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The Screwtape Letters - Letter Eight |
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"So you 'have great hopes that the patient's religious phase is dying away', have you?...Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation? Humans are amphibians--half spirit and half animal...This means that while their spirits 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. If you had watched your patient carefully, you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life--his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down...The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it. To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use [God] wants to make of it, then do the opposite. Now, it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks...The reason is this. To us, a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of it's will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at it's expense. But the obedience which [God] demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not...mere propaganda, but an appaling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with...creatures whose life, on it's miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His own. We want cattle who can finally become food, He wants servants who can finally become sons...And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why [God] 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 Irresitable and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless...For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long...He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and even if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles...Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do [God's] will, looks around upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
This was an epiphany for me. I read this and remembered having noticed this before in my own life. The devil made very good use of this by encouraging me to believe that this happened because I was doing something wrong, or because something was wrong with me, and by encouraging me to believe that the depression was going to be permanent, so I might as well give up.
NsomniAna · Mon Feb 04, 2008 @ 09:54pm · 0 Comments |
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