I have been reading CS Lewis's The Screwtape Letters which is one half of a fictional correspondence between a master demon Screwtape and his apprentice Wormwood. The subject of the letters is Screwtape's exposition on how to best corrupt hearts of men, in particular a certain man that Wormwood is assigned to whom Screwtape refers to as the 'patient'. I thought this letter painted a very accurate understanding of marriage, sex, and love from a Christian perspective, particularly a Catholic or Lutheran one. Please read and share your thoughts.
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. But on the larger issues involved I think you have a good deal to learn.
The Enemy's demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete
abstinence or unmitigated monogamy. Ever since our Father's first great victory,
we have rendered the former very difficult to them. The latter, for the last few
centuries, we have been closing as a way of escape. We have done this through
the poets and novelists by persuading he humans that a curious, and usually
short-lived, 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. This
idea 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. My good is
my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate
object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies;
if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them.
A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for
us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a
stronger. "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 isor 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 co-operate.
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. It might have been merely one more mode in which
a stronger self preyed upon a weakeras it is, indeed, among the spiders where
the bride concludes her nuptials by eating her groom. But in the humans the
Enemy has gratuitously associated affection between the parties with sexual
desire. He has also made the offspring dependent on the parents and given the
parents an impulse to support itthus producing the Family, which is like the
organism, only worse; for the members are more distinct, yet also united in a
more conscious and responsible way. The whole thing, in fact, turns out to be
simply one more device for dragging in Love.
Now comes the joke. The Enemy described a married couple as "one flesh". He did
not lay "a happily married couple" or "a couple who married because they were in
love", but you can make the humans ignore that. You can also make them forget
that the man they call Paul did not confine it to married couples. Mere
copulation, for him, makes "one flesh". You can thus get the humans to accept as
rhetorical eulogies of "being in love" what were in fact plain descriptions of
the real significance of sexual intercourse. The truth is that wherever a man
lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation
is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.
From the true statement that this transcendental relation was intended to
produce, and, if obediently entered into, too often will produce, affection and
the family, 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. The error is easy to produce because
"being in love" does very often, in Western Europe, precede marriages which are
made in obedience to the Enemy's designs, that is, with the intention of
fidelity, fertility and good will; just as religious emotion very often, but not
always, attends conversion. In other words, the humans are to be encouraged to
regard as the basis for marriage a highly-coloured and distorted version of
something the Enemy really promises as its result. Two advantages follow. In the
first place, humans who have not the gift of continence can be deterred from
seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves "in love",
and, thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any other motive seems to them low
and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a
partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the
transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion. (Don't neglect
to make your man think the marriage-service very offensive.) In the second place
any sexual infatuation whatever, so long as it intends marriage, will be
regarded as "love", and "love" will be held to excuse a man from all the guilt,
and to protect him from all the consequences, if marrying a heathen, a fool, or
a wanton. But more of this in my next,
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE
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. But on the larger issues involved I think you have a good deal to learn.
The Enemy's demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete
abstinence or unmitigated monogamy. Ever since our Father's first great victory,
we have rendered the former very difficult to them. The latter, for the last few
centuries, we have been closing as a way of escape. We have done this through
the poets and novelists by persuading he humans that a curious, and usually
short-lived, 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. This
idea 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. My good is
my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate
object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies;
if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them.
A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for
us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a
stronger. "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 isor 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 co-operate.
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. It might have been merely one more mode in which
a stronger self preyed upon a weakeras it is, indeed, among the spiders where
the bride concludes her nuptials by eating her groom. But in the humans the
Enemy has gratuitously associated affection between the parties with sexual
desire. He has also made the offspring dependent on the parents and given the
parents an impulse to support itthus producing the Family, which is like the
organism, only worse; for the members are more distinct, yet also united in a
more conscious and responsible way. The whole thing, in fact, turns out to be
simply one more device for dragging in Love.
Now comes the joke. The Enemy described a married couple as "one flesh". He did
not lay "a happily married couple" or "a couple who married because they were in
love", but you can make the humans ignore that. You can also make them forget
that the man they call Paul did not confine it to married couples. Mere
copulation, for him, makes "one flesh". You can thus get the humans to accept as
rhetorical eulogies of "being in love" what were in fact plain descriptions of
the real significance of sexual intercourse. The truth is that wherever a man
lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation
is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.
From the true statement that this transcendental relation was intended to
produce, and, if obediently entered into, too often will produce, affection and
the family, 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. The error is easy to produce because
"being in love" does very often, in Western Europe, precede marriages which are
made in obedience to the Enemy's designs, that is, with the intention of
fidelity, fertility and good will; just as religious emotion very often, but not
always, attends conversion. In other words, the humans are to be encouraged to
regard as the basis for marriage a highly-coloured and distorted version of
something the Enemy really promises as its result. Two advantages follow. In the
first place, humans who have not the gift of continence can be deterred from
seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves "in love",
and, thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any other motive seems to them low
and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a
partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the
transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion. (Don't neglect
to make your man think the marriage-service very offensive.) In the second place
any sexual infatuation whatever, so long as it intends marriage, will be
regarded as "love", and "love" will be held to excuse a man from all the guilt,
and to protect him from all the consequences, if marrying a heathen, a fool, or
a wanton. But more of this in my next,
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE
