#6 Screwtape Letter: Preoccupation with the Future and Man as a Series of Circles

Now that the patient has begun to pray, Screwtape instructs Wormwood on more techniques to help misdirect his prayers and thoughts. The first method is looking to the future at the expense of the present. Screwtape writes:

It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross, but only of the things he is afraid of. Let him regard them as his crosses: let him forget that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practice fortitude and patience to them all in advance. For real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible.

I think this approach is especially beneficial to Screwtape for a few reasons. The first is, as Screwtape saws, true resignation to a dozen fates is impossible. This means that by attempting to resign ourselves to everything, we actually prevent the resignation and full trust in God that we are seeking. Again, we shoot too high and miss. The second is that by concentrating on the future too much we forget to seek comfort on the present crosses that God is fully prepared to help us deal with. The Eucharist is our daily bread and as such the grace is best when applied to the daily i.e. present problems. Finally, I think that dealing too much with potential crosses likely inflates our ego. If we think that we’re dealing with twenty crosses when we likely only have two, we probably think that God is dealing us a harder card then we have. This can lead to an inflates sense of what God “owes” us as well as tendency to “holier than thou” as we believe that we alone are dealing with so much and persevering whereas others have much less to deal with.

The next paragraph deals with more of Screwtape’s directions on how to distract the patient from the real issue. You’ll have noticed by now that a major theme of the Screwtape Letters is distracting the patient from the truth of things into an imaginary comfort zone in which it is harder for God to work.

One can then formulate the general rule; in all activities of mind which favour our cause, encourage the patient to be unself-conscious and to concentrate on the object, but in all activities favourable to the Enemy bend his mind back on itself.

What this means is this: when we deal in sin, we need to look at ourselves. Give ourselves the hard look or the examination of conscience and see what we’ve done wrong so that we can ask for the grace to change it. On the other hand, when we are presented with good or do good or focus should be on God. When we view the sunset as the sun slowly sinks into the mountains bathing the area in an orange glow or when we see pictures of Mother Teresa, our focus should not be on how that makes us feel but on the cause of these scenes which is God. To take an argument from Aristotle, if the highest thing is contemplate the divine than we should be careful not to substitute that for contemplating us thinking about the divine. The difference might seem small but it opens a large hole for the Screwtapes.

The last thing to draw from this letter is the idea of man as concentric circles. I found this particularly interesting as I had read something similar in a book called Lift Up Your Heart written by Lewis’s Catholic equivalent (or superior, depending on your point of view), Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. I’ll put the two quotes side by side so you can compare:

Lewis:
“Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy.”

Sheen:
“Our happiness varies according to the center about which our lives revolve. If it is the ego, there are frustrations; if it is the I, there is a measure of natural happiness, still incomplete. If it is the divine, there is the joy of being one with the Infinite Life and Truth and Love.”

I think there the idea of man as a circle is very crucial; it shows that there has to be one thing around which we revolve, only one thing which we make the center of our life. However, what that center is (or should be) is very different for the Anglican Lewis and the Catholic Sheen. Lewis thinks it ought to be the will. In today’s world of psychology and other attempts to disenfranchise man of his free will and ability to choose, this can be a helpful construct. And as Lewis writes on later in the letter, it is in the will which our choices must be concentrated in order to reflect real virtue. However, the will is still an aspect of man. Believe or not, I’m going to say that Lewis was wrong (there won’t be many times I can say that). God instead should be the center of our lives, with the I (which is very close to the will for Sheen and can reflect and love as opposed to the totally selfish ego) revolving around God, not being the center. Indeed, for Sheen, having the will or the I at the center is better than just the ego but still insufficient. For the Catholic Sheen, anything less than total abandonment of the self to God is unsatisfactory.

Next Letter: Acknowledging the existence of demons and the question of Pacifism.