Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Alrighty, folks, it's Christmas break, and that seems like a really good time to bring you some great Christian content. Well, we did something here at The Daily Wire called Ben's Book Club, where we analyzed great literature. One of the pieces of literature we analyzed is one of my favorite books, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. Here's what that episode sounded like. C.S.
Lewis's The Screwtape Letters is all at once a deep rumination on religion, a high comedy rooted in the hilarity of both humanity's flaws and Satan's foibles, a tragedy about the nature of death, and a tale of redemption and everlasting life. Alrighty, so let's talk about The Screwtape Letters. It is a spectacularly good book.
One of the beautiful things about Screwtape Letters is it is a fictional encapsulation of much of C.S. Lewis's other work, If you've ever read Mere Christianity or Men Without Chests or any of his other essays, a lot of that ends up in the screw tape letters. And that's sort of how C.S. Lewis writes. I mean, C.S. Lewis famously writes the Narnia series.
The Narnia series encapsulates a lot of his values in sort of a fantasy context.
Chapter 2: What themes does C.S. Lewis explore in The Screwtape Letters?
He does the same thing. With regard to, he wrote a sci-fi trilogy that starts with Out of the Silent Planet, Perilandra. He does a lot of that sort of stuff. He takes his values and he sort of telescopes it into a fictional story for ease of use.
Screwtape Letter is a little bit different because it's so obviously theology and obviously philosophy where it's a little bit more guarded in Narnia or Out of the Silent Planet. Here, he basically just says it straight up and it's very funny. One area where Lewis is often criticized is in not being funny enough. That when you read Narnia, there's no humor. in the Narnia books.
But when you read C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, there's a lot of humor and very funny humor, actually. So Lewis himself described writing Screwtape Letters. He actually said it was tough. He said, though I'd never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment. Though it was easy to twist one's mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun or not for long.
The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. But it is wildly entertaining because he is, you know, obviously writing in the voice of one of Satan's minions. Now, I will say there's a bit of difference between sort of the Christian theology of Satan and the Jewish theology of Satan.
So the Christian theology of Satan, which is that Satan is the opponent to God, almost a dualistic structure where Satan is responsible for evil in the world and is a rebel against God, fallen angel and all of this. Jewish theology is a bit different. In Jewish theology, all of the angels, including Satan, are emissaries. The word in Hebrew for emissaries
for messenger is the same as the word for angel. The word is malach. And so whenever you see that in the Bible, a messenger, that also is an angel. So when it talks about angels visiting Abraham, it uses the word malach, which is also messenger. The idea being that angels are essentially in Jewish theology, sort of single forces in the world without will.
Whereas in the Christian theology, obviously Satan has a will of his own and he's rebelling against God, which makes him a really fascinating character. Lewis opens the book with a couple of epitaphs, one by Martin Luther, 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. and one by Sir Thomas More.
The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked. Both of them are focusing on a simple fact of the matter, something that we seem to have lost in modern society, which is laughing at evil. And we've decided that it's very important to earnestly engage with bad ideas. You're not allowed to laugh at bad and damaging things anymore.
If, for example, somebody says a man is a woman, an inherently hilarious idea because it's definitionally idiotic, If somebody says that and you laugh, you are now considered intolerant. Whereas before, you would have been able to just laugh at that and everybody would have moved on with their lives.
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Chapter 3: How does Lewis use humor in The Screwtape Letters?
It guides you toward the transcendent. That's an idea that I obviously agree with. I believe that the notion of free will, free choice in the universe, guides you toward the idea of there must be something beyond us, that if there's a logic to the universe, that guides you to the question of who is the chief logician, who made the rules, for example.
Lewis makes the same point, and then he says that the job of the secular materialist is to get you to focus on the thing, It's to get you to focus on the thing in itself. That's sort of the language of Bertrand Russell, a famous atheist.
And so Lewis says this, even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, this is as screw tape, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream.
Teach him to call it real life. Don't let him ask what he means by real. So just keep them focused on the immediate. Have them focused on the now. There's nothing that's done this more than the internet age where our attention spans have been reduced to the next 15 seconds. Sitting and ruminating on life leads you to higher ideas.
If you can prevent people from doing that sort of stuff, you end up with a very materialistic society. So what exactly does reality mean? Well, according to Screwtape, people ought to be taught that in all experiences which can make them happier or better, only the physical facts are real, while the spiritual elements are subjective.
And in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them, the spiritual elements are the main reality, and to ignore them is to be an escapist. So the idea is that when you're thinking about death, that the only thing that is real is the death. You're not supposed to look to the spiritual element of death.
Or if you look at something that makes you very happy, you're not supposed to look to the spiritual element of what makes you very happy. Just focus in on the pure materialism of the thing. The goal is to enmesh mankind in the world. This is something that Catholic theologians talk about a lot.
The idea that the spiritual world, if you can enmesh it in reality too much, then you can bring people away from the reality of something higher. This means, for example, that you have to get people to stop thinking about death. It says, Screwtape says, How disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death which war enforces.
One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime, not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever. The material world, then, is the chief ally of Screwtape because people desire not to think of God. God is a distraction. God has obligations. God has duties.
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Chapter 4: What differences exist between Christian and Jewish theology regarding Satan?
So, says Screwtape, it's far better to make them live in the future. The future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time. For the past is frozen, it no longer flows. The present is all lit up with eternal rays.
Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought, like creative evolution, scientific humanism, or communism, which fix men's affections on the future on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. See, the idea is if you're thinking about the future,
then you're not thinking about the spiritual consequences of the things you do in the here and now. You're thinking about the material consequences of the things that you do in the here and now, and that allows you to do bad things in the name of a quote-unquote better future.
Screwtape says the best thing you can do is convince people that their utopian thoughts are the things that are mandated by God. So on the one hand, you try to get people sunk in reality, and this drives them away from God. On the other hand, Screwtape advises Wormwood that people should be led to examine their own emotions constantly.
If you can be narcissistically checking yourself all the time, you're going to end up without God. So if you feel wildly enthusiastic about becoming religious, then Wormwood ought to encourage people to wait for the anti-climax, because you get enthusiastic about a thing, then you become less enthusiastic about the thing, and then you pounce.
Quote, work hard then on the disappointment or anti-climax, which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. In every department of life, it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing.
The enemy takes this risk because he has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what he calls his free lovers and servants. Sons is the word he uses. So in other words, very often in life, we engage at the beginning of a task with great enthusiasm, and then the enthusiasm wears away. This happens all the time with a variety of tasks.
And once that happens, that is when you encourage people to look into being morose, look into being depressed, to reject the spiritual aspect of their duty, to stop trying to take joy in the spiritual aspect of what they're doing and instead focus in on the fact that it's just sheer drudgery.
So, for example, when it comes to prayer, human beings should be encouraged to seek a feeling of inspiration specifically because it's very hard to find. I mean, I pray three times a day. I've talked about this before. Finding a feeling of inspiration while you're praying can be really, really difficult.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the real world versus the spiritual world in the book?
Humans can be made to infer the false belief that the blend of affection, fear, and desire, which they call being in love, is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy.
So in other words, family is a relation that is created by nature, but if we can reduce it, if the devil can reduce that down to the subjective feeling of love, then the minute that you lose the love, you lose the duty. So, obviously, this is what's happened with regard to marriage. This is how the slogan, love is love, has ended up being a definition of marriage. And it has no boundaries.
Love is love could include bigamy. Love is love could include polygamy. Love is love could include two brothers getting married. Love is love has no definition. Because, obviously, love is not, in fact, love. Love in the traditional sense meant duty. Love in the traditional sense meant familial relations between man, woman, and children.
If you redefine love as that subjective feeling within you, then love is love, I suppose, is true. The problem is that is a complete redefinition. It is a robbing marriage of its identity and then wearing it around as a skin suit. Screwtape also points out that one easy way to hell is to get people to disregard the individual human beings in front of them in the name of mankind writ large.
This obviously is the project of the left, which is willing to completely run over its neighbors in order to pursue a better world for everybody else. Screwtape says, the great thing is to direct the malice of his immediate neighbors, whom he meets every day, and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference to people he doesn't know.
The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There's something I say about people. You know, I always say that I'm sort of a not people person, but that's actually not particularly true. My thoughts about mankind at large are not particularly generous. I don't think that human beings are saints. I don't think that human beings are devils.
I think that we are somewhere in between. When it comes to interpersonal, like day-on-day relations, I get along with, I love individual human beings. Individual human beings are great. It's the species that's a problem.
And when you start to think that the human species is filled with joy and wonder, but the individuals who live next door to you are the worst people in the entire world, you can do some pretty terrible things to your neighbors. One of Screwtape's other tools, one of the tools that he likes to use as well, is the human incapacity to understand the divine.
So God obviously has to limit his power in our lives in terms of being right in our face all the time in order for us to have free will. This means a sort of unbridgeable gap between human beings and the divine. And so we have a picture in our head of what God is and that picture is not real.
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Chapter 6: How does Screwtape manipulate human perception of reality?
That acting dutifully in the world is the best way to overcome all of these flaws in yourself. Now, the end of Screwtape Letters is tragic, obviously. You're talking about a man who has found a woman. He's going to get married to her. You think they're going to have a happy life. And instead, his life is cut short in a bombing raid in World War II.
And so that's supposed to be the tragic ending, but the whole point of Screwtape Letters is that if you believe in a spiritual world, there is no sad ending. There is only a happy ending. From the perspective of the divine, the young man has now gained access to something higher. Quote, you die and die, and then you are beyond death. How could I have ever doubted it?
It's a beautifully written book. It's got wonderful pieces of advice, even for people, by the way, who are not totally religious, and how to act better in your inner world, how to treat other people better, how to have better relations with your spouse. But when it comes to the spiritual world, there's so much good advice in here. So much good advice.
Okay, let's take a look at some of your questions. Pam says, is our culture experiencing a strong demonic influence? I mean, you'd be hard-pressed to say no. So I am, as I say, a believer in the Jewish tradition. And so the idea of demons is pretty controversial in the Jewish tradition. There's sort of a debate within Judaism about active demonic forces in the world.
But you'd be hard-pressed to say that it is not demonic in the either traditional or the colloquial sense to say that young children should be ushered into a world of gender confusion and sterilized. I mean, to say that it's not demonic is beyond me by any definition of the word demonic that you choose to use. Kate, ask a question. Kate, let's go.
I recently listened to an episode of Young Heretics where Spencer Clavin talks about the resurgence of Christianity after World War I amongst writers like C.S. Lewis and his contemporaries. And my question is, do you sense that there is a resurgence of religiosity happening now? I am an example of someone who sort of lost my relationship with the Catholic Church. I'm 34 now. I have two kids.
And my husband and I have been bringing our children back to church. And I don't think I'm an anomaly, especially looking around at the other families in church on Sundays. So what do you think?
I agree with this. I mean, I do think a religious revolution is on the way. Now, typically speaking, throughout human history, it's taken some sort of vast external shock in order to jog people back into religious adherence. So World War I obviously is that sort of shock. You see in the Great Depression that there was a big return to church.
A society which had gotten pretty dissolute in the 20s in the United States suddenly became a lot more religious in the 1930s. Right now, in the aftermath of COVID, when people are seeking community, When everybody's existence was virtual and they were very unhappy, you could see that sort of thing happening.
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Chapter 7: What role does temptation play in The Screwtape Letters?
to 83848 to add your name to their declaration inside with truth and fairness. That's joinadf.com slash Ben or text Ben to 83848. What starts in women's sports spreads to schools, medicine, and parental rights. This is our moment to push back. Stand with Alliance Defending Freedom today. They do extraordinary work. Go check them out right now.
Alliance Defending Freedom, fighting the battles on the front line for America's future. That's Alliance Defending Freedom. Pat says, here's my response to the study question, which is primary in faith, reason or emotion? I think the answer is neither reason nor emotion predominate in faith. Faith is a connection that is beyond reason or emotion. It's experience unlike any other.
Faith can generate emotion and inspire the use of reason, but ultimately faith is beyond either of these processes. Primary in the experience of faith is the concept of openness. No matter how much emotion one may feel about spiritual matters, or how much reasoning one engages in on theological questions, faith cannot be truly understood unless one is open to the acceptance of faith.
Once a person humbly and gratefully opens his heart to the possibility of belief, faith comes as a gift at the perfect moment in that person's spiritual path. One cannot experience faith by wishing for it or simply setting an intention to believe. Belief will come when the necessary preparation has been done. That's the best part of this response. That is correct.
Just like any other good thing in life, you have to prepare for the good thing to happen in order for the good thing to happen. This is why I've suggested, if you want to find your marital partner, get yourself ready for marriage, and you will find your marital partner. If you want faith, get yourself ready for faith. Do the things that dutiful people do.
Do the things that faithful people do, and faith will come upon you. And there's a famous story in the Talmud in which a... a non-Jew comes to Hillel, a pagan comes to Hillel, a famous rabbi, and says to him, can I be the chief priest, the high priest? And Hillel says to him, yes. And everybody goes to Hillel and says, what are you talking about?
A convert cannot be the high priest in the temple, right, by Jewish law. And Hillel says, well, by the time he figures that out, he'll be so deeply ensconced in the faith that it won't matter. And, of course, that's precisely what happens. The person studies, becomes enmeshed in the faith, and then hits on the idea that he can't be high priest.
He comes to Hillel, and Hillel says to him, but is your life better now? And he says, yeah. So platonic lie there from Hillel. But the basic idea, which is that you have to prepare yourself for faith in order to accept the faith, is in fact true. James says, what are some temptations Screwtape and his minions did not use you think would have been more effective? So, you know, C.S.
Lewis talks about the affect of sexuality on the human psyche. But he talks about it kind of minimally here. He talks about it almost as an afterthought.
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