The Screwtape Letters by Lewis, C S (z-lib.org).epub

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The Screwtape LettersXXVMY DEAR WORMWOOD,The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merelyChristian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remainsmere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keepthem in the state of mind I call “Christianity And”. You know—Christianity andthe Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the NewOrder, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research,Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they mustbe Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for thefaith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of theSame Old Thing.The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions wehave produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion,folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. Thehumans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much ofit, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, theymust experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being ahedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has madeeating Pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any morethan eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by alove of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the veryworld He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we callRhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year thesame, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of animmemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they changefrom a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to producegluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into ademand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship. If weneglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixednovelty and familiarity of snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plumpudding this Christmas. Children, until we have taught them better, will be
perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeedhopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer. Only by our incessant effortsis the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishespleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very naturemore subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continuednovelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness orboth. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all theinnocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus byinflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing we have recently made the Arts, forexample, less dangerous to us than perhaps, they have ever been, “low-brow”and “high-brow” artists alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh,excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride. Finally, the desire fornovelty is indispensable if we are to produce Fashions or Vogues.The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from theirreal dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against thosevices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest tothat vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have themrunning about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowdingto that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make itfashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when theyare all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we arereally making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcryis directed against the dangers of the mere “understanding”. Cruel ages are puton their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones againstRespectability, lecherous ones against Puritansm; and whenever all men arereally hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate his horror of the Same Old Thinginto a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in thewill. It is here that the general Evolutionary or Historical character of modernEuropean thought (partly our work) comes in so useful. The Enemy lovesplatitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, toask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if wecan keep men asking “Is it in accordance with the general movement of ourtime? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?” theywill neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course,unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will bedepends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future tohelp them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we
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The Screwtape Letters
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MAGDALEN COLLEGEJuly 5, 1941
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at his elbow in a moment. Before I
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like. Keep everything hazy in his m
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the imagined mother will ever flow
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meant to ask Him for charity, let t
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The Screwtape LettersMY DEAR WORMWO
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The Screwtape LettersVIMY DEAR WORM
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Page 24 and 25: Your affectionate uncleSCREWTAPE
Page 26 and 27: I see much (indeed more than I like
Page 28 and 29: gives rise to many incongruities: t
Page 30 and 31: are over. A few weeks ago you had t
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Page 34 and 35: ever to act, and, in the long run,
Page 36 and 37: threatens to become a virtue. By th
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Page 40 and 41: natural phenomenon is really in our
Page 42 and 43: conduct of the services is also adm
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Page 46 and 47: Your affectionate uncleSCREWTAPE
Page 48 and 49: His real motive for fixing on sex a
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Page 52 and 53: war and peace, it is, from the poin
Page 54 and 55: the age of the waltz, and we now te
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Page 58 and 59: on the more realistic and dynamic g
Page 60 and 61: disadvantages. Nothing is naturally
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Page 64 and 65: used as a convenience. Men or natio
Page 66 and 67: dream how much of his conversation,
Page 70 and 71: have the better chance to slip in a
Page 72 and 73: are under the double blindness of m
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Page 76 and 77: been for the last ten years, and wh
Page 78 and 79: prosperity or middle-aged adversity
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Page 82 and 83: Enemy and courage the Enemy supplie
Page 84 and 85: endured no longer at the very momen
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Page 88: tempters like yourself the greatest
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