Copacabana

Those pesky devils...

A reader (I have a reader!) posted a comment responding to the link on C.S. Lewis from last week. So, in response to "heckrazer": yes, I have read the Screwtape Letters and most of The Problem of Pain. I find that it helps to read Lewis aloud; you? It's hard for me to internally make sense of someone that much smarter than me...

I've included an except from the Screwtape Letters below because I could never do the concepts to which he refers any sort of justice in the explanation of them. They are messy and unconventional. I live in a very "hip" and "indie" (I know, silly...) town and it never ceases to amaze me that these people I see everyday doing flashy (yet somehow still creatively uninteresting) things know nothing about truly unconventional thought. Lewis writes this particular book from the point of view of a demon giving advice to another demon who is trying to capture a man's soul. Not only is this kind of writing brilliant, but it can also be damaging (everyone knows how much intellectual Christianity is accepted in academia, where Lewis was firmly entrenched). Since he, very literally, plays devil's advocate in the novel, he is also risking offending those who share his belief system but maybe are able to understand only the very straightforward. And we know that the churches are full of these folks as well, don't we heckrazer?

Anyway, the man had guts and chutzpah. And he didn't need flashy cars, stupid haircuts and piercings to prove it.

Remember, in the following excerpt, enemy = God (to a devil...). The last, enlarged, part, is particularly important for me right now. I'm glad you wrote because this post is reminding me to live in the present and is proof of the folly of those (you know who you are....) who cannot.

"The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present -- either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time -- for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men's affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone interests us) is already over. The pleasure is just the part of the process which we regret and would exclude if we could do so without losing the sin; it is the part contributed by the Enemy, and therefore experienced in a Present. The sin, which is our contribution, looked forward.

To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too -- just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow's word is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is now straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future -- haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth -- ready to break the Enemy's commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other -- dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present."

posted by Lola @ 9:55 AM