Elles Se Renouvellent Chaque Matin — Change and Permanence

The verse Le reached for this morning is the one printed at the bottom of every page of this journal. His mercies are new every morning. Lamentações 3:23. It has been there for a hundred and ten entries, and she has read it every one of those mornings.

And it is the precise thing Lewis is describing.

New is the change. Every morning is the permanence. Eight words holding both halves of what Screwtape calls Rhythm — and holding them so tightly that neither can be removed without destroying the sentence.

Mercies that were new but not daily would be a series of surprises. Mercies that were daily but not new would be a ration. The verse insists on both, and the second half of it is the word Le used: great is Your faithfulness. Oh! que ta fidélité est grande!

Faithfulness is the permanence word. Newness is the change word. They are in the same breath.

And the footer has now been tested rather than admired. An apartment in Caldas da Rainha, then a van on a familiar street, then Spain, the Landes, the Dordogne, and now the Breton coast. The conditions underneath the sentence changed entirely. The sentence did not.

A word about the source, because it changes everything on the page.

This is not Lewis speaking in his own voice. It is Screwtape — a senior devil writing letters of advice to a junior one. Which means the Enemy in this passage is God.

So every good thing said about God here is being said grudgingly, by an opponent, in a private memo he never expected anyone to read. That is the whole literary trick, and it makes the compliments far stronger than praise would be.

When Screwtape calls God a hedonist at heart, he means it as an accusation. He is complaining that God made change pleasurable, as He made eating pleasurable — and the complaint is that this makes their work harder.

Which is exactly what Le read four days ago in Lewis's own voice: joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. And what Paul said plainly: who gives us richly all things to enjoy. Three witnesses, one of them hostile.

The strategy Screwtape recommends is not attack. It is addition.

If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Nothing is denied. Nothing is subtracted. Something is simply bolted on, and the bolted-on thing gradually becomes the interesting part.

And notice something about Lewis's list, because it is the best evidence for his argument. Christianity and the New Psychology. Christianity and Spelling Reform.

The list is dated, and it was chosen to be. Every one of those causes felt urgent to somebody in 1942, and most of them now sound faintly ridiculous. Which is the point: each generation's And feels like the pressing question of the hour, and each generation's And is quietly retired by the next one.

The faith outlasts every fashion attached to it, including the ones attached in good faith. Screwtape's plan works precisely because the And always looks more relevant than the noun it is attached to.

Screwtape's list of what the craving for novelty produces is worth reading slowly, because only the first item is religious.

Heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.

He is claiming that these four are the same appetite wearing different clothes. The person who cannot bear a familiar doctrine and the person who cannot bear a familiar spouse are described as having one disease.

And the diagnosis is exact. In each case something good has become boring not by getting worse, but by staying the same — and boredom has been mistaken for evidence that it was never right.

Which is why Lewis's answer is not more discipline. It is Rhythm — a form of life in which the familiar thing keeps arriving new. Not a cure for the appetite. A legitimate way of feeding it.

Screwtape says God gives them the seasons. Scripture says when.

Genesis 8:22 is spoken as Noah steps off the ark, onto ground that has just been destroyed. The first thing promised to a man standing in the ruin of the world is rhythm.

Six pairs, and every one of them a swing between two states. Seedtime and harvest. Cold and heat. Summer and winter. Day and night. Nothing static is promised. What is promised is that the alternation will not stop.

Which is precisely Screwtape's complaint: each season different yet every year the same. A world of pure change would exhaust anyone. A world of pure sameness would deaden them. God's answer to both is a wheel rather than a line.

Le writes: no such a thing as Same Old Thing with Jesus. And there is a verse that appears to contradict her, until you read where it is looking.

Solomon: there is nothing new under the sun. Il n'y a rien de nouveau sous le soleil. Jeremiah: they are new every morning.

Both are true, and the difference is the direction of the gaze. Under the sun, in the closed circuit of what people can generate for themselves — nothing new, and Solomon proved it exhaustively. From above, arriving daily — new.

The novelty is not manufactured on this side. It is delivered. Which is why the appetite Screwtape exploits can never be satisfied by And. A fashion is the newest thing under the sun, and therefore not new at all.

And there is one more line of the same family, at the very end of the Book: Behold, I make all things new. Voici, je fais toutes choses nouvelles. Not I make all new things. The same things, made new — which is the whole logic of the morning mercies, extended to everything.

One last thing about Le's verse, because it matters where it comes from.

Lamentations is a book of grief. Jeremiah wrote it looking at the ruins of Jerusalem — the city burned, the temple destroyed, the people carried off. The chapter it sits in opens: I am the man who has seen affliction.

And in the middle of that, without warning, comes the sentence about the mornings.

Which is why the verse can carry the weight this journal has put on it for a hundred and ten days. It was not written by a man having a good year. It was written by someone who had lost the house, the city, and the country, and who got up the next morning and found the mercies there anyway.

He did not write it as a comfort he was hoping for. He wrote it as something he had checked. Elles se renouvellent chaque matin.