The Screwtape Letters by C.S Lewis
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THE SCREWTAPE LETTERSTHE SCREWTAPE LETTERS
by
C. S. LEWIS
Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford
TO
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
"The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of
Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn."—Luther
"The devill . . the prowde spirite . . cannot endure to be mocked."—Thomas More
Contents
Preface
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX
X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX
XX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI XXVII XXVIII XXIX
XXX XXXI
[About this etext]
PREFACE
I HAVE no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to
the public fell into my hands.
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the
devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to
feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally
pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same
delight. The sort of script which is used in this book can be very easily
obtained by anyone who has once learned the knack; but disposed or excitable
people who might make a bad use of it shall not learn it from me.
Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that
Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle. I have made
no attempt to identify any of the human beings mentioned in the letters; but I
think it very unlikely that the portraits, say, of Fr. Spike or the patient's
mother, are wholly just. There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.
In conclusion, I ought to add that no effort has been made to clear up the
chronology of the letters. Number XVII appears to have been composed before
rationing became serious; but in general the diabolical method of dating seems
to bear no relation to terrestrial time and I have not attempted to reproduce
it. The history of the European War, except in so far as it happens now and then
to impinge upon the spiritual condition of one human being, was obviously of no
interest to Screwtape.
C. S. LEWIS
MAGDALEN COLLEGE
July 5, 1941
I
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I note what you say about guiding our patient's reading and taking care that he
sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïf?
It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the
Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries
earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved
and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still
connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as
the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other
such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever
since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about
together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" of
"false", but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "contemporary",
"conventional" or "ruthless". Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping
him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism
is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the
philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.
The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's
own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind
I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of
Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason;
and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of
thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have
been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal
issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense
experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to
call it "real life" and don't let him ask what he means by "real".
Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that
abominable advantage of the Enemy's!) you don't realise how enslaved they are to
the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to
read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought
in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his
elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work
beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by
argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck
instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested
that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the
counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear What He says to
them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have
been His line for when I said "Quite. In fact much too important to tackle it
the end of a morning", the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I
had added "Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind",
he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was
won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going
past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an
unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head
when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of "real life" (by
which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all "that
sort of thing" just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape and in
later years was fond of talking about "that inarticulate sense for actuality
which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic". He is
now safe in Our Father's house.
You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them
centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar
while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the
ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the
real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage
him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases
among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics
and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable "real life". But the
best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea
that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual
talk and reading is "the results of modem investigation". Do remember you are
there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would
suppose it was our job to teach!
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE
II
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. Do not
indulge the hope that you will escape the usual penalties; indeed, in your
better moments, I trust you would hardly even wish to do so. In the meantime we
must make the best of the situation. There is no need to despair; hundreds of
these adult converts have been reclaimed after a I brief sojourn in the Enemy's
camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily,
are still in our favour.
One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand
me. I do riot mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and
space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess,
is a spectacle which makes I our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is
quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished,
sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees
the local grocer with rather in oily expression on his face bustling up to offer
him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them
understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of
religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew
and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has
hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his
mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the
actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of
people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great
warrior on the Enemy's side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father
below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or
have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite
easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. At his
present stage, you see, he has an idea of "Christians" in his mind which he
supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. His mind is
full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the
other people in church wear modern clothes is a real—though of course an
unconscious—difficulty to him. Never let it come to the surface; never let him
ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now,
and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the
peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.
Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming
to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this
disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs
when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey
buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married
and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of
life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The
Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these
disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His "free" lovers and
servants—"sons" is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the
whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals.
Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere
affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves
them to "do it on their own". And there lies our opportunity. But also,
remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness
successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much
harder to tempt.
I have been writing hitherto on the assumption that the people in the next pew
afford no rational ground for disappointment. Of course if they do—if the
patient knows that the woman with the absurd hat is a fanatical bridge-player or
the man with squeaky boots a miser and an extortioner—then your task is so much
the easier. All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question "If
I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should
the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is
mere hypocrisy and convention?" You may ask whether it is possible to keep such
an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is!
Handle him properly and it simply won't come into his head. He has not been
anything like long enough with the Enemy to have any real humility yet. What he
says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom,
he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy's
ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great
humility and condescension in going to church with these "smug", commonplace
neighbours at all. Keep him in that state of mind as long as you can.
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE
III
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I am very pleased by what you tell me about this man's relations with his
mother. But you must press your advantage. The Enemy will be working from the
centre outwards, gradually bringing more and more of the patient's conduct under
the new standard, and may reach his behaviour to the old lady at any moment. You
want to get in first. Keep in close touch with our colleague Glubose who is in
charge of the mother, and build up between you in that house a good settled
habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks. The following methods are useful.
1. Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside
him and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the states of
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