This blog is in conjunction with the C.S. Lewis DeCal. We will deconstruct the works of one of the most influential writers and thinkers of the 20th century. The course objective is to discuss the following three questions:
1. What structures, images, themes, and plots does C.S. Lewis use? What purpose and effects are created?
2. How are the life and thoughts of C.S. Lewis reflected in these works? (to better answer this question, we will explore Lewis’ diary and literary criticism in addition to Surprised by Joy)
3. How do the books connect to each other; what overarching themes and messages do you draw from the works?
Students should come out of this course with well-formulated answers to the above questions, and an overall deeper appreciation and understanding of CS Lewis and his works.
Responses must be at least: 200 words.
Tips for responses:
1. Ask the above three questions during your reading.
2. Comment/discuss issues discussed by other classmates.
3. Pick and image or passage that stands out to you, and discuss. Keep in mind: passages from outside sources (books, diaries, journals, etc.) do not count as part of the word limit.
Screwtape advises Wormwood to misdirect the Patient from the object of worship (God) itself to prevent the Enemy from victory. Regarding the war, prayer, and church, Screwtape essentially suggests, "you must keep shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy"; basically to tempt the person to focus on the wrong things (6).
ReplyDeleteConcerning the war, the man is to be taken over by either Patriotism or Pacifism, passion about either of the positions, but not the real cause. Wormwood is supposed to make the Person, "under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard [Patriotism or Pacifism] as the most important part" rather than Christianity (7). The current day Christian can easily be riled about causes such as abortion and forget to be fired up about their faith. Screwtape shows that one of the easiest ways to trip a believer is to make him think something only a touch off the truth is the truth. He says that even prayer can be made innocuous by changing the object of the man's prayers from his mother's need for healing to her many 'sins' -- "no thought or feeling from his prayers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one" (3). The person can be made not to pray for his real mother but for an imagined one. The prayer that they want "bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy's service" (4). Clearly, the person is made to think he is doing the right thing (actually praying), but he has misdirected prayer to creating moods or his own grievances. Similarly, to knock down the power of the church, a Person can be tempted to find that "neighbours sing out of tune or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes" (2). Instead of understanding church, the Patient could divide the people and focus on appearances. He then lives only a shell of real Christianity and doing the "right things."
Distraction:
ReplyDeleteIn the first few of Screwtape’s Letters, he focuses a great deal on distraction. It is not what “the patient” does think about, it is what he is kept from thinking of. Wormwood distracts the man from the worship in the Church by allowing or guiding him to be distracted by the others in the church. Rather than thinking of God, the man thinks of all the reasons that before had kept him from worshiping. In the third letter Screwtape advocates for Wormwood’s use of the patient’s mother as a mode of distraction. He encourages him to focus on her flaws and small annoyances from his youth rather than letting his newfound love from his relationship with Christ include her. These distractions prevent him from praying for his mother as well as keeping him focused on himself rather than God or his other relationships.
In Screwtape’s opinion, the best thing possible would be to “keep the patient from serious intention of praying altogether.” Even when he does pray, the tempters are able to distract him even with the prayers of his youth. The parrots like repetitions of his childhood prayers keep him from true intimacy with God, “The Enemy” in Screwtape’s minds.
These examples of the many ways in which the demons are able to detract from the focus on God also seem applicable to our own daily encounters that occur decades later. It is not just an adamant refusal to pray or acknowledge God, it can be something so subtle and unnoticed as guided forgetfulness and mere distraction.
“The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether.” (15)
ReplyDeleteThe structure and topic of the book is very interesting. I thought the letter writing a clever way of revealing Lewis’ encounters with the devil’s temptations in his life and in other’s lives. Screwtape’s attack on prayer raised the most awareness in me. Screwtape is fully aware that the Christian’s strength comes from God. This is why he stresses the importance of keeping the patient from praying at all. Screwtape is very sly and knows he cannot completely keep the new Christian from prayer. What better trap then to make the Christian “feel” he is praying when in fact the young Christian is not going to God at all? Screwtape emphasizes the “devotional mood” which is void of all “real concentration of will and intelligence.” While reading, I thought to myself that I have often found myself under the sneaky attack from the devil to turn prayer into more of a duty lacking my fervor and concentration than a time of laying my soul naked before God. I have found the book very encouraging because I think many people forget that the devil’s attacks are real and we must be aware of his existence in order to combat his “fiery arrows.”
In my presentation I plan to talk about how Screwtape saw the act of prayer and how effective it is. Than I plan to touch on the importance of faith as opposed to trusting your emotions and feelings as Screwtape told Wormwood to get the man caught up into
ReplyDeleteI'm presenting this week! So here is my outline for the presentation. It will be a history of perceptions of the Devil throughout time and different religions, and how those beliefs fed into Lewis' "reorganization" of these beliefs for The Screwtape Letters.
ReplyDeleteI. Religion and the Devil- Baha'i, Judaism, Islam, New Age, etc.
II. Christianity and Perceptions of the Devil
- Early Christians
- Middle Ages
- Pre-Screwtape
III. Screwtape Letters
-How Lewis Changed these Previous Beliefs
IV. Modern Perceptions of Satan
Hope this helps!
The main theme in the first six letters of The Screwtape Letters is interference. I use the word “interference” as Lewis has already used it in Surprised by Joy to express what he disliked the most about Christianity in his early years. Here Lewis uses interference of Evil in every aspect of a Christian man’s life. In the Screwtape Letters, Lewis reverses the interference he once felt in his life by Christianity to interference that now Wormwood, the devil, is supposed to impose to a Christian man, who is still not very strong in his faith. Even from the first six letters one can see the parallelism of Lewis’ personal early life with that of Wormwood’s patient. Screwtape advises Wormwood to interfere with the patient’s readings, Church, habits, behaviour, prayer, reactions to war, and uncertainty and fear for the future. Similarly, in Surprised by Joy, although not a conscious and explicit interference of Evil with Lewis’ life, one can see how Lewis’ readings drift from what one would call Christian; his habits and behaviour toward his father and teachers is not so loyal and forgiving as far as his thoughts of them are concerned; his prayers are inexistent; his reactions to war are not those of an idealist but rather that of an uncertain soldier of what is right and what is wrong, and of what the future entails.
ReplyDeleteHabits
ReplyDelete“fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the immediate sense experiences.” (127)
“hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed… All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favor” (129)
“build up…a good settled habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks” (131)
“There is no good at all in enflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train” (138)
“It is only so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us” (138)
Something that stood out to me was the multiple used of the word “habit”. In the Letters Screwtape depicts this battle between The Enemy (God) and themselves to permanently possess human souls. For Screwtape a big part of the battle seems to be what kind of habits are formed in each human since there are “good habits”, such as the “habit of mutual annoyance” between people around each other for long periods of time, and there are “fatal habits”, such as “habits of virtue”. These habits can be mental, like constantly thinking about yourself rather than the people around you, or they can be physical, such as being charitable to your neighbors, and these habits have an effect on who eventually obtains the human soul. I just find it interesting that in these letters the eventual damnation or salvation is dependent on the repetition of certain actions and thoughts and for the tempters the objection seems to be to direct these actions and thoughts away from “The Enemy” and towards the immediate world and the immediate self. For the tempters it is “fatal” when the “patient” starts to practice virtuous actions towards the people who are close to them and also when they start to think about and trust in God’s bigger picture, instead of focusing on “sense experiences” such as hunger, lust or fear and worrying about the uncertainties of the future.
"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." (133)
ReplyDeleteDeception is the fundamental weapon used in the battle between screwtape and his colleagues against who the calls the “enemy.” It is screwtapes prime objective to keep humans in the realm of “ordinary” and focused on the invaluable ‘real life.’ This strategy is laid out in chapter 3. It is here that screwtape writes a letter to wormwood in regards to the newly converted patient and his mother. Screwtape advises Wormwood to create a mutual annoyance between the newly Christian convert and his mother. In this screwtape advises wormwood to bring the patient to a condition to which he is unable to do an accurate self-examination. Step two wormwood is advised to have the patient focus on his mother sins instead of her current physical state which is rheumatism. Thirdly, wormwood is advised to have the patient and the mother take every action and word that is done and said to one another for face value. And it is during this process that they become completely annoyed with one another. And the final stage is used to cause a division between the two via jealousy or any other anti-love emotion. Now the patient begins to doubt the power of his conversion and the mother is turned off from her sons lack of compassion, understanding and self righteousness. Screwtape makes it clear that he is not discouraged when patients began to convert to Christianity, because he uses the freedom that humans are given against them. His objective is to create hatred and separation from one another by keeping everyone in a haze of reality.
Screwtape encourages Wormword to keep the patient in the dark; he suggests that the best way to keep a patient from the Enemy is to keep that patient in the dark. The worst thing that Wormword can is to let the patient think about his life. Screwtape suggests that Wormword keep his patient from thinking about his life in a positive way. Lewis suggests that the enemy, the devil, actively tries to keep us in the dark. The best way for us to be kept in the dark is to make sure that we don’t think about anything. Screwtape tells Wormword that keeping his patient from thinking about things that are pleasurable because when humans delight in the pleasurable they become happy, and happiness keeps us away from revealing in sorrow. Lewis suggests that the Devil and his minions work to keep humans from thinking or acting in ways that are pleasurable in God’s eyes. Lewis suggests that by thinking about God in a superficial way is exactly what the enemy wants. The Devil wants us to think about God in a way that distances us from Him. Lewis suggests that we must be aware of the supernatural forces around us because some of those forces are actively trying to keep us in the dark.
ReplyDeleteSarah Vaughan
I like how Efrosini mentioned “interference.” I agree with her choice of this word because I see a very common theme of interference anything proper done by the “patient.” C.S. Lewis writes The Screwtape Letters from the perspective of the demons and evil spirits. Understanding this perspective allows us to understand the kind of things the demons view as obstructions to their ultimate purpose. “I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian.” (2) Throughout the letters we read, Screwtape advises his nephew, Wormwood, to distort the Patient’s direction—or focus—towards something else that is subtly contrary to his true intentions. Screwtape never suggests for Wormwood to make the Patient do anything blatantly evil or wrong, on the contrary, he suggests for Wormwood to make the Patient go through the motions of doing the right thing but meanwhile direct his focus towards the wrong areas. This tactic allows the Patient to feel as if he is being holy and justified. Interference by deception is the tactic used to corrupt the Patient in a covert fashion. Screwtape’s main focus is to cause the Patient to believe that he is doing the right thing while he is in fact not doing it.
ReplyDeleteJeremiah Lee
“to decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite” (page 141)
ReplyDeleteIt seems that a lot of the advice that Screwtape gives to Wormwood is to take the things God has decided to use for good and to use them for evil. For example, at one point Screwtape explains to Wormwood that God wants the Patient to pray and to do it in a manner that is not self-righteous before God. However, Screwtape tells Wormwood that he must try to get the Patient to form an idol in his mind that he thinks is God and have him pray to that. Or, God calls his people to love, but Screwtape wants Wormwood to stir up scenarios that will cause the Patient to be angry or annoyed with his mother. This quote that I have chosen also seems to go hand in hand with the idea of deception that Breana wrote about. In the end, Screwtape and Wormwood are trying to keep the Patient in the dark by trying to get him to do the opposite of what God wants him to do. By trying to keep him in the dark and distort what God has created, they are undoubtedly being deceptive.
Looking through chapters 1 through 9 of Screwtape Letters, I noticed that the theme of truth seemed to come up quite often. Throughout all the advice, Screwtape continues to advise Wormwood to above all, to lead his patient into a flurry of confusion, thus keeping him finding the truth. For example, in chapter 1, he says to Wormwood, “Make him think [materialism] is strong, or stark or courageous—that is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about,“ showing how he recommends that he appeal to the patient’s interests in order to confuse him. As the book continues, even after the patient has become a Christian, he seeks to confuse the patient using his point of focus as a way to muddy up his view of Christianity. He does this by having the patient focus on the churchgoers and the church itself rather than the God the church worships. This would therefore distort the patient’s view of Christianity and lead him further and further away from the truth. In the words of Screwtape, “When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours,” showing how he is manipulating the eyes and opinions of the patients view about church. This idea continues through out the rest of the chapters as well, on other topics such as war, sex, and familial relations each mentioned in an attempt to lead the patient further from desiring to find truth.
ReplyDeleteThe theme of the immense amounts of distractions that humans face in day to day life is present in Lewis' "Screwtape Letters". While writing to Wormwood, Screwtape states: “Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours..” (140). Screwtape is showing Wormwood that as long as humans are preoccupied by worldly events, it is easy for them to stray away from God. Lewis is explaining that the Devil will sometimes work to place such a large importance on these types of occurrences that people forget the importance of thinking of the Lord in day to day life. Screwtape explains that Wormwood’s goal should be to get his Patient to never actually think of the real, spiritual God, but rather attribute God’s being to an object. He says, “…whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it—to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him” (134). Screwtape wants Wormwood to use distractions during prayer to keep the Patient from making an actual spiritual connection with God. Through doing this, Screwtape believes that a person will never gain access to the Lord because their minds will be too preoccupied with other things. I found this compelling because in my daily prayer, I notice that sometimes I go through the motions of prayer without remembering the real reason for which I am doing it, to make a connection with God. It is easy to pray, just for the sake of praying, and not realize that you are not listening to the other voice on the side of the prayer. Lewis is trying to explain that as humans, we all need to speak, as well as listen.
ReplyDelete"We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique." -- P.34
ReplyDeleteI believe that this quote is a hugely important note of the agenda that the enemy has. Basically if the devil can get as few men of God to recognize the works of the enemy in their own lives and in the body of Christ, and the more men of God that can get distracted by some other purpose other than serving Jesus, the more room and access the enemy has to our hearts. Therefore we must keep up our guard against the enemy and not be shaken, stirred or blinded by our own desires or our own glory. A great man of God and revivalist Leonard Ravenhill said, “If we do not trust and obey, we will rust and decay…” What happens when the outside of a car begins to rust? It starts to forms open holes and a weak armor to fight against the externalities and destructive forces of nature. That same idea applies to our spiritual lives, for if we do not constantly obey and seek the Lord, our defense mechanisms and connection with Jesus will rust and decay…
In C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Lewis uses several themes to emphasize his overall purpose of each letter. In Chapter 5, Lewis discusses the idea of Wormwood being ecstatic about the start of the European war. Clearly, he is pretty thrilled of the idea of human suffering and despair. Wormwood thinks that a war will make people dive deeper into the realm of anger and antagonism. Instead, another idea comes up, which is the idea that war is not good for hell because it draws humans to turn to God. It makes humans want to find a higher cause, purpose and reason for life. This theme of war and hell is quite interesting to me. I think it is so intriguing because it is difficult to figure out the effect that war will have on people. It is quite ironic because on one hand, Screwtape and Wormwood would be happy because war might cause people to become likely to stray from religion because they feel God isn’t doing enough for them. If He was, there wouldn’t be pain and war. On the other hand, (and in the case of what Screwtape and Wormwood are in), people may decide that they need to find a higher purpose and comfort to help them get through the tough pain of war. C.S. Lewis describes this as a deep worry for people going to heaven rather than hell. This is just one of C.S. Lewis’s entertaining themes as he points out many that are highly amusing.
ReplyDelete“Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by real.” (p. 127)
ReplyDeleteOne thing that Screwtape continues to emphasize is the “real life” that humans have a weakness for. Whenever a ‘patient’ is about to think about God or a higher power, Screwtape urges Wormwood to direct the patient’s thoughts elsewhere, and to ground them in the ‘familiar,’ because then the ‘unfamiliar’ becomes harder to believe. Even after Wormwood’s patient has converted to Christianity, Screwtape says that it is possible to bring him back, because all of the patient’s old habits are still intact (meaning all of his weaknesses). By forcing the patient to focus on the flaws of the people in the church and making him feel disappointed, Wormwood would be able to divert the patient’s attention away from God and from his conversion, and instead cause the patient to be turned off from the church. Also, with the war and the patient’s military service, Wormwood would be able to focus the patient’s attention on fear. Using the patient’s human emotion and fear, the patient is easily distracted, and Screwtape uses all these methods to prevent patients from even thinking about the bigger picture. I understand how distracted humans can become because of the attention that they pay to immediate concerns and emotions; I am constantly struggling with that as well. It is really interesting to read these letters and see how all the human weaknesses are reflected in myself.