It is a temptation to take an important work by C. S. Lewis and call it a tour de force because you will end up calling nearly everything he wrote a tour de force. But in all honesty not everything C. S. Lewis wrote works equally well. And sometimes even Jack nodded. For instance, no one would argue that Lewis was a great poet, even though that’s what he wanted to be when first starting out. And it would be pretty hard to argue that The Pilgrim’s Regress is one of the best things Lewis wrote. Though The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has some fun stuff in it, it can never rank at the top of the Narnia books. And some of the occasional essays are too tied up with contemporary issues and arguments to speak with the same irenic urgency that Lewis’ most important works do (like The Abolition of Man--if anything, this work is even more desperately true regarding 21st century American education than mid- 20th century British education).
But The Screwtape Letters? Well, that is a TOUR DE FORCE. There are many good things one can say about this book, with its incisive examination of the way we poor mortals constantly fool ourselves into thinking we are pretty decent people. One particular aspect of this great bit of epistolary genius is the way Lewis examines the rightful place of clear thinking in the cosmic scheme of redemption. I mean, we are talking about demons, and salvation, and eternal souls, and God’s love, and sex. And right in the middle of these really really big issues, Lewis keeps returning to the importance of clear thinking--or rather the absence of it in the modern age when it comes to “spirituality.”
Uncle Screwtape tells Wormwood in the very first letter to keep the patient away from argumentation because logic, definition, well stated propositions and so forth no will not in fact clinch a solid atheism:
“But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as a result of a chain of reasoning.”
Lewis indicates that most people in 1942 had already become trained by mass media and modern education to think in terms of impressions and passing subjective states of moods as the defining condition of real life. Don’t believe your lying brain; believe in yourself, your heart, your Oprah-shaped hopes and dreams. Clear thinking (not the “critical thinking” pabulum currently so au courant in academia) helps kill this kind of ego centered stance.
Screwtape also offers this bit of advice: “Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church.”
Don’t define things. Don’t categorize. Don’t seek out cause and effect. Don’t box me in with your reductive petty ideas and logic chopping. Systematic theology is for losers. Didn’t you read the latest book on church growth? That book you have in your hands--yeah, The Imitation of Christ--man, that’s OLD. It can’t have anything to say to me. Here, read this book on prayers from twitter. And stop using those old fashioned theological words. They are such a turnoff.
This continues throughout the letters. The advice tends to center around a few key strategies: keep the patient in the stream of things (especially through mass media), keep him constantly monitoring his state of mind, keep him focused on the momentary as The Real. Above all, avoid things that might lead him to think about ultimate ends, final purposes. At one point about halfway through the letters, Screwtape’s facade of care for his nephew slips when he learns that Wormwood inadvertently let the patient have two real pleasures--a good book and a nice country walk. This practically led the patient to a second, deeper conversion because the patient was taken outside of himself to think about the ultimate end of things--which is the love of God.
The depth Lewis takes us to in this book comes, partly, from showing the linkage of logic and love. Clear thinking-- clarifying definitions, accurate comparisons, historically shaped perspectives, and so forth--do not sever us from God, from beauty, from deepest, richest emotions. Clear thinking moves out of the way the tiresome ego and its enervating fears about life so that we can finally see Reality in all of its sublime, heartbreaking beauty.
Logic does not cancel out love for the Christian. It brings us to an attentiveness that silences the constant but ephemeral propaganda that each one of us is the center of the cosmos. For me, this is one of the things that makes The Screwtape Letters such a powerful and convicting piece of writing.