If you are willing to put up with a paragraph of so of apologetic throat-clearing, I will tell you why I chose this odd title for today’s post.

I appreciate now in a way it had not occurred to me to appreciate before that the verse numbers in any Bible that has them are much more aligned to the text than the Screwtape number I am going to use as if they were an alternative source of opinion.  For instance, John 3:16 in the Bible I use most looks like this. “For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  It is not a complete thought, really, because it requires the context of the verses before and after, but just by itself, it says something and I take it that that was one of the goals of the people who invented “verses.” [1]

Screwtape 3:16 is not nearly as complete.  It reads on the page I am using “…practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those…”. Even more than John 3:16, this fragment would benefit from context.  The immediate context is provided by lines 15–18, which read

15.You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self 

16. examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about 

17. himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the 

18  same house with him or worked in the same office.

You can see, in the context of Screwtape 3:16, that an idea is being expressed, as odd as it must surely seem to people who don’t remember that Screwtape is a devil, in fact a very senior devil. [2]

How do we get a Screwtape 3:16?  The idea is very simple.  C. S. Lewis’s book, The Screwtape Letters, contains 31 separate letters. [3] and if you put a line number to every line, you will see that line 16 of Letter 3 could plausibly be referred to as Screwtape 3:16, borrowing the colon which I suppose Stevens invented for his arrangement of verses.

It is actually a little more complicated than that because just what line is numbered 16 will depend on the size of the margins, the size of the font, and the style of the font.  I am using Times font, size 15, with one inch page margins on each side.  I am aware that changing any of those would change what words appear on what line and if I attract colleagues to this project, we will need to agree on those three constraints.

Since The Screwtape Letters takes on the perspective of a devil, we would expect that if a topic is addressed by a biblical passage and also by a diabolical passage, that the categories, the vocabulary, and the causal relations, would all be different.  They really aren’t.

Anyone who has tried to live a principled and honorable life—in the context of this debate, we may abbreviate this as “a Christian life”—knows that you go through periods where this kind of life seems natural and almost easy.  Then there are periods where it seems nonsensical and therefore very difficult.  I am going to offer some comments from Paul, the Apostle and from Screwtape the Devil on that topic.  With any luck at all, I will then point out how similar they are (not denying the differences) and I will be done for the day.

Screwtape calls it “the Law of Undulation” and in Letter 8, he explains it this way.  Here are lines 8—13.  That gives me the chance to point directly to this passage as Screwtape 8:8—13

“Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?  Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) 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.”.

Romans 8:5—8, by a lovely coincidence, says nearly the same thing.

5 “Those who are living by their natural inclinations have their minds on the things human nature desires; those who live in the Spirit have their minds on spiritual things. 6 And human nature has nothing to look forward to but death, while the Spirit looks forward to life and peace, 7 because the outlook of disordered human nature is opposed to God, since it does not submit to God’s Law, and indeed it cannot, 8 and those who live by their natural inclinations can never be pleasing to God.”

Now.  Does this work in any practical way?  No, of course not.  To use this kind of comparison, you would need a Bible divided into chapters and verses and a set of the Letters, divided into letters and numbered lines.  Everybody has access to the former; only the group studying Screwtape has the latter.  So it is a very narrow effort, as it should be.  And I am doing the work of standardizing the line organization and numbering, which gets onerous at times.  On the other hand, I get to cite Screwtape 8:8—13, from which I take more pleasure than a well-balanced person would allow himself.

Even so, it is hard not to notice the similarity.  Paul is deeply committed to what he, in this passage, calls “having the mind on spiritual things.”  Screwtape sees that same reality as his deepest danger, which is why he counsels his pupil, Wormwood, to press the Patient to feel the frustration and give up on the whole “religious thing.”  The two authors see, in other words, the same reality.  Paul counsels supporting it (Romans 8:6b), where Screwtape counsels using it to destroy the Patient (Screwtape 8:35—36) and in 8:47, identifies the limits God must face. [4] 

For fans of C. S. Lewis and his treasure of diabolical advice, this whole exercise is a romp.

[1]. Robert Stevens, who goes by several other names, in 1551.  Surely there are books about just how he went about his work.  How, for instance did “Jesus wept” come to be a “verse?”

[2]. And, as C. S. Lewis, the creator of Screwtape, could not resist adding, “very low in the Lowerarchy.”

[3]. Actually only thirty and a half.  He inadvertently changed into the shape of a giant toad in the middle of one of them and needed to have another devil finish it for him.

[4]. I know I’m cheating here because I have not appended the line-numbered letters as I would have to in a study essay.  I just wanted to use the parallel citations.  Screwtape 8:35—36 reads, “We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons.” And 8:47 reads, “He cannot ravish. He can only woo.”