PWJ: S4E38 – TSL 19 – “Nothin’ ’bout love makes sense”
Following on from his previous letter about the differing philosophies of Heaven and Hell, Screwtape now directly turns to the subject of “love” and explains to his nephew why the whole idea makes no sense to him!
S4E38: “Nothin’ ’bout love makes sense” (Download)
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Timestamps
00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:14 – Welcome
00:44 – Chit-Chat
05:22 – Song-of-the-week
06:30 – Quote-of-the-week
00:00 – Drink-of-the-week
10:25 – Patreon Toast
11:24 – Chapter Summary
12:13 – Discussion
42:10 – Unscrewing Screwtape
45:43– “Last Call” Bell and Closing Thoughts
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
No Skype Session today!
Show Notes
Chit-Chat
- As I mentioned in the episode with Dr. Jason Lepojärvi, we have now been on Patreon for a year. We’ve just passed our anniversary, in fact. To mark this, as well as to say a huge “thank you” to everyone who supports us on Patreon, we wanted to offer something special to all our Patreon supporters. We’ve teamed up with the C.S. Lewis Foundation to organize a Zoom tour of Lewis’ home, “The Kilns”.
- In March (most likely on a Saturday), someone from the C.S. Lewis Foundation will be giving a tour of Lewis’ home via Zoom. This will be available to all our Patreon supporters, regardless of level-of-support. The tour will most take place a time so folks in England and the States should be able to easily attend.
- This also won’t be simply restricted to existing Patrons. If you sign up to support us between now and then, you too will be included.
- I quoted my wife on my blog.
Song-of-the-week
- The song-of-the-week was a suggestion from Cheri Randolf, Nothin’ ’bout love makes sense by LeAnn Rimes:
- Other options were:
- “What is love? (Baby don’t hurt me)” by Haddaway
- Love stinks by J. Geils Band (and Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer)
- Love is a lie by Great White
Quote-of-the-week
“He is one being, they are distinct from Him. Their good cannot be His. All His talk about Love must be a disguise for something else… What does He stand to make out of them?”
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #19)
Drink-of-the-week
- Matt was drinking Aerolite Lyndsay 10 Year Old Single and I drank a Guinness.
Patreon Toast
- Finally, we toast one of our Gold-level Patreon supporters. Today we are toasting Jake Jones:
“Satan is going to try and convince you (and all of us) everyday to doubt God’s love for us, but may trust and believe in both your worthiness and God’s goodness and love towards you”
Patreon Toast for Jake Jones
Chapter Summary
- This is the summary of Chapter #19, which was first published in The Guardian on 5th September, 1941.
Screwtape backpedals, realising that his nephew may report him for heresy for suggesting that God really loves humanity! He explains that he spoke this way only because they are ignorant of Heaven’s real plan… which was actually why Satan left there in the first place! Wormwood asked about the desirability of the patient being “in love”. Screwtape sees this as just raw material… If he is arrogant or contemptuous of the body, it might be best to keep him from romance. However, if he is an emotional, gullible man, Screwtape has high hopes of matching him with a terrible wife!
Chapter Summary of Letter #19
Discussion
A contradiction in terms?
- As listeners will recall, in last week’s letter, Screwtape looked at love, sex, and marriage. From today’s letter we can tell that, in the intervening time, Wormwood had asked a question about what he saw as a contradiction in something said by his uncle. Screwtape explains his nephew’s consternation:
If… all selves are by their very nature in competition, and therefore the Enemy’s idea of Love is a contradiction in terms, what becomes of my reiterated warning that He really loves the human vermin and really desires their freedom and continued existence?
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #19)
Nobody expects the Hellish inquisition!
- Screwtape realises that he has accidentally affirmed heresy in writing! God actually loves humanity? Certainly not! Screwtape also realises that his back-stabbing nephew is ready to turn him in to the authorities for this slip-up! He therefore immediately begins to backpedal, saying…
I hope, my dear boy, you have not shown my letters to anyone.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #19)
- Screwtape explains that his heresy was purely accidental. He also passes off all the nasty things he said about Slubgob, the head of the Training College, as well-intentioned, harmless jokes and he walks back the various threats he made to his nephew.
The contradiction
- Screwtape explains that he was only careless in how he described the situation between God and humanity, speaking as though God really loves humanity, because Hell just doesn’t know what God’s real motivation is. What Hell does know is that these ideas about love have to be utter nonsense. After all, as Screwtape writes:
[God] is one being, they [the humans] are distinct from Him. Their good cannot be His. All His talk about Love must be a disguise for something else… What does He stand to make out of them?
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #19)
Satan’s Expulsion
- Screwtape goes on to explain that this question was central to the famous incident between God and Satan at the dawn of time:
When the creation of man was first mooted [first brought up] and when, even at that stage, the Enemy freely confessed that he foresaw a certain episode about a cross, Our Father [Satan] very naturally sought an interview and asked for an explanation. The Enemy gave no reply except to produce the cock-and-bull story [a nonsense tale] about disinterested love which He has been circulating ever since.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #19)
- Of course, what Screwtape is describing here is simply Christian doctrine. Firstly, that God created humans out of love. As Lewis writes in The Four Loves:
God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
Secondly, that God foresaw the need for the cross and created us anyway. Also in The Four Loves Jack writes:
[God] creates the universe, already foreseeing… the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
This is shocking. God made us out of love, even when He foresaw that, out of love, He would take on our nature in the Incarnation, coming as a little fetus, culminating in him being nailed to a tree in the Crucifixion. For myself, it was only when I first started talking with Muslims that I was really re-sensitized to the outrageousness of the Christian message, that God humbled Himself for us and allowed Himself to be treated in this way.
If I may dare the biological image, God is a “host” who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and “take advantage of” Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
- Needless to say, Satan didn’t believe what God said about love. He wanted to know “the secret”. Screwtape tells us that…
…such an unprovoked lack of confidence caused him [Satan] to remove himself an infinite distance from the Presence with a suddenness which has given rise to the ridiculous enemy story that he was forcibly thrown out of Heaven.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #19)
- This is described in more detail in Paradise Lost (the preface to which, by the way, Lewis was working on around this time). Paradise Lost is, in turn, is based on Isaiah 14:12-19, where words about the King of Babylon have been traditionally seen as an image of Satan’s own fall from grace:
“How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! 13 You said in your heart, ‘… I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.’ But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit…
Isaiah 14:12-19
A hopeful future
- Screwtape says that both God and His followers have stuck to this ridiculous “story” about God’s “disinterested love”. Of course, the problem for Screwtape is what he says next…
We know that He cannot really love: nobody can: it doesn’t make sense.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #19)
- Screwtape notes that they even point out that if the devils ever came to understand the nature of the secret, the war between Heaven and Hell would be over. I think Screwtape is right here, but not for the reason that he thinks. He then expresses hope for the future discovery of God’s secret plan, enumerating all of the promises and penalties of Hell in achieving this goal.
- You do wonder what Screwtape does with a passage like 1 Corinthians 13, you know, the one you typically hear at weddings: “Love is patient, love is kind, …”
- Since we’re talking about love here, I do have to make a pitch for folks to read one of my favourite passages from an Early Church Father. Following a rebellion against their Corinthian clergy at the end of the First Century, St. Clement of Rome writes to the Church at Corinth to settle the matter and have their priests reinstated. In his powerful, yet winsome letter, St. Clement makes a similar appeal to love as the one which St. Paul made that congregation a few decades earlier. The whole thing is gorgeous, but I’ll here’s a taster…
Let him who has love in Christ keep the commandments of Christ. Who can describe the [blessed] bond of the love of God? What man is able to tell the excellence of its beauty, as it ought to be told? The height to which love exalts is unspeakable. Love unites us to God. Love covers a multitude of sins. Love bears all things, is long-suffering in all things. There is nothing base, nothing arrogant in love. Love admits of no schisms: love gives rise to no seditions: love does all things in harmony. By love have all the elect of God been made perfect; without love nothing is well-pleasing to God. In love has the Lord taken us to Himself. On account of the Love he bore us, Jesus Christ our Lord gave His blood for us by the will of God; His flesh for our flesh, and His soul for our souls.
Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians (Chapters 49-50)
You see, beloved, how great and wonderful a thing is love, and that there is no declaring its perfection. Who is fit to be found in it, except such as God has vouchsafed to render so? Let us pray, therefore, and implore of His mercy, that we may live blameless in love, free from all human partialities for one above another. All the generations from Adam even unto this day have passed away; but those who, through the grace of God, have been made perfect in love, now possess a place among the godly, and shall be made manifest at the revelation of the kingdom of Christ…. Blessed are we, beloved, if we keep the commandments of God in the harmony of love; that so through love our sins may be forgiven us…
Is “being in love” good or bad? It’s a dumb question
- As Screwtape begins to wrap-up his letter, we turn from the love of God (which Lewis calls “agape” in The Four Loves) to “falling in love” (“eros”). Apparently Wormwood complained that Screwtape didn’t make it clear whether falling in love was a desirable state into which to guide his patient… Screwtape says that this is a dumb question! He writes:
Leave them to discuss whether “Love”, or patriotism, or celibacy, or candles on altars… are “good” or “bad”… Nothing matters at all except the tendency of a given state of mind, in given circumstances, to move a particular patient at a particular moment nearer to the Enemy or nearer to us.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #19)
This is always Screwtape’s bottom line. Sickness/health/youth/old age/romance etc. is really just raw material. They don’t really matter per se – it’s all about how Wormwood exploits them.
One way or another
- Now that Screwtape has given us this general principle of twisting raw material, he looks at how a devil might apply it to romantic love. So, when should romantic involvement be encouraged and when should it be discouraged? Screwtape says Wormwood should encourage the patient to have contempt to for love if he’s an arrogant man who has a misguided contempt for the body and who is a bit of a contrarian:
If he is an arrogant man with a contempt for the body really based on delicacy but mistaken by him for purity — and one who takes pleasure in flouting what most of his fellows approve… Instil into him an overweening asceticism and then, when you have separated his sexuality from all that might humanise it, weigh in on him with it in some much more brutal and cynical form.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #19)
- What’s the flip-side? Well…
If, on the other hand, he is an emotional, gullible man, feed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that “Love” is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #19)
- Screwtape says that this probably won’t cause casual unchastity, but is perfect for fostering tragic adulteries which end in murders and suicides.
- Alternatively, it can be used to send the patient into a bad marriage, Hell once again twisting one of God’s good designs. With this in mind, Screwtape demands a report from Wormwood on the women in the patient’s neighbourhood who, as wives, would make it difficult for him to continue to practice his faith.
- Matt alluded to a few classic rom-com scenes:
- Screwtape ends by recapping his main point:
…get it quite clear in your own mind that this state of falling in love is not, in itself, necessarily, favourable either to us or to the other side. It is simply an occasion which we and the Enemy are both trying to exploit.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #19)
Unscrewing Screwtape
- Do believe in the genuine love and goodness of God
- Do read “Crazy Love” by Francis Chan
- Do not approach life like a zero-sum game
- Do remember that Satan can twist any good thing