S4E15 – TSL 9 – “Danger Zone”

In last week’s letter, Screwtape described the law of Undulation. In today’s letter, he explains how to exploit the trough periods during the undulations.

S4E15: Letter #9 – “Danger Zone” (Download)

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Timestamps

00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:15 – Welcome
04:49 – Song-of-the-week
07:24 – Quote-of-the-week
08:03 – Drink-of-the-week
10:30 – Patreon Toast
11:27 – Chapter Summary
12:19 – Discussion
47:35 – Unscrewing Screwtape
50:45 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Remarks

YouTube Version

After Show Skype Session

I shared some advice from Lewis to a woman who was suffering:

Show Notes

Opening Chit-Chat

• I asked Matt to guess the number of episodes we’ve released so far. At the time of recording we had released 157 episodes and had 270,000 downloads.
• Matt shared about recently reconnecting with one of his former teachers and I shared an email from my High School Extra English teacher:

I hope you are keeping well in these difficult times. I have been clearing out some papers and things and I found these two poems by David which I thought you would like.  I think they are lovely. He wrote them in 1992 when I was encouraging him to write poetry in the Japanese style which is very short!

Water rushing through my mind
Washing all thoughts away
leaving harmony.

The light of the sun
Giving new energy
Releasing my sorrows.

Email from my Dyslexia teacher

In Season 2 I would write a haiku for each chapter, so it was nice to read our some which I wrote at the age of ten or eleven!

Song-of-the-week

• It was really hard trying to come up with a song this week.
• Last week in Letter #8 Screwtape told us about the law of Undulation, how the patient’s affections wax and wane, so it was named the episode after the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ song, Love Rollercoaster.
• Today we’re studying Letter #9 where the Screwtape explains how to exploit the “Trough” periods in the patient’s life. I initially thought today’s episode would be called “It must have been love (but it’s over now)”, the 80’s classic from Roxette which appeared on the Pretty Woman soundtrack…
  • …but at church this morning I was thinking about the patient’s vulnerability during these Trough periods…so I thought it better to name today’s episode after a song from a different soundtrack. The movie is Top Gun starring Tom Cruise and the song is Danger Zone by Kenny Loggins:

Quote-of-the-week

• The quote-of-the-week came from this letter:

“Do not let him suspect the law of undulation. Let him assume that the first ardours of his conversion might have been expected to last, and ought to have lasted, forever, and that his present dryness is an equally permanent condition”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

Drink-of-the-week

• The quote-of-the-week was Glenmorangie Nectar D’or.
  • Color: Lemony gold
  • Nose: Dessert wine, honey, soft fruits, and spice
  • Body: Medium
  • Palate: Golden raisins and dates, gingerbread, and custard, balanced by lemon notes.
  • Finish: Long and spicy, with developing citrus fruits.

Patreon Toast

• One of the benefits for Gold-level supporters on Patreon is that we toast one of them each episode. Today we are toasting Cindy Keen:

Cindy, if you are in a spiritual trough or if you experience one in the future, we pray it’s an opportunity to grow closer to the Lord and become one of his dearest friends!

Patreon Toast

Chapter Summary

• Letter #9 was first published in The Guardian on 27th June, 1941 and here is my 100-word summary:

Screwtape explains how to exploit the “trough” periods in the patient’s life… Distorted sensual temptations during this time can be effective due to the patient’s weak defences. Another strategy is to make the patient assume the slump is permanent. If a pessimist, he must be kept away from Christians and Scripture and instead attempt to reclaim his initial fervour through sheer will-power. If an optimist, he should be taught to be content with the Trough and even come to doubt his initial fervour. Alternatively, the patient must assume that the current dullness somehow means that his faith is false.

One-hundred word summary of Chapter 9

Discussion

Recap

Today’s letter is a direct continuation from last week’s letter. If you recall, Wormwood thought that, through his own efforts, the patient’s religious phase was coming to an end. Screwtape instead explained this recent downtown in the patient’s religious fervour through the law of Undulation. This is the idea that humanity’s temporal nature means that it’s in a constant state of chance. As a result, the patient’s interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down, peaks and troughs. Screwtape begins today’s letter with a brief recap:

I hope my last letter has convinced you that the trough of dulness or “dryness” through which your patient is going at present will not, of itself, give you his soul, but needs to be properly exploited. What forms the exploitation should take I will now consider.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

Sensuality

So, what should Wormwood concentrate on during these trough periods? Screwtape says that they are excellent times for sensual temptations, particularly related to sex. Screwtape says that this might seem surprising. After all, would the exuberance and appetite of the peak periods be more fruitful? But he says…

…you must remember that the powers of resistance are then also at their highest [in the Peak periods]… The attack has a much better chance of success when the man’s whole inner world is drab and cold and empty.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

Screwtape says there’s another advantage to sexual temptation during trough periods:

…Trough sexuality is subtly different in quality from that of the Peak — much less likely to lead to the milk and water [insipid] phenomenon which the humans call “being in love”, much more easily drawn into perversions, much less contaminated by those generous and imaginative and even spiritual concomitants [accompaniment] which often render human sexuality so disappointing. 

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

He says this is true not just for sex, but for all the “desires of the flesh”:

It is the same with other desires of the flesh. You are much more likely to make your man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne [pain-killer] when he is dull and weary than by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment among his friends when he is happy and expansive.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

This is true for me as a comfort eater! I’m not thinking about the future. I just want to feel happy now.

On Enemy Territory

• Screwtape continues talking about pleasure and he ends this section by saying something which really shocked me when I first read this book a couple of decades ago (yes, I’m old!). Screwtape seems to regard pleasure as something dangerous for Hell!

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

We so often think of pleasures as something dangerous and sinful, but Screwtape blames God entirely! However, Screwtape had read St. Augustine so he explains to his nephew what they must do. Long-time listeners to the podcast will have heard us say something like this often…

All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent [suggestive] of its Maker, and least pleasurable. 

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

Screwtape wants the pleasure to always be diminishing.

To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return — that is what really gladdens our Father’s heart. And the troughs are the time for beginning the process.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

Lewis explains this idea more explicitly in The Four Loves where he says that a temperate man will enjoy an occasional glass of wine as a treat.  In contrast, the alcoholic gains little except brief relief from his cravings:

For the temperate man an occasional glass of wine is a treat… But to the alcoholic, whose palate and digestion have long since been destroyed, no liquor gives any pleasure expect that of a relief from an unbearable craving.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 2)

• Matt has started reading the Game of Thrones book and I mentioned that I’m re-reading Out of the silent planet.

Exploiting the Trough

So, the first way of exploiting the Trough was through sensual temptation. Screwtape now gives what he thinks is a superior way of exploiting the Trough. This second way relates to how the patient thinks about the Trough itself. As William O’Flaherty noted in our interview, the first step is to keep things out of the patient’s mind, in this case the law of undulation. Screwtape doesn’t want the patient to be conscience of the fact that they had these very natural ebbs and flows:

As always, the first step is to keep knowledge out of his mind. Do not let him suspect the law of undulation.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

Instead, Screwtape wants him to think about his current Trough in this way:

Let him assume that the first ardours of his conversion might have been expected to last, and ought to have lasted, forever, and that his present dryness is an equally permanent condition. 

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

Multiple errors! Initial ardour should have lasted forever! Instead this dryness will last forever instead!

Screwtape wants these misconceptions exploited differently, depending upon whether the patient is an optimist or a pessimist. He goes on to explain how to handle each situation.

The Pessimistic Patient

He says pessimists are becoming rarer (interesting observation), but that they’re easier to handle. 

You have only got to keep him out of the way of experienced Christians (an easy task now-a-days), to direct his attention to the appropriate passages in scripture, and then to set him to work on the desperate design of recovering his old feelings by sheer will-power, and the game is ours. 

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

Mature Christians will encourage him and also explain the law of undulation! We suggested that “the appropriate passages in scripture” is about ripping verses out of context.

Screwtape wants the patient to white-knuckle it because his will will eventually fail. Back in Season 1, Lewis told us in Mere Christianity that this was not the way to go:

It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go – let it die away – go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow – and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 6)

The Optimistic Patient

So, there’s one approach if the patient is a pessimist. What if he’s an optimist?

If he is of the more hopeful type, your job is to make him acquiesce in the present low temperature of his spirit and gradually become content with it, persuading himself that it is not so low after all.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

So, he should be taught to become content with the Trough and to never expect there to be a peak again. Screwtape can then get him even to doubt his initial fervour:

In a week or two you will be making him doubt whether the first days of his Christianity were not, perhaps, a little excessive. Talk to him about “moderation in all things”… A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all — and more amusing

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

Direct attacks on faith

Alternatively, Wormwood could be a bit more overt:

When you have caused him to assume that the trough is permanent, can you not persuade him that “his religious phase” is just going to die away like all his previous phases?

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

Screwtape points out that this isn’t actually logical:

Of course there is no conceivable way of getting by reason from the proposition “I am losing interest in this” to the proposition “This is false”. But, as I said before, it is jargon, not reason, you must rely on.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

Hell’s philology department can help out here through jargon. In particular, the word “phase”. Screwtape is particularly counting on the superiority which people tend to feel about “phases” they gone through because they’re in the past.

You keep him well fed on hazy ideas of Progress and Development and the Historical Point of View, I trust, and give him lots of modern Biographies to read? The people in them are always emerging from Phases, aren’t they?

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #9)

Screwtape will speak about the Historical Point of View towards the end of the book and we’ll talk about it more there. For the time being, let’s focus on the word “progress”.

There is no sense in talking of ‘becoming better’ if better means simply ‘what we are becoming’ — it is like congratulating yourself on reaching your destination and defining your destination as ‘the place you have reached’. Mellontolatry, or the worship of the future, is a fuddled religion.

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (“Evil and God”)

We also encountered it in Mere Christianity:

…progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Once again, Screwtape doesn’t want him to think about truth values, only jargon:

You see the idea? Keep his mind off the plain antithesis between True and False. Nice shadowy expressions — ”It was a phase” — ”I’ve been through all that” — and don’t forget the blessed word “Adolescent”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Regarding that last word “adolescent”… Since Matt hasn’t finished Narnia, I’ll just say this… Susan Pevensie.

Screwtape Unscrewed

1. Do remember you are vulnerable during the troughs
2. Don’t be fooled into cheap pleasure when you’re in a trough
3. Don’t lose hope and think that troughs are permanent
4. Do seek healthy pleasure
5. Don’t think that pleasure is wrong.
6. Do remember that “every good and perfect gift [comes from God]” (James 1:17)
7. Do build up a community around you
8. Do “remember your first love” (Revelation 2:4-5)
9. Do spend time in God’s word
10. Do think clearly

Providence eLearning