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Title: The Screwtape Letters
Author: Lewis, C. S. [Clive Staples] (1898-1963)
Date of first publication: February 1942
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Geoffrey Bles, The Centenary Press,
   September 1944
   [fourteenth printing]
Date first posted: 15 May 2014
Date last updated: 15 May 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1179

This ebook was produced by
Marcia Brooks, Mark Akrigg, Stephen Hutcheson
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






  _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
    THE PILGRIM'S REGRESS
    OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET
    THE PROBLEM OF PAIN
    BROADCAST TALKS
    CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOUR
    BEYOND PERSONALITY





                                  THE
                           SCREWTAPE LETTERS


                                  _by_
                              C. S. LEWIS
                  _Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford_


                   GEOFFREY BLES: THE CENTENARY PRESS
                           52 DOUGHTY STREET
                             LONDON, W.C.1

 _Reprinted with some alterations by kind permission of "The Guardian"_

                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  FIRST PUBLISHED      FEBRUARY 1942
  REPRINTED               MARCH 1942
  REPRINTED               MARCH 1942
  REPRINTED               APRIL 1942
  REPRINTED                 MAY 1942
  REPRINTED                JUNE 1942
  REPRINTED              AUGUST 1942
  REPRINTED              AUGUST 1942
  REPRINTED            DECEMBER 1942
  REPRINTED            FEBRUARY 1943
  REPRINTED                 MAY 1943
  REPRINTED           SEPTEMBER 1943
  REPRINTED            FEBRUARY 1944
  REPRINTED           SEPTEMBER 1944




                        PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
                       BY UNWIN BROTHERS LIMITED
                                 WOKING


                                   TO
                            J. R. R. TOLKIEN


"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 devill . . the prowde spirite . . cannot endure to be
mocked."--_Thomas More_




                                PREFACE


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 spiritual condition of
one human being, was obviously of no interest to Screwtape.

                                                             C. S. LEWIS
  MAGDALEN COLLEGE
    _July 5, 1941_




                                   I


My dear Wormwood,

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 _naf_? 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 have 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 realise 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 defence 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
counter-suggestion (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 half way 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 _ordinariness_ of things. Above all, do not attempt to use
science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity.
They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't
touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern 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 modern 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




                                   II


My dear Wormwood,

I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian.
Do not indulge the hope that you will escape the usual penalties; indeed,
in your better moments, I trust you would hardly even wish to do so. In
the meantime we must make the best of the situation. There is no need to
despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a
brief sojourn in the Enemy's camp and are now with us. All the _habits_
of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour.

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not
misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out
through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army
with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest
tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans.
All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the
new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with
rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny
little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and
one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious
lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and
looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has
hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours.
Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of
Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of
course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know
one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy's side. No matter. Your
patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool. Provided that any of
those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double
chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their
religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. At his present stage, you
see, he has an idea of "Christians" in his mind which he supposes to be
spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. His mind is full of
togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the
other people in church wear modern clothes is a real--though of course an
unconscious--difficulty to him. Never let it come to the surface; never
let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in
his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by
producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.

Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly
coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The
Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human
endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery
by _Stories from the Odyssey_ buckles down to really learning Greek. It
occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning
to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition
from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The Enemy takes this risk
because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little
human vermin into what He calls His "free" lovers and servants--"sons" is
the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole
spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals.
Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere
affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He
leaves them to "do it on their own". And there lies our opportunity. But
also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this
initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion
and therefore much harder to tempt.

I have been writing hitherto on the assumption that the people in the
next pew afford no _rational_ ground for disappointment. Of course if
they do--if the patient knows that the woman with the absurd hat is a
fanatical bridge-player or the man with squeaky boots a miser and an
extortioner--then your task is so much the easier. All you then have to do
is to keep out of his mind the question "If I, being what I am, can
consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different
vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere
hypocrisy and convention?" You may ask whether it is possible to keep
such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is,
Wormwood, it is! Handle him properly and it simply won't come into his
head. He has not been anything like long enough with the Enemy to have
any real humility yet. What he says, even on his knees, about his own
sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up
a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing
himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and
condescension in going to church with these "smug", commonplace
neighbours at all. Keep him in that state of mind as long as you can.

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  III


My dear Wormwood,

I am very pleased by what you tell me about this man's relations with his
mother. But you must press your advantage. The Enemy will be working from
the centre outwards, gradually bringing more and more of the patient's
conduct under the new standard, and may reach his behaviour to the old
lady at any moment. You want to get in first. Keep in close touch with
our colleague Glubose who is in charge of the mother, and build up
between you in that house a good settled habit of mutual annoyance; daily
pinpricks. The following methods are useful.

1. Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something
_inside_ him and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to
the states of his own mind--or rather to that very expurgated version of
them which is all you should allow him to see. Encourage this. Keep his
mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced
and spiritual ones. Aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the
horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in
which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering
any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who
has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.

2. It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but
we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are
always very "spiritual", that he is always concerned with the state of
her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages will follow. In
the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her
sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to
mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself.
Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while
he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will
find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her
soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be
praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that
imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother--the
sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table. In time, you may get the
cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling from his prayers for the
imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I
have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at
a moment's notice from impassioned prayer for a wife's or son's "soul" to
beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.

3. When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens
that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost
unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the
consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother's
eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think
how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is
and does it to annoy--if you know your job he will not notice the immense
improbability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect
that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see
or hear himself, this is easily managed.

4. In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying
things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the _words_ are not
offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not
far short of a blow in the face. To keep this game up you and Glubose
must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double
standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be
taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at
the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and
most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the
suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence
from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly
convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: "I
simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper."
Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of
a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet
having a grievance when offence is taken.

Finally, tell me something about the old lady's religious position. Is
she at all jealous of the new factor in her son's life?--at all piqued
that he should have learned from others, and so late, what she considers
she gave him such good opportunity of learning in childhood? Does she
feel he is making a great deal of "fuss" about it--or that he's getting in
on very easy terms? Remember the elder brother in the Enemy's story,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                   IV


My dear Wormwood,

The amateurish suggestions in your last letter warn me that it is high
time for me to write to you fully on the painful subject of prayer. You
might have spared the comment that my advice about his prayers for his
mother "proved singularly unfortunate". That is not the sort of thing
that a nephew should write to his uncle--nor a junior tempter to the
under-secretary of a department. It also reveals an unpleasant desire to
shift responsibility; you must learn to pay for your own blunders.

The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the
serious intention of praying altogether. When the patient is an adult
recently re-converted to the Enemy's party, like your man, this is best
done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the
parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood. In reaction against that,
he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward,
informal, and unregularised; and what this will actually mean to a
beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional
_mood_ in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part.
One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray "with
moving lips and bended knees" but merely "composed his spirit to love"
and indulged "a sense of supplication". That is exactly the sort of
prayer we want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the
prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the
Enemy's service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite
a long time. At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily
position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly
forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that
whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals
always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best
work is done by keeping things out.

If this fails, you must fall back on a subtler misdirection of his
intention. Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are
defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The
simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep
them watching their own minds and trying to produce _feelings_ there by
the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity,
let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for
themselves and not notice that this is what they are doing. When they
meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When
they say they are praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel
forgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their
success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how
much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or
ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.

But of course the Enemy will not meantime be idle. Wherever there is
prayer, there is danger of His own immediate action. He is cynically
indifferent to the dignity of His position, and ours, as pure spirits,
and to human animals on their knees He pours out self-knowledge in a
quite shameless fashion. But even if He defeats your first attempt at
misdirection, we have a subtler weapon. The humans do not start from that
direct perception of Him which we, unhappily, cannot avoid. They have
never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing and searing glare
which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives. If you look
into your patient's mind when he is praying, you will not find _that_. If
you examine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is
a composite object containing many quite ridiculous ingredients. There
will be images derived from pictures of the Enemy as He appeared during
the discreditable episode known as the Incarnation: there will be
vaguer--perhaps quite savage and puerile--images associated with the other
two Persons. There will even be some of his own reverence (and of bodily
sensations accompanying it) objectified and attributed to the object
revered. 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.
You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction
and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily
before his imagination during the whole prayer. For if he ever comes to
make the distinction, if ever he consciously directs his prayers "Not to
what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be", our
situation is, for the moment, desperate. 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 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




                                   V


My dear Wormwood,

It is a little bit disappointing to expect a detailed report on your work
and to receive instead such a vague rhapsody as your last letter. You say
you are "delirious with joy" because the European humans have started
another of their wars. I see very well what has happened to you. You are
not delirious; you are only drunk. Reading between the lines in your very
unbalanced account of the patient's sleepless night, I can reconstruct
your state of mind fairly accurately. For the first time in your career
you have tasted that wine which is the reward of all our labours--the
anguish and bewilderment of a human soul--and it has gone to your head. I
can hardly blame you. I do not expect old heads on young shoulders. Did
the patient respond to some of your terror-pictures of the future? Did
you work in some good self-pitying glances at the happy past?--some fine
thrills in the pit of his stomach, were there? You played your violin
prettily did you? Well, well, it's all very natural. But do remember,
Wormwood, that duty comes before pleasure. If any present self-indulgence
on your part leads to the ultimate loss of the prey, you will be left
eternally thirsting for that draught of which you are now so much
enjoying your first sip. If, on the other hand, by steady and cool-headed
application here and now you can finally secure his soul, he will then be
yours forever--a brim-full living chalice of despair and horror and
astonishment which you can raise to your lips as often as you please. So
do not allow any temporary excitement to distract you from the real
business of undermining faith and preventing the formation of virtues.
Give me without fail in your next letter a full account of the patient's
reactions to the war, so that we can consider whether you are likely to
do more good by making him an extreme patriot or an ardent pacifist.
There are all sorts of possibilities. In the meantime, I must warn you
not to hope too much from a war.

Of course a war is entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the
humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of
toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use
of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below? When I see the temporal
suffering of humans who finally escape us, I feel as if I had been
allowed to taste the first course of a rich banquet and then denied the
rest. It is worse than not to have tasted it at all. The Enemy, true to
His barbarous methods of warfare, allows us to see the short misery of
His favourites only to tantalise and torment us--to mock the incessant
hunger which, during this present phase of the great conflict, His
blockade is admittedly imposing. Let us therefore think rather how to
use, than how to enjoy, this European war. For it has certain tendencies
inherent in it which are, in themselves, by no means in our favour. We
may hope for a good deal of cruelty and unchastity. But, if we are not
careful, we shall see thousands turning in this tribulation to the Enemy,
while tens of thousands who do not go so far as that will nevertheless
have their attention diverted from themselves to values and causes which
they believe to be higher than the self. I know that the Enemy
disapproves many of these causes. But that is where He is so unfair. He
often makes prizes of humans who have given their lives for causes He
thinks bad on the monstrously sophistical ground that the humans thought
them good and were following the best they knew. Consider too what
undesirable deaths occur in wartime. Men are killed in places where they
knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all of the
Enemy's party, prepared. How much better for us if _all_ humans died in
costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who
lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging
the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and even, if our
workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it
should betray to the sick man his true condition! 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.

I know that Scabtree and others have seen in wars a great opportunity for
attacks on faith, but I think that view was exaggerated. The Enemy's
human partisans have all been plainly told by Him that suffering is an
essential part of what He calls Redemption; so that a faith which is
destroyed by a war or a pestilence cannot really have been worth the
trouble of destroying. I am speaking now of diffused suffering over a
long period such as the war will produce. Of course, at the precise
moment of terror, bereavement, or physical pain, you may catch your man
when his reason is temporarily suspended. But even then, if he applies to
Enemy headquarters, I have found that the post is nearly always defended,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                   VI


My dear Wormwood,

I am delighted to hear that your patient's age and profession make it
possible, but by no means certain, that he will be called up for military
service. We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind
will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of
which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety
for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be
concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about
what will happen to them.

Your patient will, of course, have picked up the notion that he must
submit with patience to the Enemy's will. What the Enemy means by this is
primarily that he should accept with patience the tribulation which has
actually been dealt out to him--the present anxiety and suspense. It is
about _this_ that he is to say "Thy will be done", and for the daily task
of bearing _this_ that the daily bread will be provided. It is your
business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his
appointed cross, but only of the things he is afraid of. Let him regard
them as his crosses: let him forget that, since they are incompatible,
they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practise fortitude and
patience to them all in advance. For real resignation, at the same
moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost
impossible, and the Enemy does not greatly assist those who are trying to
attain it: resignation to present and actual suffering, even where that
suffering consists of fear, is far easier and is usually helped by this
direct action.

An important spiritual law is here involved. I have explained that you
can weaken his prayers by diverting his attention from the Enemy Himself
to his own states of mind about the Enemy. On the other hand fear becomes
easier to master when the patient's mind is diverted from the thing
feared to the fear itself, considered as a present and undesirable state
of his own mind; and when he regards the fear as his appointed cross he
will inevitably think of it as a state of mind. One can therefore
formulate the general rule; in all activities of mind which favour our
cause, encourage the patient to be un-selfconscious and to concentrate on
the object, but in all activities favourable to the Enemy bend his mind
back on itself. Let an insult or a woman's body so fix his attention
outward that he does not reflect "I am now entering into the state called
Anger--or the state called Lust". Contrariwise let the reflection "My
feelings are now growing more devout, or more charitable" so fix his
attention inward that he no longer looks beyond himself to see our Enemy
or his own neighbours.

As regards his more general attitude to the war, you must not rely too
much on those feelings of hatred which the humans are so fond of
discussing in Christian, or anti-Christian, periodicals. In his anguish,
the patient can, of course, be encouraged to revenge himself by some
vindictive feelings directed towards the German leaders, and that is good
so far as it goes. But it is usually a sort of melodramatic or mythical
hatred directed against imaginary scapegoats. He has never met these
people in real life--they are lay figures modelled on what he gets from
newspapers. The results of such fanciful hatred are often most
disappointing, and of all humans the English are in this respect the most
deplorable milksops. They are creatures of that miserable sort who loudly
proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and
cigarettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back
door.

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some
malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice
to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his
benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know.
The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely
imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if,
at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him
and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of
your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost,
his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope,
at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the
Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are
finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities
inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are
there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I
don't, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the
conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real
centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in
the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved
and admired, will not keep a man from our Father's house: indeed they may
make him more amusing when he gets there,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  VII


My dear Wormwood,

I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in
ignorance of your own existence. That question, at least for the present
phase of the struggle, has been answered for us by the High Command. Our
policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course this has not
always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans
disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct
terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe
in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least, not yet.
I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise
and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect,
a belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the
human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The "Life Force", the
worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove
useful. If once we can produce our perfect work--the Materialist Magician,
the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls
"Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"--then the end of the war
will be in sight. But in the meantime we must obey our orders. I do not
think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark.
The fact that "devils" are predominantly _comic_ figures in the modern
imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence
begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red
tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an
old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in
you.

I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the
patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes, except
extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged. Not always, of
course, but at this period. Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and
then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of
which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is
our business to inflame them. Any small coterie, bound together by some
interest which other men dislike or ignore, tends to develop inside
itself a hothouse mutual admiration, and towards the outer world, a great
deal of pride and hatred which is entertained without shame because the
"Cause" is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal. Even when the
little group exists originally for the Enemy's own purposes, this remains
true. We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the
Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the
defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique. The Church
herself is, of course, heavily defended and we have never yet quite
succeeded in giving her _all_ the characteristics of a faction; but
subordinate factions within her have often produced admirable results,
from the parties of Paul and of Apollos at Corinth down to the High and
Low parties in the Church of England.

If your patient can be induced to become a conscientious objector he will
automatically find himself one of a small, vocal, organised, and
unpopular society, and the effects of this, on one so new to
Christianity, will almost certainly be good. But only _almost_ certainly.
Has he had serious doubts about the lawfulness of serving in a just war
before this present war began? Is he a man of great physical courage--so
great that he will have no half-conscious misgivings about the real
motives of his pacifism? Can he, when nearest to honesty (no human is
ever _very_ near), feel fully convinced that he is actuated wholly by the
desire to obey the Enemy? If he is that sort of man, his pacifism will
probably not do us much good, and the Enemy will probably protect him
from the usual consequences of belonging to a sect. Your best plan, in
that case, would be to attempt a sudden, confused, emotional crisis from
which he might emerge as an uneasy convert to patriotism. Such things can
often be managed. But if he is the man I take him to be, try Pacifism.

Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by
treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then
let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the
most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage
at which the religion becomes merely part of the "cause", in which
Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can
produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude
which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are
treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World
an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes
very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided
that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades,
matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is
ours--and the more "religious" (on those terms) the more securely ours. I
could show you a pretty cageful down here,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  VIII


My dear Wormwood,

So you "have great hopes that the patient's religious phase is dying
away", have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces
since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no
one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians--half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy's
determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things
that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits
they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. 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. If you had watched your patient
carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his
life--his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his
physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth
periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate
with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dulness through
which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your
workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no
good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy
wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to
learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He
relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special
favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.
The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the
absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of
selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men
is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk
about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as
one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He
really _does_ want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little
replicas of Himself--creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be
qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because
their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become
food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in,
He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and
flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn
all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings
united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why
the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to
human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see
that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the
very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human
will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated
degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He
can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the
creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel
them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little
over-riding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of
His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional
sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this
state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in
fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and
incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs--to carry
out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during
such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is
growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers
offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can
drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them
only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the
better. He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to
learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will
to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be
deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human,
no longer desiring, but still 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.

But of course the troughs afford opportunities to our side also. Next
week I will give you some hints on how to exploit them,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                   IX


My dear Wormwood,

I hope my last letter has convinced you that the trough of dulness or
"dryness" through which your patient is going at present will not, of
itself, give you his soul, but needs to be properly exploited. What forms
the exploitation should take I will now consider.

In the first place I have always found that the Trough periods of the
human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual
temptations, particularly those of sex. This may surprise you, because,
of course, there is more physical energy, and therefore more potential
appetite, at the Peak periods; but you must remember that the powers of
resistance are then also at their highest. The health and spirits which
you want to use in producing lust can also, alas, be very easily used for
work or play or thought or innocuous merriment. The attack has a much
better chance of success when the man's whole inner world is drab and
cold and empty. And it is also to be noted that the Trough sexuality is
subtly different in quality from that of the Peak--much less likely to
lead to the milk and water phenomenon which the humans call "being in
love", much more easily drawn into perversions, much less contaminated by
those generous and imaginative and even spiritual concomitants which
often render human sexuality so disappointing. It is the same with other
desires of the flesh. You are much more likely to make your man a sound
drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary
than by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment among his
friends when he is happy and expansive. Never forget that when we are
dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form,
we are, in a sense, on the Enemy's ground. I know we have won many a soul
through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made
the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one.
All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our
Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has
forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of
any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its
Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever
diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it's better
_style_. To get the man's soul and give him _nothing_ in return--that is
what really gladdens our Father's heart. And the troughs are the time for
beginning the process.

But there is an even better way of exploiting the Trough; I mean through
the patient's own thoughts about it. As always, the first step is to keep
knowledge out of his mind. Do not let him suspect the law of undulation.
Let him assume that the first ardours of his conversion might have been
expected to last, and ought to have lasted, forever, and that his present
dryness is an equally permanent condition. Having once got this
misconception well fixed in his head, you may then proceed in various
ways. It all depends on whether your man is of the desponding type who
can be tempted to despair, or of the wishful-thinking type who can be
assured that all is well. The former type is getting rare among the
humans. If your patient should happen to belong to it, everything is
easy. You have only got to keep him out of the way of experienced
Christians (an easy task now-a-days), to direct his attention to the
appropriate passages in scripture, and then to set him to work on the
desperate design of recovering his old feelings by sheer will-power, and
the game is ours. If he is of the more hopeful type, your job is to make
him acquiesce in the present low temperature of his spirit and gradually
become content with it, persuading himself that it is not so low after
all. In a week or two you will be making him doubt whether the first days
of his Christianity were not, perhaps, a little excessive. Talk to him
about "moderation in all things". If you can once get him to the point of
thinking that "religion is all very well up to a point", you can feel
quite happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no
religion at all--and more amusing.

Another possibility is that of direct attack on his faith. When you have
caused him to assume that the trough is permanent, can you not persuade
him that "his religious phase" is just going to die away like all his
previous phases? Of course there is no conceivable way of getting by
reason from the proposition "I am losing interest in this" to the
proposition "This is false". But, as I said before, it is jargon, not
reason, you must rely on. The mere word _phase_ will very likely do the
trick. I assume that the creature has been through several of them
before--they all have--and that he always feels superior and patronising to
the ones he has emerged from, not because he has really criticised them
but simply because they are in the past. (You keep him well fed on hazy
ideas of Progress and Development and the Historical Point of View, I
trust, and give him lots of modern Biographies to read? The people in
them are always emerging from Phases, aren't they?)

You see the idea? Keep his mind off the plain antithesis between True and
False. Nice shadowy expressions--"It was a phase"--"I've been through all
that"--and don't forget the blessed word "Adolescent",

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                   X


My dear Wormwood,

I was delighted to hear from Triptweeze that your patient has made some
very desirable new acquaintances and that you seem to have used this
event in a really promising manner. I gather that the middle-aged married
couple who called at his office are just the sort of people we want him
to know--rich, smart, superficially intellectual, and brightly sceptical
about everything in the world. I gather they are even vaguely pacifist,
not on moral grounds but from an ingrained habit of belittling anything
that concerns the great mass of their fellow men and from a dash of
purely fashionable and literary communism. This is excellent. And you
seem to have made good use of all his social, sexual, and intellectual
vanity. Tell me more. Did he commit himself deeply? I don't mean in
words. There is a subtle play of looks and tones and laughs by which a
mortal can imply that he is of the same party as those to whom he is
speaking. That is the kind of betrayal you should specially encourage,
because the man does not fully realise it himself; and by the time he
does you will have made withdrawal difficult.

No doubt he must very soon realise that his own faith is in direct
opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new
friends is based. I don't think that matters much provided that you can
persuade him to postpone any open acknowledgment of the fact, and this,
with the aid of shame, pride, modesty and vanity, will be easy to do. As
long as the postponement lasts he will be in a false position. He will be
silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent. He
will assume, at first only by his manner, but presently by his words, all
sorts of cynical and sceptical attitudes which are not really his. But if
you play him well, they may become his. All mortals tend to turn into the
thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary. The real question is
how to prepare for the Enemy's counter attack.

The first thing is to delay as long as possible the moment at which he
realises this new pleasure as a temptation. Since the Enemy's servants
have been preaching about "the World" as one of the great standard
temptations for two thousand years, this might seem difficult to do. But
fortunately they have said very little about it for the last few decades.
In modern Christian writings, though I see much (indeed more than I like)
about Mammon, I see few of the old warnings about Worldly Vanities, the
Choice of Friends, and the Value of Time. All that, your patient would
probably classify as "Puritanism"--and may I remark in passing that the
value we have given to that word is one of the really solid triumphs of
the last hundred years? By it we rescue annually thousands of humans from
temperance, chastity, and sobriety of life.

Sooner or later, however, the real nature of his new friends must become
clear to him, and then your tactics must depend on the patient's
intelligence. If he is a big enough fool you can get him to realise the
character of the friends only while they are absent; their presence can
be made to sweep away all criticism. If this succeeds, he can be induced
to live, as I have known many humans live, for quite long periods, two
parallel lives; he will not only appear to be, but actually be, a
different man in each of the circles he frequents. Failing this, there is
a subtler and more entertaining method. He can be made to take a positive
pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are
inconsistent. This is done by exploiting his vanity. He can be taught to
enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that
the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world
which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the
bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the
more because he is aware of a "deeper", "spiritual" world within him
which they cannot understand. You see the idea--the worldly friends touch
him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete,
balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being
permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel,
instead of shame, a continual undercurrent of self-satisfaction. Finally,
if all else fails, you can persuade him, in defiance of conscience, to
continue the new acquaintance on the ground that he is, in some
unspecified way, doing these people "good" by the mere fact of drinking
their cocktails and laughing at their jokes, and that to cease to do so
would be "priggish", "intolerant", and (of course) "Puritanical".

Meanwhile you will of course take the obvious precaution of seeing that
this new development induces him to spend more than he can afford and to
neglect his work and his mother. Her jealousy, and alarm, and his
increasing evasiveness or rudeness, will be invaluable for the
aggravation of the domestic tension,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                   XI


My dear Wormwood,

Everything is clearly going very well. I am specially glad to hear that
the two new friends have now made him acquainted with their whole set.
All these, as I find from the record office, are thoroughly reliable
people; steady, consistent scoffers and worldlings who without any
spectacular crimes are progressing quietly and comfortably towards our
Father's house. You speak of their being great laughers. I trust this
does not mean that you are under the impression that laughter as such is
always in our favour. The point is worth some attention.

I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and
Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on
the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is
usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms
produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause.
What that real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in
much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something
like it occurs in Heaven--a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of
celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us
no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of
itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and
austerity of Hell.

Fun is closely related to Joy--a sort of emotional froth arising from the
play instinct. It is very little use to us. It can sometimes be used, of
course, to divert humans from something else which the Enemy would like
them to be feeling or doing: but in itself it has wholly undesirable
tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other
evils.

The Joke Proper, which turns on sudden perception of incongruity, is a
much more promising field. I am not thinking primarily of indecent or
bawdy humour, which, though much relied upon by second-rate tempters, is
often disappointing in its results. The truth is that humans are pretty
clearly divided on this matter into two classes. There are some to whom
"no passion is as serious as lust" and for whom an indecent story ceases
to produce lasciviousness precisely in so far as it becomes funny: there
are others in whom laughter and lust are excited at the same moment and
by the same things. The first sort joke about sex because it gives rise
to many incongruities: the second cultivate incongruities because they
afford a pretext for talking about sex. If your man is of the first type,
bawdy humour will not help you--I shall never forget the hours which I
wasted (hours to me of unbearable tedium) with one of my early patients
in bars and smoking-rooms before I learned this rule. Find out which
group the patient belongs to--and see that he does _not_ find out.

The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction, and it
is specially promising among the English who take their "sense of humour"
so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only
deficiency at which they feel shame. Humour is for them the all-consoling
and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable
as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him,
he is "mean"; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his
fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer "mean" but a comical
fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous
exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty
is shameful--unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A
thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man's
damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do
can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of
his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke. And this
temptation can be almost entirely hidden from your patient by that
English seriousness about Humour. Any suggestion that there might be too
much of it can be represented to him as "Puritanical" or as betraying a
"lack of humour".

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very
economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or
indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk _as if_
virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to
have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is
discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a
ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up
around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and
it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of
laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of
sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who
practice it,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XII


My dear Wormwood,

Obviously you are making excellent progress. My only fear is lest in
attempting to hurry the patient you awaken him to a sense of his real
position. For you and I, who see that position as it really is, must
never forget how totally different it ought to appear to him. We know
that we have introduced a change of direction in his course which is
already carrying him out of his orbit around the Enemy; but he must be
made to imagine that all the choices which have effected this change of
course are trivial and revocable. He must not be allowed to suspect that
he is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a line
which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space.

For this reason I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer
and a communicant. I know there are dangers in this; but anything is
better than that he should realise the break he has made with the first
months of his Christian life. As long as he retains externally the habits
of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has
adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is
much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he thinks that, we do
not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully
recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he
hasn't been doing very well lately.

This dim uneasiness needs careful handling. If it gets too strong it may
wake him up and spoil the whole game. On the other hand, if you suppress
it entirely--which, by the by, the Enemy will probably not allow you to
do--we lose an element in the situation which can be turned to good
account. If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become
irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable
tendency. It increases the patient's reluctance to think about the Enemy.
All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when
thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of
half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold. They hate
every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate
the very sight of a pass-book. In this state your patient will not omit,
but he will increasingly dislike, his religious duties. He will think
about them as little as he feels he decently can beforehand, and forget
them as soon as possible when they are over. A few weeks ago you had to
_tempt_ him to unreality and inattention in his prayers: but now you will
find him opening his arms to you and almost begging you to distract his
purpose and benumb his heart. He will _want_ his prayers to be unreal,
for he will dread nothing so much as effective contact with the Enemy.
His aim will be to let sleeping worms lie.

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually
freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations.
As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more
from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and
excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for
that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that
anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You
no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his
prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in
yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in
conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations
with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make
him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at
night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the
healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be
inhibited and _nothing_ given in return, so that at last he may say, as
one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that I
spent most of my life in doing _neither_ what I ought _nor_ what I
liked". The Christians describe the Enemy as one "without whom Nothing is
strong". And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's
best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over
it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities
so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers
and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the
long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to
give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them,
the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all
young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular
wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to
which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small
the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man
away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than
cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the
gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings,
without milestones, without signposts,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XIII


My dear Wormwood,

It seems to me that you take a great many pages to tell a very simple
story. The long and the short of it is that you have let the man slip
through your fingers. The situation is very grave, and I really see no
reason why I should try to shield you from the consequences of your
inefficiency. A repentance and renewal of what the other side call
"grace" on the scale which you describe is a defeat of the first order.
It amounts to a second conversion--and probably on a deeper level than the
first.

As you ought to have known, the asphyxiating cloud which prevented your
attacking the patient on his walk back from the old mill, is a well-known
phenomenon. It is the Enemy's most barbarous weapon, and generally
appears when He is directly present to the patient under certain modes
not yet fully classified. Some humans are permanently surrounded by it
and therefore inaccessible to us.

And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed
the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and
not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. In the
second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea
there--a walk through country he really likes, and taken alone. In other
words you allowed him two real positive Pleasures. Were you so ignorant
as not to see the danger of this? The characteristic of Pains and
Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as
they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you
had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method--by making him a
kind of Childe Harold or Werther submerged in self-pity for imaginary
distresses--you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain;
because, of course, five minutes' genuine toothache would reveal the
romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole
strategem. But you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is
by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures.
How can you have failed to see that a _real_ pleasure was the last thing
you ought to have let him meet? Didn't you foresee that it would just
kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously
teaching him to value? And that the sort of pleasure which the book and
the walk gave him was the most dangerous of all? That it would peel off
from his sensibility the kind of crust you have been forming on it, and
make him feel that he was coming home, recovering himself? As a
preliminary to detaching him from the Enemy, you wanted to detach him
from himself, and had made some progress in doing so. Now, all that is
undone.

Of course I know that the Enemy also wants to detach men from themselves,
but in a different way. Remember always, that He really likes the little
vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of
them. When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means
abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really
gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid,
sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves
than ever. Hence, while He is delighted to see them sacrificing even
their innocent wills to His, He hates to see them drifting away from
their own nature for any other reason. And we should always encourage
them to do so. The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw
material, the starting-point, with which the Enemy has furnished him. To
get him away from those is therefore always a point gained; even in
things indifferent it is always desirable to substitute the standards of
the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human's own real likings and
dislikings. I myself would carry this very far. I would make it a rule to
eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually
a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for
county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I
grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of
innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I
distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in
the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other
people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our
subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient
abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the
"best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. I have known a
human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still
stronger taste for tripe and onions.

It remains to consider how we can retrieve this disaster. The great thing
is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into
action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance.
Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way,
write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilising the
seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but
act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if
we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active
habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The
more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act,
and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XIV


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.

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. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and
smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, "By jove! I'm being
humble", and almost immediately pride--pride at his own humility--will
appear. 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.

But there are other profitable ways of fixing his attention on the virtue
of Humility. By this virtue, as by all the others, our Enemy wants to
turn the man's attention away from self to Him, and to the man's
neighbours. All the abjection and self-hatred are designed, in the long
run, solely for this end; unless they attain this end they do us little
harm; and they may even do us good if they keep the man concerned with
himself, and, above all, if self-contempt can be made the starting-point
for contempt of other selves, and thus for gloom, cynicism, and cruelty.

You must therefore conceal from the patient 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 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
an opinion for some quality other than 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 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 recognise 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 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.

His 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. Your efforts to instil either vainglory or false modesty into the
patient will therefore be met from the Enemy's side with the obvious
reminder that a man is not usually called upon to have an opinion of his
own talents at all, since he can very well go on improving them to the
best of his ability without deciding on his own precise niche in the
temple of Fame. You must try to exclude this reminder from the patient's
consciousness at all costs. The Enemy will also try to render real in the
patient's mind a doctrine which they all profess but find it difficult to
bring home to their feelings--the doctrine that they did not create
themselves, that their talents were given them, and that they might as
well be proud of the colour of their hair. But always and by all methods
the Enemy's aim will be to get the patient's mind off such questions, and
yours will be to fix it on them. Even of his sins the Enemy does not want
him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns
his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                   XV


My dear Wormwood,

I had noticed, of course, that the humans were having a lull in their
European war--what they navely call "_The War_"!--and am not surprised
that there is a corresponding lull in the patient's anxieties. Do we want
to encourage this, or to keep him worried? Tortured fear and stupid
confidence are both desirable states of mind. Our choice between them
raises important questions.

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He
therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to
eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present.
For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the
present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to
the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone
freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them
continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned
with Him) or with the Present--either meditating on their eternal union
with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of
conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace,
giving thanks for the present pleasure.

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present.
With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar)
to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some
real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that
extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make them live in the
Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that
direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and
fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it
we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all
things, the thing _least like_ eternity. It is the most completely
temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the
Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have
given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution,
Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men's affections on the
Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are
rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the
present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust
an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone
interests us) is already over. The pleasure is just the part of the
process which we regret and would exclude if we could do so without
losing the sin; it is the part contributed by the Enemy, and therefore
experienced in a Present. The sin, which is our contribution, looked
forward.

To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too--just so much
as is necessary for _now_ planning the acts of justice or charity which
will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow's
work is _today's_ duty; though its material is borrowed from the future,
the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw
splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place
their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all
day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind
of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to
the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over
him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future--haunted by visions of an
imminent heaven or hell upon earth--ready to break the Enemy's commands in
the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or
avert the other--dependent for his faith on the success or failure of
schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race
perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor
happy _now_, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of
the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

It follows then, in general, and others things being equal, that it is
better for your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope (it doesn't
much matter which) about this war than for him to be living in the
present. But the phrase "living in the present" is ambiguous. It may
describe a process which is really just as much concerned with the Future
as anxiety itself. Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not
because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded
himself that the Future is going to be agreeable. As long as that is the
real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good,
because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more
impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other
hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for
the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself
with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all
knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and
should be attacked at once. Here again, our Philological Arm has done
good work; try the word "complacency" on him. But, of course, it is most
likely that he is "living in the Present" for none of these reasons but
simply because his health is good and he is enjoying his work. The
phenomenon would then be merely natural. All the same, I should break it
up if I were you. No natural phenomenon is really in our favour. And
anyway, why _should_ the creature be happy?

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XVI


My dear Wormwood,

You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued
to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he
is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I
no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you
realise that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing?
Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next
best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the
church that "suits" him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of
churches.

The reasons are obvious. In the first place the parochial organisation
should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of
likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in
the kind of unity the Enemy desires. The congregational principle, on the
other hand, makes each church into a kind of club, and finally, if all
goes well, into a coterie or faction. In the second place, the search for
a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to
be a pupil. What He wants of the layman in church is an attitude which
may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or
unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not
appraise--does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays
itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that
is going. (You see how grovelling, how unspiritual, how irredeemably
vulgar He is!) This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the
condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can
become really audible to a human soul. There is hardly any sermon, or any
book, which may not be dangerous to us if it is received in this temper.
So pray bestir yourself and send this fool the round of the neighbouring
churches as soon as possible. Your record up to date has not given us
much satisfaction.

The two churches nearest to him, I have looked up in the office. Both
have certain claims. At the first of these the Vicar is a man who has
been so long engaged in watering down the faith to make it easier for a
supposedly incredulous and hard-headed congregation that it is now he who
shocks his parishioners with his unbelief, not _vice versa_. He has
undermined many a soul's Christianity. His conduct of the services is
also admirable. In order to spare the laity all "difficulties" he has
deserted both the lectionary and the appointed psalms and now, without
noticing it, revolves endlessly round the little treadmill of his fifteen
favourite psalms and twenty favourite lessons. We are thus safe from the
danger that any truth not already familiar to him and to his flock should
ever reach them through Scripture. But perhaps your patient is not quite
silly enough for this church--or not yet?

At the other church we have Fr. Spike. The humans are often puzzled to
understand the range of his opinions--why he is one day almost a Communist
and the next not far from some kind of theocratic Fascism--one day a
scholastic, and the next prepared to deny human reason altogether--one day
immersed in politics, and, the day after, declaring that all states of
this world are _equally_ "under judgment". We, of course, see the
connecting link, which is Hatred. The man cannot bring himself to preach
anything which is not calculated to shock, grieve, puzzle, or humiliate
his parents and their friends. A sermon which such people could accept
would be to him as insipid as a poem which they could scan. There is also
a promising streak of dishonesty in him; we are teaching him to say "The
teaching of the Church is" when he really means "I'm almost sure I read
recently in Maritain or someone of that sort". But I must warn you that
he has one fatal defect: he really believes. And this may yet mar all.

But there is one good point which both these churches have in common--they
are both party churches. I think I warned you before that if your patient
can't be kept out of the Church, he ought at least to be violently
attached to some party within it. I don't mean on really doctrinal
issues; about those, the more lukewarm he is the better. And it isn't the
doctrines on which we chiefly depend for producing malice. The real fun
is working up hatred between those who _say_ "mass" and those who _say_
"holy communion" when neither party could possibly state the difference
between, say, Hooker's doctrine and Thomas Aquinas', in any form which
would hold water for five minutes. And all the purely indifferent
things--candles and clothes and what not--are an admirable ground for our
activities. We have quite removed from men's minds what that pestilent
fellow Paul used to teach about food and other unessentials--namely, that
the human without scruples should always give in to the human with
scruples. You would think they could not fail to see the application. You
would expect to find the "low" churchman genuflecting and crossing
himself lest the weak conscience of his "high" brother should be moved to
irreverence, and the "high" one refraining from these exercises lest he
should betray his "low" brother into idolatry. And so it would have been
but for our ceaseless labour. Without that the variety of usage within
the Church of England might have become a positive hotbed of charity and
humility,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XVII


My dear Wormwood,

The contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of
catching souls, in your last letter, only shows your ignorance. One of
the great achievements of the last hundred years has been to deaden the
human conscience on that subject, so that by now you will hardly find a
sermon preached or a conscience troubled about it in the whole length and
breadth of Europe. This has largely been effected by concentrating all
our efforts on gluttony of Delicacy, not gluttony of Excess. Your
patient's mother, as I learn from the dossier and you might have learned
from Glubose, is a good example. She would be astonished--one day, I hope,
_will_ be--to learn that her whole life is enslaved to this kind of
sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that the
quantities involved are small. But what do quantities matter, provided we
can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience,
uncharitableness, and self-concern? Glubose has this old woman well in
hand. She is a positive terror to hostesses and servants. She is always
turning from what has been offered her to say with a demure little sigh
and a smile "Oh please, please . . . _all_ I want is a cup of tea, weak
but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast".
You see? Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has
been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination
to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others. At the
very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is practising
temperance. In a crowded restaurant she gives a little scream at the
plate which some overworked waitress has set before her and says, "Oh,
that's far, far too much! Take it away and bring me about a quarter of
it". If challenged, she would say she was doing this to avoid waste; in
reality she does it because the particular shade of delicacy to which we
have enslaved her is offended by the sight of more food than she happens
to want.

The real value of the quiet, unobtrusive work which Glubose has been
doing for years on this old woman can be gauged by the way in which her
belly now dominates her whole life. The woman is in what may be called
the "All-I-want" state of mind. _All_ she wants is a cup of tea properly
made, or an egg properly boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted.
But she never finds any servant or any friend who can do these simple
things "properly"--because her "properly" conceals an insatiable demand
for the exact, and almost impossible, palatal pleasures which she
imagines she remembers from the past; a past described by her as "the
days when you could get good servants" but known to us as the days when
her senses were more easily pleased and she had pleasures of other kinds
which made her less dependent on those of the table. Meanwhile, the daily
disappointment produces daily ill temper: cooks give notice and
friendships are cooled. If ever the Enemy introduces into her mind a
faint suspicion that she is too interested in food, Glubose counters it
by suggesting to her that she doesn't mind what she eats herself but
"does like to have things nice for her boy". In fact, of course, her
greed has been one of the chief sources of his domestic discomfort for
many years.

Now your patient is his mother's son. While working your hardest, quite
rightly, on other fronts, you must not neglect a little quiet
infiltration in respect of gluttony. Being a male, he is not so likely to
be caught by the "_All_ I want" camouflage. Males are best turned into
gluttons with the help of their vanity. They ought to be made to think
themselves very knowing about food, to pique themselves on having found
the only restaurant in the town where steaks are really "properly"
cooked. What begins as vanity can then be gradually turned into habit.
But, however you approach it, the great thing is to bring him into the
state in which the denial of any one indulgence--it matters not which,
champagne or tea, _sole colbert_ or cigarettes--"puts him out", for then
his charity, justice, and obedience are all at your mercy.

Mere excess in food is much less valuable than delicacy. Its chief use is
as a kind of artillery preparation for attacks on chastity. On that, as
on every other subject, keep your man in a condition of false
spirituality. Never let him notice the medical aspect. Keep him wondering
what pride or lack of faith has delivered him into your hands when a
simple enquiry into what he has been eating or drinking for the last
twenty-four hours would show him whence your ammunition comes and thus
enable him by a very little abstinence to imperil your lines of
communication. If he _must_ think of the medical side of chastity, feed
him the grand lie which we have made the English humans believe, that
physical exercise in excess and consequent fatigue are specially
favourable to this virtue. How they can believe this, in face of the
notorious lustfulness of sailors and soldiers, may well be asked. But we
used the schoolmasters to put the story about--men who were really
interested in chastity as an excuse for games and therefore recommended
games as an aid to chastity. But this whole business is too large to deal
with at the tail-end of a letter,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                 XVIII


My dear Wormwood,

Even under Slubgob you must have learned at college the routine technique
of sexual temptation, and since, for us spirits, this whole subject is
one of considerable tedium (though necessary as part of our training) I
will pass it over. But on the larger issues involved I think you have a
good deal to learn.

The Enemy's demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; _either_
complete abstinence _or_ unmitigated monogamy. Ever since our Father's
first great victory, we have rendered the former very difficult to them.
The latter, for the last few centuries, we have been closing up as a way
of escape. We have done this through the poets and novelists by
persuading the humans that a curious, and usually short-lived, experience
which they call "being in love" is the only respectable ground for
marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement
permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding.
This idea is our parody of an idea that came from the Enemy.

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one
thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another
self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another
loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other
objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by
thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same.
With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the
sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. "To be"
_means_ "to be in competition".

Now the Enemy's philosophy is nothing more nor less than one continued
attempt to evade this very obvious truth. He aims at a contradiction.
Things are to be many, yet somehow also one. The good of one self is to
be the good of another. This impossibility He calls _love_, and this same
monotonous panacea can be detected under all He does and even all He
is--or claims to be. Thus He is not content, even Himself, to be a sheer
arithmetical unity; He claims to be three as well as one, in order that
this nonsense about Love may find a foothold in His own nature. At the
other end of the scale, He introduces into matter that obscene invention
the organism, in which the parts are perverted from their natural destiny
of competition and made to co-operate.

His real motive for fixing on sex as the method of reproduction among
humans is only too apparent from the use He has made of it. Sex might
have been, from our point of view, quite innocent. It might have been
merely one more mode in which a stronger self preyed upon a weaker--as it
is, indeed, among the spiders where the bride concludes her nuptials by
eating her groom. But in the humans the Enemy has gratuitously associated
affection between the parties with sexual desire. He has also made the
offspring dependent on the parents and given the parents an impulse to
support it--thus producing the Family, which is like the organism, only
worse; for the members are more distinct, yet also united in a more
conscious and responsible way. The whole thing, in fact, turns out to be
simply one more device for dragging in Love.

Now comes the joke. The Enemy described a married couple as "one flesh".
He did not say "a happily married couple" or "a couple who married
because they were in love", but you can make the humans ignore that. You
can also make them forget that the man they call Paul did not confine it
to _married_ couples. Mere copulation, for him, makes "one flesh". You
can thus get the humans to accept as rhetorical eulogies of "being in
love" what were in fact plain descriptions of the real significance of
sexual intercourse. The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman,
there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up
between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured. From
the true statement that this transcendental relation was intended to
produce, and, if obediently entered into, too often _will_ produce,
affection and the family, humans can be made to infer the false belief
that the blend of affection, fear, and desire which they call "being in
love" is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy. The
error is easy to produce because "being in love" does very often, in
Western Europe, precede marriages which are made in obedience to the
Enemy's designs, that is, with the intention of fidelity, fertility and
good will; just as religious emotion very often, but not always, attends
conversion. In other words, the humans are to be encouraged to regard as
the basis for marriage a highly-coloured and distorted version of
something the Enemy really promises as its result. Two advantages follow.
In the first place, humans who have not the gift of continence can be
deterred from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find
themselves "in love", and, thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any
other motive seems to them low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They
regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the
preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something
lower than a storm of emotion. (Don't neglect to make your man think the
marriage-service very offensive.) In the second place any sexual
infatuation whatever, so long as it intends marriage, will be regarded as
"love", and "love" will be held to excuse a man from all the guilt, and
to protect him from all the consequences, of marrying a heathen, a fool,
or a wanton. But more of this in my next,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XIX


My dear Wormwood,

I have been thinking very hard about the question in your last letter.
If, as I have clearly shown, all selves are by their very nature in
competition, and therefore the Enemy's idea of Love is a contradiction in
terms, what becomes of my reiterated warning that He really loves the
human vermin and really desires their freedom and continued existence? I
hope, my dear boy, you have not shown my letters to anyone. Not that it
matters of course. Anyone would see that the appearance of heresy into
which I have fallen is purely accidental. By the way, I hope you
understood, too, that some apparently uncomplimentary references to
Slubgob were purely jocular. I really have the highest respect for him.
And, of course, some things I said about not shielding you from the
authorities were not seriously meant. You can trust me to look after your
interests. But do keep everything under lock and key.

The truth is I slipped by mere carelessness into saying that the Enemy
really loves the humans. That, of course, is an impossibility. He is one
being, they are distinct from Him. Their good cannot be His. All His talk
about Love must be a disguise for something else--He must have some _real_
motive for creating them and taking so much trouble about them. The
reason one comes to talk as if He really had this impossible Love is our
utter failure to find out that real motive. What does He stand to make
out of them? That is the insoluble question. I do not see that it can do
any harm to tell you that this very problem was a chief cause of Our
Father's quarrel with the Enemy. When the creation of man was first
mooted and when, even at that stage, the Enemy freely confessed that he
foresaw a certain episode about a cross, Our Father very naturally sought
an interview and asked for an explanation. The Enemy gave no reply except
to produce the cock-and-bull story about disinterested love which He has
been circulating ever since. This Our Father naturally could not accept.
He implored the Enemy to lay His cards on the table, and gave Him every
opportunity. He admitted that he felt a real anxiety to know the secret;
the Enemy replied "I wish with all my heart that you did". It was, I
imagine, at this stage in the interview that Our Father's disgust at such
an unprovoked lack of confidence caused him to remove himself an infinite
distance from the Presence with a suddenness which has given rise to the
ridiculous enemy story that he was forcibly thrown out of Heaven. Since
then, we have begun to see why our Oppressor was so secretive. His throne
depends on the secret. Members of His faction have frequently admitted
that if ever we came to understand what He means by Love, the war would
be over and we should re-enter Heaven. And there lies the great task. We
know that He cannot really love: nobody can: it doesn't make sense. If we
could only find out what He is _really_ up to! Hypothesis after
hypothesis has been tried, and still we can't find out. Yet we must never
lose hope; more and more complicated theories, fuller and fuller
collections of data, richer rewards for researchers who make progress,
more and more terrible punishments for those who fail--all this, pursued
and accelerated to the very end of time, cannot, surely, fail to succeed.

You complain that my last letter does not make it clear whether I regard
_being in love_ as a desirable state for a human or not. But really,
Wormwood, that is the sort of question one expects _them_ to ask! Leave
them to discuss whether "Love", or patriotism, or celibacy, or candles on
altars, or teetotalism, or education, are "good" or "bad". Can't you see
there's no answer? Nothing matters at all except the tendency of a given
state of mind, in given circumstances, to move a particular patient at a
particular moment nearer to the Enemy or nearer to us. Thus it would be
quite a good thing to make the patient decide that "love" is "good" or
"bad". If he is an arrogant man with a contempt for the body really based
on delicacy but mistaken by him for purity--and one who takes pleasure in
flouting what most of his fellows approve--by all means let him decide
against love. Instil into him an overweening asceticism and then, when
you have separated his sexuality from all that might humanise it, weigh
in on him with it in some much more brutal and cynical form. If, on the
other hand, he is an emotional, gullible man, feed him on minor poets and
fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe
that "Love" is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious.
This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual
unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, "noble",
romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and
suicides. Failing that, it can be used to steer the patient into a useful
marriage. For marriage, though the Enemy's invention, has its uses. There
must be several young women in your patient's neighbourhood who would
render the Christian life intensely difficult to him if only you could
persuade him to marry one of them. Please send me a report on this when
you next write. In the meantime, get it quite clear in your own mind that
this state of _falling in love_ is not, in itself, necessarily,
favourable either to us or to the other side. It is simply an occasion
which we and the Enemy are both trying to exploit. Like most of the other
things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age
and youth, or war and peace, it is, from the point of view of the
spiritual life, mainly raw material,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                   XX


My dear Wormwood,

I note with great displeasure that the Enemy has, for the time being, put
a forcible end to your direct attacks on the patient's chastity. You
ought to have known that He always does in the end, and you ought to have
stopped before you reached that stage. For as things are, your man has
now discovered the dangerous truth that these attacks don't last forever;
consequently you cannot use again what is, after all, our best weapon--the
belief of ignorant humans, that there is no hope of getting rid of us
except by yielding. I suppose you've tried persuading him that chastity
is unhealthy?

I haven't yet got a report from you on young women in the neighbourhood.
I should like it at once, for if we can't use his sexuality to make him
unchaste we must try to use it for the promotion of a desirable marriage.
In the meantime I would like to give you some hint about the type of
woman--I mean the physical type--which he should be encouraged to fall in
love with if "falling in love" is the best we can manage.

In a rough and ready way, of course, this question is decided for us by
spirits far deeper down in the Lowerarchy than you and I. It is the
business of these great masters to produce in every age a general
misdirection of what may be called sexual "taste". This they do by
working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers,
actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is
to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom
spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus
we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of
making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard)
disagreeable to nearly all the females--and there is more in that than you
might suppose. As regards the male taste we have varied a good deal. At
one time we have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of
beauty, mixing men's vanity with their desires and encouraging the race
to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another,
we have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing,
so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness
of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present we are on
the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz,
and we now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely
distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even
more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female's chronic horror
of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing
and less able to bear children. And that is not all. We have engineered a
great increase in the licence which society allows to the representation
of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on
the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures
in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or
tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer
and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to
be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it
is being "frank" and "healthy" and getting back to nature. As a result we
are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does
not exist--making the rle of the eye in sexuality more and more important
and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible. What
follows you can easily forecast!

That is the general strategy of the moment. But inside that framework you
will still find it possible to encourage your patient's desires in one of
two directions. You will find, if you look carefully into any human's
heart, that he is haunted by at least two imaginary women--a terrestrial
and an infernal Venus, and that his desire differs qualitatively
according to its object. There is one type for which his desire is such
as to be naturally amenable to the Enemy--readily mixed with charity,
readily obedient to marriage, coloured all through with that golden light
of reverence and naturalness which we detest; there is another type which
he desires brutally, and desires to desire brutally, a type best used to
draw him away from marriage altogether but which, even within marriage,
he would tend to treat as a slave, an idol, or an accomplice. His love
for the first might involve what the Enemy calls evil, but only
accidentally; the man would wish that she was not someone else's wife and
be sorry that he could not love her lawfully. But in the second type, the
felt evil is what he wants; it is that "tang" in the flavour which he is
after. In the face, it is the visible animality, or sulkiness, or craft,
or cruelty which he likes and in the body, something quite different from
what he ordinarily calls Beauty, something he may even, in a sane hour,
describe as ugliness, but which, by our art, can be made to play on the
raw nerve of his private obsession.

The real use of the infernal Venus is, no doubt, as prostitute or
mistress. But if your man is a Christian, and if he has been well trained
in nonsense about irresistible and all-excusing "Love", he can often be
induced to marry her. And that is very well worth bringing about. You
will have failed as regards fornication and solitary vice; but there are
other, and more indirect, methods of using a man's sexuality to his
undoing. And, by the way, they are not only efficient, but delightful;
the unhappiness produced is of a very lasting and exquisite kind,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XXI


My dear Wormwood,

Yes. A period of sexual temptation is an excellent time for working in a
subordinate attack on the patient's peevishness. It may even be the main
attack, as long as he thinks it the subordinate one. But here, as in
everything else, the way must be prepared for your moral assault by
darkening his intellect.

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as
injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate
claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your
patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and,
as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws
him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned
on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the
unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the
friend's talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a
_tte--tte_ with the friend), that throw him out of gear. Now he is not
yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy
are _in themselves_ too much for it. They anger him because he regards
his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore
zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption, "My time is my own".
Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor
of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this
property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous
donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But
what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which
these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own
personal birthright.

You have here a delicate task. The assumption which you want him to go on
making is so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a
shred of argument in its defence. The man can neither make, nor retain,
one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well
regard the sun and moon as his chattels. He is also, in theory, committed
to a total service of the Enemy; and if the Enemy appeared to him in
bodily form and demanded that total service for even one day, he would
not refuse. He would be greatly relieved if that one day involved nothing
harder than listening to the conversation of a foolish woman; and he
would be relieved almost to the pitch of disappointment if for one
half-hour in that day the Enemy said "Now you may go and amuse yourself".
Now if he thinks about his assumption for a moment, even he is bound to
realise that he is actually in this situation every day. When I speak of
preserving this assumption in his mind, therefore, the last thing I mean
you to do is to furnish him with arguments in its defence. There aren't
any. Your task is purely negative. Don't let his thoughts come anywhere
near it. Wrap a darkness about it; and in the centre of that darkness let
his sense of ownership-in-Time lie silent, uninspected, and operative.

The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans
are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in
Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern
resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their
bodies--those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that
made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and
from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another! It is as if a
royal child whom his father has placed, for love's sake, in titular
command of some great province, under the real rule of wise counsellors,
should come to fancy he really owns the cities, the forests, and the
corn, in the same way as he owns the bricks on the nursery floor.

We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We
teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive
pronoun--the finely graded differences that run from "my boots" through
"my dog", "my servant", "my wife", "my father", "my master" and "my
country", to "my God". They can be taught to reduce all these senses to
that of "my boots", the "my" of ownership. Even in the nursery a child
can be taught to mean by "my Teddy-bear" _not_ the old imagined recipient
of affection to whom it stands in a special relation (for that is what
the Enemy will teach them to mean if we are not careful) but "the bear I
can pull to pieces if I like". And at the other end of the scale, we have
taught men to say "My God" in a sense not really very different from "My
boots", meaning "The God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished
services and whom I exploit from the pulpit--the God I have done a corner
in".

And all the time the joke is that the word "Mine" in its fully possessive
sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run
either Our Father or the Enemy will say "Mine" of each thing that exists,
and specially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to
whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong--certainly
not to _them_, whatever happens. At present the Enemy says "Mine" of
everything on the pedantic, legalistic ground that He made it: Our Father
hopes in the end to say "Mine" of all things on the more realistic and
dynamic ground of conquest,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XXII


My dear Wormwood,

So! Your man is in love--and in the worst kind he could possibly have
fallen into--and with a girl who does not even appear in the report you
sent me. You may be interested to learn that the little misunderstanding
with the Secret Police which you tried to raise about some unguarded
expressions in one of my letters has been tided over. If you were
reckoning on that to secure my good offices, you will find yourself
mistaken. You shall pay for that as well as for your other blunders.
Meanwhile I enclose a little booklet, just issued, on the new House of
Correction for Incompetent Tempters. It is profusely illustrated and you
will not find a dull page in it.

I have looked up this girl's dossier and am horrified at what I find. Not
only a Christian but such a Christian--a vile, sneaking, simpering,
demure, monosyllabic, mouse-like, watery, insignificant, virginal,
bread-and-butter miss. The little brute. She makes me vomit. She stinks
and scalds through the very pages of the dossier. It drives me mad, the
way the world has worsened. We'd have had her to the arena in the old
days. That's what her sort is made for. Not that she'd do much good
there, either. A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if
she'd faint at the sight of blood and then dies with a smile. A cheat
every way. Looks as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth and yet has a
satirical wit. The sort of creature who'd find _ME_ funny! Filthy insipid
little prude--and yet ready to fall into this booby's arms like any other
breeding animal. Why doesn't the Enemy blast her for it, if He's so
moonstruck by virginity--instead of looking on there, grinning?

He's a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and
crosses are only a faade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at
sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no
secret of it; at His right hand are "pleasures for evermore". Ugh! I
don't think He has the least inkling of that high and austere mystery to
which we rise in the Miserific Vision. He's vulgar, Wormwood. He has a
bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are
things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the
least--sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying,
working. Everything has to be _twisted_ before it's any use to us. We
fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side. (Not
that that excuses _you_. I'll settle with you presently. You have always
hated me and been insolent when you dared.)

Then, of course, he gets to know this woman's family and whole circle.
Could you not see that the very house she lives in is one that he ought
never to have entered? The whole place reeks of that deadly odour. The
very gardener, though he has only been there five years, is beginning to
acquire it. Even guests, after a week-end visit, carry some of the smell
away with them. The dog and the cat are tainted with it. And a house full
of the impenetrable mystery. We are certain (it is a matter of first
principles) that each member of the family must in some way be making
capital out of the others--but we can't find out how. They guard as
jealously as the Enemy Himself the secret of what really lies behind this
pretence of disinterested love. The whole house and garden is one vast
obscenity. It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human
writer made of Heaven: "the regions where there is only life and
therefore all that is not music is silence".

Music and silence--how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that
ever since our Father entered Hell--though longer ago than humans,
reckoning in light years, could express--no square inch of infernal space
and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those
abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise--Noise, the grand
dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and
virile--Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing
scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise
in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as
regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted
down in the end. But I admit we are not yet loud enough, or anything like
it. Research is in progress. Meanwhile _you_, disgusting little----

  [_Here the MS. breaks off and is resumed in a different hand._]

In the heat of composition I find that I have inadvertently allowed
myself to assume the form of a large centipede. I am accordingly
dictating the rest to my secretary. Now that the transformation is
complete I recognise it as a periodical phenomenon. Some rumour of it has
reached the humans and a distorted account of it appears in the poet
Milton, with the ridiculous addition that such changes of shape are a
"punishment" imposed on us by the Enemy. A more modern writer--someone
with a name like Pshaw--has, however, grasped the truth. Transformation
proceeds from within and is a glorious manifestation of that Life Force
which Our Father would worship if he worshipped anything but himself. In
my present form I feel even more anxious to see you, to unite you to
myself in an indissoluble embrace,

                                                       (Signed) Toadpipe

                             _For_ his Abysmal Sublimity Under Secretary
                                             Screwtape, T.E., B.S., etc.




                                 XXIII


My dear Wormwood,

Through this girl and her disgusting family the patient is now getting to
know more Christians every day, and very intelligent Christians too. For
a long time it will be quite impossible to _remove_ spirituality from his
life. Very well then; we must _corrupt_ it. No doubt you have often
practised transforming yourself into an angel of light as a parade-ground
exercise. Now is the time to do it in the face of the Enemy. The World
and the Flesh have failed us; a third Power remains. And success of this
third kind is the most glorious of all. A spoiled saint, a Pharisee, an
inquisitor, or a magician, makes better sport in Hell than a mere common
tyrant or debauchee.

Looking round your patient's new friends I find that the best point of
attack would be the border-line between theology and politics. Several of
his new friends are very much alive to the social implications of their
religion. That, in itself, is a bad thing; but good can be made out of
it.

You will find that a good many Christian-political writers think that
Christianity began going wrong, and departing from the doctrine of its
Founder, at a very early stage. Now this idea must be used by us to
encourage once again the conception of a "historical Jesus" to be found
by clearing away later "accretions and perversions" and then to be
contrasted with the whole Christian tradition. In the last generation we
promoted the construction of such a "historical Jesus" on liberal and
humanitarian lines; we are now putting forward a new "historical Jesus"
on Marxian, catastrophic, and revolutionary lines. The advantages of
these constructions, which we intend to change every thirty years or so,
are manifold. In the first place they all tend to direct men's devotion
to something which does not exist, for each "historical Jesus" is
unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to;
each new "historical Jesus" therefore has to be got out of them by
suppression at one point and exaggeration at another, and by that sort of
guessing (_brilliant_ is the adjective we teach humans to apply to it) on
which no one would risk ten shillings in ordinary life, but which is
enough to produce a crop of new Napoleons, new Shakespeares, and new
Swifts, in every publisher's autumn list. In the second place, all such
constructions place the importance of their Historical Jesus in some
peculiar theory He is supposed to have promulgated. He has to be a "great
man" in the modern sense of the word--one standing at the terminus of some
centrifugal and imbalanced line of thought--a crank vending a panacea. We
thus distract men's minds from Who He is, and what He did. We first make
Him solely a teacher, and then conceal the very substantial agreement
between His teachings and those of all other great moral teachers. For
humans must not be allowed to notice that all great moralists are sent by
the Enemy not to inform men but to remind them, to restate the primeval
moral platitudes against our continual concealment of them. We make the
Sophists: He raises up a Socrates to answer them. Our third aim is, by
these constructions, to destroy the devotional life. For the real
presence of the Enemy, otherwise experienced by men in prayer and
sacrament, we substitute a merely probable, remote, shadowy, and uncouth
figure, one who spoke a strange language and died a long time ago. Such
an object cannot in fact be worshipped. Instead of the Creator adored by
its creature, you soon have merely a leader acclaimed by a partisan, and
finally a distinguished character approved by a judicious historian. And
fourthly, besides being unhistorical in the Jesus it depicts, religion of
this kind is false to history in another sense. No nation, and few
individuals, are really brought into the Enemy's camp by the historical
study of the biography of Jesus, simply as biography. Indeed materials
for a full biography have been withheld from men. The earliest converts
were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a
single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin
which they already had--and sin, not against some new fancy-dress law
produced as a novelty by a "great man", but against the old,
platitudinous, universal moral law which they had been taught by their
nurses and mothers. The "Gospels" come later and were written not to make
Christians but to edify Christians already made.

The "Historical Jesus" then, however dangerous he may seem to be to us at
some particular point, is always to be encouraged. About the general
connection between Christianity and politics, our position is more
delicate. Certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to
flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything
like a really just society would be a major disaster. On the other hand
we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a
means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but,
failing that, as a means to anything--even to social justice. The thing to
do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the
Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values
Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will
not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive
the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they
can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist's
shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little
corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he
recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that "only such
a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new
civilisations". You see the little rift? "Believe this, not because it is
true, but for some other reason." That's the game,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XXIV


My dear Wormwood,

I have been in correspondence with Slumtrimpet who is in charge of your
patient's young woman, and begin to see the chink in her armour. It is an
unobtrusive little vice which she shares with nearly all women who have
grown up in an intelligent circle united by a clearly defined belief; and
it consists in a quite untroubled assumption that the outsiders who do
not share this belief are really too stupid and ridiculous. The males,
who habitually meet these outsiders, do not feel that way; their
confidence, if they are confident, is of a different kind. Hers, which
she supposes to be due to Faith, is in reality largely due to the mere
colour she has taken from her surroundings. It is not, in fact, very
different from the conviction she would have felt at the age of ten that
the kind of fish-knives used in her father's house were the proper or
normal or "real" kind, while those of the neighbouring families were "not
real fish-knives" at all. Now the element of ignorance and navety in all
this is so large, and the element of spiritual pride so small, that it
gives us little hope of the girl herself. But have you thought of how it
can be made to influence your own patient?

It is always the novice who exaggerates. The man who has risen in society
is over-refined, the young scholar is pedantic. In this new circle your
patient is a novice. He is there daily meeting Christian life of a
quality he never before imagined and seeing it all through an enchanted
glass because he is in love. He is anxious (indeed the Enemy commands
him) to imitate this quality. Can you get him to imitate this _defect_ in
his mistress and to exaggerate it until what was venial in her becomes in
him the strongest and most beautiful of the vices--Spiritual Pride?

The conditions seem ideally favourable. The new circle in which he finds
himself is one of which he is tempted to be proud for many reasons other
than its Christianity. It is a better educated, more intelligent, more
agreeable society than any he has yet encountered. He is also under some
degree of illusion as to his own place in it. Under the influence of
"love" he may still think himself unworthy of the girl, but he is rapidly
ceasing to think himself unworthy of the others. He has no notion how
much in him is forgiven because they are charitable and made the best of
because he is now one of the family. He does not dream how much of his
conversation, how many of his opinions, are recognised by them all as
mere echoes of their own. Still less does he suspect how much of the
delight he takes in these people is due to the erotic enchantment which
the girl, for him, spreads over all her surroundings. He thinks that he
likes their talk and way of life because of some congruity between their
spiritual state and his, when in fact they are so far beyond him that if
he were not in love he would be merely puzzled and repelled by much which
he now accepts. He is like a dog which should imagine it understood
fire-arms because its hunting instinct and love for its master enable it
to enjoy a day's shooting!

Here is your chance. While the Enemy, by means of sexual love and of some
very agreeable people far advanced in His service, is drawing the young
barbarian up to levels he could never otherwise have reached, you must
make him feel that he is finding his _own_ level--that these people are
"his sort" and that, coming among them, he has come home. When he turns
from them to other society he will find it dull; partly because almost
any society within his reach is, in fact, much less entertaining, but
still more because he will miss the enchantment of the young woman. You
must teach him to mistake this contrast between the circle that delights
and the circle that bores him for the contrast between Christians and
unbelievers. He must be made to feel (he'd better not put it into words)
"how different we Christians are"; and by "we Christians" he must really,
but unknowingly, mean "my set"; and by "my set" he must mean not "The
people who, in their charity and humility, have accepted me", but "The
people with whom I associate by right".

Success here depends on confusing him. If you try to make him explicitly
and professedly proud of being a Christian, you will probably fail; the
Enemy's warnings are too well known. If, on the other hand, you let the
idea of "we Christians" drop out altogether and merely make him
complacent about "his set", you will produce not true spiritual pride but
mere social vanity which, by comparison, is a trumpery, puny little sin.
What you want is to keep a sly self-congratulation mixing with all his
thoughts and never allow him to raise the question "What, precisely, am I
congratulating myself _about_?" The idea of belonging to an inner ring,
of being in a secret, is very sweet to him. Play on that nerve. Teach
him, using the influence of this girl when she is silliest, to adopt an
air of _amusement_ at the things the unbelievers say. Some theories which
he may meet in modern Christian circles may here prove helpful; theories,
I mean, that place the hope of society in some inner ring of "clerks",
some trained minority of theocrats. It is no affair of yours whether
those theories are true or false; the great thing is to make Christianity
a mystery religion in which he feels himself one of the initiates.

Pray do not fill your letters with rubbish about this European War. Its
final issue is, no doubt, important, but that is a matter for the High
Command. I am not in the least interested in knowing how many people in
England have been killed by bombs. In what state of mind they died, I can
learn from the office at this end. That they were going to die sometime,
I knew already. Please keep your mind on your work,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XXV


My dear Wormwood,

The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is
_merely_ Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but
the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become
Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call
"Christianity And". You know--Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity
and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and
Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and
Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be
Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute
for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on
their horror of the Same Old Thing.

The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we
have produced in the human heart--an endless source of heresies in
religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in
friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively.
To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different
things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need
change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable
to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not
wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has
balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has
contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made,
by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives
them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that
spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an
immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they
change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce
gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it
into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our
workmanship. If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but
transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops _this_
January, sunrise _this_ morning, plum pudding _this_ Christmas. Children,
until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal
round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn
follows summer. Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite,
or unrhythmical, change kept up.

This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes
pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very
nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And
continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice
or unhappiness or both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the
sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to
those the Enemy forbids. Thus by inflaming the horror of the Same Old
Thing we have recently made the Arts, for example, less dangerous to us
than perhaps, they have ever been, "low-brow" and "high-brow" artists
alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh, excesses of
lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride. Finally, the desire for
novelty is indispensable if we are to produce Fashions or Vogues.

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from
their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation
against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval
on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic.
The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers
whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat
which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to
expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all
really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really
making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is
directed against the dangers of the mere "understanding". Cruel ages are
put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against
Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men
are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime
bogey.

But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate this horror of the Same Old
Thing into a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect may reinforce
corruption in the will. It is here that the general Evolutionary or
Historical character of modern European thought (partly our work) comes
in so useful. The Enemy loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action
He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it
righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking
"Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it
progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?" they
will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they _do_ ask are,
of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the
future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now
invoke the future to help them to make. As a result, while their minds
are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend
them to the action _we_ have decided on. And great work has already been
done. Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others
for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this
knowledge. For the descriptive adjective "unchanged" we have substituted
the emotional adjective "stagnant". We have trained them to think of the
Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain--not as something
which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he
does, whoever he is,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XXVI


My dear Wormwood,

Yes; courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten
years later into domestic hatred. The enchantment of unsatisfied desire
produces results which the humans can be made to mistake for the results
of charity. Avail yourself of the ambiguity in the word "Love": let them
think they have solved by Love problems they have in fact only waived or
postponed under the influence of the enchantment. While it lasts you have
your chance to foment the problems in secret and render them chronic.

The grand problem is that of "unselfishness". Note, once again, the
admirable work of our Philological Arm in substituting the negative
unselfishness for the Enemy's positive Charity. Thanks to this you can,
from the very outset, teach a man to surrender benefits not that others
may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing
them. That is a great point gained. Another great help, where the parties
concerned are male and female, is the divergence of view about
Unselfishness which we have built up between the sexes. A woman means by
Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving
trouble to others. As a result, a woman who is quite far gone in the
Enemy's service will make a nuisance of herself on a larger scale than
any man except those whom Our Father has dominated completely; and,
conversely, a man will live long in the Enemy's camp before he undertakes
as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman may
do every day. Thus while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the
man of respecting other people's rights, each sex, without any obvious
unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.

On top of these confusions you can now introduce a few more. The erotic
enchantment produces a mutual complaisance in which each is _really_
pleased to give in to the wishes of the other. They also know that the
Enemy demands of them a degree of charity which, if attained, would
result in similar actions. You must make them establish as a Law for
their whole married life that degree of mutual self-sacrifice which is at
present sprouting naturally out of the enchantment, but which, when the
enchantment dies away, they will not have charity enough to enable them
to perform. They will not see the trap, since they are under the double
blindness of mistaking sexual excitement for charity and of thinking that
the excitement will last.

When once a sort of official, legal, or nominal Unselfishness has been
established as a rule--a rule for the keeping of which their emotional
resources have died away and their spiritual resources have not yet
grown--the most delightful results follow. In discussing any joint action,
it becomes obligatory that A should argue in favour of B's supposed
wishes and against his own, while B does the opposite. It is often
impossible to find out either party's real wishes; with luck, they end by
doing something that neither wants, while each feels a glow of
self-righteousness and harbours a secret claim to preferential treatment
for the unselfishness shown and a secret grudge against the other for the
ease with which the sacrifice has been accepted. Later on you can venture
on what may be called the Generous Conflict Illusion. This game is best
played with more than two players, in a family with grown-up children for
example. Something quite trivial, like having tea in the garden, is
proposed. One member takes care to make it quite clear (though not in so
many words) that he would rather not but is, of course, prepared to do so
out of "Unselfishness". The others instantly withdraw their proposal,
ostensibly through their "Unselfishness", but really because they don't
want to be used as a sort of lay figure on which the first speaker
practices petty altruisms. But he is not going to be done out of his
debauch of Unselfishness either. He insists on doing "what the others
want". They insist on doing what he wants. Passions are roused. Soon
someone is saying "Very well then, I won't have any tea at all!", and a
real quarrel ensues with bitter resentment on both sides. You see how it
is done? If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish,
they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but
just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the
other side's battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted
self-righteousness and obstinacy and the accumulated grudges of the last
ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official
"Unselfishness" of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused
by it. Each side is, indeed, quite alive to the cheap quality of the
adversary's Unselfishness and of the false position into which he is
trying to force them; but each manages to feel blameless and ill-used
itself, with no more dishonesty than comes natural to a human.

A sensible human once said, "If people knew how much ill-feeling
Unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the
pulpit"; and again, "She's the sort of woman who lives for others--you can
always tell the others by their hunted expression". All this can be begun
even in the period of courtship. A little _real_ selfishness on your
patient's part is often of less value in the long run, for securing his
soul, than the first beginnings of that elaborate and self-consciousness
unselfishness which may one day blossom into the sort of thing I have
described. Some degree of mutual falseness, some surprise that the girl
does not always notice just how Unselfish he is being, can be smuggled in
already. Cherish these things, and, above all, don't let the young fools
notice them. If they notice them they will be on the road to discovering
that "love" is not enough, that charity is needed and not yet achieved
and that no external law can supply its place. I wish Slumtrimpet could
do something about undermining that young woman's sense of the
ridiculous,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                 XXVII


My dear Wormwood,

You seem to be doing very little good at present. The use of his "love"
to distract his mind from the Enemy is, of course, obvious, but you
reveal what poor use you are making of it when you say that the whole
question of distraction and the wandering mind has now become one of the
chief subjects of his prayers. That means you have largely failed. When
this, or any other distraction, crosses his mind you ought to encourage
him to thrust it away by sheer will power and to try to continue the
normal prayer as if nothing had happened; once he accepts the distraction
as his present problem and lays _that_ before the Enemy and makes it the
main theme of his prayers and his endeavours, then, so far from doing
good, you have done harm. Anything, even a sin, which has the total
effect of moving him close up to the Enemy, makes against us in the long
run.

A promising line is the following. Now that he is in love, a new idea of
_earthly_ happiness has arisen in his mind: and hence a new urgency in
his purely petitionary prayers--about this war and other such matters. Now
is the time for raising intellectual difficulties about prayer of that
sort. False spirituality is always to be encouraged. On the seemingly
pious ground that "praise and communion with God is the true prayer",
humans can often be lured into direct disobedience to the Enemy who (in
His usual flat, commonplace, uninteresting way) has definitely told them
to pray for their daily bread and the recovery of their sick. You will,
of course, conceal from him the fact that the prayer for daily bread,
interpreted in a "spiritual sense", is really just as crudely petitionary
as it is in any other sense.

But since your patient has contracted the terrible habit of obedience, he
will probably continue such "crude" prayers whatever you do. But you can
worry him with the haunting suspicion that the practice is absurd and can
have no objective result. Don't forget to use the "heads I win, tails you
lose" argument. If the thing he prays for doesn't happen, then that is
one more proof that petitionary prayers don't work; if it does happen, he
will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up
to it, and "therefore it would have happened anyway", and thus a granted
prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are
ineffective.

You, being a spirit, will find it difficult to understand how he gets
into this confusion. But you must remember that he takes Time for an
ultimate reality. He supposes that the Enemy, like himself, sees some
things as present, remembers others as past, and anticipates others as
future; or even if he believes that the Enemy does not see things that
way, yet, in his heart of hearts, he regards this as a peculiarity of the
Enemy's mode of perception--he doesn't really think (though he would say
he did) that things as the Enemy sees them are things as they are! If you
tried to explain to him that men's prayers today are one of the
innumerable co-ordinates with which the Enemy harmonises the weather of
tomorrow, he would reply that then the Enemy always knew men were going
to make those prayers and, if so, they did not pray freely but were
predestined to do so. And he would add that the weather on a given day
can be traced back through its causes to the original creation of matter
itself--so that the whole thing, both on the human and on the material
side, is given "from the word go". What he ought to say, of course, is
obvious to us; that the problem of adapting the particular weather to the
particular prayers is merely the appearance, at two points in his
temporal mode of perception, of the total problem of adapting the whole
spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its
entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their
kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent
creative act as a series of successive events. _Why_ that creative act
leaves room for their free will is the problem of problems, the secret
behind the Enemy's nonsense about "Love". _How_ it does so is no problem
at all; for the Enemy does not _foresee_ the humans making their free
contributions in a future, but _sees_ them doing so in His unbounded Now.
And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it.

It may be replied that some meddlesome human writers, notably Boethius,
have let this secret out. But in the intellectual climate which we have
at last succeeded in producing throughout Western Europe, you needn't
bother about that. Only the learned read old books and we have now so
dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to
acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating The
Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly,
means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an
ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He
asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is
consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the
writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it
illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been
misunderstood (specially by the learned man's own colleagues) and what
the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years,
and what is the "present state of the question". To regard the ancient
writer as a possible source of knowledge--to anticipate that what he said
could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour--this would be
rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the
whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every
generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce
between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic
errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great
scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant
mechanic who holds that "history is bunk",

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                 XXVIII


My dear Wormwood,

When I told you not to fill your letters with rubbish about the war, I
meant, of course, that I did not want to have your rather infantile
rhapsodies about the death of men and the destruction of cities. In so
far as the war really concerns the spiritual state of the patient, I
naturally want full reports. And on this aspect you seem singularly
obtuse. Thus you tell me with glee that there is reason to expect heavy
air raids on the town where the creature lives. This is a crying example
of something I have complained about already--your readiness to forget the
main point in your immediate enjoyment of human suffering. Do you not
know that bombs kill men? Or do you not realise that the patient's death,
at this moment, is precisely what we want to avoid? He has escaped the
worldly friends with whom you tried to entangle him; he has "fallen in
love" with a very Christian woman and is temporarily immune from your
attacks on his chastity; and the various methods of corrupting his
spiritual life which we have been trying are so far unsuccessful. At the
present moment, as the full impact of the war draws nearer and his
worldly hopes take a proportionately lower place in his mind, full of his
defence work, full of the girl, forced to attend to his neighbours more
than he has ever done before and liking it more than he expected, "taken
out of himself" as the humans say, and daily increasing in conscious
dependence on the Enemy, he will almost certainly be lost to us if he is
killed tonight. This is so obvious that I am ashamed to write it. I
sometimes wonder if you young fiends are not kept out on temptation-duty
too long at a time--if you are not in some danger of becoming infected by
the sentiments and values of the humans among whom you work. They, of
course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the
greatest good. But that is because we have taught them to do so. Do not
let us be infected by our own propaganda. I know it seems strange that
your chief aim at the moment should be the very same thing for which the
patient's lover and his mother are praying--namely his bodily safety. But
so it is; you should be guarding him like the apple of your eye. If he
dies now, you lose him. If he survives the war, there is always hope. The
Enemy has guarded him from you through the first great wave of
temptations. But, if only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for
your ally. The long, dull monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or
middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather. You see, it is
so hard for these creatures to _persevere_. The routine of adversity, the
gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair
(hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with
which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create
in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them
to respond to it--all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out
a soul by attrition. If, on the other hand, the middle years prove
prosperous, our position is even stronger. Prosperity knits a man to the
World. He feels that he is "finding his place in it", while really it is
finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle
of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of
absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at
home in earth which is just what we want. You will notice that the young
are generally less unwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old.

The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to
life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from
the danger of feeling at home anywhere else. That is why we must often
wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for
the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up
a firm attachment to the earth. While they are young we find them always
shooting off at a tangent. Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of
explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and
poetry--the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a
horizon--are always blowing our whole structure away. They _will_ not
apply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent connections,
and the policy of safety first. So inveterate is their appetite for
Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is
to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future
date by politics or eugenics or "science" or psychology, or what not.
Real worldliness is a work of time--assisted, of course, by pride, for we
teach them to describe the creeping death as good sense or Maturity or
Experience. _Experience_, in the peculiar sense we teach them to give it,
is, by the bye, a most useful word. A great human philosopher nearly let
our secret out when he said that where Virtue is concerned "Experience is
the mother of illusion"; but thanks to a change in Fashion, and also, of
course, to the Historical Point of View, we have largely rendered his
book innocuous.

How valuable time is to us may be gauged by the fact that the Enemy
allows us so little of it. The majority of the human race dies in
infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth. It is obvious that
to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human
death, and death solely as the gate to that other kind of life. We are
allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans
call a 'normal life' is the exception. Apparently He wants some--but only
a very few--of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have
had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or
seventy years. Well, there is our opportunity. The smaller it is, the
better we must use it. Whatever you do, keep your patient as safe as you
possibly can,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XXIX


My dear Wormwood,

Now that it is certain the German humans will bombard your patient's town
and that his duties will keep him in the thick of the danger, we must
consider our policy. Are we to aim at cowardice--or at courage, with
consequent pride--or at hatred of the Germans?

Well, I am afraid it is no good trying to make him brave. Our research
department has not yet discovered (though success is hourly expected) how
to produce _any_ virtue. This is a serious handicap. To be greatly and
effectively wicked a man needs some virtue. What would Attila have been
without his courage, or Shylock without self-denial as regards the flesh?
But as we cannot supply these qualities ourselves, we can only use them
as supplied by the Enemy--and this means leaving Him a kind of foothold in
those men whom, otherwise, we have made most securely our own. A very
unsatisfactory arrangement, but, I trust, we shall one day learn to do
better.

Hatred we can manage. The tension of human nerves during noise, danger,
and fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion and it is only a
question of guiding this susceptibility into the right channels. If
conscience resists, muddle him. Let him say that he feels hatred not on
his own behalf but on that of the women and children, and that a
Christian is told to forgive his own, not other people's enemies. In
other words let him consider himself sufficiently identified with the
women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but _not_ sufficiently
identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper
objects of forgiveness.

But hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone of all the vices,
is purely painful--horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to
remember; Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the
_compensation_ by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the
miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. And Hatred is
also a great anodyne for shame. To make a deep wound in his charity, you
should therefore first defeat his courage.

Now this is a ticklish business. We have made men proud of most vices,
but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, the
Enemy permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once
courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that
all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which
they feel genuine shame. The danger of inducing cowardice in our
patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and
self-loathing with consequent repentance and humility. And in fact, in
the last war, thousands of humans, by discovering their own cowardice,
discovered the whole moral world for the first time. In peace we can make
many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is
forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them. There is
here a cruel dilemma before us. If we promoted justice and charity among
men, we should be playing directly into the Enemy's hands; but if we
guide them to the opposite behaviour, this sooner or later produces (for
He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable
issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor.

This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy's motives for creating a
dangerous world--a world in which moral issues really come to the point.
He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply _one_ of the
virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means,
at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which
yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.
Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

It is therefore possible to lose as much as we gain by making your man a
coward; he may learn too much about himself! There is, of course, always
the chance, not of chloroforming the shame, but of aggravating it and
producing Despair. This would be a great triumph. It would show that he
had believed in, and accepted, the Enemy's forgiveness of his other sins
only because he himself did not fully feel their sinfulness--that in
respect of the one vice which he really understands in its full depth of
dishonour he cannot seek, nor credit, the Mercy. But I fear you have
already let him get too far in the Enemy's school, and he knows that
Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it.

As to the actual technique of temptations to cowardice, not much need be
said. The main point is that precautions have a tendency to increase
fear. The precautions publicly enjoined on your patient, however, soon
become a matter of routine and this effect disappears. What you must do
is to keep running in his mind (side by side with the conscious intention
of doing his duty) the vague idea of all sorts of things he can do or not
do, _inside_ the framework of the duty, which seem to make him a little
safer. Get his mind off the simple rule ("I've got to stay here and do
so-and-so") into a series of imaginary life lines ("If A happened--though
I very much hope it won't--I could do B--and if the worst came to the
worst, I could always do C"). Superstitions, if not recognised as such,
can be awakened. The point is to keep him feeling that he has
_something_, other than the Enemy and courage the Enemy supplies, _to
fall back on_, so that what was intended to be a total commitment to duty
becomes honeycombed all through with little unconscious reservations. By
building up a series of imaginary expedients to prevent "the worst coming
to the worst" you may produce, at that level of his will which he is not
aware of, a determination that the worst _shall not_ come to the worst.
Then, at the moment of real terror, rush it out into his nerves and
muscles and you may get the fatal act done before he knows what you're
about. For remember, the _act_ of cowardice is all that matters; the
emotion of fear is, in itself, no sin and, though we enjoy it, does us no
good,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XXX


My dear Wormwood,

I sometimes wonder whether you think you have been sent into the world
for your own amusement. I gather, not from your miserably inadequate
report but from that of the Infernal Police, that the patient's behaviour
during the first raid has been the worst possible. He has been very
frightened and thinks himself a great coward and therefore feels no
pride; but he has done everything his duty demanded and perhaps a bit
more. Against this disaster all you can produce on the credit side is a
burst of ill temper with a dog that tripped him up, some excessive
cigarette smoking, and the forgetting of a prayer. What is the use of
whining to me about your difficulties? If you are proceeding on the
Enemy's idea of "justice" and suggesting that your opportunities and
intentions should be taken into account, then I am not sure that a charge
of heresy does not lie against you. At any rate, you will soon find that
the justice of Hell is purely realistic, and concerned only with results.
Bring us back food, or be food yourself.

The only constructive passage in your letter is where you say that you
still expect good results from the patient's fatigue. That is well
enough. But it won't fall into your hands. Fatigue _can_ produce extreme
gentleness, and quiet of mind, and even something like vision. If you
have often seen men led by it into anger, malice and impatience, that is
because those men have had efficient tempters. The paradoxical thing is
that moderate fatigue is a better soil for peevishness than absolute
exhaustion. This depends partly on physical causes, but partly on
something else. It is not fatigue simply as such that produces the anger,
but unexpected demands on a man already tired. Whatever men expect they
soon come to think they have a right to: the sense of disappointment can,
with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury. It
is after men have given in to the irremediable, after they have despaired
of relief and ceased to think even a half-hour ahead, that the dangers of
humbled and gentle weariness begin. To produce the best results from the
patient's fatigue, therefore, you must feed him with false hopes. Put
into his mind plausible reasons for believing that the air-raid will not
be repeated. Keep him comforting himself with the thought of how much he
will enjoy his bed next night. Exaggerate the weariness by making him
think it will soon be over; for men usually feel that a strain could have
been endured no longer at the very moment when it is ending, or when they
think it is ending. In this, as in the problem of cowardice, the thing to
avoid is the total commitment. Whatever he _says_, let his inner
resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it "for a
reasonable period"--and let the reasonable period be shorter than the
trial is likely to last. It need not be _much_ shorter; in attacks on
patience, chastity, and fortitude, the fun is to make the man yield just
when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight.

I do not know whether he is likely to meet the girl under conditions of
strain or not. If he does, make full use of the fact that up to a certain
point, fatigue makes women talk more and men talk less. Much secret
resentment, even between lovers, can be raised from this.

Probably the scenes he is now witnessing will not provide material for an
_intellectual_ attack on his faith--your previous failures have put that
out of your power. But there is a sort of attack on the emotions which
can still be tried. It turns on making him _feel_, when first he sees
human remains plastered on a wall, that this is "what the world is
_really_ like" and that all his religion has been a fantasy. You will
notice that we have got them completely fogged about the meaning of the
word "real". They tell each other, of some great spiritual experience,
"All that _really_ happened was that you heard some music in a lighted
building"; here "Real" means the bare physical facts, separated from the
other elements in the experience they actually had. On the other hand,
they will also say "It's all very well discussing that high dive as you
sit here in an armchair, but wait till you get up there and see what it's
_really_ like": here "real" is being used in the opposite sense to mean,
not the physical facts (which they know already while discussing the
matter in armchairs) but the emotional effect those facts will have on a
human consciousness. Either application of the word could be defended;
but our business is to keep the two going at once so that the emotional
value of the word "real" can be placed now on one side of the account,
now on the other, as it happens to suit us. The general rule which we
have now pretty well established among them is that in all experiences
which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are "Real"
while the spiritual elements are "subjective"; in all experiences which
can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main
reality and to ignore them is to be an escapist. Thus in birth the blood
and pain are "real", the rejoicing a mere subjective point of view; in
death, the terror and ugliness reveal what death "really means". The
hatefulness of a hated person is "real"--in hatred you see men as they
are, you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is
merely a subjective haze concealing a "real" core of sexual appetite or
economic association. Wars and poverty are "really" horrible; peace and
plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain
sentiments. The creatures are always accusing one another of wanting "to
eat the cake and have it"; but thanks to our labours they are more often
in the predicament of paying for the cake and not eating it. Your
patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his
emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his
emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment,

                        Your affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape




                                  XXXI


My dear, my very dear, Wormwood, my poppet, my pigsnie,

How mistakenly now that all is lost you come whimpering to ask me whether
the terms of affection in which I address you meant nothing from the
beginning. Far from it! Rest assured, my love for you and your love for
me are as like as two peas. I have always desired you, as you (pitiful
fool) desired me. The difference is that I am the stronger. I think they
will give you to me now; or a bit of you. Love you? Why, yes. As dainty a
morsel as ever I grew fat on.

You have let a soul slip through your fingers. The howl of sharpened
famine for that loss re-echoes at this moment through all the levels of
the Kingdom of Noise down to the very Throne itself. It makes me mad to
think of it. How well I know what happened at the instant when they
snatched him from you! There was a sudden clearing of his eyes (was there
not?) as he saw you for the first time, and recognised the part you had
had in him and knew that you had it no longer. Just think (and let it be
the beginning of your agony) what he felt at that moment; as if a scab
had fallen from an old sore, as if he were emerging from a hideous,
shell-like tetter, as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet,
clinging garment. By Hell, it is misery enough to see them in their
mortal days taking off dirtied and uncomfortable clothes and splashing in
hot water and giving little grunts of pleasure--stretching their eased
limbs. What, then, of this final stripping, this complete cleansing?

The more one thinks about it, the worse it becomes. He got through so
easily! No gradual misgivings, no doctor's sentence, no nursing home, no
operating theatre, no false hopes of life; sheer, instantaneous
liberation. One moment it seemed to be all our world; the scream of
bombs, the fall of houses, the stink and taste of high explosive on the
lips and in the lungs, the feet burning with weariness, the heart cold
with horrors, the brain reeling, the legs aching; next moment all this
was gone, gone like a bad dream, never again to be of any account.
Defeated, out-manoeuvred fool! Did you mark how naturally--as if he'd been
born for it--the earth-born vermin entered the new life? How all his
doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? I know what the
creature was saying to itself! "Yes. Of course. It always was like this.
All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and
forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you
thought you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all
was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth
was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die
and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?"

As he saw you, he also saw Them. I know how it was. You reeled back dizzy
and blinded, more hurt by them than he had ever been by bombs. The
degradation of it!--that this thing of earth and slime could stand upright
and converse with spirits before whom you, a spirit, could only cower.
Perhaps you had hoped that the awe and strangeness of it would dash his
joy. But that is the cursed thing; the gods are strange to mortal eyes,
and yet they are not strange. He had no faintest conception till that
very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But
when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realised what
part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had
supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not
"Who _are_ you?" but "So it was _you_ all the time". All that they were
and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends
about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last
explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always
just evaded memory was now at last recovered. Recognition made him free
of their company almost before the limbs of his corpse became quiet. Only
you were left outside.

He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a
bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you, is now
cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man. You
would like, if you could, to interpret the patient's prostration in the
Presence, his self-abhorrence and utter knowledge of his sins (yes,
Wormwood, a clearer knowledge even than yours) on the analogy of your own
choking and paralysing sensations when you encounter the deadly air that
breathes from the heart of Heaven. But it's all nonsense. Pains he may
still have to encounter, but they _embrace_ those pains. They would not
barter them for any earthly pleasure. All the delights of sense, or
heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the
delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half
nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears
that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had
believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door. He is caught up
into that world where pain and pleasure take on transfinite values and
all our arithmetic is dismayed. Once more, the inexplicable meets us.
Next to the curse of useless tempters like yourself the greatest curse
upon us is the failure of our Intelligence Department. If only we could
find out what He is really up to! Alas, alas, that knowledge, in itself
so hateful and mawkish a thing, should yet be necessary for Power!
Sometimes I am almost in despair. All that sustains me is the conviction
that our Realism, our rejection (in the face of all temptations) of all
silly nonsense and claptrap, _must_ win in the end. Meanwhile, I have you
to settle with. Most truly do I sign myself

          Your increasingly and ravenously affectionate uncle
                                                               Screwtape






                          Transcriber's Notes


--Copyright notice provided as in the original--this e-text is public
  domain in Canada.

--Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard spellings and
  dialect unchanged.

--Only in the text versions, delimited italicized text in _underscores_
  (the HTML version reproduces the font form of the printed book.)






[End of The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis]
