The attack has a much better chance of success when the man’s whole inner world is drab and cold and empty. And it is also to be noted that the trough sexuality is…much more easily drawn into perversions, much less contained by those generous and imaginative and even spiritual concomitants which often render human sexuality so disappointing…You are much more likely to make your man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary than by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment.
What Screwtape is getting at here is that when we are happy, truly happy, that is because in some way we have experienced God so that when it’s accompanied with pleasures of the flesh like drink it’s simply a complement, not the focus. Screwtape wants it to be the focus and that’s more easily done when we’re unhappy. Using the example of pornography, Screwtape sees showing it to a happily married couple as far less fruitful than to showing it to the lonely man who just broke up with his sweetheart. In times of drought, it is God we are to turn to. If Screwtape can replace that with food, sex, or anything material that is not Christ, then Screwtape’s won the battle because any time we suffer we don’t get the redemption of God. Besides, many say that we are most truly who we are when we are down and out. Screwtape, accompanied with an idea that a world without joy is most real, wants us to think that what is most real is the material object with which we have replaced God instead of God himself.
Screwtape recommends caution however in playing with the pleasures:
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul with pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made all the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural.
I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but pleasure in moderation (to put it in Aristotelian terms) is good: food, drink, sex, etc. It’s all designed by God. I believe somewhere in Mere Christianity Lewis talks about how God likes pleasures because He created them. It’s important, especially with sex, to keep in mind that pleasures properly understood can in fact enhance our ability to enjoy life and come closer to God. A drink and a fine meal can encourage fellowship which strengthens our community for instance.
After the pleasures, Screwtape advises Wormwood to start messing with the patient’s mind:
Do not let him suspect the law of undulation. Let him assume that the first ardours of his conversion might have been expected to last, and ought to have lasted, forever, and that his present dryness is an equally permanent condition.
I spoke a little about this last time. Understanding that we are naturally going to rise and fall helps us during the fall to not lose hope and during the rise to be more on guard. The battle is never fully won or fully lost; if we think either one, then the battle’s over and more likely we’re on the wrong side. Unlike many “once-saved” Christians, we believe that conversion is a continual process throughout our lives, and we always need to stay on top of it and be aware of the problems we may face. This however, does not mean that we don’t do anything about the troughs. Screwtape would like us to do either that or too much:
…then set him to work on the desperate design of recovering his old feelings by sheer willpower, and the game is ours. If he is of the more hopeful type your job is to make him acquiesce in the present low temperature of his spirit and gradually become content with it, persuading himself that it is not so low after all. In a week or two you will be making him doubt whether the first days of his Christianity were not, perhaps, a little excessive. Talk to him about ‘moderation in all things'…A moderated religion is as good for us as is no religion at all-and more amusing.
So don’t try to force getting better nor should we accept the trough as the way it ought to be. God wants us to live in joy and that is what we should seek. But we cannot do it by our own will not only because that will ultimately fail, but because that effort puts the focus back on ourselves when to be in joy the focus needs to be on the divine. We have to come to God humbly and ask for His help. We have to turn towards the sacraments for the grace to lift us up. If we persist, the door will be opened, and we will rise out of the trough.
Next letter: Associating with Non-Christians.
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