Andrew and Matt discuss the third letter from Uncle Screwtape where he offers some suggestions to sabotage the patient’s relationship with his mother…
S4E7: Letter #3 – “Mamma Mia!” (Download)
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Timestamps
00:00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:00:13 – Welcome
00:00:45 – Opening chit-chat
00:04:55 – The podcast name
00:07:22 – Song-of-the-week
00:08:47 – Episode title competition
00:09:39 – Quote-of-the-week
00:10:55 – Drink-of-the-week
00:13:57 – Patreon Toast
00:14:51 – Chapter Summary
00:15:51 – Discussion
01:03:03 – Unscrewing Screwtape
01:08:41 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Remarks
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
Yesterday I broke a cap on one of my front teeth, but because I love you all so much, I still sat down and offered my own thoughts on this week’s chapter:
Show Notes
Opening Chit-Chat
- This was the first episode with Matt and Andrew unsupervised!
- They chatted about their respective prayer lives recently. Matt commented on a book he is reading by Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage. Andrew referred to his interview on the Upstream podcast:
- Matt explained the meaning behind our podcast name to new listeners.
- “Jack” was C.S. Lewis’ nickname
- Every Tuesday morning Lewis would meet with his friends at the Eagle and Child pub.
- Andrew explained that the episode title and song-of-the-week are named after the ABBA song, “Mamma Mia”:
Andrew explained that we’re open to listeners sending us messages to with their alternative song titles. If we really like your suggestion, we’ll send you a signed copy of William O’Flaherty’s book, C.S. Lewis Goes To Hell as a prize!
- Matt shared his quote-of-the-week:
“The Enemy will be working from the centre outwards, gradually bringing more and more of the patient’s conduct under the new standard, and may reach his behaviour to the old lady at any moment“
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
- The Drink-of-the-week was Caol Ila (12 years).
- Name: Sound of Islay
- Color: Vinho Verde
- Nose: Soft. Juniper. Garden Mint. Grass. Burned Grass
- Body: Lightly oily. Simultaneously soothing and appetizing
- Palate: Lots of flavor development. Becoming spicy. Vanilla, nutmeg, white mustard. Complex. Flavors combine with great delicacy.
- Finish: Very long
- Rather than toasting one of our Gold-level Patreon supporters today, we’re going to toast two young gentlemen whom we heard are listening to this podcast for extra credit. Joseph and Jeshua (Je-shoo-a) are studying The Screwtape Letters at the moment as part of their homeschool curriculum, so we think that needs to be toasted.
- One-hundred word chapter summary:
We discover that things are tense between the Patient and his mother. Screwtape wants Wormwood and the mother’s temptor, Glubose, to sabotage their relationship further. Screwtape offers four different ways to do this…
…by deluding the Patient concerning his inner life.
…keeping his prayers about his mother so “spiritual” that they are entirely disconnected for the woman herself.
…fostering daily annoyances between them, particularly related to tone and facial expression.
…all the while maintaining plausible innocence and indignation at being supposedly “misinterpreted”.At the end, Screwtape asks about her attitude towards her son’s conversion, mining it for further possible friction.
One-hundred word summary of Letter #3
Discussion
Mother and Son
- We find out that there is tension between the patient and his mother which Screwtape proposes to exploit:
I am very pleased by what you tell me about this man’s relations with his mother. But you must press your advantage.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
Matt and Andrew discussed Lewis’ relationship with “Minto”, Mrs. Janie King Moore, and how we find echos of mother figures in The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces.
- Screwtape recognises that God’s transformation of the Patient will be progressive:
The Enemy will be working from the centre outwards, gradually bringing more and more of the patient’s conduct under the new standard, and may reach his behaviour to the old lady at any moment.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
He encourages Wormwood to get in first and to coordinate with the demon assigned to the patient’s mother:
You want to get in first. Keep in close touch with our colleague Glubose who is in charge of the mother, and build up between you in that house a good settled habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
Method #1: Look inwards and ignore the obvious
- Screwtape then offers four methods for sabotaging the patient’s relationship with his mother. The first is to encourage him to look inwards and yet ignore the obvious:
Keep his mind on the inner life… his attention is… chiefly turned at present to… that very expurgated version of them which is all you should allow him to see. Encourage this… bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
…and encourage the patient to run before he can walk.
Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
Andrew alluded to this quotation which he thought came from Letters To Malcolm and they had a great conversation about Martha and Mary:
You will find several things going on in your mind which would not be going there if you were really a son of God. Well, stop them. Or you may realise that, instead of saying your prayers, you ought to be downstairs writing a letter, or helping your wife to wash-up. Well, go and do it.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 7)
Method #2: Disconnect the prayers from the person
- The next method Screwtape suggests is to render his prayers innocuous by disconnecting the prayers from the actual object of prayer:
Make sure that they are always very “spiritual”, that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
Andrew alluded to this passage from Mere Christianity:
The question is what Miss Bates’s tongue would be like if she were not a Christian and what Dick’s would be like if he became one
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 10)
- Screwtape wants the patient to focus on her sinfulness…or at least the ways in which she is annoying:
…his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself….
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
He says that all of this is helped by the fact that the patient doesn’t have a clear idea of what a soul even is!
…since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother — the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
Andrew quoted what was written in the front of Joy Davidman’s copy of The Great Divorce by Lewis where he spoke about needing to smash the false images of himself, his neighbour and God:
Andrew also pointed to Part II of Till We Have Faces where Orual doesn’t understand who Ungit is:
Then he led me across the floor; and, a long way off before we came to it, I saw that mirror on the wall, just where it always had been. At the sight of it my terror increased, and I fought with all my strength not to go on. But his hand had grown very big now and it was as soft and clinging as Batta’s arms, or as the tough clay we had been digging, or as the dough of a huge loaf. I was not so much dragged as sucked along till we stood right in front of the mirror. And in it I saw him, looking as he had looked that other day when he led me to the mirror long ago.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part II, Chapter 2)
But my face was the face of Ungit as I had seen it that day in her house.
“Who is Ungit?” asked the King.
“I am Ungit.” My voice came wailing out of me and I found that I was in the cool daylight and in my own chamber
Method #3: Subtle annoyances
- The third method Screwtape suggests is to focus on the subtleties of annoyance:
When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
…particularly on tone and facial expression:
Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother’s eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
…all the while hiding him from his own faults:
…of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see or hear himself, this is easily managed.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
- Andrew quoted St. Paul:
Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves.
Philippians 2:3
- Andrew spoke about how his Bishop, Andrew Doyle, quotes the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who tries to ask himself two questions whenever he meets someone new:
- How can I love this person?
- What can I learn?
- Andrew also alluded to St. Peter’s epistle where he speaks about the priesthood of all believers:
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
1 Peter 2:9
Method #4: Maintain plausible innocence
- Screwtape explains that annoyance can seem, on the surface, quite harmless:
In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
- Screwtape wants them to always try and maintain a plausible innocence:
To keep this game up you and Glubose must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
The Patient’s Conversion
- Lastly, Screwtape starts hunting to see if there’s anything relating to the man’s conversion which could be used to drive a wedge between him and his mother:
Finally, tell me something about the old lady’s religious position. Is she at all jealous of the new factor in her son’s life? — at all piqued that he should have learned from others, and so late, what she considers she gave him such good opportunity of learning in childhood? Does she feel he is making a great deal of “fuss” about it — or that he’s getting in on very easy terms? Remember the elder brother in the Enemy’s story
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #3)
- Matt told a story from Tim Keller’s book:
“I hoped Kathy would guess about my desire and simply offer the time to me. But she didn’t do it, and soon I found myself deeply resentful of her ‘failure’ to read my mind. Surely she should know how much I love visiting that bookstore! I work very hard – why doesn’t she propose that I take the afternoon away simply because I deserve the break? I began to image that she knew I wanted to go to the bookstore but was dead set against it.”
Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage
- Andrew quoted from Narnia:
“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (Chapter 10)
Screwtape Unscrewed
- “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3-4).
- Do not Keep score.
- Do cultivate an inner life that transforms from the center outward and leads to charitable action.
- Do pray for the genuine goodness of those around you; pray for the struggles/crosses they are bearing in their life and wish them the absolute best both on this side of life and the next.
- Do fill yourself with the spirit so you can perform the necessary self-sacrificial actions in a relationship without resentment but with joy.
- Do not dwell on the sins of those that frustrate you in prayer.
- Do not let Satan press and build on momentum (Stay vigilant toward little, daily sin / temptation).
- Matt ended with a quotation from Pope Francis:
