Letter #18
Screwtape is now going to get into marriage
– no doubt to corrupt it.
My dear Wormwood,
Even under Slubgob you must have learned at college the routine technique of sexual temptation, and since, for us spirits, this whole subject is one of considerable tedium (though necessary as part of our training) I will pass it over. ... by persuading the humans that a curious, and usually shortlived, experience which they call ‘being in love’ is the only respectable ground for marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding.
18.1) Consider these two “versions” of what marriage is about. Compare God’s original intent to what C. S. Lewis wrote about 60 years ago to what’s happened since C. S. Lewis wrote Screwtape Letters.
This idea (the previous paragraph) is our parody of an idea that came from the Enemy.
The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. ... ‘To be’ means ‘to be in competition’.
Now the Enemy’s philosophy is nothing more nor less than one continued attempt to evade this very obvious truth. He aims at a contradiction. Things are to be many, yet somehow also one. The good of one self is to be the good of another. This impossibility He calls love, and this same monotonous panacea can be detected under all He does and even all He is—or claims to be. Thus He is not content, even Himself, to be a sheer arithmetical unity; He claims to be three as well as one, in order that this nonsense about Love may find a foothold in His own nature. ... At the other end of the scale, He introduces into matter that obscene invention the organism, in which the parts are perverted from their natural destiny of competition and made to cooperate.
18.2) Screwtape’s philosophy in this letter comes down to believing that a person is the same as an inanimate object.
What is the contradiction between (a) love and the difference between cooperation & competition and (b) the belief that humans share characteristics with inanimate objects?
How can we use this conflict to begin to show non-Christians the fallacy of Screwtape’s twisted logic?
His real motive for fixing on sex as the method of reproduction among humans is only too apparent from the use He has made of it. Sex might have been, from our point of view, quite innocent. ... The whole thing, in fact, turns out to be simply one more device for dragging in Love.
18.3) Screwtape continues to misunderstand love.
Take a look at the definition of rape - the unlawful compelling of a person through physical force or duress to have sexual intercourse.
How does this compare with the views held by Screwtape and those of God?
What would happen to the family “organism” if we reproduced like spiders? Can you see what would happen if Screwtape actually got his wish on this one?
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