Spirit Jesus

“Nothing is as helpful to a young man’s career as the advice of an experienced elder. The Screwtape Letters is a treasure of such wisdom as it was penned to young Tempter Womwood by his worldly-wise old devil of an uncle, Screwtape.

Anxious Uncle Screwtape’s brisk, businesslike letters are full of fiendishly clever advice on the capture of this, or any man. (after all, Screwtape knows a great, great deal about men and women and about the ways of the Enemy). ”

“I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands. ” CS Lewis

“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. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight…

…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…

My Dear Wormwood,

I note what you say about guiding your patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naif? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so 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 was not; and if it was proved they really believed it.

They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as a result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false”, but as academic, practical, contemporary, conventional or ruthless.

Jargon, not argument is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous - that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

The trouble about argument 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 the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, 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 favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. 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 realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary…”

Christian Classics Collection
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