The Screwtape Letters Session Notes #9 | Exploiting the Troughs
Letter #9
The content in letter #9 hits hard! The trough is real and when you are in it, it’s easy to convince yourself that it is permanent. It was a great pleasure meeting up as a group this week because we got to hang out with two men who we haven’t seen in a while. Can’t wait to knock out letter 10 next week and then celebrate Jack’s birthday in a few weeks!
Our key quote from Letter #9:
“To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return - that is what really gladdens our Father’s heart. And the troughs are the time for beginning the process.”
Key Topics We Explored
Screwtape Is Right: God Created Pleasure
We noticed immediately that despite Screwtape’s dubious assertions and mental wanderings around truth, he managed to get something right. As a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut, Screwtape correctly stumbles upon the fact that God created pleasure. We got a chuckle about how in Hell there is apparently a department that has wasted some valuable R&D budget on trying to produce pleasure. We will learn later that Screwtape likens Hell to a corporation…again, Screwtape is not always completely wrong.
We connected Screwtape’s point about encouraging pleasures during forbidden times to Mere Christianity where Lewis says that sin is in effect the seeking of a good but in the wrong way. And once again, though ironically, Screwtape speaks correctly when he says trying to tempt with pleasure puts the demons on The Enemy’s ground.
And as expected, pleasure brought us back to the undulating floating islands of Perelandra where Ransom discovered pleasure beyond all imagining in tasting the gourds. He referred to the experience as a new genus of pleasure. While his flesh wanted additional gratification, something stirred his will to ultimately reject tasting of the fruit again. In Screwtape’s case, he wants nothing more than for us to pursue pleasure at the wrong times and especially when our wills may be weakened during the trough phases.
Curbing Those Cravings
Related to pleasure we noted Screwtape’s use of the word ‘cravings’ in this quote:
“An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.”
In one sense, as KO discussed, we can crave good things such as receiving the Holy Eucharist at Mass which is in line with God’s will for us. Alternatively, we can also crave things in which the end is consumption that will benefit us yet be wholly unsatisfying. Sure, donuts taste great but invariably the promised pleasure of eating a donut is significantly higher than the actual pleasure of eating it. The experience lasts about 45 seconds and ultimately doesn’t curb our longings or desires. Well, just eat another donut, you say? We all know mindlessly chasing pleasures repetitively only makes the disappointment greater. And that is exactly what Screwtape wants.
Looking back on this part of our conversation, I wonder if Lewis is also playing with his concept of desire and longing here. His most famous quote from Mere Christianity seems appropriate here:
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Ultimately, we concluded that cravings aimed at increasing temporal pleasure for pleasure’s sake turn our gaze inward: in curvatus in se. Screwtape made it clear in a prior letter that a soul turned inward on itself is near foolproof in eventually securing that soul in Hell.
Milk and Water
Screwtape sardonically and flippantly disregards human love and its connection to human sexuality during the peak as a “milk and water phenomenon”. After some frantic internet searching, we learned that this very British phrase means insipid, weak, and wishy-washy.
Screwtape either does not understand the power of human love and sexuality seeing as how, in cooperation with God, these things lead to more human images of God, or Screwtape understands it perfectly well and wants to sweep it under the rug in the hope that it will go away. One of the men in the group commented that God once promised a land flowing with milk and honey. Again, we can see how Screwtape wants to take, devour, reduce, and minimize while God wants to give life and give it abundantly. Screwtape just can’t compete with God and he knows it. But he can connive and try to thwart God’s designs.
Moderate in Religion but Extreme in Everything Else? That’s Devilish Messed Up Advice!
Having recently discussed Screwtape’s desire for all extremes except of course extreme devotion to God, we quickly jumped on his advice that Wormwood’s Patient should come to see that religion is all good and well but that it should be tempered. This sounds all too familiar in our ‘enlightened’ post-modern 21st century. In seems that in the recent past, our secular materialist friends tolerated our Christian Faith so long as we kept it within our own homes and out of everyone else’s bedroom. Now, even a ‘moderated’ and ‘tempered’ practice of Christianity will stoke fits of apoplexy and demands for cancellation from polite society.
KO referenced Fr. Mike Schmitz who recently discussed how we have a very imbalanced approach to sports and our Christian Faith. On the one hand, we pursue sports and fitness with feverish tenacity to the point where we practically elevate it above all else. Yet our approach to eternal things and Christ Himself may only get the leftover scraps of our mental and physical energy.
We had a quick sidebar whether our pitiful approach to Christianity could stem partially from fear of soft persecution. If Screwtape has convinced people that religion must be shoe-horned to the outer rim of culture under pain of retribution, then that might partially explain why we as a culture worship at the altar of body image and physical appeal but shy away from the things that actually matter.
Letter #9 Summary
Making good on his promise from the previous letter, Screwtape provides Wormwood with a list of strategies for leveraging the trough period to the demons’ advantage. Screwtape’s advice focuses on pleasure and sensual temptation, the Patient’s thoughts towards hope or despair, and attacks on his faith. Screwtape warns that sexual temptation is typically less successful during the peak period of undulation. He assures Wormwood that he will notch more wins with sexual temptation when the Patient is in the cold and empty trough period. Screwtape suggests Wormwood make the Patient think his strong religious feelings after his conversion should have lasted longer and to then turn him to despair. Last, Screwtape urges Wormwood to encourage moderation in his Patient’s religious practices and to see his current trough as permanent. Further, the Patient ought to see that the zeal of his newfound Christianity was only just a phase.
Themes and Advice from Screwtape
Demons Cannot Create Pleasures But They Can Twist Them
Avoid Seeing Things As True or False
Despair vs Hope
Make Him Think the Trough is Permanent
Modern Biographies
Religion as a Phase and Nothing More
Sexual temptation during peak vs trough