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BK - The Screwtape Letters

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🏁 mvp This note lacks refinement, but it has been completed “enough”.
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Reflections

  • largely satire, ugh so good though
  • for me to write simple takeaways is to gloss over the insightful in-between remarks and character tone and vocabulary, that in themselves also imply so so much

Preface

  • too apathetic vs too obsessive, over demonology
  • concession that even the author may be mistaken

1 - Reason vs. Jargon

  • Moderns view beliefs/philosophies as attractive/unattractive over whether they are true/false.
    • “academic”, “practical”, “outworn”, “contemporary”, “conventional”, “ruthless”, “strong”, “stark”, “courageous”, “the philosophy of the future”
  • Truth and reason is the “Enemy’s” ground
    • vs. Jargon and current mood
  • Humans are mood-driven creatures, easily taken in the stream of ordinary plainness of “real life”
  • (Natural) Science can point to the intangible realities

2 - Church People

  • The formidable invisible Church, vs the laughable visible institution
  • Even with strong Christians, it can be small quirks that brings irrational ridicule
  • There’s a disappointing pictorial preconception of modern “Christians”, failing spiritual expectations (what even are they?)
  • Disappointment when new Christians get serious, like married couples starting to really live together. The “transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing”
  • This seems to be because of “free” lovers and “sonship”
    • this is a double-edged sword
    • it’s a phase of growing past “mere mood”
  • But of course Church people bring rational grounds for disappointment
  • still not quite the humility

3 - Domestic Household

  1. 💼 over-focus on (perceived) advanced spiritual duties, blindly neglecting the obvious external (after an hour’s examination)
  2. 🙏 praying for “spiritual”, neglecting physical — 💥 reminding the irritable sins and constructing a 👬 vague separable person
  3. 🤨 focus on annoying daily idiosyncrasies (surely on purpose)
  4. 🗯️ quarrels with offensive voice tones, yet grievance when offence taken ([[Fundamental Attribution Error]] (broken link, note not found))
  5. 👀 the older brother’s jealousy over the younger brother’s unearned elevated spiritual position

4 - Prayer

Formal prayers are still good

  • in over-correcting the parrot-like formulaic prayers, the patient may work towards “spontaneous, inward, informal, unregularised”
    • to the beginner, this produced a “vaguely devotional mood, in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part”
    • this bears a superficial resemblance to mature silent prayers
  • body position affects the soul

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

Successful prayers are not scored by produced feeling

  • gaze focus away from target and onto themselves
  • wills producing feelings instead of guiding mind
    • prayer for courage → brave feeling
    • prayer for forgiveness → feeling forgiven
  • then we’d start evaluating the value of prayer, according to success of the prayer producing the desired feeling
    • but that sort of success/failure, actually depends on our current mood

prayer produces images

  • praying humans don’t directly perceive its glorious spiritual reality
  • instead they have some poor visual conception
  • we pray to the thing we made; not to the Person who has made him
  • we should embrace the presently-invisible nature of prayer
    • “not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be”

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.

5 - Suffering & Death

  • extreme patriot vs ardent pacifist
  • terrors of war only long-term wrecks humans, if it affects their actions
  • war causes attention diverted from the self to causes higher than the self
    • though Goodness disapproves many of such causes, it does produce heroic values, which points them to Him (this is Caleb’s idea tuning)
  • war causes Christians to valiantly pass into heaven
    • rather than growing old and corrupting, an
    • “withholding all suggestion of a priest, lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition!”
  • war constantly reminds us of death, instead of numbed with contented worldliness
  • Christians should have been briefed that [[Christians should expect suffering|Christian suffering is expected]] (broken link, note not found), so “a faith destroyed by a war or pestilence, cannot really have been worth the trouble of destroying”.

6 - The Mind

  • fear of the future, should be met with patience in providence
    • present is the daily cross, not just the object of the fear
  • every bad scenario can’t all be true at the same time
  • the object vs the fear—which is the serious focus and which is just a light mood?
    • “i am now just entering a state of Anger/Lust” — before a serious action
    • “my mood is more devout” —and serious focus is inwards
  • human may proclaim hate for the imaginary, but surprisingly showing love in practice
    • don’t get it flipped: loving the imaginary Germans, but hating the real neighbours (see [[YT - The Most Misunderstood Parable]] (broken link, note not found))
    • where do we focus our active wills? (not just to keep in our imaginations)

7 - Extreme Ideologies

  • not just two extremes: supernatural magicians vs materialists and skeptics
    • a third hybrid: a vague “Life Force”, the Materialist Magician
    • worshipping “forces”, denying spirits
  • lukewarm or any extreme — except extreme devotion
  • unpopular small vocal factions
  • does the man truly grounded in his Cause? Or else, sudden emotional crisis would make a fool
  • the partisan spirit — patriotism or pacifism becomes religious
    • then religion is part of the “Cause”, and “Christianity valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in the favor” — of whichever
  • temporal affairs are just material for obedience

Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, […] it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, [he is fallen, especially if very “religious”].

8 - Undulation & Dry Seasons

  • humans are spirit-body hybrid amphibians
    • bodies go through undulating change (think a trend graph)
  • humans surrender their will to something
    • demons want bounded wills, like cattle becoming food to be consumed
    • God wants freely conformed wills, like servants becoming sons, flowing over to give out

Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

  • why do we go through troughs?
    • His nature rejects being the Irresistible and the Indisputable (Lewis’ words), just to override the human will
    • He does use an initial draw
    • but it’s temporary, He’ll withdraw from conscious experience, all supports and incentives
    • “it is during troughs that it grows into the creature He wants it to be”, stumbling on own two legs of its own desire

He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice

9 - Pleasures & Temptations

  • troughs provide worse opportune temptation
    • peaks give more physical energy, more appetite, more tempted?
    • but powers of resistance are also at the highest
    • troughs produce a different (and worse) quality of temptation — more perverted and less beautiful
    • more drunkards from painkilling than celebration
  • pleasure is for them a regrettable means to an end, operating on the Enemy’s ground
    • pleasure has permissible (natural) and forbidden (least redolent, least pleasurable) expressions

An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.

  • law of undulation, or law of permanency?
    • we’re made to falsely believe that peaks or troughs last forever
  • hyper-pessimistic: tempt with above
  • hyper-optimistic: become content, doubt their initial passions, backslide into moderation
  • “all phases die”, using jargon (not reason) to move from “mood is fading” to “this is false”

A [religion in moderation] is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.

10 - Worldly Influences

  • assimilating subtle tells of associations in opposition to faith
    • “all mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be”
  • pride, not usually shame
    • one: pretending when no one’s looking, living two parallel lives
    • two: scoffing Puritans, having deeper complete two-sided life
    • three: anti-Puritan, so good to oblige friends

11 - Comedy

  • joy - always important
  • fun - can distract, but can empower
  • joke proper - hyper-serious and hyper-crude.
  • flippancy
    • people abuse humour to excuse wrongs
    • should disapprove, but instead leads even to admiration
    • “don’t be Puritanical”
    • numb to the important things, blunting intellect

comparing joy to music, obscure to Screwtape. But unlikely, if Lucifer did music and allat

12 - Lukewarm & Numbness

  • maintaining external habits, forgetting real difference from first months
    • no explicit repentance of definite sin, instead a vague, merely uneasy, feeling/mood of “not doing well, oh well”
  • worse case scenario: becoming lukewarm
    • we are aware, but reluctant
    • dislike, yet not omitting, religious duties
      • barely think before, forget right after
    • in prayer, temptations → turn to open arms begging to numb and distract
  • joy becomes less attractive
    • “Anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention”
    • wasting years, not in sweet sins, but in numbness
    • we start to chase things we don’t even like
  • small, unspectacular sins
    • “Murder is no better than cards, if cards can do the trick.”
    • “The safest road to hell is the gradual one..”

They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a pass-book.

13 - Distinct Desires

  • detaching from self? “losing/denying one self“?
  • the value of distinctness and individuality

When they are wholly His, they will be more themselves than ever.

While He is delighted to see them sacrificing even their innocent wills to His, He hates to see them drifting away from their own nature for any other reason.

  • argument from desire, leading to Desire (and away from Dullness)
    • we must retain retain strong personal taste
    • even if trivial, and not sin
    • they have no inherent virtue
    • but innocence, humility, self-forgetfulness, disinterestedness
  • we’re tempted to be shallow snobs for the “best”, “right”, “important” things we don’t truly enjoy
  • feeling without acting → less acting → less feeling

14 - True Humility

  • less grandiose resolutions from original conversion
    • just hope for daily/hourly bread
  • humility is more like “self-forgetfulness”, unlike:
    • vainglory
    • false modesty — self-focused humility (pride)
    • self-contempt opinion (vs truth)
  • Enemy’s aims, that we
    • rejoice in our best, even if it have been done by anyone else
    • equally in neighbour’s talents, or a random giraffe
    • love ourselves as our neighbours
    • better to think we are great, then forget about it, than to drill that we are the-worst
    • we’re not called to have an opinion of our own talents
    • realise we are just gifted creatures, we “might as well be proud of the colour of our hair”
    • even not to dwell too long on sins, because then our attention turns outward

15 - Future & Eternity

  • tortured fear, stupid confidence
  • we should have two focuses: eternity and present
  • the Past hads determinate nature and resembles Eternity
  • Future’s characteristics
    • biological necessity
    • inflames hope and fear
    • unknown
  • yet, Future is least like Eternity
    • sins (begrudgingly) reward pleasure in the Present, while promising Future profit
    • while we still plan good for the Future, we do it in the Present
    • haunted by imminent heaven or hell on earth, so ready to break commands in the Present, if we think we can attain the one or avert the other—our faith depending on the success-or-failure of the schemes whose end we will not live to see
    • goose chase of rainbow’s end, never honest/kind/happy now, always using [the real gift of the Present] as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the Future.
  • “living in the present” ambiguous → can still mean anxious about the future
    • untroubled for the Future, not because concerned with the Present, but self-persuaded that the Future is agreeable
    • this is false tranquility. disappointments → impatience
  • even if horrors in Future → but praying for Present grace

16 - Church Unity

  • church as a unity of place, and not a club/faction of likings/class/psychology
  • the layman is to be critical+rejecting of the false+unhelpful, but rather humble dwelling on the nourishment
  • Church A: just acceptable
    • watered down
    • familiar same old talking points
  • Church B: just triggering
    • whatever opinion, just to inflame
    • shock, grieve, puzzle, humiliate
  • petty issues
    • mass vs communion, with no real understanding

17 - Indulgences of Delicacy

  • gluttony of delicacy (not just gluttony of excess)
    • small quantity, big bad behaviour
    • treating others badly
    • but with a false humility, self-justifying appeal to modesty, covering indulgence
  • “All-I-Want”, but no one can ever “properly” do it right. It’s impossible and insatiable
    • can also mask it on the pretence of “love”: “Not for me, but for my little boy!”
  • “proper” can also mean snobbish quality, not just minute or excessive quantity
  • false chastity

18 - Marriage Union & Pleasure

  • Hell wants competition
    • “to be” means “to be in competition”
  • but Heaven’s philosophy of “love” is to be distinct yet united
  • the Family, produced by Love, also, is distinct yet united
  • Marriage defined as “One Flesh”
    • (should be, though tough) it is irrelevant of “happily married” or “in love”
    • Paul extended it to even just copulation, a transcendental relation to either eternally enjoy and/or eternally endure
  • but its design to produce affection, can be twisted to become a delirious requirement, rather than an encouraging guidepost
    • it’s complementary with its design that “being in love” precedes marriages, intending fidelity, fertility and goodwill—just as emotion often precedes religious conversion
    • but we are start to believe that pleasure is a promised result
  • two pitfalls:
    • we avoid marriage because of the lack of feeling “in love”, discounting the “one-flesh” aspect and value and beauty
    • feeling “in love” excuses and justifies all folly

19 - Meaningful Conditions

  • “Every person in competition” vs “Selfless Love desires to give to their beloved“
  • Puzzling love, that is selfless
  • human states only matter so far as their vector on eternal consequences
    • “in love” or not, patriotism, celibacy, politics, hobbies, church preferences, etc.
  • so, we should not blanket evaluate human states
    • asceticism: delicacy masked as purity, leading to cynicism
    • hedonism: irresistible, meritorious, “noble” pursuits of twisted love
    • foolish marriages
  • the state of falling in love (or I guess, losing a loved one, or health/sickness, health/sickness, age/youth) is not, in itself, necessarily favourable to either side

20 - Physical Taste, or something

  • physical taste is largely current trends
  • sexuality with the eye and impossible
  • two imaginary ideals (uh i dont really understand this)
  • marriage

21 - Stewardship

  • misfortune PLUS injury to a felt legitimate claim that was denied
  • “20 minutes” vs “my 20 minutes”
  • “…but the total, from which these deductions have been made wasm in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.”
  • time is a gift, man cannot make nor retain — man owes all (and yet gives much lesser than due, if he really knew)
  • “sense of ownership” by pride and confusion
    • “My boots” → “my God”
    • “my teddy bear”
      • A) a symbol of my someone’s affection for me
      • B) a mere toy that i can pull to pieces if I like; the God whom my services have entitled me control over
  • “Mine” on creative right vs. conquest

22 - Foreign Spiritual Realities

  • LOL my favourite section, Screwtape just hounds on this “girl”, spitting and spewing such vulgar insults. You just got to read. this yourself.
  • pleasures to enjoy, even menial sleeping washing eating drinking…

A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood and then dies with a smile.

  • The Enemy as a hedonist, at His right hand are “pleasure for evermore”-
  • music and silence, vs noise

23 - Christianity, And.

  • [remove → corrupt] spirituality
  • People redefining “historical” Christianity for political/social agendas
  • a vague Jesus cannot be worshipped
    • Creator adored by creature → leader aclaimed by a partisan → distinguished character approved by a judiciious historian
  • even if social justice → Christianity is good because it produces social justice
  • to believe it for some other reason, than because it is true

24 - Environments and Cliques

  • ignorance and naivety, confident in familiarity
  • not really from Faith, but just surroundings
  • entering a new circle, we imitate virtues, but perhaps also their hidden dormant vices
  • educated, intelligence, agreeable
  • humble before the newfound circle, but proud over others
  • do we like the culture because of spiritual substance — or just its mood-tinted form?
  • we are different → “my special right” vs. “my humble gift”
  • true spiritual pride vs social vanity
    • proud of being Christian vs. proud of being in “a set”

25 - Rhythm

  • “Christianity And”
  • Same Old Thing
  • Good “Rhythm”: love of change x love of permanence
    • same seasons, same events, but fresh
    • mixture of novelty + familiarity
  • Twisted: “Absolute Novelty”
    • law of diminishing returns
    • costs; leading to avarice or discontent (or both)
  • We make over-correction and boogeymen
    • large focus on least dangers (vv), like fire extinguishers to flood
  • we should follow simple platitudes ([[Phlp 4#8]] (broken link, note not found))
    • and not large questions about trends and Future
    • we fail when: unchanged (descriptive) → stagnant (emotional)

We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

26 - Unselfishness

27 - Prayer & History

  • ward distractions by sheer willpower, ignoring
    • instead we should mentally active, bringing even blockers before
  • hyper-pious prayers/petitions
    • romance brings earthly happiness → but over-correction into false-spirituality
    • “boring, crude” instructions on praying for daily bread, recovery of sick — we should realise that “spiritual” food and health is just as needy
  • “heads i win, tails you lose” — prayer fails, or success inevitable anyways
  • in prayer, who is the original agent?
    • how: no problem—outside of time, foresee vs see, (wait is this A or B time theory?)
    • why: love
  • history importantly connects and guides us

for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages, there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.

28 - The Human Lifespan

  • upside of war for the patient
    • lower worldly hopes
    • defence work
    • full of loved ones
    • forced to attend to neighbours
    • gained eternally if killed tonight
  • humans regard death as the prime evil, and survival as the greatest good
    • spiritually, it is not so

The long dull monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather.

  • it’s hard for us to persevere, worn out by attrition
    • routine of adversity,
    • gradual decay of youthful loves and hopes,
    • quiet despair of overcoming chronic temptations/trials
    • drabness
    • inarticulate resentment
  • prosperity knits a man to the world, a home
    • man finds place in world → world finds place in man
  • we have a guard: we were designed against feeling at home anywhere else than Eternity
    • the young yearn for otherworldly beauty, even if not religion, and are walled against advancement/connections/safety.
    • vs. older, to make heaven on earth
  • Time is so valuable, humans have so little, demons have so little to work with
    • many die in infancy, then youth
    • “normal life” is the exception, in human history
    • only few people in heaven will have experience of spiritual warfare throughout 60-70 years

The smaller it is, the better we must use it. Whatever you do, keep your patient as safe as you possibly can.

29 - Courage & Cowardice

  • cowardice vs. courage-fuelled pride/hatred
  • corrupted virtue producing vice
  • hatred on behalf of others, “their enemies, not mine”
  • cowardice = fear → hate + shame
    • we can’t be proud of cowardice
    • calamity → courage becomes so treasured, cowardice shamed
    • cowardice, may actually bring contrition → repentance + humility
    • peace allows ignorance; danger forces undeniable courage and morality
    • that’s one reason for our dangerous world: danger $\propto$ morality
    • courage: the form of every virtue at its maximal testing point
      • the point of highest reality!
    • make a coward → he may learn too much about himself!
  • cowardice becoming Despair, that this sin is unforgivable

Courage is simply not one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means the point of highest reality.

A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger, will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

  • precautions and anxiety, under the guise of duty
  • superstitions
  • that we have something else to fall back on, other than God-given courage
  • preparing for imaginary “worst comes to worst” → belief that the worst will not come to worst
    • then in a moment, rush horrible terror out into his nerves and muscles, and he may fatally misact

Remember, that the act of cowardice is all that matters; the emotion of fear is, in itself, no sin, and though we enjoy it, does us no good,

30 - Emotional Reality

  • “temper at dog, excessive cigarette smoking, forgetting of prayer”
  • moderate fatigue produces more peevishness than absolute exhaustion
  • unexpected demands
  • ceased to think a half-hour ahead
  • false hopes, most weakest when we think the strain is almost ending
  • total commitment: to bear whatever comes vs. bear for a “reasonable period”
  • intellectual → emotional
  • emotional aspect of a “real” experience:
    • bare physical facts vs emotional experience
    • really just music in a lighted building vs. armchair never really knowing skydiving
    • we tend to fit our own definitions: war and poverty are “really” horrible; peace and plenty are mere sentimental physical facts
    • and so we “pay“ for the cake, and not eat it.

31 - The Revelation

“A sudden clearing of his eyes as he saw you for the first time, and recognised the part you had in him and knew that you had it no longer”

ayo aint this Dear Wormwood lyrics

  • final stripping, complete cleansing — “worse” then the pleasure of stripping dirty clothes into warm bath
  • so easy, death in war. no aging weariness, doctor’s sentence to operating theatre, nursing home, no false hopes of life.
  • one moment, terrible war. screams, fall, stink, taste. burn, horror, stun, ache. Next— gone, bad dream, never again to be.

How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous?

  • humans would converse with spirits, before whom demons would cower
  • really poetic section
    • strangeness of spirits to doubtful mortal eyes
    • yet upon finally seeing them, recognised each one, like awakened memories
      • not “who are you”, but “so it was you this whole time!”

The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always evaded memory was now at last recovered.

  • us foul beasts seeing Him
    • blinding suffocating fire vs. cool clarity light
    • sins finally clearer to us than to demons
    • pains to encounter, but to embrace, worth more than earthly pleasures, even delights of virtue, is now “half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whome he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door.”
  • a world where pain and pleasure take transfinite values, and demonic arithmetic (rationale) fails
    • but still insists their own Realism