Diabolical Insights into Spiritual Dryness
Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal…As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation - the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Collins, 1984, p.44
This “undulation”, as the arch-fiend Screwtape calls it,1 applies to every area of life: our interest in work, affection for friends, physical appetites all go up and down. He goes on to say, ‘The dryness and dulness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make use of it’ (p.45).
Have you ever just gone through a very dry or low spell - spiritually, psychologically or emotionally - for seemingly no reason? I do all the time. I did last week. Certain things become hard that were not hard the day or the week before: particularly work and prayer and patience with others. Part of the difficulty of this is the sense of not understanding why it is happening: Is there something wrong with me? Is it a spiritual attack? Is it trauma from some unresolved incident in my past? Very possibly it could be all three or something else. But it also extremely likely that it is, as Screwtape points out, part of what it means to be part-spirit, part-animal and living in time. For to be in time is to change. It is very easy to attribute any kind of fluctuation of mood to some moral or spiritual crisis when in fact it may have something more to do with several nights of poor sleep or a deficit of quality food in one’s diet.
The point is that there is no judgment against us for going through low periods. Anybody who is acquainted with the tradition of Christian spirituality in any way will have already noticed that this is a phenomenon frequently and radically experienced by some of the greatest saints. Sometimes it is given a name such as “the dark night of the soul” or similar. And there is a spiritual reason for this which we will come to and which Lewis in all of his insight explains so excellently. But, for now, I find it very helpful to observe that this is normal, that it may very well not be the result of sin or deficiency but that the Lord has set things up in this way and that he has a purpose for it. Conversely, we see in Screwtape’s final words quoted here that the Devil has a purpose for it too, so we need to think carefully about what those purposes are and how to make sure we get the right result.
What does “the Enemy”, as Screwtape calls him, want for our human lives? He wants us to become ‘a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself’ - a favourite quote of mine - ‘creatures whose life, on its miniature scale will be qualitatively like His own’ (p.45). In other words, God wants us to become like him but through a free exercise of our own will. Satan wants to absorb our humanity into himself, to crush us and to degrade us such that the unique stamp of God’s workmanship in us is eroded, defaced and eventually unrecognisable. God wants us to become most entirely ourselves through the free decision to conform our wills to his own.
So there is a really important point here about the human will. God wants the will to be exercised freely - that is, without an excessive or overwhelming amount of force. It is hard to explain or to understand what exactly the will is but we know what it means to have our wills overridden: when we are physically forced to do something against our will, this is clear enough. But in a similar way, when we are overwhelmed by an urge to do something, we recognise a sense in which we were less free than when we make other decisions in life. For example, I know what it is like to lose my temper and to shout. I recognise that, in the split second before it happens, my will is not particularly free. It is as though one almost loses a sense of oneself before the action itself. A very strange thing. Now, obviously there are things you can do to prevent getting to that stage. I find it very helpful to recognise potentially stressful or irritating situations before they come along and either to prepare myself for them or to avoid them as appropriate. So it is not as though these things are pre-determined because they take place in a certain context. But, nevertheless, in that moment of excessive force, or urgency, or temptation we are less free. That is the kind of bondage of the will that the Devil enjoys.
And part of the problem with it (the main problem probably) is that, the more it is indulged, the harder it is for the person indulging to break free from it. It becomes a bad habit, a habit which the perpetrator simply can’t control. This goes not just for temper but for any action that is exercised in a manner of unfreedom: sexual temptation and lust, alcoholism and other forms of substance addiction, gambling, anything that one is “tempted” into doing. And the more it happens, the less free you become. And then, eventually, your real human personality, your individuality, is subordinated to the thing, and you become far less that who you actually are because the person you are is a secondary consideration - a sacrifice - to the thing.2
By contrast, how does God want our wills to be exercised? This is perhaps hard to describe exactly. But it seems to me that God wants us to exercise our wills freely. Another way of saying this might be that he wants us to have a genuine choice. This is why ‘the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls’(p.46) - because that would be to use the weapons of Irresistibility and Indisputableness. Meaning that his power and the overwhelming reality of his presence would leave us with no genuine choice but we would have to come to him. In other words, we would be bound to come to him in unfreedom, which is the way that the true enemy - the Devil - wants us to exercise our wills.
Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo…the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve'.
Ibid., p.46
That is something of how God wants us to exercise our wills - through freely choosing so that we remain the creatures we are and voluntarily grow into the creatures he wishes us to be. This is why he does not overwhelm us with his presence or even present to us indisputable proof of his existence (though there is indeed plenty of evidence and reason to believe if one looks).
Why then do we go through such low and dry periods? And why does God allow it to happen to us? The reason has already been implied: God wants us to come to him freely and too much of his presence or of his power would override our wills. Therefore, although at times we may experience a sense of that presence in an awesome way (very often at the beginning of our Christian journeys), it nevertheless may recede dramatically for short or long periods. Why is this? It is because,
He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs - to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him the best…He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.
Ibid., 47
We are learning to walk - spiritually speaking. As we choose to pray, to obey, to love, to be patient, to draw near to God, our wills - that is, the faculty within ourselves that chooses what we will do and therefore what we will become - are being conformed to his will in freedom.
I find this thought most encouraging. I have had many experiences of the nearness of God’s presence in my life. I have also had long periods of dryness and difficulty with prayer and I have them still. From a spiritual point of view, there are good things about each of them, but the periods of difficulty are the times when God really calls me to grow. The times when I really don’t feel like praying, when I can’t see the point of it, when I’d rather be doing anything else but sitting there and doing that, those are the times when he is really at work in me. And, as Lewis says, those are the times when “the Enemy” has most reason to be pleased with our efforts.
I think I will write a follow up post about the role of desire and affection in the spiritual life (though I don’t want to promise, as I often change my mind) but suffice to say for now that I am not saying that emotion, affection and desire are unimportant in the spiritual life - far from it. I am in agreement with St Augustine that, at the bottom of everything, desire is what makes human beings tick. But the point here is that there is a deeper type of desire than the type of desire produced by an overwhelming urge to do something. It is a desire buried in the human soul, a desire to draw closer to the greatest good, even if the precise feelings don’t attend that conviction at the present moment. Like an athlete who would prefer not to get up and go on the track at five-thirty in the morning but nevertheless does it anyway. Why? To win the prize, to attain the goal. If that athlete focussed only on emotion, he would get precisely nowhere. But, because his will is set and ever-more conformed to the end of his heart’s desire, he will continue to run. Some days will feel better. Some days will feel worse. But the reality is that, the more he gets out there even on the bad days, the better the good ones will become.
There is a scriptural passage which seems to me to encapsulate all of this:
…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
Philippians 2:12(b),13
Who is doing what here? The believer is working out his own salvation. God is working in him. But God is working in him so that he might also will and work for God. God’s will and the will of the believer are, if you like, working in tandem, like the two pedals on a bicycle. God works in us, so that we might will what pleases him. Notice it doesn’t say God forces or tempts us into doing what pleases him, but God works so that we might will what pleases him. A glance at the diabolical methods of temptation and degradation give us an idea of the meaning of the true freedom that God offers us.
A Thought for Paid Subscribers
I’ve noticed on Substack that I can do create short threads, the idea being that you can use them to create discussion with subscribers. I try to read a novel every month or so and I’m wondering if it might be interesting if I were to use the thread feature to let you know what I’m reading for the particular month and then, if you want to, you can read along and we can have a little forum to share thoughts and insights. Just an idea. Let me know. At the moment I’m reading Jack by Marilynne Robinson and next month I’m thinking of re-reading Dracula because they’re talking about it on The Literary Life Podcast. Thanks, as always for your support.
If you don’t know, Screwtape is writing a letter to his nephew, Wormwood. They are both devils who are continuing a correspondence on the subject of how Wormwood is to guide and influence his human “patient” so that he ends up in hell to be food for them. The Screwtape Letters is one of my favourite ever books.
I’m aware that the actor Matthew Perry has just released a book in which he refers to his substance abuse as “The Big Terrible Thing” in the title.