PWJ: S4E44 – TSL 22 – “Isn’t she lovely?”

Wormwood’s patient is in love! Unfortunately for Wormwood, she is a Christian woman who is full of virtue! Needless to say, Screwtape is livid…

S4E44: “Isn’t she lovely?” (Download)

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Timestamps

00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:14 – Welcome
00:47 – Chit-Chat
05:20 – Song-of-the-week
06:02 – Quote-of-the-week
07:57 – Drink-of-the-week
10:35 – Patreon Toast
10:48 – Chapter Summary
11:41 – Discussion
52:02 – Unscrewing Screwtape
54:24 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Thoughts

YouTube Version

After Show Skype Session

No Skype Session today!

Show Notes

Chit-Chat

• We are now two thirds of the way through The Screwtape Letters!
• I’m already starting to plan some of the special months for next season:
  • Apologetics
  • Dorothy Sayers
  • Ecumenical Lewis, interviewing folks from a variety of religious backgrounds who find value in Jack’s works
• At the time of recording, we’ve just entered into the season of Lent, so I asked Andrew if he had assigned himself any Lenten reading…
  • Howard Thurman
  • He’s given up news apps
  • Reading the Coverdale/Vulgate psalter
  • Malcolm Guite’s David’s crown
• For myself, I’m just reading The Gargoyle Code and praying a decade of the rosary each day.
• I gave a shoutout to the YouTube channel of Fr. Jeffrey Dole. He’s got a YouTube series where he goes through each of the The Screwtape Letters giving about eight minutes per Letter. I’ll be including a link in the Show Notes, but I just wanted to share it because I love the idea of Pastors helping their congregations engage with great literature.

Song-of-the-week

• Today’s chapter is devoted to discussing the new girl in the patient’s life who seems to fit the description of Mary Poppins – practically perfect in every way. As such, one suggestion was one of my favourite wedding smooching songs, “Perfect” by Ed Sheeran, but in the end I went with a different classic, one by Stevie Wonder,  “Isn’t she lovely?”

Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she wonderful? Isn’t she precious?

Stevie Wonder, Isn’t she lovely?

Quote-of-the-week

“I have looked up this girl’s dossier and am horrified at what I find. Not only a Christian but such a Christian — a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouse-like, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss. The little brute. She makes me vomit. She stinks and scalds through the very pages of the dossier.”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

…and the runner-up:

“Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since Our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

Drink-of-the-week

• The drink-of-the-week is Amrut Single Malt Whisky . Notes from https://thewhiskeywash.com/  since the Michael Jackson book didn’t have an entry for this:
  • Appearance: Gold/pale straw. 
  • Nose: Orange segment and lemon peel steal the show. Almond or marzipan creeps up in the middle before cereal grain, like Cheerios, rounds out the finish. 
  • Palate: The mouthfeel is light. It comes off hot at first from the alcohol, but on the other hand it’s a quick burn that rounds out. The whisky comes off very phenolic, and it moves into smoked beef jerky. You get the orange from the nose on the palate with a little sweet honey. The dram is woody, and as it moves into the finish, it is reminiscent of black licorice.
• “Phenolic”: of, relating to, or having the characteristics of a phenol

Patreon Toast

• Today we are toasting Gillis Klotz.

Chapter Summary

• This is the summary of Chapter #22, which was first published in The Guardian on 26th September, 1941.

In addition to threatening his nephew, Screwtape rants about the patient’s new girlfriend, a Christian lady of great virtue – this is a disaster for Wormwood! Even worse, she also has a wonderful, supportive family and set of friends!. ( Unable to accept their loving behaviours at face-value, Screwtape wonders what they are each really up to…) Screwtape rails against God, whom he considers a great hedonist. He laments that they have to twist everything before it can be used towards their own ends. The letter is concluded by Screwtape’s secretary, as Screwtape has accidentally transformed into a centipede!

Chapter Summary of Letter #22

Discussion

Charges dropped!

• Screwtape offers some not-very-veiled threats in response to Wormwood’s attempts to get his uncle into trouble with Hell’s Secret Police over charges of heresy.  Screwtape includes in his letter this week a booklet about the new “House of Correction for Incompetent Tempters”. Screwtape comments:

It is profusely illustrated and you will not find a dull page in it.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

• We find that Screwtape would be united in an “indissoluble embrace”; remember Letter 8: “We want cattle who can finally become food”. It’s the opposite of St. John Baptist: “I must increase, He must decrease”

Mystery woman

• But the real news in this letter is that the patient has fallen in love. Wormwood is in trouble for several reasons. Firstly, because this woman went unmentioned in the report which Wormwood sent to his uncle about women in the patient’s neighbourhood…

“Worst kind he could possibly have fallen into”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

What a woman!

• …but also because Screwtape has looked at their files on the patient’s new squeeze and is horrified at what he finds…

Not only a Christian but such a Christian — a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouse-like, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss. The little brute. She makes me vomit…

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

• He goes on like this for some time… He talks about how they would have sent her to be executed in the arena in the old days, but laments that even then she wouldn’t be much use to them, looking weak, but ultimately offering a courageous martyrdom. Andrew mentioned the martyrdom of Felicity and Perpetua in the Early Church.
• Screwtape seems particularly irritated at the thought that she’d find him, Screwtape, “funny”:

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.

Luther

The devil…the prowde spirite…cannot endure to be mocked

Thomas More

Screwtape hates the idea of virtuous sex:

Filthy insipid little prude — and yet ready to fall into this booby’s arms like any other breeding animal. Why doesn’t the Enemy blast her for it, if He’s so moonstruck by virginity — instead of looking on there, grinning? Nice pun there–Artemis, goddess of the moon–and chastity!!

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

God’s facade

• In the next section, Screwtape switches from complaining about the girl to complaining about God. He says that…

He’s a hedonist at heart.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

• A hedonist is someone who thinks that pleasure is the only intrinsic good

• Now, Screwtape doesn’t think that God believes pleasure to be the only intrinsic good, but he does think that “all those fasts and vigils… are only a facade”. He says that underneath it all the asceticism are pleasures. Screwtape says:

He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are “pleasures for evermore”. Ugh!

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

This is a quotation from Psalm 16:11 KJV.

• Screwtape thinks all this is vulgar and that God just doesn’t understand what he calls the…

…high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

Human Pleasure

• My favourite section in this letter comes next. Screwtape writes:

He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least — sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

What strikes me about this list is how ordinary all these activities are. They’re not about lots of material possessions or high octane activities (apart from maybe one of them!).

Hell’s necessary strategy

• Screwtape then clearly elucidates a point which we’ve made many times throughout this collection of letters:

 Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

This is the teaching of the Early Church Fathers:

Nothing created by God is evil. It is not food that is evil but gluttony, not the begetting of children but unchastity, not material things but avarice, not esteem but self-esteem. It is only the misuse of things that is evil, not the things themselves

St. Maximus the Confessor, The Philokalia

With his divine alchemy, he [Christ] turns not only water into wine, but common things into radiant mysteries, yea, every meal into a Eucharist, and the jaws of death into an outgoing gate.

George MacDonald, The Miracles of our Lord

It gets worse

• Returning to the subject of the girl, Screwtape points out all the problems with this relationship, in particular this woman’s friends and family – they are all repugnant to Screwtape.
• He describes the house in which she lives as one that “reeks of that deadly odour”. He says that the gardener who arrived recently has started to smell of it and this even happens to short-term houseguests…and even the dog and cat!

The logic of love

• In previous letters, Screwtape has shown he’s utterly confused by the philosophy of Heaven, namely, love, and he seems rather confused by this woman’s friends and family:

[The house is] full of the impenetrable mystery. We are certain (it is a matter of first principles) that each member of the family must in some way be making capital out of the others — but we can’t find out how. They guard as jealously as the Enemy Himself the secret of what really lies behind this pretence of disinterested love.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

• We spoke about houses we’ve found like this.

• I meant to say in the episode with Dr. Lepojarvi that Screwtape’s inability to understand the logic of love reminds me of the KJV and NASB translation of John 1:5:

And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not grasp/comprehend it

John 1:5

• Screwtape goes on to describe…

The whole house and garden is one vast obscenity. It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer made of Heaven: “the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence”.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

It comes from “The Hands of the Father”, found in Volume 1 of George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons. You can also find this quoted by Lewis in his anthology of MacDonald:

And there shall be moments when, filled with that spirit which is the Lord, nothing will ease our hearts of their love but the commending of all men, all our brothers, all our sisters, to the one Father. Nor shall we ever know that repose in the Father’s hands, that rest of the Holy Sepulchre, which the Lord knew when the agony of death was over, when the storm of the world died away behind his retiring spirit, and he entered therefore all that is not music is silence (for all noise comes of the conflict of Life and Death) – we shall never be able, I say, to rest in the bosom of the Father, till the fatherhood is fully revealed to us in the love of the brothers”

George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons (Volume 1)

Music and Silence

• Screwtape then riffs on the ideas of music and silence, saying that he hates both of them. He says that neither are in Hell:

…all has been occupied by Noise — Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile — Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

• I quoted my favourite poem from Gerard Manly Hopkins. Andrew referenced a poem by Robert Frost.
• We also referred to this video:

Uncle Centipede

• Andrew referred to Lewisiana.nl.
• Screwtape is then in mid-castigation when the sentence breaks off and we’re told that…

In the heat of composition I find that I have inadvertently allowed myself to assume the form of a large centipede. I am accordingly dictating the rest to my secretary.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

Reason for transformation

• Screwtape says alludes to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the demons who raged against God are turned into snakes in Book 10 as a punishment. Naturally, he rejects this idea.
• Screwtape much prefers George Bernard Shaw’s understanding (he calls him “Pshaw”):

Transformation proceeds from within and is a glorious manifestation of that Life Force which Our Father would worship if he worshipped anything but himself.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

• Shaw was a playwright and philosopher. He was also an enthusiastic preacher about the “Life Force” which we’ve mentioned a few times now. He’s probably best known for Pygmalion (“My fair lady”) – interestingly in which there is a transformation from a flower girl into a classy lady.
• Screwtape says that in his centipede form he’s even more anxious to see his Nephew and unite him to himself…creepy.
• The letter is signed:

For his Abysmal Sublimity Under Secretary Screwtape, TE, BS, etc.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #22)

Is TE short for Tempter Emeritus?

Unscrewing Screwtape

1. Do embrace music and silence
2. Don’t give a voice to the noise
3. Do be deliberate about what you let into your life
4. Do find yourself a spouse who makes Screwtape mad!
5. Do foster a strong circle of virtuous friends
6. Do remember that God made a world packed with goodness
7. Don’t turn into a giant centipede!

Fr. Jeffrey Doyle