Screwtape Letters 6-10
- Letter 6: Thy Will be Done
- Submitting to the Enemy's will, where we seek to submit to some future potential state while toiling in suspense and anxiety in the moment, waiting for the future to fall upon us.
- Group Question: how do you react to uncertainty?
- S/T's strategy (which, if flipped on its head, may be the Enemy's as well??): In all things that support our cause, let him be un-self conscious, forgetting himself and concentrating on the object/activity of our cause. In all things which support our Enemy, focus on the self, bringing to mind how this activity affects the self.
- My translation, after reading this passage 5 times: from S/T's perspective, he desires us to be mindless when frolicking in sin, while self-absorbed when acting righteous.
- My thought on flipping this: from God's perspective, be un-self conscious when acting godly, and mindful of sin.
- Let virtues be a part of our distant fantasy realm, admired, cheered, but not a part of our core.
- Letter 7: End or Means?
- What is the practical long-term difference between FAITH as an end or a means to an end?
- S/T strategy: Have him adopt an ideal, identify that ideal as a part of Christianity, regard it as of the most importance.... then, flip it, whereby Christianity is a part of the ideal, a mechanism to obtain towards that ideal. The world is the end, and faith the means.
- Letter 8: There and Back Again
- Undulation: "To be in time means change" - wowsers
- The Trough, where "He [the Enemy] withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives," where the follower is challenged to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.
- "Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks around upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsake, and still obeys"
- Letter 9: Slippery Slope
- Trough, where S/T can degrade pleasures into debauchery, increasing the cravings while decreasing the pleasurable results, getting "a man's soul and give him nothing in return."
- Trough, where S/T encourages the Enemy-follower to recover "old feelings by sheer will-power"
- Trough, where we start to wonder if the Peak was a phase, a life-experience to learn from, rather than a portion of reality.
- Letter 10: Vanity of Vanities
- Where Wormwood makes "good use of all his social, sexual and intellectual vanity"
- Vanity, where our desire for social acceptance, or to not ruffle feathers, we betray our God and ourselves with our silence and laughter, giving great joy to S/T for both the incident and our decay. Above all, let them fear being puritanical.
- The sick reality of two parallel lives, where "he will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he out to be silent"