One of the strangest places I’ve ever learned about my own human nature is from C.S. Lewis’ satirical set of letters between two devils. The Screwtape Letters is an imagined correspondence to Wormwood, a “junior tempter,” from his superior devil, Screwtape. Screwtape comments on Wormwood’s progress and gives advice on how to use various methods of suggestion to keep a “patient” (a new Christian) from being effective for “the Enemy” (God).
Many of Screwtape’s tactics involve fostering a disconnect between the patient’s ‘real life’ and ‘spiritual life.’ As long as we’re distracted by ‘real life’ and imagine that the spiritual life is somehow separate from it, we can be distracted into faulty thinking. In Letter VIII, Screwtape explains a fundamental truth about human beings:
“Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. […] As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.”
By “amphibians,” Lewis means that humans have both a body and a soul, belonging to different ‘environments.’ The trouble comes when we forget we have both, or can’t tell them apart, or forget that they’re not entirely separate.
Our thoughts are tied to our emotions, and our emotions are tied to our bodies. For instance, having not eaten makes me cranky. Having not slept makes me feel sad. It’s difficult to keep an eternal perspective sometimes when ‘real life’ is a mess of hunger and hormones and neurotransmitters and allergies and stomachaches and migraines. My ‘inner voice’ doesn’t come with dialogue tags. I find myself having to analyze, “Was that thought from God, the devil, me, or the breakfast I didn’t eat this morning?”
Part of the solution is of course to compare my thoughts to Scripture and remember that God isn’t alterable the way human-amphibians are. And another part of the solution is just to maintain an awareness of my dual nature—to know that my thoughts, which I generally ascribe to the soul realm, are often going to be manipulated by the needs of my physical body.
That doesn’t excuse me to make angry outbursts at my family—quite the opposite, if I know being hungry makes me irritable, I know how to care for my body so that I don’t fall into that trap. Likewise, feeling hopeless because I haven’t slept enough lately doesn’t mean that I’ve been abandoned by God.
As amphibians, our challenge is to remember that our bodies and emotions are in a continual state of change—and they can’t always be trusted. Lewis calls this principle of change the “law of Undulation” where humans go through “troughs and peaks”—periods where we feel close to God and periods where we feel alone. It pleases God most when we choose to obey Him through both.
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