S4E36 – TSL 18 – “What’s love got to do with it?”

Former guest of the show, Dr. Jason Lepojärvi, returns to discuss Screwtape’s thoughts on love, sex, and marriage, as well as to listen to some Tina Turner and ask “What’s love got to do with it?”

S4E36: “What’s love got to do with it?” (Download)

Show Notes

Biographical Information

Dr. Lepojarvi was born to a Canadian mother and a Finnish father. He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Helsinki. His master’s thesis focused on the theology of the body and sexuality by Pope John Paul II, and was published as the first introduction to the subject in Finnish.

As a Visiting DPhil Candidate at Oriel College, Oxford, he served as the President of the Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society from 2012 to 2013. After marrying his wife, Iisa, in 2013, he was appointed the Junior Research Fellow in Theology at St Benet’s Hall.

He has worked as a Scholar in Residence at Regent College in Vancouver and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Thorneloe University in Ontario. His doctoral dissertation “God Is Love but Love Is Not God: C. S. Lewis’s Theology of Love” analyzed C. S. Lewis’s position in, and contribution to, the debate on love that preoccupied much of twentieth century Protestant and Roman Catholic thought.

Biographical details of Dr. Jason Lepojärvi

Chit-Chat

• We spoke about Dr. Lepojärvi’s YouTube Channel.

Song-of-the-week

• The song-of-the-week was Tina Turner’s “What’s love got to do with it?”:

• Given the discussion of marriage, “Get me to the church on time” from My Fair Lady was a solid choice
• Given the discussion of romance, Can’t Help Falling In Love by the king, Elvis Presley was tempting
• Given the discussion of “the marital embrace”, the Boyz II Men classic, I’ll Make Love To You, would have also been fitting.

Quote-of-the-week

“We have done [a great work] through the poets and novelists by persuading the humans that a curious, and usually short lived experience which they call ‘being in love’ is the only respectable ground for marriage; that marriage can and ought to, render this excitement permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

Drink-of-the-week

• The next thing is our drink-of-the-week, which today is Typhoo Tea and Dr. Lepojärvi was enjoying his morning coffee.

Patreon Toast

• Finally, we toast one of our Gold-level Patreon supporters. Today we are toasting Rachel Ross:

Rachel, thank you for all you bring to our Slack community, for your inquisitiveness, honesty and enthusiasm. May you always reject Screwtape’s “zero-sum game” approach to life and instead always be filled to overflowing with the love of God.

Patreon Toast for Rachel Ross

Chapter Summary

Screwtape offers us a seminar on sex, marriage and love… Professor Screwtape explains that God demands from us abstinence …or monogamy. The former was made harder since the Fall, the latter encumbered by romantic writers. Heaven’s philosophy of love makes no sense to Screwtape, preferring Hell’s zero-sum game perspective. Screwtape unpacks the properties of sex which makes it favourable to the Enemy: its association with affection, as well as being the very means of family-building. He concludes by explaining how Hell has taught humans to see “being in love” as the only reason for entering into and remaining in marriage.

Chapter Summary of Letter #18

Discussion

School’s Out

• Screwtape begins this letter by saying that Wormwood should have learned about sexual temptation at the Training College under Slubgob. Screwtape has already expressed his distaste for the “amphibian” nature of humanity, being a spirit and body composite. It’s clear that he finds the whole subject of sexual temptation immensely tedious, no doubt due to his purely spiritual nature. 
• Screwtape therefore announces that he’s going to focus on the larger issues in this letter…
  • First of all he looks at the dilemma which God gives to humanity
  • He considers the respective philosophies of Heaven and Hell
  • He then talks about the properties of sex itself and its relationship to love and marriage.

The Dilemma

• So… he begins by explaining that God presents humanity with a dilemma:

…either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

That’s the choice! He then explains that Hell has made both of these more difficult:

Ever since our Father’s first great victory, we have rendered the former [complete abstinence] very difficult to them.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

…and here we come to the quote-of-the-week:

The latter [unmitigated monogamy], for the last few centuries, we have been closing up as a way of escape. We have done this through the poets and novelists by persuading the humans that a curious, and usually short-lived, experience which they call “being in love” is the only respectable ground for marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding. This idea is our parody of an idea that came from the Enemy.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

• We agreed that the the “victory” Screwtape mentions here was most likely referring to the Fall of humanity in Genesis 3. Dr. Lepojärvi explained that that Lewis and Pope St. John-Paul argued that our inability to control over our bodies and master our sexual passions is at least partly a result of the the fall. Jason mentioned that St. Augustine even thought this was true of male arousal!
• What about the fall made “complete abstinence” harder? Would you mind explaining why “unmitigated monogamy”, has been made harder over the years through poets and novelists?

“The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we’re made”

J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia

• The final line in that section, Screwtape says that this whole idea of the centrality of romantic love to marriage is a Hellish parody of an idea that came from God. Screwtape is going to unpack that further, but first he needs to explain the border philosophy of Hell…

“…there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

• We spoke about James Bond, as well as the movie, Titantic:

• We spoke about the Karate Kid:

Hell’s Zero-Sum Game

• ….fortunately, Screwtape explains Hell’s philosophy next:

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom [self-evident truth] that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses…. “To be” means “to be in competition”.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

• The philosophy of Hell is basically that everything is a zero-sum game. Everything is a win-lose situation. If one person wins, another loses.

Heaven’s Love

• This is then contrasted with the philosophy of Heaven.
• Screwtape says that Heaven attempts to evade the obvious veracity of Hell’s philosophy and instead suggests that it’s possible to have a win-win situation:

[God] aims at a contradiction. Things are to be many, yet somehow also one. The good of one self is to be the good of another. This impossibility He calls love, and this same monotonous panacea [cure] can be detected under all He does and even all He is — or claims to be.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

• Love doesn’t reduce everything to a zero-sum. It believes in mutual flourishing and even sacrificing oneself for another.

Trinitarian Love

• Screwtape says that this ludicrous idea is even found in God Himself:

Thus He is not content, even Himself, to be a sheer arithmetical unity; He claims to be three as well as one, in order that this nonsense about Love may find a foothold in His own nature.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

• Why is the Trinity important? Founding love in God’s very nature – a communion of persons.

The setup of sex

• Now that we’ve got a clear understanding of the difference in outlook between Heaven and Hell, Screwtape turns to the subject of sex and, once again, he has some surprising things to say…
• Screwtape says that sex could have been (from Hell’s point of view) quite innocent, a simple exersion of power of the strong over the weak.
  • He recalls, almost wistfully, how mating among some spiders concludes with the bride eating the groom! That’s what Screwtape would like for humans…
• Unfortunately for Screwtape, not only does this rarely happen in human mating, he says that sex itself has a number of characterists which are in Heaven’s favour…

…the Enemy has gratuitously associated affection between the parties with sexual desire. He has also made the offspring dependent on the parents and given the parents an impulse to support it — thus producing the Family, …the members are more distinct, yet also united… The whole thing, in fact, turns out to be simply one more device for dragging in Love.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

• It’s easy to think of sex as something on the side of sin and Satan, but as Screwtape points out here, it’s got a certain natural holiness to it, fostering both affection between the couple and is ordered towards the building of families.

One flesh

• Screwtape goes on to talk about the “one flesh” union of sex, noting tha the Bible  uses this description to describe married couples regardless of the happiness or romantic furvor of the couple. He says humans are quick to forget this.
• Screwtape goes on to do a little bit of Bible study, talking about what St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

You can also make them forget that the man they call Paul did not confine [the “one flesh” union] it to married couples. Mere copulation, for him, makes “one flesh”… The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

• This is a reference 1 Corinthians 6:16 and Genesis:

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body

Genesis 2:24

Do you not know that he who joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two shall become one flesh.”

1 Corinthians 6:16

• Screwtape and St. Paul are saying that something mystical and transcendent happens whenever man and woman come together. Glue and paper example.

Basis or result?

• Now we come to Screwtape’s strategy for love, sex, and marriage…
• He says that because love is a fruit of marriage, that the humans can be taught to think of “being in love” as the only thing that makes a marriage happy or holy.

In other words, the humans are to be encouraged to regard as the basis for marriage a highly-coloured and distorted version of something the Enemy really promises as its result.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

• He says there are Hellish advantages if this can be achieved… Firstly, those who don’t have the gift of continence [self-restraint in sex] will avoid marriage if they don’t fall madly in love, since they will regard marry for any other reason a low motive. Screwtape finds this quite funny:

They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

• In this section, Screwtape also has this throw-away line:

 (Don’t neglect to make your man think the marriage-service very offensive.)

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

• Why do you think he makes this comment about the wedding ceremony? I think it’s most likely a reference to the vows couples typically make about “For better, for worse” and “welcoming children from God”. My guess is that these promises might seem pretty low?
• The other advantage of getting people to mistake the basis of marriage for its result is that “love” can be used as an excuse for license. Screwtape says that:

…any sexual infatuation whatever, so long as it intends marriage, will be regarded as “love”, and “love” will be held to excuse a man from all the guilt, and to protect him from all the consequences, of marrying a heathen, a fool, or a wanton [someone sexually indiscriminate].

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #18)

• It’s easy to conclude that Lewis is against romance. However, hopefully this section of Mere Christianity clears things up:

Being in love is a good thing, but… You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity… whatever people say, the state called “being in love” usually does not last…  Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be “in love” need not mean ceasing to love… It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.

Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 6)

Unscrewing Screwtape

1. Do not assume “being in love” is the only basis for marriage
2. Do not assume that “being in love” is the only thing which makes a marriage permanent
3. Do not view life as a zero-sum game.
4. Do be careful about the media you consume, particularly regarding how it affects your notions of romance, sex, and marriage.
5. Do remember that sex points to the things of Heaven and that sex is always significant
6. Do not assume that emotional highs will last forever

Dr. Jason Lepojärvi

• YouTube Channel
• Academic C.S. Lewis work
• Oxford-style tutorials

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