Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis - Essay Example

His real views on love and marriage are implicit in Screwtape’s reporting on the Enemy’s (God’s) views on love and marriage, and from Screwtape’s bad advice regarding it. Through presenting the devil’s bad advice on love and marriage, Lewis implies that “being in love” is not a sufficient condition for marriage, that the world’s view of a good spouse is not the Christian view, and that marriage are permanent and for having children. Screwtape exalts being in love as the only basis for marriage, while Lewis indicates committed love is the only real basis.

Screwtape considers being in love as a mere copulation. Screwtape states that wherever a man and a woman sleep together they can reproduce. He says, “…The Enemy described a married couple as "one flesh". He did not lay "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 rhetorical eulogies of "being in love" what were in fact plain descriptions of the real significance of sexual intercourse…..the humans are to be encouraged to regard as the basis for marriage a highly-colored and distorted version of something the Enemy really promises as its result.

” (Lewis 7). Sexual intercourse develops a transcendental relationship between a man and a woman. Therefore, affection, fear and desire together with sexual intercourse can make marriages be happy or holy. Screwtape says that sexual intercourse or copulation makes a man and a woman one flesh as the enemy defines marriage. His advices his nephew wormwood to ensure that he makes human beings believe this to be true and not the enemy’s advise. He urges wormwood to ensure that man does not form his marriage based on fidelity, fertility and goodwill (Lewis 7).

Lewis real views are that committed love is the basis of happy and holy marriages. Committed love is funded on fidelity, fertility and goodwill. When a man and a woman have these aspects, they have a sufficient condition for a successful marriage. The good of another person is one's good in committed love. This is manifested in the fact that when people get married they become one flesh. They share everything including their bodies through sexual relations for enjoyment and procreation. Marriage should be based on loyalty, mutual help, and preservation of chastity and transmission of life (Lewis 7).

Screwtape says that fashion and media give his ideal of a spouse in marriage. However, Lewis implies that such an ideal should be resisted by a specified Christian view of a spouse. Screwtape’s ideology is that the potential spouse in marriage is what fashion and media say he or she should be. He says, “…It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual "taste". This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type…” (Lewis 8).

Screwtape says that popular artists, actresses and advertisers determine the fashionable type of spouse fit for marriage. The idea is to drive men away from spiritual helpful, happy and fertile women who are desirable for Christian men. On the other hand, men are given