This Time: The State in Which We Die: more reflections on infernal correspondence; A Message from God?; and a trip to the Prospect Room of Wollaton Hall
The State in Which We Die
We are most fortunate to have come across this infernal correspondence now commonly known as The Screwtape Letters. It gives us an idea of how to ‘stand against the schemes of the devil’ (Ephesians 6:11) as the great general of the heavenly army St Paul put it in his letter to the church in Ephesus. A mother-load of enemy correspondence such as this is a rare treasure for us and we must therefore pay very close attention to it.
One particular lesson that we should attend to it the enemy’s attitude to death (when I say “the enemy”, I mean of course the actual enemy, which is Satan and his henchmen). In one particular letter, the senior devil chastises his junior member for taking delight in all the death and destruction caused by a particular war, and indeed for hoping for the death of his subject. The more cunning devil, Screwtape, reminds the naive youth that it doesn’t matter at what point his “patient” should die but rather in what state. He goes on to say, ‘They, of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the prime good. But that is because we have taught them to do so’ (Screwtape, p.142). The problem the young devil, Wormwood, really faces is that his patient is actually being made holy through the human war. The latter has caused the patient to realise the provisionality and frailty of this world and to attend to charitable works whilst demonstrating a great amount of courage. Wars of course are terrible things, but one of the spiritual realities that must be attended to in all of this is that they have a tendency to bring out the best within humanity as well as the very worst - the heavenly as well as the diabolical.
To return to the notion that survival is the ultimate good, this makes perfect sense when it is allied to the belief that human life ceases upon physical death. Humans who hold to this belief will sometimes do literally anything to avoid death, including sacrificing everything that is of value in this life. In this state, bare survival is the only goal and all must be laid down in pursuit of it.
This presumably is one of the ways that the devil can spoil not only the human being’s eternal destiny but his life in this world as well. The human being, convinced that there is no everlasting life after physical death, can sacrifice everything of value in this world in a futile bid for bare survival (a fool’s errand ultimately, as he has to die at some point). A kind of extreme puritanism comes in in which the human cannot really enjoy anything because it might bring him closer to physical death. He is gripped by fear and disgust of all the things that the Christian is able to enjoy with relative abandon. (We will save the analysis of the appropriate Christian attitude to his physical well-being for later analysis. Suffice to say for now that this is one end of a spectrum of error with the other being neglect and abuse of the earthly vessel. However it is one extreme which seems to have had great purchase over the human race in recent years because of a sudden hysteria that swept over the world resulting in a panic and dread fear of a influenza-like illness which in reality posed little more threat to humanity than any one of the dozens of other similar illnesses that pass around the globe from year-to-year but which they, by a kind of contagion of the mind, came to believe en masse was an existential threat to their survival. Many of the things that the human race voluntary forewent were simple pleasures that make our lives bearable and worth-living whilst others were of far greater spiritual significance: the abandonment of the lonely elderly, the leaving of the terminally ill to die alone in hospital without comfort of relative or priest and, of course, the total shutdown of the Christian Church and the cessation of the corporate worship of God for several months or, in some cases, years.)
The diabolical correspondence continues, challenging another one of our presuppositions, which is that the longer we live, the better. Why do the devils want us to live for such a long time? Because it gives them the opportunity to attach us to this world and to make us feel that this is really our home. The devil observes an irony here, which is that there are at points coincidences between the diabolical will for a human life and the wills of those who genuinely love and care for that life. Thus, the patient’s mother and lover are praying for his survival whilst the devils are simultaneously willing it.
In any case, what must we learn about life if we are to live for a long time, if we are not to die suddenly but to grow old and feel ourselves gradually weakening and slipping away? I will here quote from the diabolical correspondence:
But, if only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for your ally. The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather. You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it - all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition.
Screwtape, p.143
So the tempter seeks not only that we might lose faith and give up in our spiritual lives, but that we might become usefully attached to this world instead of heaven. Seventy years and more gives him time to wear down any sense that this world might not really be our home, that there might be some greater reality beyond this one, that youthful intimations of a spiritual reality that transcends the beauty of earthly loves are to be granted some sort of credence.
He ends this particular correspondence by observing that the majority of human beings do, of course, die very young, a great swathe in infancy. There will be a small proportion of people in Heaven who will have been selected for a longer life of sixty, seventy or (these days) eighty or ninety years who have truly learnt the art of spiritual perseverance through the long years of weariness and temptation, through the pain of bereavement and loss, through the winds of fashionable intellectual and cultural change and through the gradual decay and death of the earthly vessel. Throughout those decades, they will have turned their wills gradually but inevitably towards God and will therefore have become the kinds of creatures that he is seeking to know. More simply, they will be among the greatest saints. And from a spiritual perspective this must surely be the true meaning of old age.
The devils know, of course, what that homecoming will be like for all who have persevered, whether dying in young or old age, for those who have not attached their hearts to this world but gradually turned the gaze of their souls toward heaven. At the end of our correspondence the patient did indeed die and the arch-tempter, Screwtape, puts it like this:
Just think…what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore, as if he were emerging from a hideous, shell-like tetter, as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment. By Hell, it is misery enough to see them in their mortal days taking off dirtied and uncomfortable clothes and splashing in hot water and giving little grunts of pleasure - stretching their eased limbs. What, then, of this final stripping, this complete cleansing?
Screwtape, p.157
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