Letters to Tyrann

A homage I began in the style of C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, in which a senior tempter instructs a junior one. Lewis's demons labored to destroy a single soul; these, Tyrann and his elder Diavalo, work in a narrower and crueler department, the destruction of marriages. The names are invented; the strategy, sadly, is not. As in Lewis, "the Enemy" is God and "our Father below" is the devil, so the demon's advice is best read upside down: whatever he labors to prevent is exactly what a marriage needs. This is the first letter, of a series I planned to run to about thirty. It is my own composition, written in tribute, not Lewis's text.

My Dear Tyrann,

First, I must commend you as a great falling star among young tempters. You have set a nearly unsustainable benchmark for a first assignment. This new couple, all through their courtship, have learned to expect a great deal of one another, and you have met your early goals with apparent ease. They have offered each other nothing but their very best, and have rarely let any of their shortcomings be seen.

Our forefathers long ago persuaded mankind that sexual relations ought to be explored before marriage, on the pretext that the partners might not otherwise prove skilled enough to satisfy one another. A growing number now think it foolish to marry without first, shall we say, testing the waters. And so their courtship has been primed with great expectations of things to come.

Our research department will confirm that little frustrates a man so deeply as being deprived of something he has come to expect. The seeds of these false expectations, planted during the courtship, will grow into one of our finest weapons against the Enemy: discontent.

She will surely notice the gifts and flowers arriving less and less often, or that he no longer helps her in the garden, work he always found tedious and thankless, except that it pleased her. She begins to sense that her marriage is something less than the perfection she had pictured. He, for his part, may miss her subtler signals, but he cannot help noticing that she is less eager to be intimate, and he feels deprived, even deceived, of the unspoken promises of their courtship.

Here is your achievement, young Tyrann: the couple expect selflessness from one another, and expect it more often than not. They are wholly unprepared for anything less than perfection. You have prepared the perfect soil for discontent. Each has come to expect that every need will be met by someone other than himself, namely his spouse.

This transfer of responsibility would be absurd, had it not been crafted so carefully over the centuries. Where else on earth may a man rightly expect another to be accountable for his own happiness? With one exception, perhaps, in politics, and we both know how shallow and short-lived those promises are.

Beyond the slow unraveling of their expectations, you must keep them from certain dangerous activities. Above all, keep them from gathering in any meaningful way to commune with the Enemy. And if they do, almost certainly they will, turn their attention to the differences in what they believe, and never let them rest on common ground. They will devour one another, perhaps even despise one another for a moment, and so cast aside anything good that might have come of it.

Done well, after a few such failed attempts to worship together, your couple will come to avoid the conflict altogether, and with it any honest conversation about faith. They will acquire a distaste for it, and for every future attempt to commune with their Creator. Lead them gently toward that pain, and you may yet succeed. As you know, anything that breeds division, or even the bare awareness of difference, can be turned into a far more powerful instrument for our cause.

Send me word of what they have come to expect from their unmarried friends.

In sincere indifference,
Your cousin Diavalo

Read rightly, it is a marriage sermon turned inside out. The tempter's whole campaign rests on one lie: that another person exists to satisfy your expectations, and that your happiness is a debt your spouse owes you. The cure is everything Diavalo fears. Expect less and give more; receive each kindness as grace and not as payment; refuse to keep score; and above all keep gathering, keep worshipping together, keep resting on the common ground of the One who made you both. What the demon labors to prevent is exactly what a marriage was built to do.

Written by Christopher Gaith DeMaria (2010) as the first of a planned series, in tribute to C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942). Lewis's own book remains under copyright; this is an original homage in his style, lightly edited for readability.