Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal... 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. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation — the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. (The Screwtape Letters, Letter 8)
Lewis' Law of Undulation attempts to explain the changing attitude towards and desire for that which is eternal and holy. Humans are amphibious. Hence, their spiritual half is continuously desirable of God and constantly reaches towards spiritual heights. However, their animal half pulls the other way, seeking the gratification and pleasure of the physical causing the dryness and numbness towards the spiritual. It is difficult (impossible?) for humans to ignore one of the other, or even come to a constant medium between the two. Rather, a given human's attitude towards the spiritual will oscillate in a series of troughs and peaks.
Lewis (as Screwtape) goes on to explain that the troughs, when a human does not perceive or even particularly desire God, is not an unfortunate corollary of humans. Actually, they are key in God's plan. God wants humans act independently, and to love Him and cling to Him on their own volition, even when His presence seems to have disappeared. Again, quoting Screwtape:
Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
In Lewis' Law of Undulation the pendulum swings between perceiving God in our lives, experiencing His presence, on the one hand, and not seeing Him, feeling forsaken on the other.
R' Soloveitchik also formulates a Law of Undulation but one that relies on differently formulated extremum. As explained by R' Goldmintz:
On the one hand man craves to be close to Him and so he approaches God "at a rapid pace, where all his being, beset by the torment of fiery longing, is tensed toward the encounter with his divine lover." But precisely at the moment when he is so close to unification with God, he stops, indeed retreats, for he is filled with a sense of awe so great that coming close seems inconceivable. "He runs toward God but also recoils from Him, He runs toward God, for how can man distance himself from God and live?" But he then retreats from God, for how can man attach himself to God and live? Man is hurled back and forth "by the two colossal forces of love and awe" and this pendulum-like movement, rather than resulting in frustration or defeat, "embodies the most magnificent worship of God." (The Rav of Tefillah)
The pendulum swings between love of God and fear of God. On one extreme God is right in front of man ready to embrace, on the other God is concealed in His Heavenly abode, for the transcendent distance between the Infinite and finite cannot be bridged. It is not the animalistic side of man that drags him away from God, but the closeness itself forces man to reckon with his own physicality and finitude.
We will compare and contrast these two Laws of Undulation in a later post.
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