As we near the end of the collection of letters from Uncle Screwtape, Matt and David discuss one of his final letters where he talks about bravery and cowardice.
S4E58: “Fearless” (Download)
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Timestamps
00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:12 – Welcome
00:43 – Chit-Chat
08:56 – Song-of-the-week
10:40 – Quote-of-the-week
11:18 – Drink-of-the-week
12:48 – Patreon Toast
13:25 – Chapter Summary
14:17 – Discussion
51:16 – Unscrewing Screwtape
53:45 – The Other C.S. Lewis Podcast?
54:42 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Thoughts
56:06 – The C.S. Lewis Podcast
YouTube Version
Show Notes
Chit-Chat
- This is the first episode we’ve recorded after the conclusion of Lent and the arrival of Easter.
- I mentioned that in Byzantine parishes during this season we greet each other with “Χριστός ἀνέστη”, a Greek phrase which means “Christ is risen!” and the response “Aληθώς ανέστη!” which means “Indeed He is risen!”
- Marie and I spent our Easter in Wisconsin with family. Matt shared his experience at the Easter Vigil. I quoted something which we said in Season 1 of our podcast:
Faith is hanging in the darkness what you’ve seen in the light
David & Matt, Season 1
…as well as a line from George MacDonald in The Great Divorce:
…both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 9)
- I shared a few quotations related to fashions which I recently discovered:
The Truth is the truth even if nobody believes it, and a lie is still a lie, even if everybody believes it
Archbishop Fulton Sheen
“Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and all fashions are mild insanities. When Italy is mad on art the Church seems too Puritanical; when England is mad on Puritanism the Church seems too artistic. When you quarrel with us now you class us with kingship and despotism; but when you quarrelled with us first it was because we would not accept the divine despotism of Henry VIII. The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross
“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News (April 19, 1930)
Song-of-the-week
- On to the song-of-the-week… Today’s letter deals with the topics of virtue and vice, bravery and cowardice. Listener John Marr suggested…
- “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen
- “I Don’t Want to be a Hero” by Johnny Hates Jazz
- …and the epic rock anthem, “Holding Out for a Hero” by Bonnie Tyler
- I very nearly went with Brave, by Sarah Baraeilles, a great pick-me-up song, but in a moment of weakness, I decide to throw Matt a bone and, since we’re nearly done with the book, I chose….a Taylor Swift song, Fearless:
You take my hand and drag me head first, fearless
Taylor Swift, Fearless
And I don’t know why but with you
I’d dance In a storm in my best dress, fearless
Quote-of-the-week
- The quote-of-the-week is…
…[God] sees as well as you do[, Wormwood,] that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point…
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
Drink-of-the-week
- Matt drank Oban Little Bay Scotch:
- Nose: Dried apple chips, floral herbs and chopped mint, candied orange and a touch of milky coffee.
- Palate: Those fancy chocolates with the flakes of sea salt, pound cake topped with demerara sugar and cinnamon. Citrus returns on the mid-palate.
- Finish: Spiced with cinnamon and ginger.
- I drank Dewars 12.
Patreon Toast
- Well, let’s toast a Gold-level supporter… Monique Stam:
In the moment of weakness, may you always surrender to God and receive the virtue of courage and fortitude to overcome any vice or temptation.
Toast for Monique Stam
Chapter Summary
- So here’s my one-hundred word summary for Letter #29, which was first published in The Guardian on 14th November, 1941…
Given impending air raids, Screwtape addresses whether they should tempt the patient… …to cowardice …to pride by means of courage (but they can’t do that because they can’t tempt humans to any kind of virtue) …or tempt him to hatred of the Germans. They choose this option, muddling the patient’s thinking, and strengthening his hatred through fear. Unfortunately, fear also runs the risk of awakening the patient, yielding self-knowledge and, even worse, giving rise to repentance. Finally, Screwtape hopes to… …aggravate the man’s shame to produce despair, ….foster superstitions, … …and ultimately to catch the man by surprise.
Chapter Summary of Letter #30
Discussion
Impending Air Raids: Cowardice, courage or hatred?
- We open today’s letter with the revelation that German air raids are certain to come to the patient’s town. Screwtape wants his nephew to consider their demonic “policy:
Are we to aim at cowardice — or at courage, with consequent pride — or at hatred of the Germans?
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
Option #2: Courage
- Screwtape ignores Cowardice for the time-being. He first of all focuses on the second option, aiming at couraging for the sake of the consequent pride. Screwtape says this isn’t a good choice, because…
Our research department has not yet discovered…how to produce any virtue.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- Throughout this season we’ve often commented on how the devils always have to twist things. Up until now we’ve focussed on the twisting itself, but here we see the necessity of the raw material so that devils can actually do something. Screwtape explains:
To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue. What would Attila have been without his courage, or Shylock without self-denial
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- We identified the people mentioned in this qutoation:
- Attila is “Attila the Hun”, warrior and leader of the 5th Century Hun Empire. He features in both Night At The Museum and Bill and Ted’s Most Excellent Adventure.
- Shylock is a character from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. In the play he loans money to Antonio, under the agreement that if Antonio defaults on the loan, Shylock gets to take a “pound of flesh” as payment.
- We talked about how the devils can’t supply virtue to the patient in order to convert it to vice. Virtue can only come from God and this means that God constantly has a foothold in the patient’s life which they can’t entirely extricate. I think there’s also a sobering insight here that virtue can be transformed to vice… which explains why you can never have too much prudence.
- When speaking about twisting virtue, Matt alluded to Mere Christianity:
When we have understood about free will, we shall see how silly it is to ask, as somebody once asked me: “Why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong?” The better stuff a creature is made of — the cleverer and stronger and freer it is — then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow cannot be very good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius, still more so; a superhuman spirit best — or worst — of all.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book II, Chapter 3)
Option #3: Hatred
- So, if you recall, Screwtape presented three strategies: Cowardice, Courage, and Hatred. We’ve discovered that Courage is a non-starter, so Screwtape now turns to Hatred…
- He notes that they can easily tempt to hatred, particularly during turbulent times of danger and when the patient is fatigued. However, given that the patient is a Christian he knows he shouldn’t hate, so what should Wormwood do if he resists the temptation to Hate? Screwtape suggests that they do what they do best…
…muddle him. Let him say that he feels hatred not on his own behalf but on that of the women and children, and that a Christian is told to forgive his own, not other people’s enemies. In other words let him consider himself sufficiently identified with the women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but not sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper objects of forgiveness.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- This is one of the most unpopular of Christian doctrine – forgiveness. In Mere Christianity Lewis says that everyone thinks it’s lovely idea until they have to do it themselves, and then howl with pain! If listeners will recall, there is an important distinction Lewis makes…
Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 7)
Option #1: Cowardice
- Screwtape transitions by saying that hatred is best paired with Courage’s counterpoint, Fear. So, returning to the three options Screwtape outlined at the beginning of the letter: Cowardice, Courage, and Hatred. He discounted Courage, he spoke about Hatred, and now Screwtape talks about Cowardice…
- He explains that most vices have some pleasure to them… except cowardice. He points out that a frightened man is likely to make himself feel better by nurturing hatred.
The more he fears, the more he will hate. And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame. To make a deep wound in his charity, you should therefore first defeat his courage.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- So, Screwtape wants to discourage Courage, but that’s problematic because he says fostering cowardice is tricky. He says that the devils can often make people proud of their vices, but this can’t really be done with cowardice because God allows calamities (such as a war or natural disasters) which show the necessity and beauty of courage. As a result, cowardice is the one remaining vice about which humans genuinely feel shameful. Not only that, there’s a real danger in inspiring cowardice…
The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing with consequent repentance and humility.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- Screwtape is rather bitter that, during World War I (the war in which Lewis himself fought)…
…thousands of humans, by discovering their own cowardice, discovered the whole moral world for the first time. In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- Screwtape comments that…
This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world — a world in which moral issues really come to the point.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- We spoke about whether anyone is ever really pleased with their own cowardice. I suggested that we will sometimes recast it as intelligence. As an example, I referred to the play, A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt. I (badly) quoted two lines from the character COMMON MAN:
You know the old adage? “Better a live rat than a dead lion,” and that’s about it.
A Man For All Seasons, Robert Bolt
I’m breathing . . . Are you breathing too? . . . It’s nice, isn’t it? It isn’t difficult to keep alive, friends just don’t -make trouble – or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that’s expected. Well, I don’t need to tell you that. Good night. If we should bump into one another, recognize me.
- Matt referred to Mere Christianity where Lewis suggests if you want to find out how bad you are, to try and be good:
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 11)
- Quoting The Problem of Pain, I suggested that our own weakness puts us back into contact with reality and leads to self-knowledge:
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Chapter 6)
- In speaking about Cowardice, Screwtape talks about its counterpoint, Fortitude, in our quote-of-the-week:
…courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point…. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- The Pilate here, of course, refers to Pontius Pilate, who was the 5th Prefect of Judea, between AD 26-36. He is probably best known for being pressured by a mob to sanction the execution for a popular Jewish Rabbi.
- So, Fortitude is essential, that’s why it’s one of the Cardinal Virtues which Lewis outlines in Mere Christianity. I quizzed Matt on the Cardinal Virtues. I didn’t mention it in the episode, but here’s the mental picture I have to help me remember them.
- The brain relates to right choices (i.e. prudence)
- The arm relates to strength (i.e. fortitude)
- The scales relate to right and wrong (i.e. justice)
- The stomach relates to what we consume (i.e. temperance)
Responding to shame
- As I’ve mentioned before, the consequences of our sin are themselves a mercy from God. He lets us reap what we sow, to see the falsity of sin. This is why Screwtape is nervous about inspiring cowardice:
it is therefore possible to lose as much as we gain by making your man a coward; he may learn too much about himself!
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- Screwtape’s suggests that, instead of “chlorforming the shame” which comes from cowardice, instead of trying to numb it they should aggravate it and produce Despair:
This would be a great triumph. It would show that he had believed in, and accepted, the Enemy’s forgiveness of his other sins only because he himself did not fully feel their sinfulness — that in respect of the one vice which he really understands in its full depth of dishonour he cannot seek, nor credit, the Mercy.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- Unfortunately for Wormwood, Screwtape thinks that the patient is too well-formed at this point to succumb to despair…
…he knows that Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- Here he’s not talking about mental illness, but the mindset that my sin is greater than God, beyond His capacity to forgive and heal.
- I recommended my usual Casting Crowns song:
Matt recommended a newer song by the same band:
Fostering Cowardice
- Screwtape ends the letter with a bit of a HOW TO in temptations to cowardice:
The main point is that precautions have a tendency to increase fear.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- We discussed what Screwtape means by “precautions”. I suggested that it referred to the carrying gas masks, building an air raid shelter, putting up blackout curtains etc. Screwtape says that the problem with using these precautions to inspire fear is that they soon become routine. When they become routine, the fear starts to diminish.
- I compared this to going on a plane the first time and learning about the evacuation procedures. However, the nervousness which inspired the first time gradually diminishes…
- Screwtape suggests that it would be fruitful to have the patient always think about what he can do to make himself safer. This will give rise to superstitions…and Screwtape says…
The point is to keep him feeling that he has something, other than the Enemy and courage the Enemy supplies, to fall back on, so that what was intended to be a total commitment to duty becomes honeycombed all through with little unconscious reservations.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- The point of all this is to make him think that the worst can’t ever really come to the worst. He can then be caught off-guard:
…at the moment of real terror, rush it out into his nerves and muscles and you may get the fatal act done before he knows what you’re about. For remember, the act of cowardice is all that matters; the emotion of fear is, in itself, no sin and, though we enjoy it, does us no good,
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #29)
- This reminds me of the rats from Mere Christianity, suddenly turning on the lights in a cellar reveals the rats that are there, likewise, when we’re caught off-guard, our inner character is revealed.
Unscrewing Screwtape
- Do pray for and foster the virtue of Fortitude. It will be necessary to be a virtuous person.
- Do not… abandon virtue when it is inconvenient and risky
- Do not… give into despair. Your sin cannot be greater than God’s mercy.
- Do not… rely solely upon yourself – trust in God
- Do …remember that virtue can be twisted into vice. This is why need prudence!
- Do not let fear turn in to vice like anger or hatred
- Do …watch your temper when you’re tired
- Do not… rationalize away hateful thoughts. Christ commands us to love our enemies!
- Do… know yourself
- Do beware of fear, as it often feeds hatred. This warning can be reformulated several ways:
- “Fear is the path to the dark side”
- “Fear leads to anger … anger leads to hate … hate leads to suffering.”
Wrap-up
- At the end of the episode we play the trailer for the new C.S. Lewis podcast from Premier Christian Radio:
David recently interviewed the host, Ruth Jackson, about it.
Fr. Jeffrey Doyle
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