What would it be like to spy on demons as the plan to tempt us? In this episode Trent sits down with Pints with Jack co-host David Bates to talk about C.S. Lewis’s book The Screwtape Letters.
Host:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
It’s time to go on a tour. We’re going to go on a tour in the next two episodes from hell to heaven and back again and one of the greatest Christian apologists in the 20th century, if not in the history of the church, is going to be our guide and someone who hosts a podcast dedicated to this particular apologist is going to be our guide to the guide to the afterlife. I am Trent Horn, this is the Council of Trent Podcast. I’m glad that you’re able to stop by. Before we get into our interview today with our wonderful guest, I just want to remind you, be sure to go and check out trenthornpodcast.com. Your support is what makes the podcast possible and when you become a supporter for as low as $5 a month, you get access to bonus content there. We’ve got lots of bonus content, sneak peaks of my book, Can a Catholic Be a Socialist?, including a coming soon are the audio portion, so sneak peeks of the audio book, Can a Catholic be a Socialist?
I’ve also posted some fun little videos. If you ever wanted a tour of my office or show how I pack for a 16 hour trip overseas and what you can learn from that as well. You can get a special thank you video from me, the ability to submit questions for open mailbag episodes, lots of great stuff and sneak peaks of our upcoming episodes. Next month I’m going to be doing a debate on the Deuterocanonical books of scripture. So I’m going to be debating on the podcast. I actually haven’t had done a debate in a long time, so I’m super excited for this. I’m going to debate Steve Christie, the author of the book, Why Protestant Bibles are Smaller. So our subscribers will get a sneak peek, that’ll be mid April, but if you’re a subscriber to the podcast, you get the debate early just for you. All that and more, be sure to check it out at trenthornpodcast.com.
Now onto the show today. Our guest is Mr. David Bates. He is the cohost of Pints With Jack, a podcast devoted to C.S. Lewis and he also has some other fun personal news that have come crashing into our Catholic answers studios as of late, we’ll get to shortly. David, welcome back to the podcast.
David Bates:
It’s wonderful to be here again.
Trent Horn:
So we’re going to talk about C.S. Lewis. We’re going to talk about, you’ve been on before, so I’ll include links in the descriptions of this podcast to the previous episodes we did. I think we’re going to call them, you don’t know Jack, but I don’t remember if we stick with the title or not, but it was a good introduction to C.S. Lewis when we had you on before.
David Bates:
Yeah, just outlining who he was, what his life was about and some of the ideas that he communicated in his writings.
Trent Horn:
And so what we’re going to do for today’s episode and Thursday’s episode, is we’re going to dive deep into two of his books we didn’t get a chance to touch on in our previous introduction to Lewis. Before we do that, you have big news. You are now engaged to assistant producer Marie, who works here at Catholic Answers Live, helps to set up the studio for us to do interviews like this and I was there and you put me to shame, man. Laura and I, we just went to the Melting Pot, adoration, and I said, you want to get married? And she’s like, sure. I’m like, okay. I mean it was a bit more formal than that. But you did vespers at the Church, you had a blessing and then you had all the friends and family downstairs waiting. I mean, kudos to you, my friend. Were you nervous?
David Bates:
I was terrified.
Trent Horn:
Oh yes.
David Bates:
I actually wasn’t meant to be cantering vespers, but all of our other cantors disappeared that week. So it was in danger of being canceled. But I had planned everything around that, so it was like, okay, no, I’ll do the cantering. But it was in the end really good because it meant I had an hour of singing praises to God and reading his word in preparation before I actually got down on one knee and asked her to marry me.
Trent Horn:
Oh my gosh, were there tears? There were so many tears. I was crying. Everyone was crying. It’s so beautiful. And especially because I’m in that time of life, Laura and I were talking about this, and maybe our listeners can sympathize, where you go through time of life, especially like in your twenties, you get married, your friends get married, there’s like a bazillion weddings you have to be off, you’re like, oh, I got to go to another wedding. And then you get older, you’re like, I’m not going to any other weddings. And the only thing you hear is like, so-and-so got divorced. So I’m like, oh no. But then it’s exciting within a circle of your friends to see people getting married, especially in a culture that likes to talk the talk about marriage, but never really rarely walks the walk, you know?
David Bates:
And your listeners might recall a time quite a while ago when you spoke about doing a trip to Disneyland with a couple who were dating. And yes, that was the two of us.
Trent Horn:
So I, I think that, in the grand story of your romance, I have a little place there to allow your little date at Disneyland to be magic instead of tears and chaos and waiting in line sunburnt and other things like that, which by the way, if you’re going to Disneyland and you don’t want to have tears and chaos, check out our previous free for all Friday episodes, how to hack Disneyland, you won’t be disappointed. Let’s hop into the topic for today. So let’s just give a quick one minute summary. Almost everyone’s heard of C.S. Lewis, but a lot of things they may not know about him. Our quick one minute primer C.S. Lewis.
David Bates:
Sure thing. So I think most people know C.S. Lewis as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia. He was actually born in Northern Ireland in 1898. He was known to his friends as Jack, that’s why our podcast is called Pints with Jack. And he was raised in a Christian household, but he became a confirmed atheist very early on, even while he was still at school. However, following multiple one, he started to reconsider his atheism and starting to see issues with that worldview. And he then became a theist, he described himself as the most reluctant convert in all of England, and eventually then he became a Christian and he was part of the inklings, is really one of the founding members and that was a group of scholars and writers, people like Charles Williams, Owen Barfield and the author of the Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien. And over the course of his career, Lewis wrote many, many books, 20, 30 it kind of depends on how you chop them up, but he wrote to across all different genres, fantasy, sci-fi, apologetics.
Trent Horn:
I’m hoping to catch up to him, at least in number. I thought about trying to catch up to Peter Kreeft, but it’s never going to happen.
David Bates:
Not possible.
Trent Horn:
I don’t think it’s possible because he’s still writing books. I think he’s written over like 90 books. I’m up to I think nine or 10 right now. So maybe numbers wise, Lewis, but I don’t think I’m ever going to beat Lewis when it comes to genre. I mean I’m playing around nonfiction right now, here or there, but it’s hardly getting anywhere. But genre wise, he was an amazing prolific author when it comes to crossing different types of literature.
David Bates:
And he was immensely well-read. He read everything in their original languages, Greek, Latin, didn’t matter.
Trent Horn:
All right, well let’s get into one of his works then, which is kind of a mishmash of genres. It’s part apologetic, part fantasy, part horror. And that would be The Screwtape Letters. So what are the Screwtape Letters?
David Bates:
Well, for many people, this is their favorite book of his. He published it in 1942 so as this is still during World War II and it was actually the book that made him famous, particularly here in the United States. It actually even got him on the cover of Time Magazine.
Trent Horn:
So yeah, I thought it would have been Mere Christianity, but that started his radio series then became a book.
David Bates:
Back in England, yes.
Trent Horn:
Oh yes. But this is the book that made him famous.
David Bates:
Particularly in the United States. This was the one that really put him on the map.
Trent Horn:
That would so be us. Instead of like, we enjoy this profound apologetic defense of Christianity. And then in America it’s like we want the lured book about hell. Thanks America.
David Bates:
Well, I’m going to defend the Americans because this is also a very, very profound book, and it’s a very subtle and it’s very, very funny. And Lewis does what he does best, which is communicating deep spiritual truths in a way that engages both reason and the imagination.
Trent Horn:
Right. So yeah, and we’ll be talking about that more that this book. And then in Thursday’s episode we’re going to talk about The Great Divorce. He uses a lot of imagined supposings. And so this is one of those.
David Bates:
Yes. So in The Screwtape Letters, it’s what if you could overhear what the devils are doing. So the Screwtape Letters is a series of 31 letters that are sent from a senior demon, one called Screwtape to a junior demon who was also his nephew called Wormwood. And he’s basically instructing him in the art of temptation. Screwtape is trying to show him how to take his patient, this Christian that he’s been given to tempt how to send him to hell. And the funny thing about this book is everything is turned upside down because you’re getting it from the demonic point of view. So good is bad, bad is good. When Screwtape talks about to the enemy, he’s actually talking about God. When he talks about our father below, he’s talking about Satan. And it’s just so full of humor and wisdom and some really fun names. All of the demons have names like Screwtape, Wormwood, Slubgob, Glubose, Toadpipe.
Trent Horn:
Toadpipe. I guess a lot of them, when you’re drawing the motifs of how do you name a demon?, it seems like a lot of them are connected to either insects or ooze, and that’s what our imagination gravitates us towards as to what the demonic is. We just find those things that are a aesthetically the most displeasing in our physical reality and they’re like a faint image of the demonic essentially.
David Bates:
In all of his books. Lewis chooses wonderful character names that are evocative, that engage your imagination even before you’ve learnt anything about them.
Trent Horn:
I love him. And this must be an inkling trait because I think, well it must have been Tolkien who said this? The most beautiful word in the world. He said it was cellar door.
David Bates:
Cellar door.
Trent Horn:
Cellar door. And the inklings is this Tolkien word with Lewis. They knew how they knew language well because he said cellar door the most… And when I see it I’m like, it does have the perfect balance to it. And he said, you just combine it together, cellar door, sell a door, and then now you’ve got a character name and, but that crafting of language is so helpful. And that’s good because this book was a response to someone of his time who was also good at crafting language to rile people up. And that would be Adolf Hitler, who of course, who’s the most appropriate person to originate the idea of a book about the demonic, but Hitler himself, right?
David Bates:
Yeah. Lewis was listening to a speech by Hitler. Think he was listening to it with a friend of his who is also his doctor, and he was really shocked by how when he was listening to Hitler speak, he was momentarily convinced. And he was convinced of things that he knew were false. And the following day he went to church. He didn’t actually go to the service that he normally went to. He only went to the one without the organ. So he ended up going to a service with an organist who chose music that he didn’t like and a clergyman who thought he couldn’t preach and so he was kind of bored during church. And so he was reflecting on the speech that he had recently heard from Hitler and he was thinking about how Hitler speech and Satan’s temptations are very similar in so far as they swerve us away from the things that we want and the things that are truly good and twist up and confuse our thinking.
Trent Horn:
It’s not a 100% bold face lie because then you would just not listen.
David Bates:
No.
Trent Horn:
But it has seeds of truth sprinkled in it that ended up getting you hooked. So, from my understanding is that, it began similar like how mere Christianity began as a series of radio addresses. This began as sort of a series in a Church of England magazine called The Guardian.
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes, it was released in a serial fashion so each letter was in each edition of the magazine. Well, some of the biographers noted that there was at least one clergyman that wrote into the magazine to say that he was canceling his subscription because some of the advice given in those letters was not only erroneous, it was downright diabolic.
Trent Horn:
Yes, it does remind me that I wrote an article, my first article that was the genesis of my book, What the Saints Never Said. So I wrote an article based on that in Catholic Answers Magazine and I included at the beginning saying that Abraham Lincoln once said that one third of the quotes on the internet are false. And we printed this and letters to the editor the next month. Someone wrote in saying, I would like to highlight an error in your magazine. Either the internet is older than we know, or Abraham Lincoln lived much longer than we know so I would like that to be corrected in the next issue. And then our editor, Tim Ryland simply replied back, he said, there are these two options is, or there’s a third option, dot, dot, dot. So all right. So then the series eventually became a book and it deals a lot with the psychology of temptation.
And a lot of that seems to be drawn also from the ascetics, the desert fathers. And this is just really refreshing to see, especially from a Protestant. And I think this is probably common among Protestants in the mid 20th century, the idea that we need to combat the devil to protect our souls. Because one of the hardest things that I deal with now, I mean I did my debate with James White three years ago and I still interact with Protestants all the time. Their main thing is, well, once saved, always saved. You can lose your salvation, which I think has got to be, if he rewrote the book today, that would be Wormwood’s Best advice to give the young demon, just tell him there’s no way he could lose his salvation, take him off his guard. But Lewis was concerned about this, just like the desert ascetics were.
David Bates:
Yeah, and what was interesting is people asked him where he got his material for The Screwtape Letters. Was it from drawing from the aesthetics of the desert and or great church history and our great mystics. He says, well, somewhat. But there’s actually another way of knowing this sort of thing. And it was basically by introspecting and seeing where he fell down. When you fall into sin and you look back and you see the ridiculous lie and ridiculous train of thought that you followed that took you there.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Well let’s talk about that and we’re going to go through, now I encourage you to read the book for yourself or to get it on audio book, I think you would thoroughly enjoy all of Lewis’s works are great in that regard. So let’s talk about Screwtapes’ advice. So the habits that he wants to instill, he tells Wormwood to instill in his victims. So one of them is hell by the gentle path of small sins.
David Bates:
Yes, Screwtape wants to teach his nephew that it’s not necessarily about producing great wickedness in your patient. Just make sure he gets to hell. He gives some example of some small sins and he says that you’ll say these are very small, but doubtless like all young tempters, you want to produce great wickedness in your patient. And he says, it doesn’t matter. He says, the safest road to hell is the gradual one. It’s the gentle slope, soft underfoot without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. It’s all about a slow fade. You don’t want your patient to realize how far he is sliding away.
Trent Horn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And with this advice, I think it’s possible for all of it. We can invert it to get someone to heaven, not completely inverted, but take it in a different direction. So the same error to think that in order to go to heaven, I have to be a saint today, I have to be perfectly beatified in this very moment and since I can’t, I give up. Is that doing small acts of good and self-deny, especially small acts of self denial. It’s like, I’m not going to be able to jump into a fast [inaudible 00:15:45] and give up all corporal pleasures. So it’s like, just deny yourself something small and then the more you do that, you will grow and strengthen that area.
David Bates:
This ties back into something that we talked about last time I was on the show about heavenly and hellish creatures. Lewis had this idea that, and it’s from family base in everything in life that you start a journey of a thousand miles with a single step. That it’s these small acts of virtue that will lead you to becoming a virtuous person and small acts of vice that we’ll be sending in the other direction.
Trent Horn:
Let’s take a look at another one of the habits before we go on talking about the issue of the church, which I think is interesting that you would think a lot of this is just about willpower and appetites and that is a lot of it. But there’s also theological advice that he gives, that the demon gives Wormwood. Focus on the temporal rather than the eternal.
David Bates:
Screwtape tells his nephew, you want to keep this guy thinking in just the here and now. Don’t let him have his eyes on heaven. Don’t let him think about eternal things. And even recounts a story of somebody that he had been tempting years ago and he said he was a confirmed atheist, he was all good and he was reading in the library and Screwtape notices his train of thought going off in an odd direction. One that he didn’t like because he knew where this was going. And he said, so what I did is I immediately took control of the man over the best parts of him over which I had control, his stomach. I suggested how about lunch? And he says, my patient brightened up yes, yes, this is far too important to think about on an empty stomach. Let’s go get something to eat.
And he says he had him out of the library and he gave him a good dose of real life. So he saw a bus, he saw a newsboy, and before he knew it, he was well away from the train of thought that would have perhaps led him somewhere that Screwtape didn’t want him to go. And this is one of the reasons why we fast. We’re in lent at the moment. And the entire point of fasting is about self-mastery. It’s we master ourselves, we master our passions so that we are in charge of our body and not the other way around.
Trent Horn:
Right. And I think that anytime we look at when we’re denying ourselves things, whatever it may be, whether it’s denying something for a fast or saying no to a particular sin, whether it’s small or large, something I usually say to myself, it’s helpful to remember and I would tell my children the same thing, is that many times you will regret saying yes, but you’ll never regret saying no. Like it’s just about getting out of that present moment because then just to have a future of days and months and years and decades where you can always have the pleasure of knowing you said no. I mean that’s so enduring, a wonderful pleasure then the guilt of having said yes that you, that can’t ever really be undone.
David Bates:
And if you can’t ever say no, what is your yes even really worth?
Trent Horn:
Right. It doesn’t mean anything. Your yes only means something if you also have a corresponding no. Theological advice he gives, so Screwtape wants to make use of the man’s parish, his actual church to drive someone away from Christianity. How does he do that?
David Bates:
I’d invite listeners just to think about your parish and think about the people who annoy you. And Screwtape says it can be because they have squeaky shoes because they sing off key. You don’t like the way they dress. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous it is. All of these things, you want to focus the patient’s attention on these because it’ll start to annoy you and you’ll start focusing on the other people’s vices, either real or imaginary. And he says, you want to keep your patients thinking about that and never once consider how ridiculous he might look to them and assume that because he can see the sins and faults in these other people that therefore Christianity isn’t really true.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. It’s so funny that in the one place where he should be able to find solace and comfort, and it of course makes sense for the demons to say, we want to keep you away from God, church especially, go to mass, the divine liturgy, that’s the place to be closest to him. Let’s throw out all the big guns we can right here just to annoy you. But it’s important to know that’s what’s happening.
David Bates:
And to try and inoculate him from the grace and wisdom that’s there. Because if he’s spending all of his time criticizing and thinking about how terrible everyone else is around him, he isn’t going to have an open heart to receive the grace that’s going to be there.
Trent Horn:
And to encourage him to shop around to think may be, and this is funny, maybe a better church will be better for me. Is part of a Screwtapes advice to go church shopping?
David Bates:
Absolutely, and I think this is something that’s become more rampant in recent years. There’s kind of ecclesial consumerism that you just keep shopping around to try and find the church that’s right for you, which tends to be a little bit of a code for the one that says everything up on the platter for me, it doesn’t really demand anything from me. And also if you can keep him shopping, then he’ll never put down roots. If he never puts down roots, then nothing will ever be asked of him because it’s when you put down roots in a parish that you really grow. Iron sharpens iron. And it’s when you actually have to deal with the parishioner who sings off key. It’s when you actually have to do a job that your priest has asked you to do, that you would really rather not do.
Trent Horn:
I would say about that parishioner, you handle me very well, so I am quite grateful for that. Yeah, so it says in The Screwtape Letters, his advice, he says, if a man can’t be cured of church going, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that suits him until it becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. The search for a suitable church makes the man a critic where the enemy, God, wants him to be a pupil. Now, of course, I don’t think that means that you can’t ever choose a church that makes you feel at home with God. Even that’s appropriate, but the sense of that church only exists to fulfill my particular needs is something I shop around at, just like I shop around for a restaurant or a department store, that’s when you start falling into trouble.
And then you see this especially, I mean I remember hanging out with Protestant friends who would say, well I don’t need to go to church this Sunday, we’re in a new town and I’m just going to stay home and read the Bible because what do I need it for? So let’s talk then about prayer. So obviously Screwtape does not, tells Woodworm we don’t want this guy, we want to keep him away from the enemy, keep him away from God. And when he tries to pray, and it happens to all of us when we try to pray, that’s when we feel attacked. I remember in Peter Kreept’s book, The Battle for Prayer, a wonderful book I’d recommend for all our readers, he says that the number one thing you can do when it comes to increasing your prayer life is to just pray.
Because the second you try to do it, everything will go wrong. The phone will ring, everything will be busy, you will feel terrible, and you just have to kind of power through it. So he advises Wormwood to tell his victim to focus just on the feelings when you’re praying.
David Bates:
Absolutely. If you can’t get him to not pray, if he is going to do this, okay, get him just to focus on the feelings. So if he’s praying for courage, let prayer be just really about him trying to feel courageous to try and feel brave. And the same thing with anything else that he’s praying for. Let him try and evaluate his prayer based on how it makes him feel. If he doesn’t have the feeling of whatever he’s been praying for or about, then let him think that that prayer was worthless.
And this is a real beauty of Screwtape because we’re hearing the worst advice possible when we invert it, we’re much more receptive to the truth that’s behind it. Because the truth is, we pray because we need a relationship with God. And sometimes he will give us feelings and sometimes he won’t. But that’s not the important point. The important point is to have that relationship and to foster that relationship.
Trent Horn:
Well, Lewis mentioned once, this was something that always, I still remember reading it. You know it’s funny when you remember like a part of a book. Especially for me when, this happens to the audio books a lot, but sometimes when a part of a book really strikes you, you remember the place you were, where you read it. So sometimes when I’ve listened to certain debates or audio books and my preparation, sometimes I’ll do that on bike rides. I’ll remember certain places where I was riding my bike and I heard that debate or this point. With Mere Christianity. I was reading it in the stacks at Scottsdale Civic Center Library when I lived there, that’s where I converted. I lived in Phoenix, Arizona. I became Catholic, Christian and Catholic in high school and I was reading it in between the stacks there at the civic center library, beautiful library in Scottsdale, Arizona.
And the line Lewis said was, growth. He said that you always think like, oh, I’m not growing. Like we can’t see that we’re growing. Well, look at yourself. You can’t tell that you’re growing. You only know when you have grown by looking at an old picture and noting the stark contrast. And so I think for us, like in prayer and our relationship with God, we think my relationship with God isn’t growing. I don’t have a good relationship with God. Well, you’re not going to notice that right now in the midst of prayer, but after years and years of the spiritual life, you see the difference how much closer you are to God, which is something that takes time to develop and to notice the growth in that area.
David Bates:
And very often it’ll be pointed out by other people. Which is why it’s important to journey and community. Because every now and again you get to tell someone when you see the wonderful way they’ve reacted to a difficulty and it’s like you wouldn’t have reacted like that a couple of years ago, that is amazing. God has really moved you in your life in this way, that patience that you always said that you never had, I can see it growing.
Trent Horn:
And that brings us to the other advice he gives Wormwood about prayer, take it away from charity.
David Bates:
Oh yeah.
Trent Horn:
He writes, it is no doubt impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous, make sure that they are always very spiritual, quote unquote, that he, the victim, is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism, her being his mother. What does he mean by that?
David Bates:
Well, he wants the patient. Again, if he’s going to pray, if you can’t distract him, okay, we have to do something to this prayer, so it doesn’t remain linked with charity. So if he’s praying to his mother’s soul, well then well that means already is what you can make him think it means is then focusing on her sins. Because you want her to be a good Christian woman. Therefore, she’s got to stop gossiping, she’s got to pull her weight a little bit more around the house. And again, this is why the patient’s attention is turned. Not to his mother’s good, not to his own sins, but to the sins of other people. Which for the devils, that’s exactly where you want it. And not only that, he this, this Christian is a very new Christian and even an advanced Christian, when you’re thinking about to someone’s soul, it’s almost something abstract, something separate from the person herself.
So if he’s not praying for her bad back, but praying for her soul, well then it’s almost like it’s a separate person. And Screwtape even says that he has had some patients so well in hand that they can be fervently praying for the souls of their family and then shouting at them and beating them in the next second because the two things being completely separated.
Trent Horn:
Right. So they have that Cartesian dualism, this mistaken view that many people have this mistaken view, I call it the Patrick Swayze Ghost theory of the soul. Because people say like, what’s a soul? Well a soul is that ghostly image of you that pops out of you in the movie, like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, with Whoopi Goldberg and Demi Moore and he’s just there and he’s like, all right and somehow he’s still wearing clothes and, but that’s the real you that inhabits the shell of your body. That’s like one of the biggest errors heresies we face in the world today and why people don’t understand life issues, why they don’t understand issues of sexual morality because they think that like the soul is the real person. Whether you’re, if you’re even if you’re an atheist, the soul must be the mind, mental collections and beliefs or if you’re even a religious believer, it’s just this ethereal, ghostly form and the body is secondary rather than truly complimentary that we don’t have bodies, we are bodies.
There’s a crucial distinction between the two so that when you die and we say you go to heaven, that is a very qualified you in the sense, you don’t go to heaven hell or purgatory after death, your soul goes. And then you exist, but in a separated state and which St. Paul says in second Corinthians chapter five, he says it’s a very unnatural state. He talks about how the soul without the body is like the body without clothes. He talks about it. It’s a very unnatural idea of the soul existing without the bodies, like you’re naked essentially. We have to put on an imperishable body. We have to be transformed to renewed. So seeing that we are bodies, what we do at the bodies matter, which is why our prayer and the virtue of charity, faith, hope and love, they have to be United into one thing.
David Bates:
It’s about the goodness of the person and the person has a body soul composite because we not Gnostics. We believe that the body is good. The spirit is good.
Trent Horn:
Let’s talk about some of the other advice really to virtues and vices. Screwtape wants to destroy a man’s humility. His advice to Wormwood, your patient are Christian being tempted has become humble. Have you drawn his attention to that fact? Why does he know? We know the devil of course hates all the virtues, but why is he especially concerned about humility?
David Bates:
Well, humility is the source of the others in the same way that pride is the source of our vices. And he says, all virtues are less formidable once the man is aware of them. But this is particularly true for humility. And this is one of my favorite passages in The Screwtape because it’s comic. He draws attention to the fact that he’s been humble. But if he catches himself and realizes, oh, I’m paying attention to my humility, then congratulate him again for catching that. But he does warn him, don’t do that too much otherwise he’s just going to laugh at you and go to bed.
Trent Horn:
Right. So he wants to see, I love your expression here, that pride is the source of the vices because we think we are all we need. And so the other vices easily creep in. Humility then as a source of the other virtues because we realize we are not all that we need. We need other things to be Holy, to be moral, to be virtuous. And so we realize once we stopped seeing the need for God, it just all goes downhill after that basically.
David Bates:
And over the course of the book, he corrects many ideas, false ideas about humility because often people think it means thinking less of themselves, whereas it’s much more about self forgetfulness when you’re looking to the goodness of God.
Trent Horn:
Right. Here’s another one I like. To conceive misfortune as injury and his time, his own. I love these little aphorisms that he puts together here because they’re true, they’re absolutely true. And then they’re used to the devil’s advantage. Men are not angered by mere misfortune, but by misfortune conceived as injury. As we think about it, like when something happens bad to us, like let’s say for example, if I walk outside and I step in bird poop. Like, ah man.
David Bates:
Why me?
Trent Horn:
Right. But it’s like, oh well whatever. Okay, dang it. But if I step in gum, I’m like, who left their gum here? Like pigeons are going to make droppings or pitches backdrop is whatever. But if somebody carelessly left their gum somewhere where they shouldn’t have and they’re careless and they injured me, suddenly I’m angry when it’s still just gunk on my shoe basically. So Wormwood wants us to see every misfortune is people are out to get me basically.
David Bates:
And it all stems from the idea that he wants to encourage in the patient that everything is his, his time, his money. All of these things are his, they’re not gifts from God. They’re not gifts that were given for the service of others, but they’re his. And therefore if anybody takes any of those things, if anyone wants money out of him, if anyone wants time out of him, is there taking away of something that is rightfully his own and this passage in Screwtape, this is the one I really don’t like because this is me. I like to think my time is my own and therefore if I have to give time to somebody else it’s like, oh it’s going to cost me an hour.
Trent Horn:
And maybe that’s temperaments because I think, well I’ve done the four temperaments episode before. I’m pretty melancholic. You may be somewhat melancholic yourself. You are introspective, detail oriented, analytic, takes one melancholic to another. And so each of us, each of us, our own temperaments, and I’m sure Lewis alludes to this, that people have their different kinds of temptations. When you look at the different personality traits like melancholic contend towards despair and they think like with our time, we think I want to use it the most efficient way possible and you’re a waste of my time. Whereas like a sanguine personality, the fun bubbly person who’s the life of the party with everybody, my wife for example.
David Bates:
I was thinking the same thing.
Trent Horn:
They love giving her time away to other people, but she has other things that she might struggle with when it when it comes other, we all do. But I think, so for her, it’s going to be something else. There’s always something. There is always going to be something we think belongs solely to us that not even God has authority over. And that’s where the root of the problem stems.
David Bates:
Yeah. We treat God and the spiritual life kind of like our taxes. It’s like we have to give a certain amount we know we have to, and then we were angry about every little piece of it. And particularly when sometimes we get a tax bill higher than we think is necessary. But if everything is God’s gift, then it’s everything that we should be giving back to him. Now let’s wrap up the patients and what happens to the patient that Screwtape and wormwood are trying to tempt. The patients at the end of the book? What happens to him?
Okay, so spoiler warning, if you don’t want to know the ending, skip to the next episode. But the patient dies. He dies in an air ride. But this isn’t a tragedy. This is actually a victory because Screwtape tells us what happens to him. He says he not only saw them, he’s referring to the guardian angels who had been with the patient the entire time. He said he saw him.
Trent Horn:
Capital H.
David Bates:
Capital H. He says this thing’s thing be gotten out of bed, could look on him. He gets to see God. And he says that everything you’ve tempted him with, up until now, it seems like nothing to him. He says now, it seemed to him like the half nauseas attractions of a rattled harlot would have on a man who hears it as true beloved, who he’s loved all of his life and who he believed is dead is now at the duel. So in comparison to seeing God and entering heaven, all of those temptations, all the things that you’ve used to push him around with in his life or at least try to, they will now seem like nothing in comparison.
Trent Horn:
And that is why in our next episode, you and I, we’re going to go on a tour, a trip to heaven. We did our trip through hell and the demonic will stop by hell a little bit more in the next episode for another imagined supposing, imaginative supposing of hell. But this is good. We’re going to start with the bad news and now in our next episode we’re going to move to the good news on our trip to heaven through The Great Divorce. So do stay with us, David, thanks for being here today. Looking forward to our interview on Thursday.
David Bates:
Wonderful. Looking forward to it.
Trent Horn:
Alrighty. And so stick with us. We’re going to go part two of our interview with C.S. Lewis. We went through hell and the demonic and now we’ll get away from some more of the bad stuff. We’re going to talk about how to get to heaven and the great divorce and CS Lewis’ imagine supposings. We’re going to get on a fantastic bus ride next episode. You’re not going to want to miss it. You’re going to be back. They got to go to your podcast. They got to go to your podcast. Tell them where to go to your podcast.
David Bates:
It’s very easy. Just go to pintswithjack.com on Twitter and Instagram at @pintswithjack. You’ll be able to listen to our three seasons where we go through Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce and we’re currently just wrapping up Till We Have Faces.
Trent Horn:
That’s Pints with Jack.
David Bates:
Pints with Jack. If you hear an Australian voice, you’ve gone to the wrong podcast.
Trent Horn:
Right. Pints With Jack is our British friend talking about C.S. Lewis. Pints with Aquinas is our Australian friend talking about Thomas Aquinas, so thank you very much David and thank you all. Hope you will check out Pints With Jack and catch us for part two of our discussion of C.S. Lewis from hell to heaven here on the Council of Trent podcast. Thank you all so much and hope you have a very blessed day.
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