I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer
to the public fell into my hands.
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about
the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to
believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They
themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a
magician with the same delight. The sort of script which is used in this
book can be very easily obtained by anyone who has once learned the knack;
but ill-disposed or excitable people who might make a bad use of it shall
not learn it from me.
Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything
that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle.
I have made no attempt to identify any of the human beings mentioned in the
letters; but I think it very unlikely that the portraits, say, of Fr.Spike
or the patient's mother, are wholly just. There is wishful thinking in
Hell as well as on Earth.
In conclusion, I ought to add that no effort has been made to clear up the
chronology of the letters. Number XVII appears to have been composed
before rationing became serious; but in general the diabolical method of
dating seems to bear no relation to terrestrial time, and I have not
attempted to reproduce it. The history of the European War, except in so
far as it happens now and then to impinge upon
"The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of
Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn."
- Luther
"The devil ... the prowde spirite. . cannot endure to be mocked."
- Thomas More [Ed.Note: El Morya]
I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care
that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being
a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to
keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had
lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty
well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they
really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were
prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.
But what with the weekly press and other such weapons, we have largely
altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to
having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his
head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as
"academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or
"ruthless." jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the
Church.. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is
true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous---that it is the
philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.
The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the
Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical
propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to
be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below.
By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is
awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought
can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been
strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal
issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense
experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach
him to call it "real life" and don't let him ask what he means by "real."
Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human
(oh, that abominable advantage of the Enemy's!) you don't realize how
enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a
sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum.
One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning
to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment.
Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter.
If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defense by argument, I should
have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the
part of the man which I had best under my control, and suggested that it
was just about time he had some lunch.
The Enemy presumably made the countersuggestion (you know how one can never
quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than
lunch. At least I think that must have been His line, for when I said,
"Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning," the
patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added "Much
better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind," he was
already halfway to the door.
Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy
shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he
reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable
conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he
was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of "real life" (by which
he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all "that
sort of thing" just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape,
and in later years was fond of talking about "that inarticulate sense for
actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere
logic." He is now safe in Our Father's house.
You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in
them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the
unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes.
Keep pressing home on him the dryness of things. Above all, do not attempt
to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defense against
Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities
he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modem
physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and
sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable "real life."
But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand
general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have
picked up in casual talk and reading is "the results of modem
investigation." Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some
of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!
Your affectionate uncle
Screwtape
Continued... Buy the book!
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[From the Preface: "This is a book about working conditions in Hell . . .
There are no flames whatever in this book. Instead Hell is a highly
organized, computerized, dignified and virile place with almost but not
quite perfect management. Screwtape is an important Under Secretary who
advises, and at times threatens, his nephew Wormwood, the imp assigned to
negotiate a young man "patient" into the infernal regions. He signs his
letters to Wormwood "Your affectionate uncle," but the reader becomes aware
of a catch in that word "affectionate." . . . One of the chief antagonisms
to God among the "Lowerarchy" is His lack of proud dignity, a quality
cherished in Hell where every devil, whatever his claims to the contrary,
is for himself alone. The inevitable results is envy, jealousy, power
politics and the threat of annihilation. On Wormwood's final failure as a
tempter Screwtape promises to make him "as dainty a morsel as ever I grew
fat on." . . . Lewis intended this book for the ordinary reader . . . It is
also in some sense a textbook in psychology where such things as the
upturned eyebrow, the little sniff, the tightening of a jaw or the real
hate in a mannered look of love become hellish. But no sort of action
pleases Hell so much as the easy road--"the gentle slope, soft underfoot,
without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts," the host
of little daily choices which are molehills that turn into mountains."
[Ed.Note: "The Screwtape Letters" exposes subtle strategies used by the
fallen ones in our modern day-and-age, in their attempts to sow seeds of
discord and complacency within the heart of the chela.]
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