Doing Things with Temptations with Crafty Devils

By

Obododimma Oha

So, devils, too, could be jealous of their pupils whom they are supposed to be bringing up and perfecting in the art of temptation? Just read The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis (or its film and stage adaptations) and then, read The Fleetwood Correspondence: A Devilish Tale of Temptation by William Griffin and you can see what I mean. Although Lewis wrote his book many years before Griffin’s, the latter responds effectively, becoming an inevitable complement to the first (if we take the epistolary discourse from a devil’s perspective to a wider circumference). It is as if two humans (and not the two devils) are now collaborating in the indirect discourse on the emotional lives of devils in their devilry!

In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis features an interesting imagination but a theological situation where a senior devil, Screwtape, whose assignment is to teach a junior one who is really his nephew, Wormwood, on the best and most effective ways of tempting various categories of people and succeeding (but more precisely how he should handle his target (the "Patient") and special case, a young man). Of course, Screwtape, in his instruction, shows his love for philosophy and history, his excitement and inclination to forms of knowledge related to sex and psychoanalysis, but his dislike for science. The exchange or instruction is in the form of letters, in which the senior devil capitalizing on the power-oriented nature of the discourse, mainly performs the act of criticizing, blaming, ordering, warning, condemning, etc. He wants to show his pupil that he is in charge; that his future as a master in devilry lies with this teacher, etc. Even though he pretends to be zealous in showing the best way to destroy humans, we know that he has another hidden agenda: he just wants to demonstrate his supremacy as a tempter (You would say, “A Professor of Temptation”!) and is secretly unhappy that his pupil may outshine him! And really, in spite of the admonitions of Wormwood which he arrogantly ignores, the target (called “the Patient”) goes to Heaven eventually and Screwtape is penalized in hell for this inefficiency. If not for his arrogance, the “Patient” would have been available to the devils, at least to experiment with and finally pushed to Hell. But the devils lost him. That is seen as “not good” and it is because of a “know-all” attitude.

But in Griffin’s The Fleetwood Correspondence, the pupil has inevitably grown and can now confidently write back and tell his “uncle” (whom he refers to in  face-threatening nomenclatures as “Most Scrabous Uncle,” “Most Capricious Uncle”), the senior devil and teacher, the hard truth about how the former saw the teaching experience. The former pupil can now tell the senior devil courageously: “Oh, you pretended to like me and pretended to be teaching temptation strategies honestly. But we know that you were very jealous of me, making me your victim, always scolding me for nothing sake, even when I had done well. We know that you saw a superior devil coming and did not like it. You sought to shoot me down but instead made me stronger and ‘better’ as a tempter.” His former teacher is challenged to live up to the demands of temptation in a modern world. In other words, that this senior devil should update his knowledge for it to be really relevant in modern times, as could be seen in the handling of a target in Manhattan, a young woman who has just come to Manhattan. Wormwood, who is Fleetwood in this discourse now, would show how her soul could be won over completely as he uses her for that spiritual battle required by modern times, modern reasoning, modern lure.

It is interesting that the devils understand how language empowers the other side of the battle. Two important strategies in addressing this in the discourse are: first, avoidance: not calling the other side of the battle what it calls itself or what its adherents call it; calling it something else that is injurious, offensive; in other words, reconstructed and negative references. God and his forces are for the devils “the enemy,” even though the term “the enemy” seems to feature as a satanic substitute for Jesus Christ. For the devils, God should not be called “God.” To do that is to subtly endorse or recognize his being master, his authority! So, he is enemy for the enemy! Doesn’t that show the slippery side of the label, “enemy”? It all depends on the side from which the person calls the other “enemy”!

Similarly, references to Jesus Christ and Christianity are upturned in order to weaponize the references in a way the battleline would become obvious. Modern born-again cultural productions have also learnt from Lewis and Griffin how to use languages (used by the devils) to draw the line! We should not be surprised that the devils call those they against whom they are doing battle something unfavourable. Do they not try to put them in a disfavor, a disadvantage? In Christian discourse, God is referred to as “Our Father Above.” Is the familial configuration of God as “father” not soothing, not consoling?   The tag invites us to project the emotions we have for a real (biological) father to him. If God is our father, then he cares for us; he listens when we talk to him, (and, of course, we can even argue with him, “wrestle” with him)! Further, if this father is above and not below, better: things above are superior, are in charge. Things below have a disadvantage and have to struggle to secure the top. Ancient imagination that gave the impression that this below was uncomfortable and undesirable. That was why the place of the dead, Hades in ancient Greek thinking, was located below. That was why our ancestors in Africa thought the middle of the Earth (below) was inhabited by spirits of the dead. Well, our modern time, we know that “above” and “below” are prepositions that metaphorically project our speculations about devils and gods. For the devils, this requires a major contrast, the term, “Our Father Below” (Lucifer himself) is created to subvert it. Undermining God’s business in creation requires an undermining in language! Lucifer is made to feature as God’s antonym, even though we know it is really the case.

I think that something needs to be said about the euphemization of temptation in the discourse of both devils. A handy example is the representation of the person undergoing a temptation as a "patient." It is as if the person is ill, is in a clinic and is being treated for an ailment. Righteousness or doing good is paradoxically an affliction, an ailment and the individual has to be rescued from it! Is this really a rescue or a damnation? In this shocking paradoxical case, good is bad and bad is good! The "patient" is being made very ill, not well, with wrong medication (wrong thoughts, suggestions or ideas that would really, in our ideal world make him or her a bad person. The ideal situation is to save life, not destroy it. In the discourse of devilry, a patient is somebody who has tendencies or possibilities of doing good and being on God's side. Such a person has to be "treated" the devil way!

And what does this strange "patient" suggest of the tempter? The tempter suggestively steps in the role of a doctor, a physician with a difference. Imagine a diabolical doctor administering capsules containing millions of malignant viruses to his clients at a clinic. Or a doctor in a makeshift kiosk armed with the kinds of butchering sharp blades that are used in an abattoir. Surely, there is a world of difference between a killer and a healer! But in the paradoxical discourse of the devils, a killer is a healer.

The second strategy apart from a reconstruction of language is total avoidance; that is, to avoid using the same expression used by Christian adherents. This is very difficult, and is treated as a step to reconstruction. It is as if we have the following rule:

Avoid using the same language used by X and endeavor to find replacements for that expression, making sure the replacements are weapons!

But it is also interesting that this doing things with language, with others, happens at two levels. One is the one against God and Christians; the other is one devil against another. We have seen how that internal (inter-devil war) is enacted in the references each of the devils made about each other. The senior devil is an uncle quite alright, but he is a “most Capricious” type! That is to say, that devil with me is also against me, an interesting contradiction logically speaking. If two devils (they do not call themselves that) are against each other, is it not the case that they reveal the hopelessness of their enterprise and would indirectly be helping their “enemy” Lewis and Griffin raised made language issues once again take centre stage in theological dedates, something Thomas Aquinas had opened up in his argument that a good comprehension of God’s word required a sound attention to linguistic signification. It is essential, not only in evangelization, but also also in literary configurations about God, our relationship with the supernatural, salvation, the problem of difference in the spiritual appropriations of languages, spiritual weaponizations of language, translation of the sacred, euphemisations and dysphemisations of spiritual oppositions, etc.