S4E60 – TSL 30 – “Under Pressure”

The patient is about to be in a high-stress situation and Screwtape wants his nephew to exploit this. Richaél from the Clumsy Theosis podcast joins David to unpack this devilish advice.

S4E60: “Under Pressure” (Download)

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Timestamps

00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:12 – Welcome
00:36 – Chit-Chat
07:09 – Song-of-the-week
10:35 – Quote-of-the-week
10:58 – Drink-of-the-week
11:34 – Patreon Toast
12:00 – Chapter Summary
12:59 – Discussion
52:55 – Unscrewing Screwtape
54:30 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Thoughts

YouTube Version

After Show Skype Session

No Skype Session this week!

Show Notes

Chit-Chat

• Since it’s May 4th, Star Wars Day, May The Force be with you!
• We exchanged the traditional Slavic Byzantine Easter greeting:
  • “Christ is Risen”/”Indeed He is risen”, or in Church Slavonic, “Christos Voskres”/“Voistynu Voskres”
• Richaél shared a little bit about the origins of her podcast, Clumsy Theosis.
  • I highlighted a series which Richaél had just completed on her podcast on the broad story of Salvation History.

Song-of-the-week

• The topics of today’s letter are fatigue and stress. Our Meistro, long-time listener John Marr, had quite a high brow suggestion for the song-of-the-week, “Nessun Dorma” by Puccini (literally it means in Italian “Let no one sleep”). However, in his message, John emphasized that this is an aria, NOT a song per se, so I disqualified it from being song-of-the-week. It is beautiful though…

• This week’s song comes from a different kind of musical royalty! Rather than Puccini, the song-of-the-week is Under Pressure by the British Band, Queen.

Pressure pushing down on me
Pressing down on you, no man ask for…
Under pressure – that burns a building down
Splits a family in two
Puts people on streets

Queen, Under Pressure

Quote-of-the-week

• The quote-of-the-week is…

“…moderate fatigue is a better soil for peevishness than absolute exhaustion. This depends partly on physical causes, but partly on something else. It is not fatigue simply as such that produces the anger, but unexpected demands on a man already tired.”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

Drink-of-the-week

• The drink-of-the-week is a local San Diego beer, Ballast Point’s “Passing Haze”, which is an IPA.

Patreon Toast

• Today we are toasting Patreon supporter Justin Patton:

Justin, whatever trials you encounter, whatever strain and stress you feel, may you always lean on the One who can sustain you through them all. Cheers!

Toast for Patreon Supporter, Justin Patton

Chapter Summary

• So, on to Letter #30, our penultimate letter, which was first published in The Guardian on 21st November, 1941. Here is my one-hundred word summary…

Despite being very frightened, the patient did his duty during the recent air raid and perhaps even a bit more than his duty demanded. Needless to say, Screwtape is furious, telling his nephew to bring back food or be food himself.

Screwtape says the patient’s current fatigue can be put to good use if handled correctly by dissuading him from resolute commitment by nurturing false hopes and receiving all disappointments as injury.

He outlines how to make best use of future carnage by confusing the patient’s language, regarding all horrors as “real”, but all joys and beauties as mere sentiment.

Chapter Summary of Letter #30

Discussion

Wormwood’s failure

• Screwtape is not happy with his nephew (again). He begins in a frustrated tone…

I sometimes wonder whether you think you have been sent into the world for your own amusement. I gather, not from your miserably inadequate report but from that of the Infernal Police, that the patient’s behaviour during the first raid has been the worst possible.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• In the chapter summary said what was “terrible” about the patient’s behaviour. Here it is in Screwtape’s own words:

He has been very frightened and thinks himself a great coward and therefore feels no pride; but he has done everything his duty demanded and perhaps a bit more

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• Richaél spoke about these words of St. Paul:

We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.

Romans 8:28

Screwtape’s threat’s

• Wormwood had apparently complained to  his uncle about the toughness of his job, but he doesn’t find a sympathetic ear with Screwtape…

What is the use of whining to me about your difficulties?

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• He says that Wormwood is operating on God’s idea of justice that extenuating circumstances should be considered, all of which is heresy to Screwtape! He reminds his nephew that Hell is…

…concerned only with results. Bring us back food, or be food yourself.…

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• Screwtape will happily feast on humans or other devils. Listeners will recall that Lewis spoke about this consumption in his 1961 Preface to this book. Hell is a dog-eat-dog world…
• Richael spoke compared Hell’s mindset of utility and our world today, where people are valued on their usefulness.

A good start

• It’s not all bad news in Wormwood’s letter, though… Screwtape finds some reasons for hope, particularly related to reports of the patient’s growing fatigue. The patient’s tiredness is no doubt growing from the cocktails of air raids and all his various responsibilities (family, work, and war-related). Screwtape warns his nephew that tiredness won’t automatically produce Hellish results…

… it won’t fall into your hands. Fatigue can produce extreme gentleness, and quiet of mind, and even something like vision. If you have often seen men led by it into anger, malice and impatience, that is because those men have had efficient tempters.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• Richael explained that fatigue will either result in taking the steam out of your ego and connected it to her “Life Verse”:

I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship. Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.

Romans 12:1-2

• Alternatively, fatigue can deteriorate your discipline. She spoke about the H.A.L.T. Rule in her marriage, to not talk about anything controversial if you’re Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired.

Better luck with moderate fatigue

• Screwtape normally likes extremes (except, of course, extreme devotion to “the Enemy”), but in this case, Screwtape says that moderate fatigue can be preferable, saying that…

…moderate fatigue is a better soil for peevishness than absolute exhaustion.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• Richael suggested that moderate fatigue is strong enough to be effective and too subtle to be noticed and corrected.

Technique #1: Fostering Injury

• So, moderate fatigue is often preferable, but how to exploit it? Screwtape writes that it…

…is not fatigue simply as such that produces the anger, but unexpected demands on a man already tired. Whatever men expect they soon come to think they have a right to: the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• Richaél compared entitlement and gift.

“…modern man is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself, his life, and society. This is a presumption that follows from being selfishly closed in on himself, and it is a consequence – to express it in faith terms – of original sin.”

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate.

• She also spoke about St. Augustine’s conception that original sin is turning in oneself.

“The Pharisee does not really look at God at all, but only at himself; he does not really need God, because he does everything right by himself. …The tax collector, by contrast, sees himself in the light of God. …He draws life from being-in-relation, from receiving all as gift; he will always need the gift of goodness, of forgiveness, but in receiving it he will always learn to pass the gift on to others.”

Cardinal Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazarth (Pg. 62)

• She said that in the Parable of the Tax Collector and the Pharisee, the Pharisee looks inward, the Tax collector looks upward. Richael recommended The Sacrament of the Present Moment aka Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean-Pierre de Caussade.

• This is very similar to what we talk about back in Letter #21 (“I want it now”) where Screwtape wrote…

“Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #21)

Technique #2: Feeding false hopes

• Screwtape points out a danger in pushing the patient too far, saying that if the patient thinks the difficult situation is irremediable (that it can’t possibly be fixed), if he’s given up hope of being saved, if he’s just dealing with the current moment… Scerwtape says that’s dangerous soil for the kind of humility and gentleness which he said before can be produced by fatigue. He therefore says:

To produce the best results from the patient’s fatigue, therefore, you must feed him with false hopes.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• To achieve this, Screwtape wants his nephew to feed the patient with comforting thoughts of home, suggesting that there’ll be a break in the air-raids and that it’ll all soon be over. He says:

…men usually feel that a strain could have been endured no longer at the very moment when it is ending, or when they think it is ending.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• Richael says we’re called to following Jesus:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Hebrews 12:1-3

• …including his sufferings.

But rejoice in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.

1 Peter 4:13

Technique #3: Avoiding total commitment

• I quoted the passage where Jesus is heading towards his Passion in Jerusalem, foretold by the Prophet Isaiah:

For the Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been confounded; therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame;

Isaiah 50:7

• Screwtape says that the final important thing to do is to stop the man from committing himself totally.

Whatever he says, let his inner resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it “for a reasonable period” — and let the reasonable period be shorter than the trial is likely to last. It need not be much shorter; in attacks on patience, chastity, and fortitude, the fun is to make the man yield just when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• I compared this to Navy Seal training when the instructors end the test just after people have given up:

• Richaél said that the this bothered her, the idea of being setup to fail. She compared it to the Kobayashi Maru in Star Trek. Unfortunately, she misspoke and said it was in Star Wars… so I teased her mercilessly. She said that God’s “testing” of us is actually more like training.
• Things are darkest before the dawn. This ties in with the previous letter’s comments about the virtue of fortitude and about how it is the testing point of every virtue.
• I said that it also reminds me of what we read in Mere Christianity:

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 11)

• Richaél concluded this section talking about resting in the Lord and about how that is written into creation, the way God set everything up. Richaél pointed out that Mother Teresa would send her sisters to Adoration when they had more things they needed to get done!

Battle of the sexes

• Screwtape gives a brief aside, offering some guidance about what to do should the patient meet his girlfriend while he is fatigued. Screwtape says that to…

…make full use of the fact that up to a certain point, fatigue makes women talk more and men talk less. Much secret resentment, even between lovers, can be raised from this.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• I asked Richaél if she thought this generalisation is fair. She said she didn’t like it…but did agree.

The Problem of Pain

• In the final third of the letter, Screwtape outlines the kind of attack which might be best utilized during these times of pressure. He says that, due to Wormwood’s previous failures, the death and destruction the patient is bound to see won’t really do much to attack his faith intellectually, however, Screwtape says that they could attack his emotions.

It turns on making him feel, when first he sees human remains plastered on a wall, that this is “what the world is really like” and that all his religion has been a fantasy.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

What’s real?

• As usual, Screwtape wants the patient to be confused and not to think clearly. In particular, what do we mean by the word “real”?  Screwtape wants the patient to use the word to mean different things, depending upon the context… If the patient has some great spiritual experience, Screwtape wants him to say that all that really happened was that he heard some music in a lighted building. 

…here “Real” means the bare physical facts, separated from the other elements in the experience they actually had. 

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• However, the word “real” can also be used in the opposite sense, referring not to bare physical facts, but the emotional impact of those “bare physical facts” upon the man. He gives the example of someone going up to the high dive at a pool. When they get up there and look over the edge, they’ll know what it’s really like… In this case, no new facts have been introduced – it’s just that the person standing on the high dive gets to experience them directly. Screwtape says that Wormwood’s job is to keep the patient bouncing between the two different meanings of the word “real”.

Screwtape’s Rule

• Screwtape wraps up this section and the letter as a whole by offering the general rule in applying this technique…

…in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are “Real” while the spiritual elements are “subjective”; in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main reality and to ignore them is to be an escapist. 

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• He gives some examples

in birth the blood and pain are “real”, the rejoicing a mere subjective point of view

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• He does the same thing with death and hatred – these are real…

…but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a “real” core of sexual appetite or economic association.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• Screwtape says that humans often accuse one another of wanting to have their cake and eat it (although he offers it in a more archaic form), but the devils’ job is to make them pay for the cake and not eat it. Basically, Screwtape wants to give the patient absolutely nothing.

Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #30)

• Richaél compared this to a book she’s currently reading, The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton. She said that focussing on the wrong thing can cause us to separate Good Friday from the resurrection of Easter Sunday:

For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.

2 Corinthians 4:17-18

I compared this to a line from The Magician’s Nephew:

“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (Chapter 10)

Unscrewing Screwtape

1. Do… beware of fatigue
2. Do… beware of self-reliance
3. Do not… automatically conceive misfortune as injury
4. Do not… negotiate with vice
5. Do… be more considerate when you or the person you are with is tired!
6. Do not… reduce reality to raw physical facts
7. Do… prioritize rest, especially in the Lord, even during times of fatigue and suffering
8. Do not… “lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.” (2 Corinthians. 4:16)

Clumsy Theosis

• Listen to Richaél on her podcast, Clumsy Theosis.
• Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Fr. Jeffrey Doyle

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