Channel: CSLewisDoodle

Category: Education

Tags: the screwtape letters (book)c.s. lewissocial justice

Description: Senior Demon Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood, discuss how to use one of John Hamilton’s academic Christian friends (with an upside-down view of Social Justice), to corrupt John’s Christianity also. You can find the original book here: amazon.com/The-Screwtape-Letters-Proposes-Toast/dp/0060652896#reader_0060652896 And the audio dramatisation here: amazon.com/The-Screwtape-Letters-Dramatization-Diabolical/dp/1589973240 And the book here: amazon.com/The-Screwtape-Letters-Proposes-Toast/dp/0060652896#reader_0060652896 Further reading: 'Pagan’s believed' (0:20): Here Lewis' own writings are put by the dramatist into the mouth one of John Hamilton's intellectual friends. See Lewis' essays, ‘Modern Man and and his Categories of Thought’ “De Descriptione Temporum,” and 'A Christmas Sermon for Pagans". In the early 20th Century, strong anti-Christian movements sort to break away from Christianity. Some sort to fix humanity's affections on the Future, but others sort to return Europe to the time before its Christian baptism, and into Norse paganism. The most successful of these cults was, of course, the Nazi cult of 'blood and soil'. (4:30, 8:00) 'Scientism' - It is, in a word, the belief that the supreme moral end is the perpetuation of our own species, and that this is to be pursued even if, in the process of being fitted for survival, our species has to be stripped of all those things for which we value it - of pity, of happiness, and of freedom (Lewis, 'A Reply To Professor Haldane'). I.e. "Believe this NOT because it is true but because it will increase SURVIVAL (an atheist ethic)". (4:38) "The 'historical Jesus' has to be a "great man" in the modern sense of the word—one standing at the terminus of some centrifugal and unbalanced line of thought—a crank vending a panacea [cure-all]. We thus distract men's minds from Who He is, and what He did. We first make Him solely a teacher, and then conceal the very substantial agreement between His teachings and those of all other great moral teachers. For humans must not be allowed to notice that all great moralists are sent by the Enemy not to inform men but to remind them, to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our continual concealment of them. We make the Sophists [who were masters at teaching rhetoric and style but refused to teach students absolute truth. They taught that 'man is the measure of all things']: He raises up a Socrates to answer them." (5:52) Some missing text: "The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin which they already had—and sin, not against some new fancy-dress law produced as a novelty by a "great man", but against the old, platitudinous, universal moral law which they had been taught by their nurses and mothers." (6:43) One of Screwtape's key points is repeated in text here: "About the general connection between Christianity and politics, our position is more delicate. Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really JUST SOCIETY would be a major disaster. On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to SOCIAL JUSTICE. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a GOOD SOCIETY might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist's shop." 'Social Justice' or 'Social Good' is just a odd reversal of the words 'Just Society' or 'Good Society'.