The Screwtape Letters Audiobook

[Music] audio literature presents the Screwtape Letters read by John please I'd like first to read the preface written by CS lewis at maudlin college on July the 5th 1941 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 devil's 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 is once learn the neck 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 father spike or the patient's mother are holy just there is wishful thinking in hell as well as on earth in conclusion I ought to wear that no effort has been made to clear up the chronology of the letters number 17 appears to being 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 insofar as it happens now and then to impinge upon the spiritual condition of one human being was obviously of no interest to screw-type [Music] my dear wormwood I note what you say about guiding your patients reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend but are you not being a trifle naive it sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches now 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 were the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that your man has been accustomed ever since he was a boy to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head he doesn't think of doctrines as primarily true or false but as academic or practical outworn or contemporary conventional or ruthless jargon not argument is your best ally in keeping him from the church don't waste time try to make him think that materialism is true make him think it is strong or stark or courageous but 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 to whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I'm 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 favor you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues 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 enemies you don't realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary I once had a patient a sound atheist who used to read in the British Museum one day as he sat reading I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way the enemy of course was at his elbow in a moment before I knew where I was I saw my 20 years work beginning to totter if I had lost my head and began to attempt a defense by argument I should have been undone but I was not such a fool I struck instantly at the part of the man that I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch now the enemy presumably made the counter suggestion you know how one could never quite overhear what he says 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 that patient brightened up considerably and by the time I had added much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind he was already halfway to the door once he was in the street the battle was won I showed him a newsboy shout in the midday paper and a number 73 bus going by 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 on 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 again 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 well 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 defense against Christianity they will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see there have been sad cases among the 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 reading is the results of modern investigation do remember you are there to phuddle him from the way some of you young fiends talk anybody would suppose it was our job to teach your affectionate uncle Screwtape [Music] 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 and the enemy's camp and on how with us all the habits of the patient both mental and bodily are still in our favor 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 oldest 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 state 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 around him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided you wanted lean pretty heavily on those neighbors 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 neighbors 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 armors and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real they'll cause 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 he will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which he'll affords work hard 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 endeavor 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 girls 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 handling 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 [Music] 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 center outwards gradually bringing more and more of the patients conduct under the new standard and may reach his behavior to the old lady at any moment you want to get in first keep in close touch with our colleague bloomers 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 one 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 expedited 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 she can practice 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 all worked in the same office too 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 sora 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 herself we'll 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 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 wife's or son's soul to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm three when two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face that are almost unendurable 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 turns and looks which similarly annoy her as he cannot see or hear himself this is easily managed and for in civilized 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 glue bows 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 were the fullest most oversensitive interpretation of a tone and a 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 asked 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 say things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offenses take 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 Pete that he should have learned from others and so late what she considers she gave him such a good opportunity of learning in childhood does she feel he is making a great deal of fuss about it all that he's getting in on very easy terms remember the elder brother in the enemies story your affectionate uncle Screwtape [Music] my dear wormwood the amateurish suggestions in your last letter warned 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 right to his uncle nor a junior tempt her to the Undersecretary 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 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 in word informal and unregular eyes 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 practiced by those who are very far advanced in the enemy's service clever and lazy patience 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 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 miss direction 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're 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 forgiving 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 whenever 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 human beings 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 at if you look into your patients 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 ink on there will be Vega 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 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 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 comes to make the distinction if he consciously directs his prayers not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thy self to be our situation is for the moment desperate once all his thoughts and images have been flying 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 Roman never knowable by him as he is known by it wide 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 affection of Uncle Screwtape [Music] 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 were 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 and you're very unbalanced accounts 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 labors the anguish and the wildermann 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 of the happy past some fine thrills and 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 the 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 then he will be yours for ever a brimful 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 Myriad's 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 Escapist 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 favorites only to tantalize and torment us to mock the incessant hunger which during this present fees 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 favor 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 was following the best they knew consider to 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 admit doctors who lie nurses who live 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 less it should betray to the sick man his true condition and how disastrous first is the continual remember currents of death which war enforces one of our best weapons contented worldliness is rendered useless in wartime not even a human can believe he is going to live forever I know that scab tree 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 was speaking now of diffused suffering over a long periods 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 they were affectionate uncle Screwtape [Music] my dear wormwood I am delighted to hear that your patience age and profession make it possible but by no means certain that he will be called out 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 would 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 of 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 practice fortitude and patience to them in advance for real resignation at the same moment to a dozen different and hypothetical faiths is almost impossible and the enemy does not greatly assist those who are trying to attain it resignation to present an 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 under estate 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 favor our cause encourage the patient to be unselfconscious and to concentrate on the object but in all activities favorable 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 neighbors 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's never met these people in real life they are lay figures modeled on what he gets from the newspapers the results of such fanciful hatred or off the most disappointing and of all humans the English are in this respect the most deplorable milk sobs they are creatures of that miserable sort who loudly proclaim the 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 patients soul the great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference to people he does not the malleus thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary there is no good at all in in flaming his hatred of Germans if at the same time a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother his employer or 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 insofar as they reach the will and their their embodied inhabits that the virtues are really fatal to us I don't of course mean what the patient mistakes for his will the the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth but the the real scent of 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 he may make him more amusing when he gets there your affectionate uncle Screwtape [Music] my dear wormwood I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in ignorant of your errand existence that question at least for the present phase 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 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 skeptics at least not yet I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalize and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is in effect of 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 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 cannot therefore believe in you I have not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient and extreme patriot or an extreme pacifists all extremes except extreme diversion to the enemy are to be encouraged not always of course but at this period some ages are lukewarm and complacent and it is our business to sue them yet faster asleep other ages of which the president 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 hot house mutual admiration and towards the outer world a great deal of pride and hatred which is entertain without shame because the course 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 either 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 affection but subordinate factions within her have often produced admirable results from the parties of Paula and of a policy 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 automatically find himself one of a small vocal organized and unpopular society and the effects of this on one so new to Christianity will almost certainly be good but only almost certain had 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 went 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 but whichever he adopts your main task will be the same let him begin by treating the patriotism or the pacifism as 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 favor of the British war effort or a pacifism the attitude which you want a 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 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 us and the more religious on those terms the more securely ours oh I could show you a pretty cage full down here your affectionate uncle Screwtape [Music] my dear were what sir you have great hopes that the patient's religious phase is dying away heavier I always thought the training college guard pieces as they put all slap gob at the head of it now I'm sure has no one ever told you about the law of undulation humans are amphibians half spirit and half animals 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 what 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 dullness through which your patient is now going and 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 trust even more than on the peaks some of his special favorites 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 Salford 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 in them as one would gladly believe me a propaganda but an appalling truth he really does want to fill the universe with a lot of blow some 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 coming 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 override 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 he can only woo but his ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it the creatures are to be one with him and yet themselves merely to cancel them or assimilate them would not serve he is prepared to do a little overriding 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 what we can drag our patients along by continual tempting because we designed 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 so do not be deceived our course is never more in danger than when a human no longer desiring but still intending to do our enemies 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 shall give you some hints on how to exploit them your affectionate uncle Screwtape my dear wormwood I hope my last letter has convinced you that the trough of dullness 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 shall now consider in the first place I have always found that the trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunities for all sense your 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 concomitant 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 then by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment amongst his friends when he is happy and expansive I forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in it's 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 and 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 blends 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 orders of his conversion might have been expected last of an autumn lasted forever and that his present dryness is a 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 amongst the humans if your patient should happen to and with everything is easy you have only got to keep him out of the way of experienced Christians and easy tasks nowadays 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 willpower 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 into 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 a direct attack on his faith when you've 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's 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's jog and 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 patronizing to the ones he has emerged from not because he's really criticized them but simply because they are in the past you keep him well fed on hazy ideas of progress development and the historical point of view I trust and give him lots of modern biographies to read these people in them they're always emerging from phases are they so you see the idea keep his mind off the plain antithesis between true and false nice shadowy expression it was a phase I've been through all that don't forget the Blessed word adolescent your affectionate uncle Screwtape my dear wormwood I was delighted to hear from trip trees 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 at just the sort of people we want him to know rich smart superficially intellectual and brightly skeptical about everything in the world I gather they 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's a subtle play of looks and tones and loves 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 realize it himself and by the time he does you will have made withdrawal difficult no doubt he must very soon realized 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 force 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 skeptical attitudes which are not really his but if you play him well they may become yes all mortals tend to turn into the thing that they're 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 realizes 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 2,000 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 fewer 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 that we've 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 realize 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 will 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 contrary wise to enjoy the boardy 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 decease to do so would be pretty sh intolerant and of course puritanical meanwhile he would 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 [Music] 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 a thoroughly reliable people steady consistent scoffers and welding's who without any spectacular crimes are progressing quietly and comfortably towards our father's house you speak of their being great laughes I trust this does not mean that that you are under the impression that laughter as such is always in our favor 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 and the wear jokes is usually provided but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produced 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 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 used 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'm not thinking primarily of indecent or bawdy humor which though much relied upon by second-rate tempters is often disappointing in its results the truth is that he ones 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 any indecent story ceases to produce lasciviousness precisely insofar 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 humor will not help you I shall never forget the hours which I wasted hours to be of unbearable tedium with one of my early patients in bars and smoking rooms before I learn this rule find out which group the patient belongs to and see that he does not find out the real use of jokes or humor is in quite a different direction and it is specially promising among the English who take their sense of humor so seriously that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency of which they feel shame humor is for them the all consoling and Marcus 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 twitch his fellows with having been scored off he is no longer mean but a comical fellow mere cowardice is shameful cowardice boasted off 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 baudet 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 humor any suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as puritanical or as betraying a lack of humor 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 a 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 [Music] my dear wormwood obviously you are making excellent progress my only fear is less than attempting to hurry the patient you were waking 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 affected 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 then that he should realize 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 recently this dim uneasiness needs careful handling if it gets too strong it may wake him up and spoil a 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 that patience 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 10 they hate every idea that suggests him just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a bankbook 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 forgive him as soon as possible when they're 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 always begging you to distract his purpose and be numb his heart he won't 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 could make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people who meet likes but also 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 over healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing 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 taught 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 or it knows not what and those know why in the gratification of curiosities so feeble the man is only half aware of them in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels and 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 started them the creature is too weak and shuttled to shake off you will say 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 that 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 angle Screwtape [Music] My dear of 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 they repentance and renewal of what the other side call grace on the scale which you described 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 Clara 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 and a certain modes not yet fully classified some humans are permanently surrounded by it and therefore in accessible to us and now for your blunder 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 to real positive pleasures where 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 dam your man by the romantic method by making him a kind of child Harold or better submerged in self-pity for imaginary de-stresses you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain because of calls five minutes genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they wear and unmask your whole stratagem but you were trying to dam your patient by the world that is by palming off vanity bustle irony and pensive tedium as pleasures how can you have fail 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 laborious ly 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 that 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 for themselves but in a different way remember always that he really liked the little firm him and said sit absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them when he talks at they're losing their selves he means only abandoning the clamor of self will once they have done that he really gives them back all their personality and boasts I'm I'm afraid sincerely that when they are wholly his they will be more themselves than ever pence 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 had to get him away from those is therefore always a point paint even in things indifferent it is always desirable to substitute the standards of the world or conventional fashion for a human's own real likings and disliking 's 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 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 happens what other people say about it is by that very fact for armed against some of our setlist modes of attack you should always try to make the patient abandoned 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 temptation to social ambition by 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 it let him if he has any been that way write a book about it that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the enemy plants in a human self 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 have 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 [Music] 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 for too long for fear you awake his sense of humor 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 neighbors all the objection and self-hatred are designed in the long run solely for this end unless they attain this end they do us a 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 a 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 fixed in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to me 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 that they're 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 then 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 favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor's talents or in a sunrise and elephant or a waterfall he wants each man in the long run to be able to recognize all creatures even himself as glorious and excellent things he wants to kill their animals 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 neighbors as themselves they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbors for we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our enemy he he 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 then that he should spend much time in pains trying to think himself a bad one your efforts to instill 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 color 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 [Music] my dear wormwood I had noticed of course that the humans were having a lull in their European war what they naively call the war and I'm not surprised that there is a corresponding lull in the patience anxiety 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 Destin's 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 se widow or 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 determinant 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 in flames hope and fear also it is unknown to them so that in making them think about it we may than think of and realities in a word the future is of all things the thing least like eternity it is the most completely temporal part of time 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 a 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 Mara'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 now 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 doing so we make him think he can tane 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 whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbows end never honest nor kind not happy now but always using as mere fuel were width to heap on the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in a present it follows them in general and other things being equal that it is better for your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope 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 it 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 at 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 fellow logic alarms done good work try the word complacency 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 over you know natural phenomenon is really in our favor and anyway why should the creature be happy your affectionate uncle Screwtape my dear wormwood the contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of catching souls in your last letter shows only 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 affected by concentrating all our efforts on gluttony of delicacy not gluttony of excess your patience mother as I learned from the dossier and you might have learned from Gruber's 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 querulous honest impatiens and charitable nurse and self concern lubos has this old woman well in hand she is a positive terror to hostesses and servants she is always turning from what she's been offered to say with a demure little sigh and a smile oh please please to all I want is a cup of tea weak but not too weak and the tinea Sweeney as' bit of really crisp toast you see because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before she never recognizes 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 practicing temperance in a crowded restaurant she gives a little scream at the plate which some overworked waitress has set before and says oh 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 glue bows 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 sermon or any friend who can do these simple things properly because her properly conceals an insatiable demand for the exact and almost impossible palette all 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 at the table meanwhile the daily disappointment produces daily ill temper cooks give notice and friendships are cooled if ever the enemy introduces into our mind a feigned suspicion that she is too interested in food glue bows counted 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 heart is 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 buddy all I want camouflage males are best turned into gluttons were the help of their vanity they ought to be made to think themselves very knowing about food to peek themselves on having found the only restaurant in the town where stakes are really properly cooked what begins as vanity can then be gradually turned into half 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 with champagne or teas sold cold air or cigarettes puts him out for then his charity justice and obedience 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 inquiry into what he's been eating or drinking for the last 24 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 use 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 [Music] my dear wormwood even under slub god you must have learned at college the routine technique of sexual temptation and since for our 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'll 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 fathers 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 humans that are 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 especially that oneself 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 itself 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 oneself is to be the good of another this impossibility he calls love and this same monotonous panacea can be detected and all he does or even all he is all claims to be thus he is not content even himself to be a sheer arithmetic or unity he claims to be three as well as one in order for this nonsense about love may find a foothold in his own nature and the other end of the scale he introduces him to matter that obscene invention the organism in which the parts are perverted from their natural destiny of competition and made to cooperate is real motive for fixing on sex as the method of reproduction of my 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 but 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 here comes the joke the enemy described a married couple as one flesh he did not say a happily married couple or a couple of 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 ask at 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 immediately 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 design 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 colored and distorted version of something the enemy really promises as its result do advantages follow in the first place humans who have not the gift of countenance 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 or something lower than a storm of emotion and don't neglect to make your man think that marriage service very offensive in the second place any sexual infatuation whatever as long as it intends marriage will be regarded as love and love will be held to excuse a man from all the guilts 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 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 the counters 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've not showed my letters to anyone not that it matters of course anyone would see that the appearance of heresy into which I fall is purely accidental by the way I hope you understand too that some apparently uncomplimentary references to slab gob were purely jocular I really have the highest respect for him and of course some things I said about not shielding Hugh from Thor ''tis were not seriously bent you can trust me to look after your interest 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 is of course 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 it can do any harm to tell you that this very problem was the chief cause of our fathers quarrel with the enemy when the creation of man was first mooted and when even at that's 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's been circulating ever since this our Father naturally could not accept he implore 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 imagined at this stage in the interview that our fathers discussed at such an unprovoked lack of confidence caused him to remove himself an infinite a 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 we came to understand what he means by love the war would be over we should reenter ever 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's really up to hypothesis after hypothesis has been tried 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 what a novel patriotism or celibacy or candles on altars or teetotalism or education is 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 instill into him an overweening asceticism and then when you've separated his sexuality from all that might humanize it weigh in on him with it in some much more brutal and cynical for 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 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 suicide feigning that it can be used to steer the patient into a useful marriage for marriage although the enemy's invention has its uses there must be several young women in your patients neighborhood 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 your necks right in the meantime get it quite clear in your mind that this state of falling in love is not in itself necessarily favourable either to us all 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 aging youth or peace and war it is from the point of view of the spiritual life mainly raw material your affectionate uncle Screwtape [Music] an idea of 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 was stopped before you reach 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 neighborhood 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 should 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 that we can manage in a rough-and-ready way of course this question is decided for us by spirits far deeper down in the lower our key 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 dress makers 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 and prodigal women and another we have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type faintin languishing so that the folly and cowardice and all the general falseness and little lists of mine which go with them shall be at a premium since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most with us aggravate the females chronic horror of growing old with many excellent results and render her less winning and less able to bear children and that is not all we have engineered a great increase in the license 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 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 role 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 patients 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 terrestial and an infernal Venus and that his desire differs qualitatively according to its object readily mixed with charity readily obedient to marriage cut it all through with that golden light irreverence of naturalist which we did test 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 and I do 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 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 saltiness or craft or cruelty which he likes 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 would 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 [Music] 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 is 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 friends talkative wife turning up when he looked forward to a tete-a-tete with a friend that throws him out of gear now he is not yet so on charitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for him 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 24 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 find a shred of argument in its defense 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 moon and the Sun 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 will 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 the pitch of disappointment if for only 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 realized 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 rapid darkness round it and in the center 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 an inhale 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 pulsing with the energy that may the world 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's place for love's sake in titular commander some great province under the real rule of wise counselors should come to fancy he really owns the cities the forest and the court 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 not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun the finally 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're 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 guard on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit and all the time the joke is that the word mine in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by human being about anything in the long run either our Father or the enemy will say mine of everything that exists and especially of each man they will find out in here never fear to whom their time their souls and their bodies really belong certainly not to them whatever happens at present the enemy's is 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 [Music] 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 the little misunderstanding with a secret police which you tried to raise about some unguarded expressions in one of my letters has been tidied 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 I'm horrified at what I find not only a Christian but such a Christian a vile sneaking simpering demure monosyllabic mouths like watery insignificant virginal bread-and-butter miss the little brute she makes me vomit she stinks and skulls through the very pages of the dossier drives me mad the way the world has worsened we'd have had her in the arena in the old days that's what her sort is made for not that she do much go there either a two-faced little cheat I know the sort it looks as if she'd faint at the sight of blood and then dies with a smile a cheat every way it looks as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth and yet has a satirical with a sort of creature don't find me honey filthy insipid little prude and yet ready to fall into this boobies arms like any other breeding animal why doesn't the enemy blast her for it if he's so moonstruck my virginity instead of looking on there dreaming he's a hedonist at heart all those fasts and vigils and sphynx and crosses are only a facade we're only like foam on the seashore 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 forevermore I don't think he has the least inkling of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the misery thick vision he's bought her wormwood he has a bourgeois mind 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 now that that excuses you I'll settle with you presently you've always hated me and been insolent when you dared then of course he gets to know this woman's family and whole so could you not see that the very house she lives in is one he ought never to have entered the whole place reeks of that deadly odor the very gardener though he has been there only five years is beginning to acquire it even guests after a weekend 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 be in some way making capital out of the others but we can't find how they guard as jealously as the enemy himself the secret of what really lies behind his pretence of disinterested love the whole house and garden are one vast absurdity it bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human right are 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 vile 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 we'll be shouted down in the end but I admit we are not yet loud enough nor anything like it research is in progress meanwhile you just gasping 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 rumor 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 Shaw 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 toad pipe for his abysmal sublimity undersecretary Screwtape TBS etc [Music] 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 in 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 coloring 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 council infidelity in marriage and in constancy 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 love of permanence he has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world he's 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 this natural pleasantness of change and twisted 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 conquers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite or Unruh the core 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 then perhaps they have ever been lowbrow and highbrow 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 vogue the use of fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers weave direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices which is his 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 around with fire extinguishers whenever there's a flood and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunnel 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 essentially 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 comes in so usefully the enemy loves platitudes of a proposed course of action he wants men as far as I can see to ask very simple questions easy to righteous easy 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 well their minds are buzzing in this vacuum we have a 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 adjectives unchanged we have substituted the emotional adjectives stagnant we have trained them to think of the future as a Promised Land which favoured heroes attained not as something which everybody reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour whatever he does whoever he is your affectionate uncle Screwtape [Music] 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 a 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 waved 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 fellow logical 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 party's concern our 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 guard 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 everyday thus while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people's rights each sex without any obvious own reason 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 the mode 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 we choose 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 favor of bees suppose wishes and against his own while bee 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 harbors 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 altruism but he's not gonna be done out of his debauchery unselfishness either he insists on doing what the others want they insist on doing what he wants passions are aroused soon someone is saying very well then I won't have tea at all and a real quarrel ensues with bitter resentment on both sides you see how it's 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 forted self-righteousness and obstinacy and from the accumulated grudges in the last 10 years is concealed from them by the nominal or official unselfishness of what they're 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-conscious unselfishness which may one day blossom into the sort of thing I've described some degree of mutual falseness some surprise that the girl does not always noticed 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 the charity is needed and not yet achieved and that no external law can supply its place oh and I wish slum TripIt would do something about undermining that young woman's sense of the ridiculous your affectionate uncle Screwtape [Music] 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 willpower 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 Lee's endeavors 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 another such matter 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 of 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 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 patience has contracted the terrible habit of obedience it will probably continue such crude prayers whatever you do but you can one of 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 thingy praiseful doesn't happen then that is one more proof that petitionary prayer don't work if it does happen it would 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 the enemy does not see things that way yet in his heart of hearts he regards this as a peculiarities 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 try to explain to him that men's prayers today are one of the innumerable coordinates with which the enemy harmonizes 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 we're 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 are you ought to say of course it's obvious to us that the problem of adapting the particular weather to the particular prayers is merely the appearance two points in his temporal mode a 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 enemies nonsense about love how it does so is no problem at all enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future but sees them doing so in his unbounded now 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 that we have at last succeeded in producing throughout Western Europe you needn't bother about that only the learning read old books and we have now so dealt with the learning 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 learning 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 on the right is development or in the general history thought it illustrates and how it affected later writers and how it has been misunderstood especially about the learning man's own colleagues and what the general course of criticism on it has been to 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 what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded and since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time it is most important to us 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 an hour's little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that history is bunk your affectionate uncle Screwtape [Music] 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 Rhapsody's about the death of men and the destruction of cities insofar as the war really concerns a 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 realize 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've 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 defense 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 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 when 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 a 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 will have time itself for your ally the long Dharma Nautilus years of middle age prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning whether 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 he inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out to soul by attrition if on the other hand the middle years prove prosperous our position is even stronger prosperity myths a man to the world he feels that he is finding his place in it well really it is finding its place in him his increasing reputation is widening circle of acquaintances his sense of importance the growing pressure of absorbing an agreeable work build up in him a sense of being really at home on 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 70 years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unraveling 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 laughs poetry I mean a face of a girl is sort of a bird 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 the 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 by a most useful word a great human philosopher nearly let our secret eye 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 died 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 very few of the human animals with which he is peopling heaven - a heavy experience of resisting us through an earthly life of 60 or 70 years hmm well that 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 [Music] my dear wormwood now that it is certain the German humans will bombard your patients town and that his duties will keep you 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'm afraid it's no good trying to make him brave our research department is not yet discovered though successes 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 like without his courage or without his 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 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 busier ease of fear 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 but 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 that 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 or 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 behavior this sooner or later produces for he permits it to produce a war or a revolution and the undisguised able 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 all honesty of mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions Pontius 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 in 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 his full depth of dishonor he cannot seek nor credit the mercy but I fear you have already let him get too far in the enemies school and he knows the despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoked it hmm 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 seemed to make him a little safer get his mind off the simple rules I've got to stay here and do so answer and into a series of imaginary lifelines 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 recognized as such can be awakened the point is to keep him feeling that he has something other than the enemy and the 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 expedience 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 faecal Act and 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 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 behavior during the first raid has been the worst possible he's being 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 that 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 in 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 tempers 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 of 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 half an hour ahead as 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 a 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 no need relief was almost in sight I do not know whether he is likely to meet the girl and conditions our 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 face your previous failures have put that out of your paw but there is a sort of attack on the emotions which can still be tried it turns on making him feel when he first sees you 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 fond 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 the 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 yeah 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 these spiritual elements are subjective in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them these spiritual elements of 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 your 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 each other of wanting to eat their cake and have it but thanks to our Labour's they are more often in the predicament of paying for the cake and not eating it your patient properly him will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of reality and here's the emotion at the site of happy children or Fairweather as mere sentiment your affectionate uncle Screwtape my dear my very dear wormwood my poppet my honey bun 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 alike 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 Oh a bit of you love you why yes a 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 Masri 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 have fallen from an old saw as if he had 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 ease limbs what then of this final stripping this complete cleansing them all one thing was about it the worse it becomes he got through so easily no gradual misgivings no doctor sentence no nursing hope no operating theater no false hopes of life sheer instantaneous liberation one moment it seemed to be our world the scream of bombs the fall of houses the stinking taste of high-explosive on the lips and in the lungs the feet burning with weariness for heart cold with horror as the brain reeling the legs aching the next moment this was all God gone like a bad dream never again to be of any account defeated out maneuvered for did you mark how naturally as if he'd been born for it the Ashbourne vermin entered the new life how all his doubts became 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 bottleneck 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 died and died 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 real bat dizzy and blinded more hurt by them than he had ever been by bonds 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 would hope that the awe and strangeness of it would - is joy but that is the cursed thing that 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 be locked and even doubted their existence but when he saw them he knew that he had always know and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself a note so that now he could say for them one by one not who are you but so it was you all the time all that they were instead of 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 he'd 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 but gotten in a bed could look on him what is blinding suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him his clarity itself and where's the form for 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 woman a clearer knowledge even than your own on the analogy of your own choking and paralyzing sensations when you encounter the deadly air that breathes from the heart of heaven but it's all Paine's he may still have to encounter but they embrace those pains they would not barter them for any earthly pleasure all the delights a sense or heart or intellect which you could once have tempted him even the delights of virtue itself now seemed to him in comparison but as the half nausea subtractions of a rattled 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 where all our arithmetic is dismayed once more the inexplicable meets is 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 Morticia things 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 [Music] the scene is in hell at the annual dinner of the tempters training college for young devils the principal dr. slob gob has just proposed the health of the guests Screwtape a very experienced devil who is the guest of honor rises to reply mr. principal your eminence your disgrace is my fall shade ease and gentle Devils it is customary on these occasions for the speaker to address himself chiefly to those among you who have just graduated and who will very soon be posted to official tempter ships on earth it is a custom I willingly obey I will remember with what trepidation I awaited my own first appointment I hope and believe that each one of you has the same uneasy astern ight your career is before you Hill expects and demands that it should be as mine was one of unbroken success if it is not you know what awaits you I have no wish to reduce the wholesome and realistic element of terror the unremitting anxiety which must act as the lash and spur to your endeavors how often you will envy the humans their faculty of sleep yet at the same time I would wish to put before you a moderately encouraging view of the strategical situation as a whole your dreaded principle has included in a speech full of points something like an apology for the banquet that he has set before us well gentle Devils no one blames him but it would be vain to deny that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality not all the most skillful cookery of our tormentors could make them better than insipid Oh to get one's teeth again into a farinata Henry the eighth or even a Hitler it was a real crackling there something to crunch rage it is emultion Lee just less robust than our own it put up a delicious resistance to being devoured it warmed your inwards when you'd got it down instead of this what have we had tonight there was a municipal authority with graft source personally I could not detect in him the flavor of a really passionate and brutal avarice such as delighted one in the great tycoons of the last century was he not unmistakably a little man a creature of the petty rake off pocket hit with a petty joke in private and denied with the stainless platitudes in his public utterances a grubby little nonentity who had drifted into corruption only just realizing that he was corrupt and chiefly because everyone else did it then there was the lukewarm casserole of adulteress could you find it at any trace of a fully inflamed defiant rebellious insatiable lust and I couldn't they all tasted me like undersexed morons who had blundered or trickled into the wrong beds in automatic response to sexy advertisements or to make themselves feel modern and emancipated or to reassure themselves about their virility or their normalcy or even because they had nothing else to do frankly to me who have tasted Messalina and Casanova they were nauseating the trade unionist stuff with sedition was perhaps a shade better he had done some real harm he had not quite unknowingly worked for bloodshed famine and the extinction of Liberty yes in a way but what away he thought of those ultimate objectives so little toeing the party line self-importance and above all mere routine but what really dominated his life but now comes the point gastronomically all this is deplorable but I hope none of us puts gastronomy first is it not in another and far more serious way for of hope and promise consider first the mere quantity the quality may be wretched but we never had cells of a sort in more abundance and then the triumph we have tempted to say that such Souls or such residual puddles of what once was so I hardly worth damming yes but the enemy for whatever inscrutable and perverse reason thought them worth trying to save believe me he did you youngsters are not yet been on active service have no idea with what labor with what delicate skill each of these miserable creatures was finally captured the difficulty lay in their very smallest and flabbiness here were vermin so muddled in mine so passively responsive to environment it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible to raise them just enough but not that fatal millimeter of too much for then of course all would possibly have been lost they might have seen they might have repented on the other hand if they had been raised too little they would very possibly have qualified for limbo as creatures suitable neither for heaven nor for hell things that having failed to make the grade are allowed to sink into a more or less contented sub humanity forever in each individual choice of what the enemy would call the wrong turning such creatures are at first hardly if at all in a state of full spiritual responsibility they do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them and of course we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur what would be a bribe in someone else's profession is a tip or a present in their job or their tempters was first of course to harden these choices of the hell word roads into a habit by steady repetition and then and this was all important to turn the habit into a principle a principle the creature is prepared to defend after that all will go well conformity to the social environment at first merely instinctive or even mechanical how should a djeli not conform now becomes an unacknowledged creed or ideal of togetherness or being like folks mere ignorance of the law they break now turns into a vague theory about it remember they know no history a theory expressed by calling it's conventional or Puritan or bourgeois morality thus gradually there comes to exist at the center of the creature a hard tight settled core of resolution to go on being what it is and even to resist moods that might tend to alter it it is a very small core not at all reflective they're too ignorant nor defiant their emotional and imaginative poverty excludes that almost in its own way prim and demure like a pebble a very young cancer but it will serve our turn here at last is a real and deliberate though not fully articulate rejection of what the enemy calls grace these then are too welcome phenomena first the abundance of our captures however tasteless are fair we are in no danger of famine secondly the triumph the skill of our tempters has never stood higher but the third moral which I have not yet drawn is the most important of all the sort of souls on whose despair and ruin we have well I once a thief did but at any rate subsisted tonight are increasing in numbers and will continue to increase our advices from lower command assure us that this is so our directives warn us to orient all our tactics in view of this situation the great sinners those in whom vivid and genial passions have been pushed beyond the bounds and in an immense concentration of will has been devoted to objects which the enemy abhors will not disappear but they will grow rarer our catches will be ever more numerous but they will consist increasingly of trash trash which we would once a throne to Cerberus and the hellhounds as unfit for diabolical consumption and there are two things I want you to understand about this first that however depressing it may seem it is really a change for the better and secondly I would draw your attention to the means by which it has been brought about it is a change for the better the great and toothsome sinners are made out of the very same material as those horrible phenomena the great Saints the virtual disappearance of such material may mean insipid meals for us but is it not utter frustration and famine for the enemy he did not create the humans he did not become one of them and died among them by torture in order to produce candidates for limbo failed humans he wanted to make Saints gods things like himself is the dullness of your present fare not a very small price to pay for this delicious knowledge that his whole great experiment is petering out but as the great sinners grow fewer and the majority lose all individuality the great sinners become far more effective agents for us every dictator or even demagogue almost every film star or crooner can now draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him they give themselves what there is of them to him in him to us there may come a time when we shall have no need to bother about individual temptation at all except for the few catch the bellwether and his whole flock comes after you but do you realize how we have succeeded in reducing so many of the human race to the level of ciphers has not come about by accident it has been our answer and a magnificent answer it is - one of the most serious challenges we ever had to face let me recall to your minds what the human situation was in the latter half of the nineteenth century the period at which I ceased to be a practicing tempter and was rewarded with an administrative post the great movement towards liberty and equality among men had by then born solid fruits and grown mature slavery had been abolished the American War of Independence had been won the French Revolution had succeeded religious toleration was almost everywhere on the increase in that movement there had originally been many elements that were in our favor much atheism much anti-clericalism much envy and thirst for revenge even some rather absurd attempts to revive paganism were mixed in it it was not easy to determine what our own attitude should be on the one hand it was a bitter blow to us it still is that any sort of man who had been hungry should be fed or any who had long worn change should have them struck off but on the other hand there was in the movement so much rejection of faith so much materialism secularism and hatred that we felt we were bound to encourage it but by the latter half of the century the situation was much simpler and also much more ominous in the English sector where I saw most of my frontline service a horrible thing had happened the enemy with his usual sleight of hand had largely appropriated this progressive or liberalizing movement and perverted it to his own ends very little of its old anti Christianity remained the dangerous phenomenon called Christian socialism was rampant factory owners of the good old type who grew rich on sweated labor instead of being assassinated by their work people we could have used that were being frowned upon by their own class the rich were increasingly giving up their powers not in the face of revolution and compulsion but in obedience to their own consciences as for the poor who benefited by this they were behaving in a most disappointing fashion instead of using their new liberties as we reasonably hoped and expected massacre rape and looting or even for perpetual intoxication they were perversely engaged in becoming cleaner more orderly more 50 better educated and even more virtuous believe me gentle Devils the threat of something like a really healthy state of society seemed then perfectly serious thanks to our Father below the threat was averted our counter-attack was on two levels on the deepest level our leaders contrived to call into full life an element which have been implicit in the movement from its earliest days hidden in the heart of this striving for liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom that invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it in his perfect democracy you remember only the state religion is permitted slavery is restored and the individual is told that he has really willed even though he didn't know it whatever the government tells him to do from that starting point for Hegel another indispensable propagandist on our side we easily can try both the Nazi and the communist state even in England we were pretty successful I heard the other day that in that country a man could not without a permit cut down his own tree with his own axe make it into planks with his own saw and used the planks to build a toolshed in his own God such was our counter-attack on one level you who are mere beginners will not be entrusted with work of that kind you will be attached as tempters to private persons against them or through them our counter-attack takes a different form democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose the good work which our fill illogical experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning they won't it will never occur to them democracy is properly the name of a political system even a system of voting and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to self nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question whether democratic behavior means the behavior that democracies like or the behavior that will preserve a democracy for if they did it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same you are to use the word purely as an incantation if you like purely for its selling power it is a name they venerate and of course it is connected with a political ideal that men should be equally treated you then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal especially the man you are working on as a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading and also the least enjoyable of all human feelings you can get him to practice not only without shame but with a positive glow of self approval conduct which if undefended by the magic word would be universally derided the feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I'm as good as you the first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the center of his life a good solid resounding lie I don't mean merely that his statement is false in fact that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness honesty and good sense than in height or waist measurement I mean that he does not believe it himself no man who says I'm as good as you believes it he would not say it if he did listen Berner never says it to the toy dog nor the scholar to the dance nor the employable to the bum nor the pretty woman to the plain the claim to equality outside the strictly political field is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior what it expresses is precisely the itching spotting driving awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept and therefore resents yes and therefore resents every kind of superiority and others denigrate sit which is its annihilation presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority no one must be different from itself invoice clothes manners recreations choice of food here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphonious Lee than I it must be a vile upstage la-dee-da affectation yes a fellow says he doesn't like hot dogs thinks himself too good for them no doubt here's a man who hasn't turned on the jukebox he's one of those goddamn high brows and is doing it to show off if they were honest to God alright Jose they'd be like me they've no business to be different it's undemocratic now this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new under the name of Indy it has been known to the humans for thousands of years but hitherto they always regarded it is the most odious and also the most comical of Isis those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame those who were not gave it no quarter in others the delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it make it respectable and even laudable by the encanta Tory use of the word democratic under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labor more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level but that is not all under the same influence those who come or could come nearer to a full humanity actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic I am credibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their being like folks the people who would really wish to be and are offered the grace which would enable them to be honest chase or temperate refuses to accept might make them different might offend against the way of life take them out of togetherness impair their integration with the group they might horror of Horrors become individuals all if summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have added recently Oh God make me a normal 20th century girl thanks to our Labour's this will mean increasingly make me a minx a and a parasite meanwhile as a delightful by-product the few fewer everyday who will not be made normal and regular and like folks and integrated increasingly tend to become in reality the prigs and cranks which the rabble would in any case' believe them to be for suspicion often creates what it suspects since whatever I do the neighbors gonna think near which communist agent I might as well be hang for sheep as a lamb and become one in reality as a result we now have an intelligence here which though very small is very useful to the cause of hell but that is a mere by-product what I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting and finally the elimination of every kind of human excellence moral cultural social or intellectual and is it not pretty to notice how democracy in the incantatory sense is now doing for us the work that once was done by the most ancient dictatorships and by the same methods you remember how one of the Greeks they call them tyrants then sent an envoy to another dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government the second dictator led the envoi into a field of grain and there he slicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level the moral was plain allowed no preeminence among your subjects let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mess cut them all down to a level all slaves all ciphers all nobodies all equals that's tyrants could practice in a sense democracy but now democracy can do the same work without any tyranny other than her no one need now go through the field with a cane the little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones and the big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to be like stalks I have said that to secure the damnation of these little cells these creatures that have almost ceased to be individual is a laborious and tricky work but if proper pains and skill are expended you can be fairly confident of the result the great sinners seem easier to catch but then they are incalculable ask you have played them for 70 years the enemy may snatch them from your claws in the 71st they are capable you see of real repentance they are conscious of real guilt they are if things take the wrong turn as ready to defy the social pressures around them for the enemy's sake as they were to defy them for hours it is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot at close range a wild elephant but the elephant is more troublesome if you miss my own experience as I have said was mainly on the English sector and I still get more news from it than from any other it may be that what I am now going to say will not apply so fully to the sectors in which some you may be operating but you can make the necessary adjustments when you get there some application it will almost certainly have if it has too little you must labor to make the country you are dealing with more like what England already is in that promising land the spirit of I'm as good as you has already become something more than a general social influence it begins to work itself into their educational system how far its operations they've gone at the present moment I would not like to say with certainty nor does it matter once you have grasped the tendency you can easily predict its future developments especially as we ourselves will play our part in the developing the basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces & idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils that would be undemocratic these differences between the pupils for they are obviously a naked ly individual differences must be disguised this can be done on various level at universities examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks entrance examinations must be framed so that all nearly all citizens can go to universities whether they have any power or wish to profit by higher education or not at schools the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time let them for example make mud pies and call it modeling but all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have I believe the English already use the phrase parity of esteem an even more drastic case is not impossible children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back because the others would get a trauma plz about what a useful word by being behind the bright pupil this remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his Co evils attempt to spell out a cat sat on a mat in a word we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of Education when I'm as good as you has fully had its way all incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish the few who might want to learn will be prevented who are they to overtop their fellows and any way the teachers or should I say nurses will be far too busy reassuring the dances and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching we shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit an incurable ignorance among men that little firm in themselves will do it for us of course this would not follow unless all education became state education but it will that is part of the same movement P no taxes designed for that purpose I liquidate in the middle class the class who were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have their children privately educated the removal of this class besides linking out with the abolition of education is fortunately an inevitable effect of the spirit that says I'm as good as you this was after all the social group which gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists physicians philosophers theologians poets artists composers architects jurists and administrators if ever there was a bunch of tall stalks that needed their tops knocked off it was surely they as an English politician remarked not long ago a democracy does not want great men it would be idle to ask of such a creature whether by want it meant need or like but you had better be clear for here Aristotle's question comes up again we in hell would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the strict sense of the word the political arrangements so called like all forms of government it often works to our advantage but on the whole less often than other phones and what we must realize is that democracy in the diabolical sense I'm as good as you being like force togetherness is the finest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth for democracy or the Democratic spirit diabolical sense leads to a nation without great men a nation mainly of sub literate full of the COTS honest which flattery breeds on ignorant and quick to snarl a whimper at the first hint of criticism and that is what hell wishes every democratic people to be for when such a nation meets in conflict a nation where children will be made to work at school where talent is placed in high posts and where the ignorant mass are allowed no say at all in public affairs only one result is possible the democracies were surprised lately when they found that Russia had got ahead of them in science what a delicious specimen of human life if the whole tendency of their society is opposed to every sort of excellence why do they expect their scientists to excel it is our function to encourage the behavior the manners the whole attitude of mind which democracies naturally like and enjoy because these are the very things which if unchecked will destroy democracy you would almost wonder that even humans don't see it themselves even if they don't read Aristotle that would be undemocratic you would have thought the French Revolution would have told them that the behavior aristocrats naturally liked is not the behavior that preserves aristocracy they might then have applied the same principle to all forms of government but I would not end on that note I would not help a bit encourage in your own minds that delusion which you must carefully foster in the minds of your human victims I mean the delusion that the phase of nations is in itself more important than that of individual Souls the overthrow of free peoples and the multiplication of slave states are for us a means besides our cause being fun but the real end is the destruction of individuals for only individuals can be saved or Damned can become sons of the enemy or food for us the ultimate value for us of any revolution war or famine lies in the individual anguish treachery hatred rage or despair which you may produce I'm as good as you as a useful means for the destruction of democratic society but it has a far deeper value as an end in itself as a state of mind which necessarily excluding humility charity contentment and all the pleasures of gratitude or admiration turns a human being away from almost every road which might finally lead him to heaven but now for the pleasantest part of my duty it falls to my lot to propose on behalf the guests the health of principle slub garb and the tempters training college fill your glasses what is this I see what is this delicious bouquet I inhale can it be mr. principal I unsay all my hard words about the dinner I see and smell and even under wartime conditions the college cellar still has a few dozen of sound old vintage Pharisee well well well this is like old times hold it beneath your nostrils for a moment gentle Devils hold it up to the light look at those fiery streaks that rise and tangle in its dark heart as if they were contending and so they you know how this wine is blended different types of Pharisee have been harvested trodden and fermented together to produce its subtle flavor types that were most antagonistic to one another on earth some were all rules and relics and rosaries others were all drab clothes long faces and petty traditional abstinence ease from Lionel cards or the theater both had in common their self-righteousness and the almost infinite distance between their actual outlook and anything the enemy really is or demands the wickedness of other religions was the really live doctrine in the religion of each slander was its gospel and denigration it's literally how they hated each other up there were the SunShot how much more they hate each other now that they are forever conjoined but not reconciled their astonishment their resentment at the combination the festering of their eternally in penitent spite passing into our spiritual digestion will work like fire dark fire all said and done my friends it will be an ill day for us if what most humans mean by religion ever vanishes from the earth it can still send us the truly delicious sins the fine flower of unholiness can grow only in the close neighbourhood of the holy no where do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the altar your eminence your disgraces my fall Shady's and gentle Devils I give you the toast of principle slab gob and the college [Music] you [Music]

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Keywords: screwtape, the screwtape letters (book), the screwtape letters, letters, lewis, the, c.s., cs lewis, audiobook, c.s. lewis, by, christian, book, books, library, theatre

Id: HEf7sdiohjk

Length: 214min 14sec (12854 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 19 2018