Musings on Screwtape 1

I began reading The Screwtape Letters this morning, and the book will serve as a catalyst for many thoughts. This is the first of these.

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. there is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward to the Will.

This reminds me of a lecture Richard Holzapfel gave (and is available in audio on a CD published by Deseret Book) on "Jesus and the Gospel of Love." He discussed the idea of having charity for all people. His thesis was that this general, good-feeling type of charity is really easy to feel. It's easy to say that you love everyone in the world. It's easy to feel a kind-of-a love for humanity in general. He said, in effect, that this is not the kind of love Jesus is talking about when He says we should love our neighbors as ourselves. And then Holzapfel makes it personal and says that what Jesus means is that we need to have charity for our spouses, siblings, next-door neighbors, those who cut us off on the highway, the slow waiter, the bishop who offends us, etc.
Lewis' "series of concentric circles" works the very same way. It is those who are within the reach of our Will everyday that we need to love. As John wrote that "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar," so we may also infer that If a man say, 'I love everybody in the whole world' and flippeth off another driver, he is a liar.