Screwtape Letters – Preface

October 5, 2008 in C S Lewis
Tags: Screwtape Letters

C.S. Lewis
THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS
To J.R.R. Tolkien
“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.”—Luther
“The devill . . the prowde spirite . . cannot endure to be mocked.”—Thomas More
PREFACE
I HAVE no intention of explaining how the correspondence [...]

Screwtape Letters – Letter I

October 5, 2008 in C S Lewis
Tags: Screwtape Letters

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 materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïf? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have [...]

Screwtape Letters – Letter II

October 5, 2008 in C S Lewis
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MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. Do not indulge the hope that you will escape the usual penalties; 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 [...]

Screwtape Letters – Letter III

October 5, 2008 in C S Lewis
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MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I am very pleased by what you tell me about this man’s relations with his mother. But you must press your advantage. The Enemy will be working from the centre outwards, gradually bringing more and more of the patient’s conduct under the new standard, and may reach his behaviour to the old lady [...]

Screwtape Letters – Letter IV

October 5, 2008 in C S Lewis
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MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
The amateurish suggestions in your last letter warn me that it is high time for me to write to you fully on the painful subject of prayer. You might have spared the comment that my advice about his prayers for his mother it “proved singularly unfortunate”. That is not the sort of thing [...]

Screwtape Letters – Letter V

October 5, 2008 in C S Lewis
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MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
It is a little bit disappointing to expect a detailed report on your work and to receive instead such a vague rhapsody as your last letter. You say you are “delirious with joy” because the European humans have started another of their wars. I see very well what has happened to you. You [...]

Screwtape Letters – Letter VI

October 5, 2008 in C S Lewis
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MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I am delighted to hear that your patient’s age and profession make it possible, but by no means certain, that he will be called up for military service. We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of [...]

Screwtape Letters – Letter VII

October 5, 2008 in C S Lewis
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MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in ignorance of your own existence. That question, at least for the present phase of the struggle, has been answered for us by the High Command. Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course this has [...]

Screwtape Letters – Letter VIII

October 5, 2008 in C S Lewis
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MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
So you “have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away”, have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?
Humans are amphibians—half [...]

Screwtape Letters – Letter IX

October 5, 2008 in C S Lewis
Tags: Screwtape Letters

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I hope my last letter has convinced you that the trough of dulness or “dryness” through which your patient is going at present will not, of itself, give you his soul, but needs to be properly exploited. What forms the exploitation should take I will now consider.
In the first place I have always [...]