The Screwtape Letters

by C.S. Lewis

One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.

Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar.

But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that.

to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’,

The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment.

to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes.

him a grand general idea that he knows it all

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

Encourage Judging Christians around him

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?’

Lessen his view of his own sin. Feed jnto his pride that he is better than his pew mates.

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,

Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him and

You must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.

the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.

Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so.

He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period. Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them.

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.

Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion.

The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

what use the Enemy

wants to make...

He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks;

really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures

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.

is pleased even with their stumbles.

and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground.

is His invention,

An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.

To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return—that is what really gladdens Our Father’s heart.

moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.

progressing quietly and comfortably towards Our Father’s house.

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.

‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy.

It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,

wants to detach men from themselves, but in a different way. Remember always, that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them. When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.

The Enemy’s demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy. Ever

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.

They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen.

The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time;

all comes to him by pure gift;

And all the time the joke is that the word ‘Mine’ in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything.

the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say ‘Mine’ of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.

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,