mind that compares and contrasts synagogues, and assigns points and demerits. It’s much harder to get prayerful. Best to focus my efforts.
That’s just one example. I’m half-inclined to write about the letters at length, tho’ it could certainly get repetitive, and with the lovely diversity of beliefs and practices amongst my Gentle Readers, I don’t know that any of our specific thoughts would help any others of us. Anyway, his insights are not original, nor does he make any claim to their originality. One of the things he is trying to do here (and one of the things he thinks religion is trying to do) is to make us listen to things we know are true, and don’t think about. That divides reponses to these essays into ‘damn, but that’s completely true’ and ‘damn, but that’s utter crap’. Not really the best platform for conversation, when you think about it.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.