Can I agree with someone's comment, "you are a good looking man" and still be humble?

I want to focus on the latter chapters that for this moment have had the heaviest impact on me today. It begins in Screwtape’s 14^th letter on page 62 .

“My dear Wormwood,

The most alarming thing in your last account of the patient is that he is making none of those confident resolutions which marked his original conversion. No more lavish promises of perpetual virtue, I gather; not even the expectation of an endowment of ‘grace’ for life, but only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation! This is very bad.”

BRILLIANT! So often we make and hear of "life commitments to God" and we have this tendency to make once and for all statements and think nothing else of it. Humility says, "I Need You God this day or I'll fall off the deep end!" and each day after humility leads us to Him.

So what does the demon tutor Screwtape advise the little tempter to do?

“I see only one thing to do at the moment. Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility…If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt—and so on, through as many stages as you please. But don’t try this too long, for fear you awake his sense of humour and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed.”

What is funny and interesting about the timing of me reading this was literally moments before I read this I went through that cycle in my mind. Being proud of being humble, realizing that this was being prideful, and then gong through the cycle for a minute and then silently chuckling about it. I thought it was pretty interesting to me how the very thing C.S. Lewis was describing about how the enemy tempts us to be prideful when we are being humble is something I was going through in the present.

Here is another quote, I mean the entire page or two, that blessed me starting on page 63:

“You must therefore conceal from the patient [the human person the demon has been assigned to tempt] the true end of Humility. Let him think of it, not as self-forgetfulness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying >>page 64 to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value a opinion for some quality other than the truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it, and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy’s [Screwtape calls God the Enemy] strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of >>page 65 self love—a charity and gratitude for all selves including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created, and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left.” (I added bold).

Ok that was A LOT. So now we can address the question that I had as my title

Can I agree with someone's comment, "you are a good looking man" and still be humble?

This part of the book answers that question:

“By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it, and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy’s [Screwtape calls God the Enemy] strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.”

I do this. Whenever someone says that I’m a good-looking man I quickly reject the compliment for ‘humility’s’ sake. Or I often make comments calling myself ugly.
I try to be humble by believing something I don’t believe it, though I used to believe it years ago, and many others don’t believe. Am I allowed to believe that “I am a good-looking man”? Can I be humble and believe that or depending on context of course, say it? After reading this 14^th letter in the Screwtape letters I think I can. I feel free to. Now with that statement I also know that physical beauty of any kind is ‘wasting away’ and is temporary. It is one thing to know it, and another to put your trust in it. I don’t trust any degree of my handsomeness. I could be marred by a dog, get into an accident, or I could be in a culture that thinks my features are undesirable. Also I along with everyone will experience the slow decay of our bodies. But I feel free to believe that God has created me, and I am good looking. That’s it. Nothing more nothing less. Nothing to boast about b/c just as in money it is fleeting. But it does me no good as C.S. Lewis so eloquently pointed out to say something I don’t believe or that really isn’t true.

The quote continues in the 14^th Letter on page 65,

“His [God’s] whole effort, therefore, will be to get the man’s mind off the subject of his own value altogether. He would rather the man thought himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one.”

He would rather the man thought himself a great poet and then forgot about it, that’s it. I don't need to believe I'm a bad one writer in order to be humble. This is really freeing. I've never been able to say anything like this before.

Anyone have any thoughts about this?

A few Appetizers

To start and give you a taste of what I discovered in this short reading take a few minutes and read below.

Screwtape’s 6^th letter on page 28, “He [God] wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.”

In the 5^th letter uncle Screwtape is writing to his young tempter in training nephew Wormwood. Screwtape says, “And how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.” Page 27.

The Fourth Letter on page 22-23, “I have known cases where what the patient called his ‘God’ was actually located—up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall. But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it—to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him…Once all his thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with a full recognition of their merely subjective nature, and the man trusts himself to the completely real, external, invisible Presence, there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it—why, then it is that the incalculable may occur. In avoiding this situation__this real nakedness of the soul in prayer—you will be helped by the fact that>>page 23 the humans themselves do not desire it as much as they suppose. There’s such a thing as getting more than they bargained for!

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE”

These quotes are but a few of the many that really opened my mind to my own thinking and the enemy’s schemes/tendencies.