BK - The Screwtape Letters

  • 1.9kW
  • WIP
  • <1d ago

Reflections

  • largely satire, ugh so good though
  • for me to write simple takeaways is to gloss over the insightful in-between remarks and character tone and vocabulary, that in themselves also imply so so much

Preface

  • too apathetic vs too obsessive, over demonology
  • concession that even the author may be mistaken

1 - Reason vs. Jargon

  • Moderns view beliefs/philosophies as attractive/unattractive over whether they are true/false.
    • “academic”, “practical”, “outworn”, “contemporary”, “conventional”, “ruthless”, “strong”, “stark”, “courageous”, “the philosophy of the future”
  • Truth and reason is the “Enemy’s” ground
    • vs. Jargon and current mood
  • Humans are mood-driven creatures, easily taken in the stream of ordinary plainness of “real life”
  • (Natural) Science can point to the intangible realities

2 - Church People

  • The formidable invisible Church, vs the laughable visible institution
  • Even with strong Christians, it can be small quirks that brings irrational ridicule
  • There’s a disappointing pictorial preconception of modern “Christians”, failing spiritual expectations (what even are they?)
  • Disappointment when new Christians get serious, like married couples starting to really live together. The “transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing”
  • This seems to be because of “free” lovers and “sonship”
    • this is a double-edged sword
    • it’s a phase of growing past “mere mood”
  • But of course Church people bring rational grounds for disappointment
  • still not quite the humility

3 - Domestic Household

  1. 💼 over-focus on (perceived) advanced spiritual duties, blindly neglecting the obvious external (after an hour’s examination)
  2. 🙏 praying for “spiritual”, neglecting physical — 💥 reminding the irritable sins and constructing a 👬 vague separable person
  3. 🤨 focus on annoying daily idiosyncrasies (surely on purpose)
  4. 🗯️ quarrels with offensive voice tones, yet grievance when offence taken ([[Fundamental Attribution Error]])
  5. 👀 the older brother’s jealousy over the younger brother’s unearned elevated spiritual position

4 - Prayer

Formal prayers are still good

  • in over-correcting the parrot-like formulaic prayers, the patient may work towards “spontaneous, inward, informal, unregularised”
    • to the beginner, this produced a “vaguely devotional mood, in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part”
    • this bears a superficial resemblance to mature silent prayers
  • body position affects the soul

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds; in reality our best work is done by keeping things out

Successful prayers are not scored by produced feeling

  • gaze focus away from target and onto themselves
  • wills producing feelings instead of guiding mind
    • prayer for courage → brave feeling
    • prayer for forgiveness → feeling forgiven
  • then we’d start evaluating the value of prayer, according to success of the prayer producing the desired feeling
    • but that sort of success/failure, actually depends on our current mood

prayer produces images

  • praying humans don’t directly perceive its glorious spiritual reality
  • instead they have some poor visual conception
  • we pray to the thing we made; not to the Person who has made him
  • we should embrace the presently-invisible nature of prayer
    • “not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be”

I have known cases where what the patient called his “God” was actually located—up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall.

5 - Suffering & Death

  • extreme patriot vs ardent pacifist
  • terrors of war only long-term wrecks humans, if it affects their actions
  • war causes attention diverted from the self to causes higher than the self
    • though Goodness disapproves many of such causes, it does produce heroic values, which points them to Him (this is Caleb’s idea tuning)
  • war causes Christians to valiantly pass into heaven
    • rather than growing old and corrupting, an
    • “withholding all suggestion of a priest, lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition!”
  • war constantly reminds us of death, instead of numbed with contented worldliness
  • Christians should have been briefed that [[Christians should expect suffering|Christian suffering is expected]], so “a faith destroyed by a war or pestilence, cannot really have been worth the trouble of destroying”.

6 - The Mind

  • fear of the future, should be met with patience in providence
    • present is the daily cross, not just the object of the fear
  • every bad scenario can’t all be true at the same time
  • the object vs the fear—which is the serious focus and which is just a light mood?
    • “i am now just entering a state of Anger/Lust” — before a serious action
    • “my mood is more devout” —and serious focus is inwards
  • human may proclaim hate for the imaginary, but surprisingly showing love in practice
    • don’t get it flipped: loving the imaginary Germans, but hating the real neighbours (see [[YT - The Most Misunderstood Parable]])
    • where do we focus our active wills? (not just to keep in our imaginations)

7 - Extreme Ideologies

  • not just two extremes: supernatural magicians vs materialists and skeptics
    • a third hybrid: a vague “Life Force”, the Materialist Magician
    • worshipping “forces”, denying spirits
  • lukewarm or any extreme — except extreme devotion
  • unpopular small vocal factions
  • does the man truly grounded in his Cause? Or else, sudden emotional crisis would make a fool
  • the partisan spirit — patriotism or pacifism becomes religious
    • then religion is part of the “Cause”, and “Christianity valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in the favor” — of whichever
  • temporal affairs are just material for obedience

Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, […] it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, [he is fallen, especially if very “religious”].

8 - Undulation & Dry Seasons

  • humans are spirit-body hybrid amphibians
    • bodies go through undulating change (think a trend graph)
  • humans surrender their will to something
    • demons want bounded wills, like cattle becoming food to be consumed
    • God wants freely conformed wills, like servants becoming sons, flowing over to give out

Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

  • why do we go through troughs?
    • His nature rejects being the Irresistible and the Indisputable (Lewis’ words), just to override the human will
    • He does use an initial draw
    • but it’s temporary, He’ll withdraw from conscious experience, all supports and incentives
    • “it is during troughs that it grows into the creature He wants it to be”, stumbling on own two legs of its own desire

He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice

9 - Pleasures & Temptations

  • troughs provide worse opportune temptation
    • peaks give more physical energy, more appetite, more tempted?
    • but powers of resistance are also at the highest
    • troughs produce a different (and worse) quality of temptation — more perverted and less beautiful
    • more drunkards from painkilling than celebration
  • pleasure is for them a regrettable means to an end, operating on the Enemy’s ground
    • pleasure has permissible (natural) and forbidden (least redolent, least pleasurable) expressions

An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.

  • law of undulation, or law of permanency?
    • we’re made to falsely believe that peaks or troughs last forever
  • hyper-pessimistic: tempt with above
  • hyper-optimistic: become content, doubt their initial passions, backslide into moderation
  • “all phases die”, using jargon (not reason) to move from “mood is fading” to “this is false”

A [religion in moderation] is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.

10 - Worldly Influences

  • assimilating subtle tells of associations in opposition to faith
    • “all mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be”
  • pride, not usually shame
    • one: pretending when no one’s looking, living two parallel lives
    • two: scoffing Puritans, having deeper complete two-sided life
    • three: anti-Puritan, so good to oblige friends

11 - Comedy

  • joy - always important
  • fun - can distract, but can empower
  • joke proper - hyper-serious and hyper-crude.
  • flippancy
    • people abuse humour to excuse wrongs
    • should disapprove, but instead leads even to admiration
    • “don’t be Puritanical”
    • numb to the important things, blunting intellect

comparing joy to music, obscure to Screwtape. But unlikely, if Lucifer did music and allat

12 - Lukewarm & Numbness

  • maintaining external habits, forgetting real difference from first months
    • no explicit repentance of definite sin, instead a vague, merely uneasy, feeling/mood of “not doing well, oh well”
  • worse case scenario: becoming lukewarm
    • we are aware, but reluctant
    • dislike, yet not omitting, religious duties
      • barely think before, forget right after
    • in prayer, temptations → turn to open arms begging to numb and distract
  • joy becomes less attractive
    • “Anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention”
    • wasting years, not in sweet sins, but in numbness
    • we start to chase things we don’t even like
  • small, unspectacular sins
    • “Murder is no better than cards, if cards can do the trick.”
    • “The safest road to hell is the gradual one..”

They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a pass-book.

13 - Distinct Desires

  • detaching from self? “losing/denying one self“?
  • the value of distinctness and individuality

When they are wholly His, they will be more themselves than ever.

While He is delighted to see them sacrificing even their innocent wills to His, He hates to see them drifting away from their own nature for any other reason.

  • argument from desire, leading to Desire (and away from Dullness)
    • we must retain retain strong personal taste
    • even if trivial, and not sin
    • they have no inherent virtue
    • but innocence, humility, self-forgetfulness, disinterestedness
  • we’re tempted to be shallow snobs for the “best”, “right”, “important” things we don’t truly enjoy
  • feeling without acting → less acting → less feeling

14 - True Humility

  • less grandiose resolutions from original conversion
    • just hope for daily/hourly bread
  • humility is more like “self-forgetfulness”, unlike:
    • vainglory
    • false modesty — self-focused humility (pride)
    • self-contempt opinion (vs truth)
  • Enemy’s aims, that we
    • rejoice in our best, even if it have been done by anyone else
    • equally in neighbour’s talents, or a random giraffe
    • love ourselves as our neighbours
    • better to think we are great, then forget about it, than to drill that we are the-worst
    • we’re not called to have an opinion of our own talents
    • realise we are just gifted creatures, we “might as well be proud of the colour of our hair”
    • even not to dwell too long on sins, because then our attention turns outward

15 - Future & Eternity

  • tortured fear, stupid confidence
  • we should have two focuses: eternity and present
  • the Past hads determinate nature and resembles Eternity
  • Future’s characteristics
    • biological necessity
    • inflames hope and fear
    • unknown
  • yet, Future is least like Eternity
    • sins (begrudgingly) reward pleasure in the Present, while promising Future profit
    • while we still plan good for the Future, we do it in the Present
    • haunted by imminent heaven or hell on earth, so ready to break commands in the Present, if we think we can attain the one or avert the other—our faith depending on the success-or-failure of the schemes whose end we will not live to see
    • goose chase of rainbow’s end, never honest/kind/happy now, always using [the real gift of the Present] as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the Future.
  • “living in the present” ambiguous → can still mean anxious about the future
    • untroubled for the Future, not because concerned with the Present, but self-persuaded that the Future is agreeable
    • this is false tranquility. disappointments → impatience
  • even if horrors in Future → but praying for Present grace

16 - Church

  • the Church

Gluttony

  • gluttony of delicacy vs gluttony of excess
    • small quantity, big behaviour
    • treating others badly.