The Screwtape Letters
by C.S. Lewis
(San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1942)
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.
Page ix.
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.
Page ix.
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.
Page ix.
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.
Page 2.
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.
Page 4.
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.
Page 7.
The best thing, where it is possible is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether.
Page 15.
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.
Page 16.
I must warn you not to hope too much from a war.
Of course a war in entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below?
Page 22.
Let us there think rather how to use, than how to enjoy, this European war.
Page 23.
How much better for us if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition!
Pages 23-24.
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.
Page 25.
Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy.
Page 28.
When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics.
Page 31.
All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period.
Page 32.
Once you have made the World and end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.
Page 34.
Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.
Page 35.
To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense.
Page 36.
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.
Page 37.
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.
Page 40.
When we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do it 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.
Page 44.
A moderate religion is as good for us as no religion at all - and more amusing.
Page 46.
It is jargon, not reason, you must rely on.
Page 46.
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
Page 50.
As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one.
Page 57.
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.
Pages 60-61.
The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels t hem a touchstone of reality.
Page 64.
The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.
Page 66.
All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.
Page 69.
The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free form any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents - or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.
Page 71.
When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.
Pages 71-72.
The sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased.
Page 73.
Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind.
Page 75.
The Present is the point at which time touches eternity.
Page 75.
If a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.
Page 81.
The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing and, specially, that one self is not another self.
Page 94.
I hope, my dear boy, you have not shown my letters to anyone. Not that it matters of course. Anyone would see that the appearance of heresy into which I have fallen is purely accidental. By the way, I hope you understood, too, that some apparently uncomplimentary references to Slubgob were purely jocular. I really have the highest respect for him. And, of course, some things I said about not shielding you form the authorities were not seriously meant. You can trust me to look after your interests. But do keep everything under lock and key.
Page 99.
Marriage, though the Enemy’s invention, has its uses. There must be several young women in your patient’s neighbourhood who would render the Christian life intensely difficult to him if only you could persuade him to marry one of them.
Page 102.
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.
Page 107.
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.
Page 111.
The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they ‘own’ their bodies.
Page 113.
The word ‘Mine’ in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say ‘Mine’ of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong - certainly not to them, whatever happens. At present the Enemy says ‘Mine’ of everything on the pedantic, legalistic ground that He made it: Our Father hopes in the end to say ‘Mine’ of all things on the more realistic and dynamic ground of conquest.
Pages 114-115.
You may be interested to learn that the little misunderstanding with the Secret Police which you tried to raise about some unguarded expressions in one of my letters has been 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.
Page 117.
Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.
Pages 118-119.
We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end.
Page 120.
For a long time it will be quite impossible to remove spirituality from his life. Very well then; we must corrupt it.
Page 123.
Each ‘historical’ Jesus is unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to; each new ‘historical Jesus’ therefore has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another, and by that sort of guessing.
Page 124.
Humans must not be allowed to notice that all great moralists are sent by the Enemy not to inform men but to remind them, to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our continual concealment of them.
Page 125.
No nation, and few individuals, are really brought into the Enemy’s camp by the historical study of the biography of Jesus, simply as biography.
Pages 125-126.
The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin which they already had. … The ‘Gospels’ come later and were written not to make Christians but to edify Christians already made.
Page 126.
The great thing is to make Christianity a mystery religion in which he feels himself one of the initiates.
Page 133.
Pray do not fill your letters with rubbish about this European War. Its final issue is, no doubt, important, but that is a matter for the High Command. I am not in the least interested in knowing how many people in England have been killed by bombs. In what state of mind they died, I an learn from the office at this end. That they were going to die sometime, I knew already. Please keep your mind on your work.
Page 133.
If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring.
Page 135.
The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence.
Pages 135-136.
The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns.
Page 137.
The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers.
Page 137.
Whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.
Page 138.
We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain - not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
Page 139.
Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years later into domestic hatred.
Page 141.
Let them think they have solved by Love problems they have in fact only waived or postponed under the influence of the enchantment.
Page 141.
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 quire far gone in the Enemy’s service will make a nuisance of herself on a larger scale than any man except those whom Our father has dominated completely; and, conversely, a man will live long in the Enemy’s camp before he undertakes as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman may do every day. Thus while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.
Page 142.
Anything even a sin, which has the total effect of moving him close up to the Enemy, makes against us in the long run.
Page 147.
False spirituality is always to be encouraged. On the seemingly pious ground that ‘praise and communion wish God is the true prayer’, humans can often be lured into direct disobedience to the Enemy.
Page 148.
The Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now.
Page 150.
Since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others.
Page 151.
Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is ‘finding his place in it’, while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth, which is just what we want.
Page 155.
We must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth.
Page 156.
The justice of Hell is purely realistic, and concerned only with results. Bring us back food, or be food yourself.
Page 165.
How mistakenly now that all is lost you come whimpering to ask me whether the terms of affection in which I address you meant nothing from the beginning. Far from it! Rest assured, my love for you and your love for me are as like as two peas. I have always desired you, as you (pitiful fool) desired me. The difference is that I am the stronger. I think they will give you to me now; or a bit of you. Love you? Why, yes. As dainty a morsel as ever I grew fat on.
Page 171.
The world into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness sand geniality had to be excluded.
Page 183.
Every ideal of style dictates not only how we should say things but what sort of things we may say.
Page 184.
The ‘great’ sinners, those in whom vivid and genial passions have ben pushed beyond the bounds and in whom 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.
Page 192.
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.
Page 193.
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 (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side) we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state.
Page 196.
Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. … They should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning.
Page 187.
No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did.
Page 198.
The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.
Page 198.
All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: ‘Oh God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!’ Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly, ‘Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite’.
Page 200.
The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic’.
Page 203.
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.
Page 204.
It is our function to encourage the behaviour, 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.
Page 207.
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 fate of nations is in itself more important than that of individual souls.
Page 207.
It will be an ill day for us if what most humans mean by ‘religion’ ever vanishes from the Earth. … The fine flower of unholiness can grow only in the close neighbourhood of the Holy. Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the altar.
Page 209.