The Screwtape Letters (1942)
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not
now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not
done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final
result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted)
in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white
collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise
their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the
bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business
concern.
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
naive? It sounds as if you suppose 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.
Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and
ambition look ahead.
When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will
be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.
Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into
domestic hatred.
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and
those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot,
without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong
to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they
"own" their bodies — those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy
that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and
from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the
devils...
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.
Of course a war is 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? When I see the temporal suffering of humans who
finally escape us, I feel as if I had been allowed to taste the first course of
a rich banquet and then denied all the rest. It is worse than not to have
tasted it at all. The Enemy, true to His barbarous methods of warfare, allows
us to see the short misery of His favourites only to tantalize and torment us —
to mock the incessant hunger, which, during this present phase of great
conflict, His blockade is admittedly imposing.
Be not deceived, Wormwood, our cause is never more in jeopardy than when a
human, no longer desiring but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks
round upon a universe in which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and
asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.
A sensible human once said, "If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness
occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit"; and again,
"She's the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by
their hunted expression."
