Letter #2

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. Do not begin to hope that you will escape the usual punishments; indeed, in your better moments, I trust you would hardly even wish to do so. In the meantime we must make the best of the situation.

There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the Enemy's camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favor.

One of our great allies right now is the church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not 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 quiver. But fortunately THAT Church is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the poorly constructed multipurpose building built on the edge of town. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with a rather oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him a shabby little book containing old texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print.

When he gets to his seat and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he normally prefers to avoid. 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 row. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next row 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 smell funny, or have double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion is most likely 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 an image. His mind is full of expensive clothes and good hair and great teeth and an impressive physique and the mere fact that the other people in church wear normal 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 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 churchgoer. 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 of Ninja Warriors buckles down to really learning Martial Arts. It occurs when lovers get 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 obsessive love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural relationships with these 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 up to now on the assumption that the people in the next row afford no actual ground for disappointment. Of course if they do—if the patient knows that the woman with the absurd hat is addicted to playing the lottery or the man with the greasy hair is a cheapskate and a money grubber—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 as bad a sinner as I know myself to be, can be considered a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next row prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and play acting?" 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 nowhere near 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

Letter #1

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 unbelieving friend. But aren't you being a little naive?

It sounds like you thought that the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches was by winning the debate. That might have been the case 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 wasn't; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to change their way of life as
the result of a chain of reasoning.

But what with daytime talk shows and other such weapons we have largely changed that. Ever since he was a boy, your man has gotten used to having 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". Nice sounding sayings, not logical argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that atheism is true! Make him think it is strong, or trendy, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.

The trouble about discussing ideas 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 inferior to our Our Father Below. By the very act of discussion, 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 paying attention to universal truths and withdrawing his attention from what is happening around him. Your business is to fix his attention on his immediate surroundings. 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 library. 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 at the end of a morning", the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added "Much better come back to it after lunch and think about 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 vendor selling hotdogs, and the 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 hotdog vendor) 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 hard to describe sense of real life which is our ultimate safeguard against the trappings of mere logic". He is now safe in Our Father's house.

Are you starting to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, these humans 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, real science) as a defence against Christianity. That will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases of conversion recently 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 already knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is "generally accepted fact". Remember you are there to keep him distracted. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach! 

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE

Preface

I HAVE no intention of explaining how these letters which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.

There are two equal and opposite falsehoods into which our race can fall about demons. 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 welcome a skeptical or a mystical person with the same delight. The method of writing which is used in this book can be very easily obtained by anyone who has once learned the knack; but those excitable people of you 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 perspective. 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 Pastor 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. Letter number 17 appears to have been composed before rationing became serious; but in general the demonic method of dating seems to bear no relation to earthly time and I have not attempted to reproduce it. The history of the War on Terror, except in so far as it happens now and then to impact the spiritual condition of one human being, was obviously of no interest to Screwtape.