There is a lull in the War. Should Wormwood make the patient more worried or less worried, and should he get him to focus on the past, the present or the future?
S4E28: Letter #15 – “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” (Download)
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Timestamps
00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:13 – Welcome
00:43 – Chit-Chat
01:11 – Song-of-the-week
03:47 – Quote-of-the-week
05:49 – Drink-of-the-week
08:35 – Patreon Toast
09:44 – Chapter Summary
11:34 – Discussion
39:58 – Unscrewing Screwtape
42:53 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Thoughts
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
Show Notes
Opening Chit-Chat
Song-of-the-week
- In today’s letter, Screwtape discusses what to do with the lull in the war, and explains whether Wormwood should make the patient concentrate on the past, the present or the future.
- We had a few options for the episode title and song-of-the-week…
- Listener John Marr suggested Life during Wartime by Talking Heads…solid suggestion…
- I had initially thought of Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper…
- …but in the end I settled on another of John’s suggestions. In today’s song-of-the-week, Fleetwood Mac echo Screwtape’s advice in their song Don’t stop thinking about Tomorrow:
In case you don’t know the song, the chorus is:
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
Fleetwood Mac, Don’t stop thinking about Tomorrow
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here
It’ll be better than before
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone
- I mentioned that I listen to this song before going to the gym:
Quote-of-the-week
- Here’s the quote-of-the-week:
“[God] would… have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present… obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.”
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #15)
“If…he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once.”
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #15)
Drink-of-the-week
- The quote-of-the-week is Dewar’s White Label:
- Nose: Honey / Peach / Apple / Wood
- Palette: Medium / vanilla fudge, toffee, heather honey, oak/
- Finish: Good length, honeyed sweetness
Patreon Toast
No Patreon toast!
Chapter Summary
- I shared my one-hundred word summary of today’s letter:
There is a lull in the war and the patient’s anxiety level is starting to fall – what should Wormwood do? Screwtape says that God wants humanity to focus on the present and eternity. Screwtape therefore wants us to live in either the past or the future, but has a preference for the future. This is because it is full of uncertainty, inflaming hopes and fears, and is the “home for all vice”. He concludes that the patient should only be peaceful if he thinks everything will be okay, which will build up the resentment if it should not.
One-hundred word summary of Letter #15
Discussion
Fear and Confidence
I had noticed, of course, that the humans were having a lull in their European war — what they naïvely call “The War”! — and am not surprised that there is a corresponding lull in the patient’s anxieties. Do we want to encourage this, or to keep him worried? Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind. Our choice between them raises important questions.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #15)
- There was naivety in the earlier part of the century when people called World War I “The Great War”. They thought it was going to be the war to end all wars. Little did they know, there would be a sequel soon afterwards.
- There’s a lull in the war and this has resulted in a lull in the patient’s anxieties. What should be done about this? Should it be encouraged or discouraged? Screwtape says that “Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind”.
- Which of these they should choose turns on some important questions…
Time and Eternity
- In earlier letters Screwtape had spoken about the “amphibious” nature of humanity, being composed of both flesh and spirit. Now Screwtape speaks about another way in which humanity has a foot in two different campes.
The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present — either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #15)
- God wants us to attend to eternity and the present.
- “Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?” – Christianity Reflections, Historicism
The business of Hell – The Past
- So what does Hell suggest instead? Screwtape says that getting the patient to live int he past can be rather good…
Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #15)
- Widows and scholars are good to tempt to living in the past.
- Scholars have a keen interest in the past.
- As for widows, remember the Mother in The Great Divorce:
“You’re wrong. No man ever felt his son’s death more than Dick. Not many girls loved their brothers better than Muriel. It wasn’t against Michael they revolted: it was against you-against having their whole life dominated by the tyranny of the past: and not really even Michael’s past, but your past.“
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)
“You are heartless. Everyone is heartless. The past was all I had.”
“It was all you chose to have. It was the wrong way to deal with a sorrow. It was Egyptian-like embalming a dead body“
- He says that the downside of having the patient live in the past is that he has “real knowledge” of it and it has a “determinate nature” being like eternity.
- Screwtape doesn’t say this, but you can imagine him offering further advice as to how to compensate for these disadvantages by having a poor assessment of the past (like the Mother in The Great Divorce)
The business of Hell – The Future
- However, he says that a far more profitable strategy is to have the man live entirely in the Future:
It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #15)
- He points out “biological necessity” (and by this I think he means the survival instinct) points towards the future already.
- What he seems to really love about the future is that it is uncertain. As a result, it can nurture either hope or fear. Remember the earlier letter where Screwtape wanted the patient worrying about all the mutually-exclusive futures?
- Screwtape always wants the patient to live in unreality and the future offers that.
- He points to useful schemes which all rely upon the future:
- We’ve mentioned “Creative Evolution” before in Letter 7. It was a indea developed by French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson.
- “Scientific Humanism” argued that humankind’s full potential could be achieved through human effort alone and not through any supernatural force.
- Communism is the attempt to build a classless society where goods and services are collectively owed.
Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone interests us) is already over. The pleasure is just the part of the process which we regret and would exclude if we could do so without losing the sin; it is the part contributed by the Enemy, and therefore experienced in a Present. The sin, which is our contribution, looked forward.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #15)
- Sin always disappoints and fails to deliver.
The serious business of Heaven
To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too — just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future — haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth — ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other — dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #15)
- …
Living in the present
It follows then, in general, and others things being equal, that it is better for your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope (it doesn’t much matter which) about this war than for him to be living in the present. But the phrase “living in the present” is ambiguous. It may describe a process which is really just as much concerned with the Future as anxiety itself. Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once. Here again, our Philological Arm has done good work; try the word “complacency” on him. But, of course, it is most likely that he is “living in the Present” for none of these reasons but simply because his health is good and he is enjoying his work. The phenomenon would then be merely natural. All the same, I should break it up if I were you. No natural phenomenon is really in our favour. And anyway, why should the creature be happy?
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #15)
- Philology is the study of the structure and development of languages.
Screwtape Unscrewed
- Do pray for all the virtues you will need in the coming days to meet both the good and the bad.
- Do focus on the present and eternity.
- Do what is right, and leave the rest to God.
- Do plan tomorrow’s good deed.
- Do not focus on what you cannot control.
- Do not “put your trust in princes”
The “cult” I referred to was based on this book by Danny Wallace.
