In 1942, novelist, literature professor, and lay theologian C.S. Lewis wrote a religious satirical novel, The Screwtape Letters, about correspondence between Screwtape, a demon in Hell’s bureaucracy, and his nephew Wormwood, an apprentice demon whose mission was to keep this one person from turning to life in God, and instead turn more and more to the false overly-selfish life. It is a natural then for recovery’s daily struggle, and daily victories. For people of any specific faith or none.
I resist the “Devil made me do it” defense which minimizes and deflects personal responsibility, but on a deeper allegorical level where the Devil is a metaphor for the way the combined psychological, spiritual, and cultural temptations drive the biological urges to increase our self-medicating to emotional problems, “the Devil” seems pretty close to reality. Once one is sober it especially seems apt to look back and see your former addictive self in terms of something akin to “demonic possession” by something both totally alien and totally yourself. Besides, we already talk loosely about the “insanity” we lived in while acting out without trying to meet medical definitions of that term. Spiritual insanity for sure.
The Screwtape Letters explores the moral slippery slopes (the “How did I find myself in this bad place? question), and how entitlement and hidden resentments and all the addict's "stinking thinking" makes it easier to make immoral choices (the “What was I thinking? question). Especially, Lewis demonstrates how going to any extreme, including in what one and others consider good, ends up actually producing an increasingly isolated life and less transparency and accountability, all doors to evil actions in whatever banal guises.
Plus, Lewis denotes the damage to one’s moral self in not resisting a dominant culture’s traits. Two to three decades after The Screwtape Letters, many societies saw their cultures begin undergoing an increasing explosion of sexuality in various media, especially in porn’s unhealthy sexuality depictions, coupled with no support for comprehensive sexuality education for adolescents or adults that distinguishes between the healthy (which can come in a broad spectrum of sexuality) and unhealthy. It produced the proverbial Perfect Storm, and once the internet and social media were added in it became the SuperStorm whose personal, familial, and social destruction we face.
These fictional demons plant seeds of self-will and resentments and false gods, knowing that these are seeds of sin (defined as that which makes us miss our true mark, the truth of our life.) They know these seeds will inherently grow if unchecked. These demons seek to keep their assigned person from the kind of outer circle connections and practices that would be such a check. It is all a good representation of how addiction grows progressively worse, and buried within that is the equal truth that recovery progressively can get better too with intention and attention, from which the demons try to distract us.
While it is easy to escape responsibility by positing a Devil beyond one's self whom we are at war with, it was helpful for me to ponder the demonic as that within me which tempts me to convenience, power, lying, fear, shame and secrecy, quick selfish pleasure, and of course pride. All of that kills the truly good of one's life. In particular, Lewis illustrates how “strength” of self-will and of our ego for our own purposes will eventually be our undoing, while self-vulnerability that shows us our need for others and our Greater Power makes us truly stronger and more resilient against all the temptations and vagaries of life.
I was thankful that a former colleague sent me a copy of The Screwtape Letters while I was incarcerated. It then became another piece of my self-reflection and inspiration in recovery. I am now in a more hopeful and contented place, unlike Wormwood who having failed in the mission ends up devoured by other demons, including Screwtape who, as always, was really only out for himself all along.
My own theology did not place much emphasis on the inherent presence of these temptations to so-called individual sin (focused more on social sin), and it placed too much of an emphasis on my own perceived innate ability to ignore and resist them. My culture made it too easy for me to keep turning to this denial of how sin was marking my character with a lack of integrity.
But these lessons can come with any theology and spiritual culture. I know many who were raised differently from me, who were immersed in a world of constant threats of personal sin abounding, but where fear of omnipresent temptations from the culture actually backfired and they sought out the sins or the sins found their way into their lives anyway because they were always there secretly in others. It may have been worse because their culture's purity strictures also meant they had little recourse for voicing struggles and little support if they tried. Still, they were drawn down the same addictive path as I was, to the same ends.
Where my theology of personal growth embraced, belatedly, recovery and therapy, I note that these others may have difficulty being part of recovery groups and have a disdain for therapy, doubling down on just "trying to get right with God" without a full understanding of the helpful paths to do that. I believe Lewis would have recognized this self-rationalizing dynamic.
Addictions can have many different spiritual parents. In recovery, we are all siblings of the God of our understanding.