PWJ: S4E21 – TSL 12 – “Slow Fade”
Screwtape continues to try and slowly draw the patient away from his faith…
S4E21: “Slow Fade” (Download)
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Timestamps
00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:12 – Welcome
06:51 – Song-of-the-week
08:12 – Quote-of-the-week
08:42 – Drink-of-the-week
11:18 – Chapter Summary
12:04 – Discussion
38:57 – Unscrewing Screwtape
43:06 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Remarks
YouTube Version
The YouTube version of today’s episode:
After Show Skype Session
Andrew jumped on a Skype call to discuss today’s episode:
Show Notes
Opening Chit-Chat
- I thanked John Marr for all his song-of-the-week suggestions.
- I shared a message from a listener and promoted the detailed show notes which are available on my blog.
I’ve been listening to Pints with Jack for months, and I finally found Restlesspilgrim.net! This has great information; why don’t you mention it more prominently in the podcast? I get the podcast through the iPhone Podcast app and YouTube, and neither channel make it clear that this site exists. I went to the Pints with Jack website to try to find the show notes that David always says he puts links in, but I couldn’t. I tried clicking on the iTunes podcast link, and although I didn’t find show notes there, when I clicked on the episode, I did see a link to “episode website”, and that’s where I found this page. Anyway, this is a treasure that I somehow missed for several months, but not anymore. Keep up the good work, gentlemen! This is my favorite podcast!
Gregory Graham
- I gave a shout-out to the Risking Enchantment podcast which recently discussed Till We Have Faces and mentioned us.
- While Matt is still reading The Meaning of Marriage by Timothy Keller, I mentioned that I’ve been reading Letters To An American Lady, for the first time. I’ve also been working through Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth. I’ve been enjoying it. He really takes his time showing you how Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth gradually took shape through Tolkien’s life.
- I announced that this Thursday there’s going to be a bonus Christmas episode for Patreon supporters as a Christmas present.
- We asked for prayers for Evan and his family, who recently discovered that they’ve contracted COVID. I also noted that Lewis’ former secretary, Walter Hooper, was in declining health and asked for prayers. He died between the time we recorded this episode and posted it.
Song-of-the-week
- Listener John suggested So Far Away by Carole King as today’s song-of-the-week and episode title, but I had chosen today’s song long before we began this Season. The letter we’re reading today is all about how Screwtape wants the patient to drift away from God and be blissfully unaware that this is happening. Therefore the song had to be Slow Fade by Casting Crowns, a song which I’ve referenced many times over the course of this podcast:
It’s a slow fade when you give yourself away
Casting Crowns, Slow Fade
It’s a slow fade when black and white are turned to gray
And thoughts invade, choices are made, a price will be paid
People never crumble in a day
It’s a slow fade, it’s a slow fade
Quote-of-the-week
- The quote-of-the-week is…
…the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
Drink-of-the-week
- The drink-of-the-week is Green Isle Blended Scotch:
- Color: Gold Amber
- Nose:
- A bowl of milky breakfast cereal is served with sliced green apples and a cup of infused fruit tea.
- Milky / green apples / fruity
- Palette
- Soft on the arrival, but far from overtly thin – there’s plenty of natural oiliness. Tarry peat smoke is tempered by a lick of coastal salinity and a building cask-driven pepperiness. Orchard fruits are at the core – bright and fresh and joined by liquorice and chocolate shavings together with moist cellars and earthy mushrooms.
- Soft but not thin, oily, peppery, and fruity.
- Finish:
- Medium in length with pear juice, persisting smoke and oven-baked buns
- Medium in length
Patreon Toast
- None today!
Chapter Summary
- Letter #12 was first published in The Guardian on 18th July, 1941 and here is my 100-word summary:
In today’s letter, Screwtape warns Wormwood about moving his patient along too quickly. It is paramount that the patient not realize that he is being slowly drawn away from God. His dim uneasiness must be managed.
If too strong, it may lead to repentance… …but if too weak, Wormwood will not be able to use uneasiness to dissuade him from seeking real, honest contact with God.
If successfully handled, the patient will not even need real pleasures to tempt him away from virtue, and he can proceed to Hell by the soft, safe road…
100-word summary of Letter #12
Discussion
The Patient’s Trajectory
- Screwtape has certainly had his coffee this morning! He begins today’s letter by saying that Wormwood is making “excellent progress”. However, he is still concerned…
My only fear is lest in attempting to hurry the patient you awaken him to a sense of his real position.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
- Screwtape wants Wormwood to “hurry slowly” in his journey towards Hell. Screwtape says that they know they’ve tweaked the patient’s direction which will eventually take him out of God’s orbit. However, the patient must be kept in the dark:
…he must be made to imagine that all the choices which have affected this change of course are trivial and revocable. He must not be allowed to suspect that he is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
The Patient’s Trajectory
- The senior demon explains that he’s actually glad that the patient is still going to church on Sunday and still receiving Holy Communion. He admits, there are dangers, sure, but that this is preferable to him realizing his new trajectory…
- We’ve spoken quite a bit about habits this season, about how good habits form virtue and bad habits form vice, but in this letter Screwtape makes a crucial distinction. Habits are good, but they can remain surface-level and when this happens it can greatly hamper the formation of virtue.
- As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. Screwtape is happy because while the patient is in this state…
…we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
- As I mentioned, I’m currently reading Letters To An American Lady and there Lewis tells us how we should respond:
What the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt or feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption. ‘Details, please?’ is the answer
C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady (07/21/58)
Managing the uneasiness
- The patient’s uneasiness needs to be carefully handled since, if it becomes too strong, the patient will realize what’s going on. He’ll realise what’s going on and repent.
- However, conversely, Screwtape warns Wormwood against suppressing the uneasiness entirely. Not only will God probably not allow him to do this, Wormwood will lose certain advantages:
If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance… it increases the patient’s reluctance to think about the Enemy.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
- Screwtape is using the patient’s own uneasiness as a disincentive for him to want to come into contact with God!
- Screwtape says that humans always have a little bit of this reluctance getting into contact with God, but the patient’s current situation makes this reluctance much more potent. Screwtape even says:
They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a pass-book [bank book] …he will increasingly dislike his religious duties. He will think about them as little as he feels he decently can beforehand, and forget them as soon as possible when they are over.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
- Before Wormwood had to tempt him to inattention, but Screwtape says that soon he’ll be…
…almost begging you to distract his purpose and benumb his heart. He will want his prayers to be unreal, for he will dread nothing so much as effective contact with the Enemy.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
Pleasure Management
- In earlier letters, Screwtape spoke about how pleasures put things onto God’s playing field (since they all come from Him).
- As this dull uneasiness becomes more deeply established, Wormwood will be able to rely less and less on pleasures as temptations:
As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention…
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
Lesser Pleasures
- Screwtape gives a number of examples:
You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
- All of this can become less and less substantial:
You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
- Social Media feed, anyone?
- All of this culminates in the kind of situation and exchange that Screwtape adores:
All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
- Screwtape then quotes a Collect (prayer) from The Common Book of Prayer which describes God as one without whom nothing is strong. Screwtape riffs on this, saying that nothing is…
…strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them… [a] dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled [variant: drugged] to shake off.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
O God, the protector of all that trust in Thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: increase and multiply upon us Thy mercy
Book of Common Prayer, Collect
The bottom line
- Screwtape wraps up his letter by anticipating an objection from his nephew:
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
- Remember what we learned in Mere Christianity that the nature of sins isn’t always what we might expect:
The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christainity (Book III, Chapter 5)
- This is probably the most chilling closing sentence offered by Screwtape:
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signpost.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #12)
Unscrewing Screwtape
- Do: Spiritual Direction and be aware of your spiritual progress/regression
- Do build community
- Don’t stay away from God
- Do commit to one small thing
- Don’t be satisfied with unspecified vague feelings – chase them down
- Don’t waste your life away! Do not live the unexamined spiritual life!
- Do things you really enjoy and make you feel alive!