Religion/Theology:
Next book in my religious books section is The Screwtape Letters
If you don’t know, here is the premise of this book: it is a correspondence between an old devil (literally) and his nephew Wormwood. Wormwood is new at this whole “being a devil” thing, and his uncle trains him. We only get one side of the correspondence – the uncle’s side. The Screwtape Letters is a tale of temptation, and evil, and sin – Wormwood is in charge of one young huamn being’s damnation. It is essential that Wormwood bring it about. His uncle sends him tip after tip: try this, try that … It’s tough, though, because of that whole “free will” thing, put onto the earth by God (referred to in this book as The Enemy). Because “free will” exists, you have to coax people to evil, you have to trick them, you have to help them turn away from the light … But “free will” is strong and a huge problem if you’re a devil intent on corrupting a human being’s soul.
EXCERPT FROM The Screwtape Letters
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.
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. 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. 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.
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 word is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is now 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.
Great great book.
Yet another reason I love C. S. Lewis. The man was freaking awesome.
(Sidenote: Has anyone else seen the trailer for the Chronicles of Narnia film opening in December? If I may be so bold, I’m thinking it will be as good as LotR.)
shutup.
Jorge – you are responding to a comment made in 2005. 15 years ago. You are literally telling someone from 2005 to shut up. lol
Narnia has come down with the Disney. It’s going to suck.
I love it when Screwtape gets all irritated when Wormwood’s subject meets a nice girl…how could he let this happen? It’s abominable! Hahahaha.
Here’s a funny story.
It’s the first time I had cancer. I’ve been doing chemotherapy and radiation for about 8 years. I’m in my mid-twenties and the doctors decide it’s time for a last-ditch bone marrow transplant.
So it’s the second week of the transplant, I’m two hours from home, for all intents and purposes dying in my bed, and my girlfriend (now my wife) decides it would be a good idea to bring me “that movie about C.S. Lewis” to cheer me up since she knew I was a fan.
Can anyone finish this hilarious story?
no. way.
oh, man, that’s bad.
Dave,
Looking back it’s kind of funny.
For those not in the know, the movie she brought was “Shadowlands,” which unbeknownst to her is the dark film in which CS Lewis watches his beloved wife die of… you guessed it… cancer, then struggles to regain his faith.
Or, as we call it these days, “that movie about C.S. Lewis.”
Lewis’ grief and struggle with faith after his wife Helen Joy Brown’s death is beautifully chronicled in his book “A Grief Observed.” It didn’t mean as much to me as it did when my mother died from cancer several years ago.
As to the Screw Tape Letters quote from above, it’s the most powerful image Lewis leaves us throughout the letters, and points out the power of living gloriously in the present.
A final book to read of his, to round out the theology of what happens today and tomorrow, so to speak, is “The Great Divorce.” It is a very powerful Revelations-inspired book, although, frankly, more like Letters and more helpful in terms of understanding a right relationship with God.
C. S. Lewis committed suicide, a good Christian example, or a victim of his own words?
He did not commit suicide…he died of renal failure the same day Kennedy was shot.