The Screwtape Letters, Week 1

 

The Screwtape Letters 

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A Girardian Reading, Week 1

Introduction

For those who have never read it, The Screwtape Letters is a series of letters written by a devil named Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, ostensibly to give advice on how to convert Wormwood’s “patient” away from God and toward an afterlife with the Father Down Below (Satan). Each letter seems to have a specific purpose behind it, warning Wormwood of things to watch out for and recommending ways of overcoming the Enemy’s (God’s) various tactics. This backwards writing forces us to note the philosophical and religious points Lewis wants to make. 

I do not claim to be a scholar of either Girard or Lewis. I am not a Wolfgang Palaver, and neither am I a Walter Hooper. But what I do claim is this: both these writers’ ideas extend beyond Christianity, and they converge in ways that make for an interesting juxtaposition. Over the next several weeks, let us see how interesting this juxtaposition is. 

Letter 1: Summary 

The opening letter of the book sees Screwtape reprimanding Wormwood for encouraging his “patient” to engage in argument with his materialist friend. There are several things wrong with this, according to Screwtape. (1) The act of arguing - really arguing, as opposed to “saying stuff” - awakens the human ability to reason. (2) Once reason is awakened, there is no controlling it. (3) Even if reason can be directed and perverted, the patient is still attending to universal issues rather than immediate sense experiences. This is the Enemy’s [God’s] territory.

Screwtape therefore recommends Wormwood have his patient avoid arguing about truth and falsity altogether. He claims that while humans used to connect thinking with doing, and would alter their way of life with new thought, they no longer do so. Further, modern advances in information technology make it possible for people to hold several incompatible philosophies at the same time. Wormwood’s attention, therefore, should be on getting his patient to think ideas are “strong” or “weak,” or “practical” or “conventional” or “outworn.” Even better, Screwtape says, would be to “give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and [casual] reading” is the result of actual research. But the best case scenario is to have the patient fixate on “real life,” which is understood as immediate sense experience. The idea is that if the patient fixes his attention on the never-ending “stream,” he will not even think to ask what he means by “real.” He will thus never contemplate universals. 

To illustrate his point Screwtape relays a story about one of his own patients. The patient was reading in a library and came upon a significant idea. Sensing the imminent danger of revelation, Screwtape successfully distracted the patient with thoughts of lunch, the shouts of a newspaper boy, and the rumble of a bus going past. 

The point, Screwtape says, is to fuddle humans so that they never really entertain and explore ideas.

Letter 1: Girardian Reading

I teach my students that “argument” in academia means “reasoning together toward some truth.” In line with this idea, Lewis’s use of “argument” here undercuts the combative reciprocity inherent in lay understandings of the term, all of which indicate some form of rivalry. One converses with a partner, but argues or debates in the lay sense against an opponent who must be defeated. The idea that the patient and his materialist friend reason together means their collective focus is not on overcoming and defeating each other; their focus is directed toward something greater than themselves. This is dangerous for devils like Wormwood and Screwtape because their job is to fix our attention on the “stream of immediate sense experience” - in this case, on the objectified person in front of them, and on the words used - which in Girardian terms is the “superhighway of mimetic crisis.” 

That Screwtape suggests having the patient regard ideas as “academic” or “practical” and  “contemporary” or “outworn” is particularly devious: all such descriptors rely on other people to confirm them and may lend themselves to being fads, thus casting the patient as vaniteux. He gravitates to academic ideas not because they are academic, but because the term connotes to the masses something better than introspection or common knowledge. He shows preference for the practical not to get any real use of it, but because it is thought by many to be superior to idealism. 

But the nail in the coffin - the thing that ultimately condemns the patient, should he be seduced - is this advice: “Make him think . . . that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.” Saying something is “contemporary” or “practical” would seem to focus on what is going on now - how people think at the moment, and how those people would judge our ideas today. Denoting something as a “philosophy of the future,” however, consigns the entire enterprise of truth-seeking to the mimetic sphere. It is not sufficient to think how people judge in the now, there must always be a focus on what they will think on down the line. By replacing the search for truth with the search for whatever is modern and . . . dare I say progressive, the patient is led on a quest for what is ultimately ephemeral and constantly beyond his grasp. 

Of course the quick and easy solution for a devil is to not let the patient argue at all, but instead to distract her or him with notions of “real life.” A rumbly tummy can most often be depended upon for this, but the last twenty years have inculcated in us something far more sinister, something that not even devils (to borrow from Gaiman and Pratchett) are wicked enough to think up on their own: the fear of missing out (FOMO). We cannot even eat nowadays without stopping to check what others are thinking, doing, and saying - and mostly about things which have nothing at all to do with our own lives. 

News feeds with constantly updated public and personal headlines advertise more information than we can possibly appreciate, tempting us (often successfully) to pay more attention to the stream than to ourselves or to those around us. Worse, the various headlines and posts we read give us “the grand general idea that [we know] it all,” and that what we do read in passing counts as “modern investigation.” The end result is that, unlike perhaps in Lewis’s and Girard’s times, today we have taken the devils’ work as our own. It is no longer their job to fuddle us: we fuddle ourselves.