LETTER VIII
In discussing the periodic “dry spells” of decreased religious commitment which most believers experience, Screwtape says the following:
You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. 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.
Who said anything about overriding? Atheists like myself ask only that God, if he exists and desires our belief, make at least the minimum effort to convey that wish to us himself, in some unambiguous manner, and not leave it up to fallible, conflicting, easily mistaken human beings. This would not have to involve some dramatic supernatural event that would awe and terrify people ? it could be something as simple as a voice speaking out of the air. An omnipotent being would, by definition, be capable of this, and it would not override any human being’s will.
But even say we accept Lewis’ argument and that God, if he appeared to human beings, would have to do so in a way that overwhelmed their senses. Why would this remove their free will or their ability to obey? Why could a person not know God for who and what he was and still choose to rebel? As Lewis himself writes, the demons seem to be well aware of God’s presence, and are not overwhelmed or forced into obedience by it:
The humans do not start from that direct perception of Him which we, unhappily, cannot avoid. They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing and searing glare which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives.
And yet this does not seem to have taken away the demons’ ability to do evil. It seems strange to me that Lewis can contradict his own theology so plainly and not notice.
LETTER IX
Although Lewis writes in the preface that one should avoid “excessive and unhealthy” belief in demons, he seems to grant them a remarkable degree of power over the mental lives of human beings:
It all depends on whether your man is of the desponding type who can be tempted to despair, or of the wishful-thinking type who can be assured that all is well. The former type is getting rare among the humans. If your patient should happen to belong to it, everything is easy. You have only got to keep him out of the way of experienced Christians (an easy task now-a-days), to direct his attention to the appropriate passages in scripture, and then to set him to work on the desperate design of recovering his old feelings by sheer will-power, and the game is ours.
So we are to believe that a demon can control a person’s actions, to the extent of directing that person’s attention to specific biblical passages, and can control a person’s thoughts to the extent of setting them on a particular plan of action toward producing feelings of religious exaltation? Just one chapter before, Lewis was talking about how God values human free will so greatly that he does not override it with supernatural manifestations. Why, then, would he permit the demons to do the very same thing and not interfere with their evil actions? In several places elsewhere in this book, Lewis mentions specific occasions on which God prevents the demons from influencing humans in certain ways ? but why, if God desires to save souls, would he not simply prevent them from exerting any influence over humans at all?
LETTER XV
In this letter, Screwtape discusses the human perception of time’s passage and how the demons can best use it to their advantage.
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.
…we want a man hag-ridden by the Future ? haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth…
Though Lewis does not address this fact, he must have known that secular systems of thought are hardly the only ones that focus people’s attention on the future. The most obvious example was staring him in the face: the apocalyptic belief in Jesus’ second coming and the end of the world, which has wholly captured the attention of Christians for nearly two thousand years now. Every generation of Christian believers has obsessed over what they believed to be the imminent return of Christ and the hell on earth that would soon ensue, and as each of those generations grew old and gray and died away, the next one took up the torch of apocalyptic fervor just as readily. And today, despite Jesus’ promises to return now being two millennia overdue, Rapture fever is stronger than ever, with triumphalist Christian fiction like the Left Behind books burning up the bestseller charts. This remarkable pattern, by Lewis’ logic, would seem to suggest that most of evangelical Christianity is in thrall to unseen demonic spirits.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/essays/the-screwtape-letters/
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