PWJ: S4E8 – TSL 4 – “Livin’ on a prayer”

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Today I was joined not by one guest co-host, but two! Fr. Michael O’Loughlin, a Byzantine priest, and Sister Natalia, a Byzantine Nun, came on the show to discuss Chapter 4 of “The Screwtape Letters”.

S4E8: Letter #4 – “Livin’ on a prayer” (Download)

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Timestamps

00:00 – The Dearth Apology
01:22 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
01:35 – Welcome
02:02 – Song-of-the-week
02:43 – Today’s guest co-hosts!
08:06 – What God Is Not
10:04 – Quote-of-the-week
10:25 – Drink-of-the-week
12:44 – Toast
13:35 – Chapter Summary
14:24 – Discussion
51:12 – Unscrewing Screwtape
55:19 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Remarks

YouTube Version

After Show Skype Session

After listening to this podcast episode, Matt gave me a call to talk about it:

Show Notes

Opening Chit-Chat

  • Today’s episode title and song-of-the-week is Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a prayer, since it is prayer which is the central subject of today’s Screwtape’s epistle.
    • Having said that, because of the advice which Screwtape gives to his Nephew today, I very nearly named this letter after the Morris Albert song, Feelings, nothing more than feelings. I’m sure you’ll understand why as we proceed through the letter…
  • Today we had two guest co-hosts, Fr. Michael and Sister Natalia from the podcast What God Is Not, which is a reference to apophatic theology. Normally I’d read a prepared bio for each of my co-hosts, but in the first episode of their podcast, What God Is Not, Fr. Michael and Sr. Natalia introduced each other, so I asked them to do the same on this episode.
  • I first encountered Fr. Michael through the podcast Catholic Stuff You Should Know. Since we are both Byzantine, I’ve occasionally bumped into him at the Eparchy. He also preached at a wedding where I was cantoring and Emceeing. I first came across Sister Natalia through her Pints With Aquinas interview:
  • The quote-of-the-week came from this letter:

“Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends upon whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)
  • Drink-of-the-week is Eagle Rare Bourbon (and a cup of tea). Fr. Michael was drinking a Salvator for buy-a-priest-a-beer day. Sr. Natalia was drinking Throat Coat Tea from her Oakland Raiders mug. As a result of our discussion she decide to start buy-a-nun-a-beer day on the day of her final profession.
  • This past month we had a dearth of Gold-level supporters, but a load Silver-level supporters. Thanks to them, we’ve actually very nearly reached our next Patreon goal, so I dedicated today’s toast to them:

May you always be attentive to the voice of The Shepherd, may you grow in knowledge of who God is, and what God is not. Cheers!

Patreon Toast

We toasted in Russian: “Na Zdorovie!”

  • I shared my one-hundred word summary of today’s letter:

Screwtape instructs his nephew on the subject of prayer. Ideally, the patient must be kept from prayer, but if he must, he should be encouraged to belittle the formal prayers of his youth and, instead, to imitate superficially “the prayer of silence”. At the very least, he must think his bodily position during prayer unimportant. Above all, he must get the Patient to focus his own feelings, rather than God during his prayer. And his concept of who God is must be kept as muddled and as tamed as possible… and be completely ignorant that this is the case.

One-hundred word summary of Chapter 4

Discussion

Wormwood’s Blunders

  • Screwtape threatens Wormwood and says he’s going to instruct Wormwood on the subject of prayer.

Avoid Prayer

  • Ideally, Screwtape doesn’t want the patient to pray at all:

The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

Prayer of silence

  • However, if he does pray, Wormwood should remind him of his childhood prayers and attempt to do something quite different:

In reaction against [the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood], he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

Screwtape points to the Romantic poet, Coleridge:

One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray “with moving lips and bended knees” but merely “composed his spirit to love” and indulged “a sense of supplication”. That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

Screwtape here is quoting one of Coleridge’s poems:

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble truth mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought express,
Only a sense of supplication;
A sense o’er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.

Samuel Coleridge, “The Pains of Sleep”

Regarding the “prayer of silence”, I quoted Letters to Malcolm:

For many years after my conversion I never used any ready-made forms except the Lord’s Prayer. In fact I tried to pray without words at all – not to verbalise the mental acts. Even in praying for others I believe I tended to avoid their names and substituted mental images of them. I still think the prayer without words is the best – if one can really achieve it. But I now see that in trying to make it my daily bread I was counting on a greater mental and spiritual strength than I really have. To pray successfully without words one needs to be “at the top of one’s form.” Otherwise the mental acts become merely imaginative or emotional acts – and a fabricated emotion is a miserable affair. When the golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift? But He does not give it – anyway not to me – day in, day out. My mistake was what Pascal, if I remember rightly, calls “Error of Stoicism”: thinking we can do always what we can do sometimes.

C.S. Lewis, Letters To Malcolm (Letter #2)

Disregard the body

  • Screwtape underscores that the patient shouldn’t connect his body with his prayer:

At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

Christianity affirms the body like no other religion:

Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 5)

Lewis talks about this in Letters to Malcolm:

The body ought to pray as well as the soul. Body and soul are both the better for it. Bless the body.

C.S. Lewis, Letters To Malcolm (Letter #3)

However, he does qualify himself. It’s not just about bodily position:

The relevant point is that kneeling does matter, but other things matter even more. A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep. Sometimes these are the only alternatives. (Since the osteoporosis I can hardly kneel at all in most places, myself.)

C.S. Lewis, Letters To Malcolm (Letter #3)

Keep thoughts out!

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

Egotistical Prayer and Nothing more than feelings

  • Screwtape acknowledges that when humans turn to God, the demons lose. Therefore, they must be turned to something else:

The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

 Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for themselves and not notice that this is what they are doing. When they meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When they say they are praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)
  • In his spiritual autobiography, Lewis says that he did this exact thing when his mother was dying:

When her case was pronounced hopeless I remembered what I had been taught; that prayers offered in faith would be granted. I accordingly set myself to produce by will-power a firm belief that my prayers for her recovery would be successful; and, as I thought, I achieved it.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy (Chapter 1)

Later he would write in Letters To Malcolm:

We must not encourage in ourselves or others any tendency to work up a subjective state which, if we succeeded, we should describe as “faith”, with the idea that this will somehow ensure the granting of our prayer. We have probably all done this as children. But the state of mind which desperate desire working on a strong imagination can manufacture is not faith in the Christian sense. It is a feat of psychological gymnastics.

C.S. Lewis, Letters To Malcolm (Letter #11)

Now, Lewis isn’t against emotions and feelings. In a letter he wrote to Mrs Frank L Jones, he speaks to this aspect of the Incarnation:

God [could], had he pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape Him. Of HIs great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane. Otherwise we should have missed the great lesson that it is by his will alone that a man is good or bad, and that feelings are not, in themselves, of any importance

C.S. Lewis to Mrs. Frank L. Jones (23rd February 1947)

Some self-reflection and self-knowledge is obviously a good thing, but what Lewis is doing here is to stop us becoming self-obsessed. In Mere Chrsitianity when he talks about faith he says that, much like growing up, you only realize that a change has occurred within you after-the-fact.

Do not, I implore you, start asking yourselves, “Have I reached that moment?” Do not sit down and start watching your own mind to see if it is coming along. That puts a man quite on the wrong track. When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, “Hullo! I’m growing up.” It is often only when he looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call “growing up.” You can see it even in simple matters. A man who starts anxiously watching to see whether he is going to sleep is very likely to remain wide awake. As well, the thing I am talking of now may not happen to every one in a sudden flash—as it did to St Paul or Bunyan: it may be so gradual that no one could ever point to a particular hour or even a particular year. And what matters is the nature of the change in itself, not how we feel while it is happening. It is the change from being confident about our own efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything for ourselves and leave it to God.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book III (Chapter 12)
  • Sister Natalia quoted a prayer which is often said after Divine Liturgy (Mass):

Lord my God, I thank you; for you have not rejected me, a sinner, but have made me worthy to be a partaker of your holy mysteries. I thank you for allowing me, unworthy as I am, to be a partaker of your most pure and heavenly gifts. O Lord who love us all, you died and rose for our sake; and you have given us these awesome and life-creating mysteries for the benefit and sanctification of our souls and bodies. Grant that they may bring about the healing of my soul and body; the defeat of every enemy; the enlightenment of the eyes of my heart; the calming of my thoughts and emotions; a faith that cannot be confounded; a love that does not pretend; a wisdom that overflows; the full observance of your commandments; the increase of your divine grace; and citizenship in your kingdom. Being preserved in your holiness by them, I will remember your love at all times. I will live no longer for myself, but for you, my Lord and Benefactor. Thus, having spent my earthly life in the hope of life without end, I will attain eternal rest where the sound of rejoicing never ceases, where the delight of those who gaze upon the beauty of your face cannot be expressed. For you, Christ our God, are our true desire, and the inexpressible joy of those who love you; and all creation glorifies you forever. Amen.

Prayer of Our Holy Father Basil the Great

God’s Response

  • It is reiterated that prayer is dangerous for the demons:

Wherever there is prayer, there is danger of His own immediate action.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

…and they particularly hate it because of the mixing of the natural and supernatural:

 He is cynically indifferent to the dignity of His position, and ours, as pure spirits, and to human animals on their knees He pours out self-knowledge in a quite shameless fashion.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

What God is not

  • If all else fails, Screwtape advises Wormwood to confuse the patient about God:

The humans do not start from that direct perception of Him which we, unhappily, cannot avoid. They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing and searing glare which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives. If you look into your patient’s mind when he is praying, you will not find that.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

It turns out that we are very easily confused:

If you examine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is a composite object containing many quite ridiculous ingredients. There will be images derived from pictures of the Enemy as He appeared during the discreditable episode known as the Incarnation: there will be vaguer — perhaps quite savage and puerile — images associated with the other two Persons. There will even be some of his own reverence (and of bodily sensations accompanying it) objectified and attributed to the object revered. I have known cases where what the patient called his “God” was actually located — up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall. 

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

Jack actually speaks about this in, of all works, An Experiment in Criticism!

“The Teddy Bear exists in order that the child may endow it with imaginary life and personality and enter into a quasi social relationship with it. That is what ‘play with it’ means. The better this activity succeeds the less the actual appearance of the object will matter. Too close or prolonged attention to its changeless and expressionless face impedes the play. A crucifix exists in order to direct the worshipper’s thought and affections to the Passion. It had better not have any excellencies, subtleties, or originalities which will fix attention upon itself. Hence devout people may, for this purpose, prefer the crudest and emptiest icon. The emptier, the more permeable; and they want, as it were, to pass through the material image and go beyond”

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (“How the Few and the Many Use Pictures and Music”)
  • In the same way that praying for his mother’s “soul” was used to disrupt his prayers, Screwtape wants the patient praying to his idea of God, rather than God himself:

But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it — to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him. You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

Prevent right iconoclasm

  • Given this is his goal, the worst thing that could happen for Screwtape is for the patient to realize the difference between God and his idea of God:

For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if ever he consciously directs his prayers “Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be”, our situation is, for the moment, desperate.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

I’m not quite sure where this quotation comes from, but it sounds very similar to the opening parts of Augustine’s Confessions and  Anselm’s Proslogion.

  • The worst thing to happen would be for a right form of iconoclasm:

Once all his thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with a full recognition of their merely subjective nature, and the man trusts himself to the completely real, external, invisible Presence, there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it — why, then it is that the incalculable may occur.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

Once again, Lewis expounds this further in Letters To Malcolm:

The prayer preceding all prayers is, “May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.” Infinitely various are the levels from which we pray. Emotional intensity is in itself no proof of spiritual depth. If we pray in terror we shall pray earnestly; it only proves that terror is an earnest emotion. Only God Himself can let the bucket down to the depths in us. And, on the other side, He must constantly work as the iconoclast. Every idea of Him we form, He must in mercy shatter. The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking, “But I never knew before. I never dreamed…” I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology: “It reminds me of straw.”

C.S. Lewis, Letters To Malcom (Letter #15)

Naked and afraid

  • Screwtape ends by reminding Wormwood that humans actually don’t really want contact with the Divine:

In avoiding this situation — this real nakedness of the soul in prayer — you will be helped by the fact that the humans themselves do not desire it as much as they suppose. There’s such a thing as getting more than they bargained for!

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #4)

After all, he’s not “He’s not a tame lion”…

Screwtape Unscrewed

  1. Do: Pray!
  2. Do: Discern what you should be doing with your body in prayer
  3. Don’t: Disdain formal prayers.
  4. Do: stay alert for images of God which are unfamiliar
  5. Do: Focus on God in your prayer: A.C.T.S. (Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, Supplication)
  6. Don’t: Value prayers by the feelings generated
  7. Don’t: Put God in a box

What God is not

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