Screwtape and MacDonald on Love and Marriage
From Screwtape: “The enchantment of unsatisfied desire produces results which the humans can be made to mistake for the results of charity. Avail yourself of the ambiguity in the word ‘Love’: let them think they have solved by Love problems they have in fact only waived or postponed under the influence of the enchantment….”
“The erotic enchantment produces a mutual complaisance in which each is really pleased to give in to the wishes of the other. They also know that the Enemy demands of them a degree of charity which, if attained, would result in similar actions. You must make them establish as a Law for their whole married life that degree of mutual self-sacrifice which is at present sprouting naturally out of the enchantment, but which, when the enchantment dies away, they will not have charity enough to enable them to perform. They will not see the trap, since they are under the double blindness of mistaking sexual excitement for charity and of thinking that the excitement will last.”
“Now comes the joke. The Enemy described a married couple as ‘one flesh.’ He did not say ‘a happily married couple’ or ‘a couple who married because they were in love’, but you can make the humans ignore that. You can also make them forget that the man they call Paul did not confine it to married couples. Mere copulation, for him, makes ‘one flesh’. You can thus get the humans to accept as rhetorical eulogies of ‘being in love’ what were in fact plain descriptions of the real significance of sexual intercourse. The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured. From the true statement that this transcendental relation was intended to produce, and, if obediently entered into, too often will produce, affection and the family, humans can be made to infer the false belief that the blend of affection, fear, and desire which they call ‘being in love’ is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy…In other words, the humans are to be encouraged to regard as the basis for marriage a highly-coloured and distorted version of something the Enemy really promises as its result.”
From George MacDonald: “While one is yet only in love, the real person lies covered with the rose leaves of a thousand sleepy-eyed dreams, and through them come to the dreamer but the barest hints of the real person. A thousand fancies fly out, approach and cross, but never meet. The man and the woman are pleased, not with each other, but each with the fancied other. The merest common likings are taken for signs of a wonderful sympathy, of a radical unity. But though at a hundred points their souls seem to touch, their contact points are the merest brushings, as of insect antennae. The real man, the real woman, is all the time asleep under the rose leaves. Happy is the rare fate of the true . . . to wake and come forth and meet in the majesty of the truth, in the image of God, in their very being, in the power of that love which alone is being! They love, not this and that about each other, but each the very other. Where such love is, let the differences of taste, the unfitness of temperament, be what they may, the two must by and by be thoroughly one.”
“The negative and positive relation we live daily causes us to emerge from beneath the rose leaves and penetrate each other so as to have really seen and be seen. It takes the negative to arouse each of us from our sleep . . . But the miracle of love that comes to birth each time forgiveness appears is truly the kiss of the spirit.”
A.S. Peterson has crafted a work of compelling historical fiction which begs the question, “Can this really be a debut novel?” With dogged fidelity, Peterson captures the spirit, manners, and social conditions present during the American Revolutionary War. We meet colorful, credible characters who navigate the high seas of life and love, dependence and independence, war and peace, truth and consequence, and despite forays into dark places, The Fiddler’s Gun is beautiful, lyrical, and redemptive.
Walt Wangerin, Jr. strikes again.
Janner Igiby lives in Glipwood, a nothing little village in the land of Skree, on the edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. Manhood is on the horizon, but Janner finds it hard to feel much hope for the future. Skree is ruled by foreign oppressors, snake men called the Fangs of Dang, servants of a shadowy emperor named Gnag the Nameless. The Skreeans are weak and weaponless. They’re even tool-less. Any Skreean who needs to use a hoe has to borrow one from the Fangs (and fill out the requisite paperwork). And from time to time, the Black Carriage arrives in Glipwood to carry young Skreeans toward an unknown fate across the Dark Sea.
I am not a fan of Civil War literature; in fact, I have always thought of it as one of those weird sub-genres for obsessive types. They’re almost like Trekkies with their re-enactments and maniacal devotion to detail. It’s just not my thing (although I’m secretly jealous that they get to dress up and shoot cannons).
A Randall Goodgame song is like a great independent movie. Characters deliver lines like they were lifted from a break room, a truck stop, or a downtown diner. Seemingly incongruent scenes are juxtaposed and plot isn’t obvious; in fact, narrative–a good story–is often more evident than linear plot lines. An indie movie, like a Randall Goodgame song, seems to tell itself. Rather than being rudely yanked by a chain through a sequence of contrived events, with a Randall Goodgame song, I have the sense that I’m being allowed a willing, but vicarious sneak peak into the real lives of his real characters.
Sara Groves irritates me just a little bit. With each album she makes, she moves from strength to strength and is always raising the bar with the quality, depth, and lyrical ambition of her work. And as a fellow artist, that’s just a little irritating since it means the rest of us are going to have to work harder if we hope to keep up.
I am outside on my front porch. The yellowed leaves are methodically falling from the black walnut in the yard, my breath is chalky visible in the recent cold snap, and lately I have been exploring the unpleasant nuances of the dark night of a soul - my own, to be exact. It is a strange passion we live out on this over-glorified orb of rock hurtling through space at some rate that I’m sure would astound me were I to know what it was. It is an odd series of days, I am realizing, when you question your own faith more than you question your own doubt. And, indeed, it is these nagging questions which have prompted me to share my thoughts on Andrew Peterson’s 2003 album, Love and Thunder.
11-year old Reuben Land, a character in the 2001 book Peace Like a River, provides narration that is clear-eyed and insightful, yet retains the magic, wonder, and innocence of youth. I found it easy to entrust my imagination to the author’s clever method of telling the story through the sensibilities of a pre-teen boy. An author with lesser skill would have either made the boy too smart-alecky for his own good or impossibly cute.
I just finished a book that upon closing it, I felt like it finished me in a sense. A quiet meditative book that reached down and stirred the deep waters in me. It’s Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer prize winner Gilead, given to me by my friend Andrew Peterson.
Eric Peters’s body of work addresses a diverse range of topics, but hope is a recurring theme that gently percolates in the midst of it all. And yet, somewhere between the 2001 masterpiece Land of the Living, and Scarce, the flavor of hope that Peters’s work emits has evolved closer to a tone that is more resolute than what came before. And though the complexion of hope has a broad range, the lyrics from Scarce–while intermittently contrite and timorous as in previous efforts, are now strengthened and bolstered by roots that have grown deeper, radiating an underlying grit and security.
Having read The Great Divorce many times over the years, I’ve found this classic from the great C.S. Lewis to be full of startling clarity and depth on the differences between Heaven and Hell. The only thing both have in common is that both begin in the human will; we can either let Heaven enter us and rule in us to blossom into love and goodness, or allow Hell to infect and reign in our hearts by the daily refusal to submit to Heaven.
Even if you haven’t heard Room to Breathe, its still likely you’ve heard Andy Gullahorn. He’s what I’d call a heavy lifter by trade. He writes lyrics, plays guitar, arranges vocals and adds production help to the work of artists like Jill Phillips and Andrew Peterson.
Allow me to preface this by telling you that I am a great despiser of gushing reviews. I’d much rather write (or read) a scathing dismemberment of the latest Brett Ratner film or Terry Goodkind book than suffer through four hundred words of overblown hyperbole about even the best of things. But when asked to write some thoughts on Frederick Buechner’s Godric, no amount of distaste for high praise was able to intervene. I hope you’ll take what I say with the understanding that I do not say it readily or lightly.
Appreciate these quotes. Thank you for posting them. I especially like, “It takes the negative to arouse each of us from our sleep . . . But the miracle of love that comes to birth each time forgiveness appears is truly the kiss of the spirit.”
These are wonderful quotes! C.S. Lewis and George Macdonald were truly brilliant men.
such beauty and truth! (and i love those pictures of George and Louisa!!)
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Ron, thanks!
The story line immediately surrounding the MacDonald quote is one of my favorites, though that is a big list of favorites. Was the quote taken from an edited version or from the unedited, “What’s Mine’s Mine”?
I am currently reading a collection of MacDonald’s letters entitled “The Expression of Character” which displays how much his own life modeled what he wrote. I don’t think it a stretch to assume his name could be added to the signficant list in Hebrews 11.
what a pleasure to read. thanks!
Ahh Screwtape, few other books are as poignant and hilarious at the same time. There are new things to be learned every time I read it.
I went on a long rode trip and just listened to The Screwtape Letters on audio from Focus on the Family. I realized “again” how great that book is.
[...] I was reading this book, I also read several quotes from C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald on love and marriage at The Rabbit Room. The distinctions drawn there are an apt sidebar to McNees’s [...]