Screwtape Letters Chapter 5
Screwtape Letters Chapter 5 – 1 THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS by C.S. Lewis The AUTHOR Clive Staples Lewis ( ) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland; his father was a lawyer and his mother a mathematician. He died when Lewis was nine years old, and the trauma eventually drove him to atheism as a teenager. He read avidly from his youth and began writing at an early age. He served for a short time in World War I, and graduated from Oxford in . He returned to Oxford to teach English at Magdalen College ( ). He died on the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated – November 22, It is not surprising that reading and conversations with his fellow scholars led to Lewis’s conversion. Christian writers such as George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton led him to question the arrogance of his atheism, and eventually the exercise of his imagination together with his reason brought him to Christ. He went on to become one of the greatest spokesmen of the Christian faith in the twentieth century. Lewis preferred the company of men to women, living most of his life with his older brother Warren and spending long and lovely afternoons discussing with his fellow writers at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford. The writers who gathered there called themselves the Inklings, and included J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams. However, he was looking after the mother of his college roommate, Paddy Moore. They had both vowed to take care of the other’s families to kill each other in the war, and Lewis kept his promise, allowing Mrs. after a long correspondence with Joy Davidman, a divorced American Jew, they both fell in love when she visited him in England and married in Their marriage was a happy one, but it was cut short when Joy died of cancer in Lewis’s writings. huge variety and quality in various styles and genres. They include the children’s stories for which he is perhaps most famous (The Chronicles of Narnia, ), autobiographical writings (The Pilgrim’s Regress, 1933; Surprised by Joy, 1955; A Grief Observed, 1961), his Space Trilogy (Out of). the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Stength, ), and theological and apologetic writings (The Problem of Pain, 1940; The Screwtape
2 Letters, 1942; Christianity alone, 1943; Abolition of Man, 1943; The Great Divorce, 1945; Miracles, 1947; and God in the Doc, published in 1970), together with literary criticism and essays on a variety of other subjects. The Screwtape Letters were conceived while Lewis was sitting in church in July He began writing and found that the letters flowed easily from his pen. The letters were published for the first time in The Guardian in serial form in Tw Daed y immediately popular and were published in book form the following year. Despite constant prodding from his audience to write more issues of the demonic correspondence, Lewis refused until he received an invitation from the Saturday Evening Post, to which he added Screwtape Proposes a Toast in MAIN FEATURES Screwtape – An older devil whose letters advice to his nephew, and an apprentice tempter, making up the book. Wormwood – The younger tempter who receives the correspondence that makes up the book. Glubose – The temptress assigned to Wormwood’s object mother. Slubgob – Head of the Tempers Training College for young demons, and is probably an ineligible rank. Toadpipe – Screwtape’s secretary. Slumtrimpet – The temptress assigned to Wormwood’s love interest. NOTES Letter #1 – Screwtape advises Wormwood not to engage his patient in reasoning, but to kill his mind with jargon and distractions. Thinking about things beyond human experience should be discouraged by any means necessary. Letter #2 – Screwtape notes that Wormwood’s patient has become a professed Christian, but tells his nephew not to give up hope. Many have been turned away, he points out, by focusing on the faults and peculiarities of Christians rather than on Christ himself. As long as the patient somehow thinks of himself as a good person, he can easily be persuaded that those he sees in the church are hypocrites because of their imperfections. Letter #3 – In the next letter, Screwtape advises Wormwood on how to use his subject’s relationship with his mother for the benefit of Our Father Below. If the man can be made to think high spiritual thoughts while ignoring the daily routines of life, he can be made to think himself very spiritual while at the same time growing increasingly angry with his mother (and she with him – Wormwood i work with her). her tempter, Glubose, to bring this about). Very few offenses can be made to produce significant results if handled correctly.
Screwtape Letters Chapter 5
3 Letter #4 – The next letter is about prayer, and Screwtape advises Wormwood to get his man to think that prayer only really happens when he feels spiritual, getting him to focus on himself rather than the Enemy (i.e., God). When he prays to God, he should be encouraged to pray to his own imaginary version of what God should be, so that his prayers are actually directed to nothing at all. Letter #5 – Wormwood is delighted that war has started in Europe (a reference to WWII, when the book was written). Screwtape warns him, however, that suffering can turn men to God, and that serious thought must be given to encouraging the alternatives of patriotism or pacifism. Letter #6 – Screwtape is pleased to hear that whether or not the young man will be called up for military service remains uncertain. He sees value in uncertainty because doubt and worry keep a person from thinking about the Enemy. In fact, Screwtape advises Wormwood to stimulate his subject’s thoughts in such a way that his malice is directed at people he knows and sees every day, while his kindness is directed at the some that are far away and unknown. Furthermore, when his thoughts favor the Father Below, he is to focus on the object of his anger or lust and not on his own heart, but when his thoughts favor the Enemy, he is to encouraged to focus on his own laudable emotions instead. than on the object of those emotions. Letter #7 – Screwtape addresses the question of whether or not demons should reveal their existence to their subjects. He notes the advantages and disadvantages of both methods, then concludes that the ideal is actually to get people to the point of worshiping the forces of evil when thinking about them in scientific terms, thereby denying their existence. He also suggests that Wormwood should refer his subject to pacifism, as this shows the greatest promise of becoming a religion in itself, thereby drawing attention away from the Enemy. Letter #8 – Overhearing Wormwood reveling in the apparent decline in his subject’s religious interests, Screwtape warns his nephew that the Enemy did His best work when His children were going through struggles. Obedience in the face of doubt, he asserts, is the tempter’s worst enemy. Letter #9 – Screwtape now advises Wormwood that sexual temptation is stronger when a subject is going through a dry spell because they are then less likely to find true pleasure and more susceptible to perversion. Furthermore, troughs can be easily exploited when the subject does not realize that such things are temporary, and so they can be led to accept a low level of spirituality as the norm and think that there was no more spiritual interest. at the time of conversion was nothing more than a step. Letter #10 – Screwtape is pleased to learn that Wormwood’s subject has been making worldly friends, and encourages the young temptress to teach his man skepticism. Most importantly, he should be taught to look down on the Christians around him because they are less worldly-wise than him, while looking down on his new friends because they are not as spiritual. Any real movements of conscience in him should be immediately marked down as Puritanical.
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4 Letter #11 – The subject of Wormwood makes more new friends among the worldly, and Screwtape is pleased with this development. He uses this letter to teach Wormwood the difference between genuine joy and the kinds of humor that only encourage one to take lightly all that is holy. Letter #12 – Screwtape here emphasizes the importance of keeping the subject ignorant of his true condition; while he thinks he continues to move in the Enemy’s orbit (albeit with a more balanced approach to life), he should never be allowed to see that the path he is following leads directly away from the Truth. In this regard, it is important that he continues to do so