Screwtape and the ‘Horror of the Same Old Thing’ by Mitchell Kalpakgian
In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Uncle Screwtape, the master devil,
counsels his junior apprentice, Wormwood, to use tried and true techniques to
seduce souls into sin. One tactic he highly recommends is the strategy that
perverts man’s natural love of change: “The horror of the Same Old Thing is one
of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless
source of heresies in religion,
folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.”
Screwtape urges devils to cultivate in persons a passion for novelty, change for
the sake of change—arbitrary, erratic, irrational changes in the name of escape
from the boredom and monotony of repetition. Screwtape explains to Wormwood that
man already possesses an inherent enjoyment of change that is balanced with
man’s innate love of permanence.
According to Screwtape, the “Enemy” (God) has created in man a natural rhythm
that alternates between the need for stability and the need for variability—a
delight in variety similar to man’s pleasure in eating: “he has contrived to
gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of
change and permanence which are called Rhythm.”
The ‘Horror of the Same Old Thing’
On the other hand, the artfulness of the devil instigates radical, revolutionary
changes as a substitute for the natural, organic developments that occur in the
law of rhythm, whether it is day or night, summer or winter, or youth and age.
What Screwtape calls the Horror of the Same Old Thing the Church recognizes as
ordinary life. What Screwtape calls “a demand for absolute novelty” does not
correspond to the simple pleasure of contrast or the natural enjoyment of
effortless variety that children welcome with each of the four seasons.
In Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous lines from A Child’s Garden of Verses,
“Sing a song of seasons! / Something Bright in All! / Flowers in the summer, /
Fires in the fall.” The children in these poems always welcome the natural
changes of weather as their play changes from the swing and hayloft on the farm
in the summer to the “Happy chimney corner days” of winter “Sitting safe in
nursery nooks/ Reading picture story books.”
On the contrary, the type of change the devils encourage is a disordered
restlessness that culminates in “the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical,
change kept up.”
The Grimm folktales, known as Household Stories, depict the familiar experience
of homemaking, caring for children, going to market, and tending animals as full
of surprising turns, strokes of good luck, and dreams come true. For all its
ordinariness daily life is not the Same Old Thing. Wonderful things happen to
ordinary people performing the humble work of the day as the story of Cinderella
(Aschenputtel) calls to mind: “And when she stood up, and the prince looked on
her face, he knew again the beautiful maiden that had danced with him, and he
cried, ‘This is the right bride’.”
In “The Frog Prince” a royal princess who keeps her promise to a lowly frog for
fetching a ball from the well marvels to see the frog transformed into a prince,
her bridegroom to be. Although the princess loathed the thought of welcoming the
frog to her home and regretted her promise of agreeing to let the frog eat with
her, play with her, and be her companion, she kept her word because her father
insisted on truthfulness: “That which thou hast promised must thou perform.”
These are the natural changes and normal surprises of daily life that make it as
unpredictable as it is ordinary—not the Same Old Thing.
The Law of “Undulation”
Screwtape’s strategy, then, intends to frustrate these rhythmical changes that
naturally occur in the course of things and seeks to exploit the weakness of
human beings when they find themselves at the troughs rather than the peaks that
govern the law of “undulation.” He informs Wormwood of the human vulnerability
during these fluctuations between the ups and downs of man’s emotions: “As long
as he lives on earth, periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness
will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty.”
The devils must exploit the state of dryness that accompanies the trough and use
the state of “anti-climax” to incite the love of absolute novelty and endless
change as the magical cure to boredom. In other words, dramatic, spectacular
changes in the name of newness will eliminate the virtues of patience, hope,
trust, and perseverance that acknowledge that sameness is not monotony but an
aspect of natural order and eternal law like the high tide and low tide that
govern the sea.
This madness for change naturally leads man to govern his life, Screwtape
explains, by trendy ideas that are a la mode: “Finally, the desire for novelty
is indispensable if we are to produce Fashions or Vogues.” From the natural love
of change to an obsessive love of novelty to a disenchantment with the ordinary
to the worship of current fashions in thought and morals, the devils’ artfulness
tempts man with subversive ideas that undermine the meaning of normal, natural,
human, and moral. As folktales about the household illustrate, reality is not
flat and boring but wild and adventurous.
As the Grimm tale about the Gallant Little Tailor (who killed “seven with one
blow”) shows, the story of the weak overcoming the powerful always amazes. As
Stevenson’s poems and folktales illustrate, the natural order is both permanent
and variable, both familiar and mysterious, and both human and divine. As the
child in Happy Thought observes, “The world is so filled with a number of
things/ We should all be as happy as kings.”
The endless variety of play the child sees in the four seasons, the joy of
playing both outdoors and indoors, with friends or with one’s own imagination,
in the daylight with “The Summer Sun” and at night in the “Land of Nod” all
refute Screwtape’s subtle lie about the Same Old Thing.
The Same Old Thing that never changes is a misnomer for the Lovable Familiar
Thing that will always surprise.
http://www.setonmagazine.com/dad/dr-mitchell-kalpakgian/screwtape-and-the-horror-of-the-same-old-thing#IU6o3Rsr10XOGA8M.99