PWJ: S4E70 – SPAT 2 – “Quantity over quality”
David and guest co-host Dr. Brenton Dickieson resume their discussion of “Screwtape Proposes A Toast”. When it comes to souls, is it better to have quantity or quality?
S4E70: Screwtape Proposes A Toast (Part 2 – “Quantity over Quality”) (Download)
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Timestamps
00:09 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:14 – Welcome
00:58 – Song-of-the-week
01:17 – Quote-of-the-week
02:15 – Drink-of-the-week
02:23 – Chapter Summary
03:10 – Discussion
53:07 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Thoughts
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
No Skype Session today!
Show Notes
Song-of-the-week
The song-of-the-week is The More I Drink by Blake Shelton:
Well, if I have one, I’ll have thirteen
Blake Shelton, The More I Drink
Naw, there ain’t no in-between
‘Cause the more I drink, the more I drink
Quote-of-the-week
The great (and toothsome) sinners are made out of the very same material as those horrible phenomena the great Saints. The virtual disappearance of such material may mean insipid meals for us. But is it not utter frustration and famine for the Enemy?
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
Drink-of-the-week
David and Brenton were finishing off their drinks from the previous episode.
Chapter Summary
Screwtape says that the night’s meal was quantity over quality. He explains this isn’t such a bad thing, as there is a risk in producing great sinners – their depravity might cause them to repent!
He explains the devils best draw souls to Hell by muddling their language and the creation of vice through repetition, which builds a deliberate, yet unarticulated rejection of Grace.
Hell’s current strategy might produce mostly insipid sinners, but it also reduces the number of great Saints, and turns most people into sheep, who can be easily guided by just a few celebrities.
Summary of Part 2 of Screwtape Proposes A Toast
Discussion
Just above the passing grade
- What is it that so poor quality about the souls they consumed at the Tempter’s Dinner? Screwtape says that the souls they’ve captured are small and flabby. The patients were so muddled, so passively responsive that…
…it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
The idea of Mortal Sin is based on the first epistle of St. John:
If any one sees his brother committing what is not a mortal sin, he will ask, and God will give him life for those whose sin is not mortal. There is sin which is mortal; I do not say that one is to pray for that.
1 John 5:16
The Catholic conception of Mortal Sin has three conditions, that the sin is Grave Matter, committed with full knowledge and deliberate Intent. What this means in English is that the person did something really bad, knew it to be really bad, but purposefully did it anyway.
- Screwtape explains that it’s a balancing act to give the patient enough clarity and deliberateness, but not too much because then all might be lost…
For then, of course, all would possibly have been lost. They might have seen; they might have repented.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
On the other hand, if they had been raised too little, they would very possibly have qualified for Limbo , as creatures suitable neither for Heaven nor for Hell; things that, having failed to make the grade, are allowed to sink into a more or less contented subhumanity forever.
Limbo is a a blurry term, a theological speculation about which many disagree. In Dante’s Inferno, Limbo was actually the first Circle of Hell, the residence of the Virtuous Pagans and Unbaptized Souls. Lewis alludes to Limbo in The Pilgrim’s Regress and also writes about Limbo to a fan:
[I don’t] pretend to have any information on the fate of the virtuous unbeliever… [but] Residence in Limbo… is compatible with ‘perishing everlastingly’ and you’ll find it quite jolly, whereas Heaven is an acquired taste, Limbo is a place of ‘perfect natural happiness.’ In fact you may be able to realize your wish ‘of attending with one’s whole mind to the history of the human spirit’.’ There are grand libraries in Limbo, endless discussions, and no colds. There will be a faint melancholy because you’ll all know that you have missed the bus, but that will provide a subject for poetry. The scenery is pleasant though tame. The climate endless autumn”
C.S. Lewis (5th April, 1939)
Heavenly & Hellish Creatures
- Screwtape unpacks the process of sinning. He seems to credit the patients with a significant amount of innocence in the early stages…
In each individual choice of what the Enemy would call the “wrong” turning, such creatures are at first hardly, if at all, in a state of full spiritual responsibility. They do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
He says that they are easily influenced by their surroundings:
Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
…and, as we found out in The Screwtape Letters, the devils do their best to muddle their language:
And of course we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur; what would be a bribe in someone else’s profession is a tip or a present in theirs.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
Maintaining the trajectory through hardening
- Screwtape says that it’s the job of the tempers…
“to harden these choices of the Hellward roads into a habit by steady repetition. But then (and this was all-important) to turn the habit into a principle — a principle the creature is prepared to defend. After that, all will go well.”
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
- Screwtape says that humans initially have an instinct to confirm the social environment. He compares it to jelly/jello conforming to a mould. However, he says that this instinct needs to be converted into an unacknowledged creed. They’ll come to call the law they’re breaking as “conventional or Puritan or bourgeois ‘morality.’” Over time this will become calcified:
…gradually there comes to exist at the center of the creature a hard, tight, settled core of resolution to go on being what it is, and even to resist moods that might tend to alter it.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
It’s small…but holds great promise… Screwtape calls it a young cancer!
It is a very small core; not at all reflective (they are too ignorant) nor defiant (their emotional and imaginative poverty excludes that); almost, in its own way, prim and demure; like a pebble, or a very young cancer.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
However, Screwtape says that it’ll serve them very well because…
Here at last is a real and deliberate, though not fully articulate, rejection of what the Enemy calls Grace.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
The Future
- Screwtape says that, as a consequence of everything he’s been saying, they will continue to win lots of souls, a credit to the skill of the Tempters, so they’ll be in no danger of famine, but the souls will be pretty tasteless, but they’ll be in no danger of famine. He says the“great” sinners will not disappear but will grow rarer.
- In contrast, the number of half-hearted souls will continue to increase:
Our catches will be ever more numerous; but they will consist increasingly of trash — trash which we should once have thrown to Cerberus and the hellhounds as unfit for diabolical consumption.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
- Cerberus was the three-headed hound who guarded the gates of the underworld.
Demonic Lessons
- While the prospect of poorer souls might seem depressing, Screwtape wants his listeners to realise that this is really a change for the better.
The great (and toothsome) sinners are made out of the very same material as those horrible phenomena the great Saints. The virtual disappearance of such material may mean insipid meals for us. But is it not utter frustration and famine for the Enemy?
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
So, no great sinners, but also no great Saints! Screwtape seems to see this as a taunt to God:
He did not create the humans — He did not become one of them and die among them by torture — in order to produce candidates for Limbo, “failed” humans. He wanted to make them Saints; gods; things like Himself. Is the dullness of your present fare not a very small price to pay for the delicious knowledge that His whole great experiment is petering out?
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
- He also gives another advantage of having fewer great sinners… they also become far more effective because everyone else loses all individuality…
Every dictator or even demagogue — almost every film star or crooner — can now draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him. They give themselves (what there is of them) to him; in him, to us. There may come a time when we shall have no need to bother about individual temptation at all, except for the few. Catch the bellwether, and his whole flock comes after him.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast
Note: The “bellwether” is the leading sheep of a flock, with a bell on its neck.
- David quoted an apocryphal saying of St. Theresa of Calcutta. He realized this when he listened back to the episode – he’s very ashamed.
More Information
- Dr. Brenton Dickieson can be found on Instagram, Twitter, and his blog, A Pilgrim In Narnia.