“Nothing matters at all except the tendency of a given state of mind, in given circumstances, to move a particular patient at a particular moment nearer to the Enemy or nearer to us.” (19)
This is one of the broadest summary statements from Screwtape. Satan wants to keep us from glorifying God and enjoying our relationship with him. This final installment of the series will focus on how demons attempt to disrupt our earthly relationships as a means to destroy our relationship with God.
Familial relationships
Early in the book, Screwtape addresses the relationship between Wormwood’s patient and his mother, who live together. Because the mother also has a demon working on her, Screwtape and his colleague to “build up between you in that house a good settled habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks.”(11) This involves using every aspect of their communication, verbal and non-verbal, to make each “almost unenduringly irritating to the other.” (13)
Another strategy is to keep the man from sincerely praying for his mother. If he does pray, his prayers are to focus not on her wellbeing, but on her sins and her spiritual condition, from a negative, judgmental perspective. Screwtape cynically suggests that the man’s prayers should only be concerned with “the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism.” (12) And by all means, his prayer life should never be allowed to manifest in treating his mother with greater love and kindness. Keep his prayers detached from his actions.
Screwtape also counsels Wormwood to emphasize religious differences between the two. Is she jealous that he is now fervent about his faith, when she feels she should get some credit for leading him in the right direction as a child? Capitalize on that. Screwtape throws out the question, “Remember the elder brother in the Enemy’s [God’s] story? The demons want the mother to feel that her son is making a big deal of his religion in an unseemly way, or that he’s getting into the kingdom of God “on very easy terms.” (14) Obscure revelation of the amazing grace of the God who has saved him.
The relationship between the man and his mother is the only non-romantic relationship on which Screwtape elaborates, but it seems to stand in for all familial relationships. Whether it is a mother, father, sister, brother, grandparent, etc., the demonic goal is to keep conflict, annoyances, jealousy, resentment, and judgmentalism churning. In this way, the spiritual life of the believer cannot positively impact the quality of these relationships, and they instead become constant distractions from a life of worship.
We learn from this the great importance of guarding our hearts and guiding our behaviors against demonic relationship killers. Paul writes,
Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. (Eph. 4:31-32)
When we take responsibility for our attitudes and behaviors, and respond to those close to us with patience and compassion, we honor the Lord and silence many demons.
Sexual relationships
Screwtape correctly points out that God’s will is that his people would practice “either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy.” 93
Our nature makes the first very difficult for most people, as Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 7. Very few of us possess the gift of singleness and chastity. Therefore, believers are instructed to marry so as not to burn with lust or morally offend against their own bodies.
Many individuals, however, whether married or unmarried, will find themselves succumbing to lifelong sexual temptation and sin, which may include masturbation, pornography addiction, perversion, and illicit affairs. This is one of the enemy’s oldest tricks.
Screwtape suggests a sinister trickery to keep people from sexual purity or marital satisfaction. One objective is toward this end is “persuading the humans that a curious, and usually shortlived, experience which they call ‘being in love’…(93) is the only criterion for choosing to marry.
When demons are successful at this, people become disillusioned. They may decide to avoid marriage because they don’t feel a constant state of rapture with a prospective partner. Or, once married, decide to abandon the marriage when the hormonal burst of being in love subsides and the work of loving a partner unselfishly takes priority.
As we experience and witness our personal and cultural tensions related to sexuality, we should receive these lessons from a master demon. The demonic strategies that worked 5000 years ago still work well today.
At its core, the demonic strategy is to obscure the spiritual reality that sexual relations between a man and woman create a one flesh relationship between them, whether they like it or not. This bond then “must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.” (96) According to God’s order in creation, this happens whether the sexual partners are married or not. A soul tie is formed that can only be broken through intentional, conscious faith and prayer.
The best revenge for the damage wreaked by Satan in the area of sexuality and marriage is threefold.
• Commitment to sexual purity by believers who are not part of a covenant marriage. If we believe that this is an impossible commandment, it means we are listening and obeying the voice of the enemy and not the voice of Jesus.
• Those who marry must remain faithful toward their spouses and are careful to attend to each other’s sexual needs.
• Believers, married or not, value marriage between a man and a woman as a blessing from God that provides security, companionship, shared responsibility for childrearing, and an opportunity to grow beyond carnal selfishness. It is about much more than falling in love and insisting that our partners make us happy.
The Love of God
In the introduction to the series, we noted one limitation of demons is their inability to comprehend the love of God. For demons, every action is based on enmity, competition, and conquest. Their goal is to divide, conquer, rape, plunder, steal, kill, and destroy.
Our God’s philosophy, as Screwtape rightly instructs, is that–
“the good of one self is to be the good of another. This impossibility He calls love, and this same monotonous panacea can be de detected under all He does and even all He is–or claims to be.” (94)
This applies to all relationships, sexual and otherwise. Relationships between friends, family members, and married partners in God’s economy are to be mutually loving and beneficial. Again, Paul provides the prescription:
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. (Phil. 2:3-4)
Demons hate this. Screwtape prefers to promote the kind of relationship that exists between a black widow spider and her mate; after she has used him to get what she wants, injects her venom and devours him.
A Christian family, headed by a man and woman who are committed to love one another until death, is a stench in the enemy’s nostrils. We can imagine Screwtape wanting to spit as he describes the family home of the man’s Christian fiancé:
“The whole house and garden is one vast obscenity. It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer made of Heaven: ‘the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence’…Music and silence, how I detest them both!” (119)
When we strive to create this type of sublime loving atmosphere in our homes and our relationships, demons shrink away in horror. Let it be so!
Conclusion
At the end of the C.S. Lewis’s extraordinary book, Wormwood loses his grip on the man. The man becomes securely bonded to God and God’s people. He gains control over his emotions and his sexual urges, so as not to dishonor the woman he has come to love. He understands that the Christian life is a journey more than a destination. He learns how to pray.
Screwtape heaps scorn on Wormwood for his failure, for God and his angels have prevailed:
“You have let a soul slip through your fingers…It makes me mad to think of it. How well I know what happened at the instant when they snatched him from you! There was a sudden clearing of his eyes…as he saw you for the first time, and recognized the part you had had in him and knew that you had it no longer.” (171)
It is gratifying, isn’t it, my fellow believer, to know that when we became followers of Jesus Christ, we are simultaneously freed from the tyranny of all satanic enemies and their schemes? Light dawns and their power is broken.
Outside of the Bible, I don’t know of a book that illustrates this more vividly and powerfully than C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters.
Thank you for traveling this road with me.
