“And now for your blunders. On your own showing, you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. In the second place you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there—a walk through a country he really likes, taken alone. In other words, you allowed him two positive Pleasures.” –C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
In this passage, Uncle Screwtape, a master devil, is advising Wormwood, his junior apprentice, in the artfulness of evil and temptation. He counsels his student to practice the techniques of deceit that promise success and to avoid the practices that lead to defeat and the loss of souls to the “Enemy” (the Devil’s word for God). An inexperienced novice, Wormwood assumed that the seduction of pleasure serves the devil’s party and captures souls. He is being instructed, however, to divert the “patient” from the pursuit of his favorite pastimes, recreations, and occasions of pure delight.
Screwtape explains to his pupil that pleasure, like marriage, is God’s “invention” and is intended to lead souls to heaven, not hell. The devil’s task is “to substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human’s own real likings and dislikings.” In other words, junior devils need to be forewarned of the implicit dangers lurking in the theology of pleasure that leads souls to salvation rather than perdition. The pleasures that demons need to instill in their patients are the illicit uncontrollable desires that lead to the deadly sins: lust, avarice, and gluttony.
Screwtape knows that “positive Pleasures” fill a person with pure joy and innocent delight and divert a person from seeking forbidden, immoral pleasures in the pursuit of happiness. These normal pleasures illuminate the nature of goodness and give it a concrete reality that prevents the term from being reduced to an abstraction. When David in the Psalms writes, “Taste and see the sweetness of the Lord,” he acknowledges God’s goodness as the source of the great pleasure, the sweetness of life, and the gladness of this joy naturally evokes a sense of gratitude for the author of the gift. Screwtape wants his pupil to be knowledgeable about the hard facts of pleasure and pain: “The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality.”
Instead of the word “goodness” used as an abstract noun or invoked as some pious platitude, the “positive Pleasures” inform the idea with a living reality that is felt, experienced, sensed, and known. These enjoyments that the devils must prevent are the simplest and most innocent kinds of mirth like “a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa.” The frustration of these enjoyments allows the Devils to tempt human souls with sophisticated entertainment to fill the void. Thus the entertainment of Hollywood, the opinions of celebrities, and the propaganda of popular culture and advertising can more easily substitute imitations for realities. “You should always,” insists Screwtape, “try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the ‘best’ people, the ‘right’ food, the ‘important’ books.” For the Devils to achieve success, the inane entertainment of the masses needs to replace the wholesome, natural enjoyment of God’s gifts.
Screwtape fears that this childlike sense of fun as sheer joy, as the pursuit of a good for its own sake, cultivates in human beings certain virtues that naturally lead souls closer to God. With innocent pleasures come virtues like innocence and self-forgetfulness that revel in the love of life and overflow with merriment. If a person follows his natural inclinations and personal tastes for the people, books, and food he really likes, he is not prone to the blandishments of temptations and the advertisements of popular culture; he is not motivated by pride to impress others or enhance his image in important circles.
Screwtape also worries that truly enjoyed pleasures will erode the jaded, world-weary apathy that the Devils expect to impose on the patient’s state of feeling. The simple joys will counteract the effects of the Devil’s attempts to produce melancholy and despondency: “That it would peel off from his sensibility the kind of crust you have been forming on it, and make him feel that he was coming home, recovering himself.” In other words, these natural enjoyments that lift the heart and renew the spirit are healing and restorative and banish the afflictions that deaden the soul with ennui, a state of mind prone to many temptations utilized by the Devils, especially the sin of sloth known also as “the noon-day demon.”
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Screwtape knows that God created man for beatitude and that all men by nature desire happiness. Screwtape never forgets that, in St. Thomas Aquinas’s words, “No man can live without pleasure.” His intention is to rob persons of their fond memories of childhood, to make them grow old prematurely, to deprive them of the anticipation of favorite pastimes, to convince them that joylessness is the normal human condition, and to extinguish in them a love of life as a great adventure. However, no matter a person’s age or experience, these “positive Pleasures” keep alive a keen taste and savory relish for “the sweetness of the Lord,” the goodness of the Creation, and the bountiful abundance of pleasure God has provided to last a lifetime.
In the words of the child in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, “The world is so filled with a number of things/ I think we should all be as happy as kings.” Because Screwtape is only too aware of these riches of simple pleasures that lead man to God, he alerts his pupil, “The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence for what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.”
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Fisher More College and Fisher More Academy.
