Screwtape #5: Initial Reaction to War

The Screwtape Letters were written during World War II and we see the first product of that in the 5th letter. This is a short letter for our purposes as most of it is focused on Screwtape admonishing Wormwood for taking too much pleasure in the pain caused by the war and not enough on the more fruitful business of capturing the patient’s soul and having the eternal pleasure of that soul’s anguish. Screwtape explains that war can have negative consequences for their efforts:

“Consider too what undesirable deaths occur in wartime. Men are killed in places where they knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all in of the Enemy’s party, prepared. How much better it is for us if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence…And how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.”

There are number of things to draw out from this short quote. The first is the danger of letting suffering become an excuse. How often have we excused our cutting someone off in traffic because we’ve had a bad day and are in a foul mood? Similarly, when in suffering we and the people around us can be tricked into thinking that somehow the expectations for behavior have changed. “We shouldn’t chastise him; he’s sick,” we might say; thereby allowing the person to slip further from God. Suffering then cannot be an excuse but rather as a means in which to grow. This idea is something that Lewis examines later in the letters but more fully in his book A Grief Observed.

The second thing is the nature of being preparing for death by simply acknowledging that we are not eternal. We might claim to know this but often we don’t. Ask yourself this: can you imagine a world that you’re not in? A world in which no one knows your name? A world in which no one cares for you? Save for a very select few that will be the world that exists for all of us two centuries from now. Especially in times of peace we can be carried away by the illusion that that’s not true, that somehow we will live on. But we won’t; the thief in the night may come at any time whether in war or driving to school or during a vacation in Destin. War simply makes that reality more imminent. We then must be aware of this reality.

As if that wasn’t hard enough, we face another problem: the ‘contented’ aspect of the worldliness that Screwtape refers to. As spiritual as we may become there is always the danger of still being too attached. Again another question that forces us to examine ourselves: if you had the choice between living and dying, which one do you choose? I’m not talking about suicide or anything like that which inserts our own will for God’s and intentionally hurts others, but our simple desire to be on this earth as long as it takes. If we truly want full union with God, the notion of death should be something we’re comfortable with and perhaps even anticipate so that while we live we can look forward to our deaths as they bring us into full communion with the infinite that can match up to our infinite desires.

I’ll leave you with something in this letter that I found amusing considering some of the discussions that went on in Planned Parenthood’s spirituality series. In these discussions, it has been said that suffering is not a part of God’s plan. I got much enjoyment out of the idea of reading this passage to them and seeing their reaction:

“The Enemy’s human partisans have all been plainly told by Him that suffering is an essential part of what He calls Redemption; so that a faith which is destroyed by war or pestilence cannot really have been worth the trouble of destroying.”

Happy Mardi Gras!