Screwtape Sets A Frost

The diabolical timetable is somewhat different from the terrestrial one, and the devil Ragwort, who has responsibility for the entirety of the Scottish Sector, has just submitted his annual report. No doubt Hell, like any other bureaucracy, has official channels through which reports filter and responses are made; but, like any other bureaucracy, it seems that the real work is done outside that mandated structure. What you have before you, it would appear, is Screwtape’s unofficial response to Ragwort’s report. Screwtape has spent many years in the role of diabolical mandarin, and as a result his advice to his juniors is well worth heeding. For us, who are both spectators to, and the prize in, the Great Game, his commentary is scarcely less essential: when the stakes are this high, it is always worth paying attention to the state of play…

 

My dear Ragwort,

 

Allow me to come straight to the point. Your report has done the rounds, and although of course there has as yet been no official decision made on the nature of your Superiors’ response to it, I can tell you unofficially that that response will be highly favourable. You have done an excellent job in the last year, and you should be well pleased with your efforts thus far. I stress this because, of course, your task is not completed. Nor is it even close to being so. But you have made an excellent start.

The first section of your report, concerning the progress of Atheism in Scotland, speaks for itself, and does not require much by the way of commentary. The situation is satisfactory and is continuing in that manner. One development I did enjoy seeing was the success of the philological department’s most recent subterfuge. Replacing the term ‘atheism’ with ‘rational secularism’ or even ‘teapot agnosticism’ is a very real victory on two fronts, appealing to two different mindsets. ‘Rational secularism’ seems so much less bald, so much less stark, so much more sophisticated than the nakedness of mere atheism. It is the perfect term to be deployed by those who believe they have outgrown, out-matured the crudities of religious belief. ‘Rational secularism’ – it covers a multitude of sins.

The other prong of this attack resides with ‘teapot agnosticism’. “No one believes in the presence of a teapot orbiting Jupiter,” the argument goes, “but we can’t prove the non-existence of the teapot. Therefore we are agnostic about the teapot. So too with God. We can’t prove His non-existence, but no one seriously believes He is there. He is on the same level as the orbital crockery.” It is a magnificent argument for several reasons. First of all, it appeals to the sense of ‘fair play’ so many of these creatures purport to respect. By identifying itself as a form of agnosticism, the patients who hold to it can convince themselves that all they require is a really solid argument to change their minds. This is true in so few cases that we may as well ignore the risk entirely. People who are agnostic refer to themselves as agnostic, without the prosthetic addition of tableware. Secondly, by putting God on the level of a teapot orbiting Jupiter, there is a very real – if unacknowledged – identification of the Lord of the universe as being absurd. It may seem inconsequential, but this is a very real assault on the majesty of God. It is an excellent stratagem: it is hard to believe in God if He is ridiculous. The diminution of God by this argument is probably as potent a weapon against Him as the argument itself: the old ‘if You’re there, show Yourself’ demand we have been encouraging (provided the question is never asked with genuine desire to see) for thousands of years.

All this is good news. Heartening, even, and it will probably lead to a letter of commendation in your file. But it is to the second part of your report that I wish to recall your attention.

This second section deals exclusively with the nature of the Christian church in Scotland. The successes you have achieved (and let me say now that this year has, by and large, been one of success) can, essentially, be summed up in a single word: Balkanisation. Like a good hard frost on the rock upon which the church is built, the cracks between various groups are widening, and soon true fractures will appear.

One could almost sympathise with the little vermin. They have been so comprehensively thrown into tumult that human nature, aided and abetted by our ever-labouring agents, has taken an ascendant role in their dealings with one another and they have turned for comfort and guidance not to the Enemy, even though that is what He so earnestly desires, but to those among their peers whom they can already count on to agree with them.

There has been no cross-pollination of ideas. There has been precious little genuine discussion. Instead (oh, how sweet!) there has been much talk of ‘battle-lines being drawn’, and ‘the thin end of the wedge’ and so on and so forth. That man Yeats surely spoke very good sense when he observed that those unwilling to engage with argument prefer faction-fighting to the labour of unfamiliar thought. Better still, these battle lines are drawn between each other, rather than between the Church and Us. Make no mistake, Ragwort: the Christian Church is still a lion rampant, its teeth still sharp and its claws still fearsome. But thanks to our efforts it is now mostly engaged in chasing its own tail.

You must persist in encouraging this happy state of affairs. Never forget the blessed transmutation of the meaning of the word ‘parochialism’. It used to mean ‘pertaining to the parish’. When it did so it was a word to be feared: can you imagine the danger of a parish church actually involved in the life of its community, seen as a focal point for that community, open to all, exclusive to none, alive, active and healthy? You do well to recoil in horror from the thought. It offends every principle we hold dear. But thanks to many years of hard work, of clever strategising from devils whose names you rightly revere (my own superior, Grotwrangle, was involved), we now use ‘parochialism’ to mean ‘an excessively narrow-minded perspective on the world’. If there must be such entities as ‘parish churches’, our job is to ensure that the parish in question extends no further than the walls of the church building itself. By denying the very existence of ‘common ground’ it becomes infinitely easier to manufacture conflicts in which these churches can clash – and even in the case of genuine disagreements, the concealment of the common ground renders rapprochement all but impossible.

This, then, is your assignment for the next year. It is upon you that the burden rests. If we can’t directly blind the Christians whom we are trying to despoil to the truth that one must love one’s neighbour as oneself, we may yet be able to blind them to the fact that they have any neighbours at all. I noticed some considerable success scored recently against many Christians whom you persuaded to forget that their duty of Agape extends even to – indeed, especially to – those who horrify them. The trick is to make the Christians ever more comfortable, so that ever more about ‘the outside world’ offends them. If they cannot bear to face it they will not do so, and will instead live within the protection of the church family – a family we must pervert into defending itself against any and all threats, real or imagined, until it lies rabid and alone. You will find that the success of this project offers a very particular and invigorating delight, and the victims of your triumph will amuse the palates of those of us who here await them.

 

In the meantime, I remain, as ever,

Your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Under-Secretary for Inhuman Resources

 

Reason and Sticky Buns

There are times, Dear Reader, when I am heartily sick of, and fed up with, the behaviour of Christians. And the reason I get so annoyed and dispirited by it is that the people who are behaving badly have no excuse, and ought to know better.

There are a couple of situations of this type on my personal radar at the minute. I know one pastor who is being maligned in the press (both secular and ecclesiastical) for no good reason, on the basis of either inadequate understanding or inadequate theology. I know a church where incredibly destructive and misinformed gossip is placing huge strain on the eldership for no very good reason that I can see. And I am angry about this, because both those elders and that minister are my friends, and what is being done to them is spectacularly unfair.

I love Doctor Who. But I disagree with the Doctor’s oft-repeated mantra (at least since Christopher Ecclestone) that “people are brilliant!” People aren’t brilliant. People can be brilliant, but it’s not their ground state. I think Calvin’s doctrine of Total Depravity a far more clear-sighted and unromanticised view of the nature of humanity. I think Yeats was right when he talked about ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. I was told recently, on the basis of my Screwtape Letters, that I have ‘a real insight into the nature of the human heart’. That’s a nice compliment to receive, and I am grateful for it, but there are times I wonder if ‘you have a real insight into the nature of cesspools’ isn’t equally applicable.

And all that’s fine. I am entirely comfortable with thinking of humanity at its worst because I know I share in it. I am no better. I can, on occasion, be every bit as small-minded, petty, vindictive and unpleasant as anybody else – like, for instance, you, Dear Reader. But what really grieves me about the situation facing this minister and these elders is that it would be relatively simple to resolve these situations if everybody was prepared to sit down and talk about it. As the minister’s opponents have discovered, it is easy to sit at a computer and make comments that one would baulk at in a face-to-face encounter. As the gossipers have discovered, the last thing you want is to meet with the people who could make clear the situation. To do so wrecks the deliciousness of being in the group ‘that knows what the real problem is’.

I am sometimes accused – with a fair degree of accuracy, I must acknowledge – of being overly intellectual, of not engaging with anything on an emotional level. And, mea culpa, I acknowledge this to be true. I do over-emphasise rationality. I do have a tendency to lock emotions away in a box. But in situations like these, I think that approach a strength rather than a weakness. I am, I admit, angry on an emotional level – these things are happening to people I care about. But I am nevertheless clear-thinking enough to see why they’re happening – and even to see how they can be made to stop.

But here’s the thing. It is not my place to resolve any of these situations. I am not a member of the church where the eldership is being worked against. I am not a minister to leap into inter-ministerial disputes, nor am I a journalist to take other journalists to task for sloppy reporting, inadequate reasoning and poisonous personal attacks. (And I’m not going to mention Rosemary Goring by name, so you won’t know to whom I refer). But dear God all the people involved in these situations, of whatever stripe, faction or persuasion, are meant to be Christians, so why they can’t begin to live up to the name is beyond me. Is it too much fun being unpleasant? Is it too entertaining? Or is it that it’s too hard to behave as we are commanded?

Love God. Love thy neighbour. These are Christ’s two commandments, and if they were taken on board things would improve almost instantaneously. There would have to be acknowledgement, first off, that things have been badly handled. This is what’s called humility, and God knows it’s a painful business. But it is essential, and remarkably effective at leading to productive meetings, productive relationships and productive churches.

All this is Theology 101. I am not a proper theologian by any means (my brother occupies that niche in my family), but this is firstly plain old common sense and secondly such a basic biblical principle that one wonders how it could have been overlooked in the first place.

Following humility, there would be discourse. Tempers would be left outside with the coats, while inside rationality and sticky buns would hold full sway. (Incidentally, can I recommend “Rationality and Sticky Buns” as the format for all church meetings about everything, ever? Seriously, how is that not a winning recipe?)

And following the discourse? I think Abraham Lincoln put it best, in his second inaugural address:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in…

That, I submit, is to be our aspiration. But it can’t happen until the high horses are dismounted, the mutterings are quelled, and straightforward conversation in humility occurs. This may not seem like much of a conclusion – it’s certainly no bombshell – but I can’t see a flaw in it. However, until it happens, I suspect I will remain angry, and sad, and wishing that people would be as good as Doctor Who believes they are.

Here is today’s moment of Zen:

Oh look. A rational, sensible approach to putting out fires.

Screwtape’s Prostrate Exam

The devil Ragwort, though usually entirely in favour of encouraging corporeal excess, has found himself recently stymied by Lent. Ragwort, a ‘big picture’ manager if ever there was one, had no idea that there existed among the Christians of the Scottish Sector a widespread belief in the importance of self-denial. His outrage has clearly reached his superior, Screwtape, who has taken the time to respond with some sage words of advice and encouragement. Screwtape, a devil whose seniority has been earned through hard work, experience and skill, can still run circles round his underlings…

 

 

My dear Ragwort,

I wonder sometimes if you really are as naïf as you seem. The reports filter down to me, you know; most assuredly do I have my informants in your department even as you try to recruit some in mine (oh yes, I know all about that. I will deal with the matter, and with you, in due course). The story seems straightforward: you have been blindsided by a social phenomenon you ought to have seen coming, and as a result you have been sending increasingly frantic and incoherent policy diktats into the field. Meanwhile, the resulting confusion in the ranks allows souls to slip through our fingers.

This will not do.

But I understand the source of your confusion. You have been unable to distinguish between those acts of abstention caused by a moral decision and those caused by mere cultural conformity. There is, as it happens, some excuse: most of the patients themselves are victims of the same confusion. I think it is probably best that I lay out for you now what is going on, and what the High Command says we ought to do about it. That way we can get things back on track as soon as possible.

You are responsible for the Scottish Sector. Therefore, there are two very specific cultural influences at work. There is the Roman Catholic concept of Lent, and there is the Calvinist concept of self-denial. Although these would normally work against one another, on this particular issue they converge. This is not because they are naturally convergent, but because you are dealing with a social belief rather than an individual one. In other words, if you say something often enough, and in broad enough terms, it will become accepted even though it may not actually be true (remember they know no history, and those who do would never believe themselves susceptible to the technique one of our agents referred to as ‘The Big Lie’). So if we say that Lent is an inescapable part of the Christian tradition, and that Calvin preached a dour, strict abstention from everything not explicitly commanded biblically, it does not matter what the facts are: we are endeavouring to create a perception that supersedes such trivialities. In this way we have created a popular belief that Calvinist Scotland is as well suited as was the Soviet Union to the aphorism that “that which is not commanded is forbidden: the trick is to remember which is which”.

What we are trying to do, in this specific instance, is remove independent volition from the act of fasting. If our Christian patients choose to fast, let them do so because they feel they do not, in fact, have a choice. Let them believe tradition demands it, or doctrine compels it, or duty requires it. What we want to get them away from, more than anything else, is a desire to better know the Enemy.

For that is the purpose of the voluntary abstention. The time occupied by eating (in the traditional sense) or whatever else they forego (in the more modern sense) should be occupied with communion with their Lord. Our job, therefore, is to ensure that that does not happen. I am well aware of the difficulties. Fasting, through its very nature, removes from us one of our best weapons: sensual pleasure. Of course there is no vice in the pleasure itself: rather, it becomes such when it rates a higher priority in the patient’s will than knowledge of and obedience to the Enemy. This is the primary goal of all our sensual temptations. Gluttony is a sin not because enjoying food is bad but because elevating mere sensual satisfaction to a position superior even to that of their God is a sin.

The overarching sin I am describing, the sin to which gluttony is subordinate, has a name, but we have spent centuries disguising it. It is of course Idolatry. What else could it be? Whatever else occupies the space in our patients’ hearts that the Enemy designed solely to fit Himself is by definition an idol. It doesn’t matter what that idol actually is. I have known a love of football damn a man as efficiently as a love of Our Father Below. The important thing is that it forcibly excludes the Enemy from the place He most wants to be. You will seldom see a more naked example of the struggle our tempters mount against the Enemy than in that secret enclave of the heart. There, there is where the war will be lost or won: that is where the battle for the soul rages between Heaven and Hell, each side wooing the patient either to virtue or vice, the Enemy or us. It is stark. It is unequivocal. And it is of ultimate importance.

This is why fasting is in itself important. Fasting offers a real and practical defence against some of our most sophisticated stratagems for encouraging idolatry. It is a forcible reminder of the old truth that man does not live by bread alone. Through temporary abstinence it encourages an acknowledgement of the bountiful nature of God’s provision. It ensures the Enemy is elevated to precisely that position we most want Him not to occupy in our patients’ hearts. They concentrate on Him, and in so doing they cannot fill their heads with the kind of tat and dross we most want them to be concerned with. You know of course that under usual circumstances we achieve much more by keeping thoughts out of their heads than by putting things in – but if their thoughts do start to wander down perilous paths we must distract them. The discipline imposed by fasting forefends against this. If a patient starts to fast, and for good, personal reasons, our position is for the moment precarious indeed.

Our solution is to take refuge in the old certainties of human moral frailty. Let us suppose you have a patient who is fasting, who is determinedly seeking the Enemy. Our position is very bad – but it is not yet hopeless. It is not hopeless because we can always draw the patient’s attention to what they are doing rather than why they are doing it. This distinction is important. Instead of having patients concerned with fasting to better know God, we want to encourage them to become more like the Pharisee praying on the street corner. If they must be holy, let us poison that holiness with pride, and a desire to accumulate spiritual brownie points. Let them desire to be known as a holy person amongst their fellows. You know how it is done. It is always about subtlety. A half-smile, a wink, a slight incline of the head – these are the betrayals we must encourage, partly because our patients are almost (but not quite!) unaware of them themselves. As soon as we redirect our patients’ thoughts away from the Enemy and towards themselves, we foster the most corrosive form of idolatry of all: the elevation of the self.

Let them prostrate themselves before that golden calf. Let them focus all their energies on serving their own desires. Let them put their own interests at the centre of their personal universes. Let their modes of dress and speech and behaviour ensure their conformity with those examples of humanity they most admire (I trust you are continuing to push the Celebrity agenda in Scotland? Our replacing saints with nonentities is of paramount importance), and all in order to ‘fit in’ or ‘be like folk’. The folk we want them to be like, of course, are equally self-obsessed, and so we generate the delightful – and vastly amusing – situation whereby everyone is trying to be like everyone else for reasons purely to do with selfish vanity and not because anything they copy is inherently worth emulating.

In so doing we simultaneously encourage self-worship while introducing a nagging, never-quite-articulated fear that there is nothing really different about the self that they worship, nothing to distinguish them from a seething mass of undifferentiated humanity. This will, apart from anything else, excite an ever-greater fervour in their idolatry – through effort alone they will hope to make themselves worthy of the attention they crave. The irony is that this effort will have precisely the opposite effect, making them ever more insular, ever more isolated (this is why the Enemy makes such an issue of fellowship, since it defends against this). The idols we most want to create in Scotland, Ragwort, are hollow gods as insubstantial as the mist in the glens – because that is what we have reduced our patients to. Let them prostrate themselves before their own selfishness, and let the fulfilment of that selfishness achieve nothing at all. While the Enemy promises to fill and then overflow His sons and daughters, idolatry is an Ourobouros – a snake forever eating its own tail. If you encourage it properly, we will have all eternity to enjoy the bewildered horror its eventual exposure will reveal.

In the meantime, I remain, as ever,

Your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Under-Secretary for Inhuman Resources

Screwtape and the Crooked Timber

The devil Screwtape, if you recall, concluded his last letter with a request that Ragwort write to him with his “thoughts on what we ought to do about the notion of ‘friendship’, that perversion of natural competition”. It seems Ragwort has risen to the challenge, and although as yet no copy of Ragwort’s letter has fallen into my hands I am able to reproduce for you here Screwtape’s response. Clearly Screwtape can barely stomach the meat of the conversation; equally clearly, Ragwort, despite his position on the diabolical fast-track down the Lowerarchies, still has much to learn from his wily old superior…

My dear Ragwort,

Of course the time of year (as they reckon it) had some bearing on my question. Good cheer? Peace on Earth and good will to all men? It is enough to make me vomit. The very words stink and scald. How revolting, how offensive, is the thought! It affronts all the austere majesty of Hell. That these creatures, these dust-made animals given spirit, should dare to love one another, should dare to love their Creator, should dare to be loved in return – it appals.

For love, as always, is at the root of our problem. It disconcerts even the greatest minds of our strategists. It is the supreme virtue, the thing that is most of the Enemy. No wonder it is so incomprehensible. The merest whiff of it leaves us reeling, nauseated. When Christ said that “where two or more are gathered in My name, there I am also” He knew His presence, His perfect love, casts out not just fear but us also. You know, from your own experience as a tempter, that a man loving God cannot love us as well. He is defended by his own fealty, and that fealty is returned to him by He whom he loves.

This is the model of friendship that is most dangerous to us. It is selfless, it is vulnerable, it gives without seeking recompense – and as such, it is all the more fulsomely rewarded. There are no chinks in its armour, no weaknesses for us to exploit. But fortunately, it is not nearly so common as the humans think or believe. Perfect love casts out fear: very well, what about imperfect love?

In some respects, imperfection is very much our stock-in-trade. We corrupt, we despoil, we erode and we distort. And we have so much material to work with: we, in our way, are carpenters of the crooked timber of humanity, ensuring no straight thing will be made. As part of our unceasing efforts, one of the things we must strive to ensure is that ‘friendship’ becomes self-serving, self-focused, self-oriented.

The crucial word is, as you can see, ‘self’. You are aware, no doubt, of our doctrine of the 3 Ages of Personhood: youth is self-obsessed; middle age is self-satisfied; old age is selfish. We encourage young people to behave as though they are the centre of the universe; we foster in the middle-aged the delusion that they possess all the answers (and terrify them with the suspicion that they might not); we instil in the aged the belief that tyranny, disguised as concern and excused as ‘just being how old people are’, is appropriate behaviour.

These attitudes, if carried over into interpersonal relationships, are poison. It is inevitable that some of them will be: human beings are incapable of divorcing themselves from their own concerns completely. However, if, in submission to the Enemy’s will, they suppress their inherent selfishness, and meet one another first and foremost with the other’s concerns in mind, then our position is, for the moment, untenable. This is fellowship, and it is something we cannot directly assault. It resists every attack we can mount upon it, because it is protected, jealously guarded, by the Enemy Himself.

The real problem we face with friendship and fellowship is not that they are virtues in and of themselves, but that they serve to encapsulate so many others. Friendship affords every person the opportunity to exercise grace, to exercise love, to exercise faith and kindness and patience and every other fruit of the spirit. A friend is someone you love, is someone before whom you place yourself as an equal, and is someone from whom you seek no selfish gain. There are no friends in Hell, Ragwort; there is no nonsense about the abrogation of the self. Here all is competition, all is exclusion, all is isolation. Hell is not other people: Hell is the human lack, the ultimate rejection, the excoriation of all compassion.

You know this already, of course. You want someday to ascend to my position, and I to my superiors’. It is all perfectly natural. You and I are not friends (the very thought revolts) but we are, at least, comrades, insofar as we share the common goal of securing the damnation of human souls. Human beings, on the other hand, have been afforded the opportunity to come alongside one another not simply because they share characteristics or objectives or even mere interests but because they share an essential humanity; being made in the Enemy’s image they have the capacity to love something other than themselves. And it is in friendship, more than any other kind of relationship (even eros is subordinate to agape), that that capacity for love is expressed.

It is best expressed in expenditure. I am not talking about money or material gifts – though, Hell knows, these offer priceless opportunities for corruption in their own right (which is why we ought to encourage an awareness of the financial dimension of a friendship if at all possible – how many marriages have had seeds of dissatisfaction sown in them due to inequalities of pay between the two spouses?). No, I mean rather that friendships cost those involved in them. They cost time. They cost effort. They represent an emotional investment. The Enemy makes no secret of it: “Rejoice with those who rejoice,” that abominable man Paul once wrote, “and mourn with those who mourn”. In the same letter – indeed, virtually in the same breath – he instructs the Christians to “practice hospitality” and “Be devoted to one another in love. Honour one another above yourselves.” It is this selflessness, this horrendous unselfishness, that so dismays our tempters. It represents a fundamental challenge to not merely our mode of operation but also our very essence of being. We are individuals forced through circumstance to ally ourselves with one another to secure a final victory: they are individuals who ally themselves with one another not necessarily to take power or emotional sustenance or to enlarge their egos but to support or care for or help one another. And they enjoy it! The little vermin actually derive pleasure from it!

The picture is a bleak one. It certainly horrifies those of us who see it. But it is not quite the complete picture, because we have developed tactics and strategies to alleviate the effectiveness of true friendship.

Pride is the most beautiful of the vices. It is the most corrosive and it is the most dangerous. It is the vice that opens the door to all the others. And nothing, nothing will demolish a friendship faster than pride entering into it, like a worm devouring an apple from the core outwards. And one particular route by which Pride might enter is Charity.

Charity, of course, is a virtue especially espoused at this time of year. The word is used to mean being benevolent to those less well off than oneself. This is useful to us as it immediately assumes that the charitable person is practicing their charity from a position of superiority. Very well: let us use this helpful little philological slip-up to wreck fellowship. You see, true charity comes not from superiority but from equality: charity ought to be a circle encompassing all believers, not a straight line devolving from the wealthiest / most theologically gifted / most intellectually advanced. Our charity creates a hierarchy and, within that linear structure, a series of cliques; the Enemy’s charity creates a community of believers all of whom draw strength from one another and the One whom they love. If we can invoke our charity in a friendship then we promote the relationship of superior and inferior, not the relationship of two friends who accept one another on equal terms. That done, the friendship – and the fellowship – will swiftly founder on the shoals of competition and envy. Fellowship works through the simultaneous adoption of humility – the idea that no one person is better than any other, though they may have gifts and abilities not available to everyone (the church worship group may be comprised of better musicians than the rest of the congregation, but it is not comprised of better people) – and honesty, the willingness both to be vulnerable in sharing one’s own weaknesses and to be tactful and courageous enough to support those whose weaknesses would undermine them (i.e., everyone). If we can encourage pride then by default we exclude humility; if we can encourage superiority then inevitably honesty will fall by the wayside, since no one who feels themselves superior will be willing to entertain any vulnerability that might demonstrate that their seeming superiority is based on false premises.

This Christmas, I hope you will instruct your underlings to pay particular attention to any patient whom they feel is in danger of becoming either honest or humble. The Enemy Himself is both these things – what was His incarnation, the beginning of which is the very focus of this festival, if not the ultimate expression of humility? – and so we must work to stamp them out wherever we find them in danger of flourishing. Pride, the humans say, goes before a fall. This Christmas, let us do what we can to knock the little wretches over.

I look forward to reading your subsequent report on the success of this campaign. But in the meantime, I remain, as ever,

Your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Under-Secretary for Inhuman Resources

Screwtape Shucks the Habit

The devil Screwtape has just returned from a brief sabbatical – or sabbat, as they are known in his diabolical circles – in the course of which he attended a conference on ‘The Gentle Art of Falsity’, hosted by Hell’s Insincerity Research Council. Stimulated by the discussions and papers given at this retreat, Screwtape has taken it upon himself to offer a few sound words of advice to those best placed to disseminate the information further. One of these, naturally, is his protégé Ragwort, who is responsible for the Scottish Sector. I have managed to obtain a copy of Screwtape’s analysis, and I reproduce it here for your consideration.

My dear Ragwort,

I trust I find you well, and the Christians of Scotland in demoralised disarray? Your old colleague Guttersnipe sends his regards: I ran into him at an IRC conference. He was delighted to hear of your promotion, though in truth I think he believes some of the credit due is his. It was under his supervision that you wrote your thesis, wasn’t it? “Bells, Smells and the Road to Hell: Corrupting Traditional Church Structures in Modern Britain”? In any case, he was chairing a panel on ecclesiastical corruption, and I promised to pass on some of the more intriguing of his points. Which brings me to the purpose of this letter.

Scotland is lousy with Christians. Turn over a rock and out they scuttle, their little faces aglow with righteous piety. However, Guttersnipe was telling me – and I am keen to tell you, to encourage you and your department – that these ‘Christians’ are frequently members of our camp.

So why call them ‘Christians’? This, for me, was where it became truly interesting. My dear Ragwort, I had no idea the extent of your manipulation. I’m delighted. We call them Christians because they are Christians habitually, not spiritually.

As you may know, I recently had to have a tooth taken out and the gap bridged (damage was done to the fang when I tried to consume an egotist still crackling with the arrogance of his self-importance). The tooth had seemed alright, but underneath all was rotten, decayed; the pain was ignored until the tooth could not be saved and, hollowed out, there was no strength left. Now it has been replaced by a bridge, a false tooth indistinguishable from the real things that surround it.

We ought to be working for something similar. Our ‘Christians’ ought to be, like false teeth, indistinguishable from the real thing, while at the same time being hollowed out, empty, devoid of the strength that comes of being a real, living and growing part of the body. They might look good; they might even, at a superficial level, be capable of performing some of the same tasks. But the vitality at the core, the nerve that connects the tooth to the system governing the whole body, is absent.

These are our kind of ‘Christians’, and one of the great tools we might use to create them, to foster the illusion of spiritual health, is habit – though it is not without its dangers. There is a great deal to be concerned about if a patient surrounds himself on a weekly basis with the Enemy’s true servants, listens to the Enemy’s own Word, and observes as those around him enjoy true communion with the Enemy in prayer. Nevertheless, provided the patient commits to nothing more than a superficial participation, this has the almost incalculable benefit of shielding him from some of the Enemy’s most barbarous methods of assault. The patient, provided he can be persuaded to ignore the alarms of his own conscience – like the pain of a tooth one does not believe is dying – will simply drift into a kind of spiritual limbo, where his experience of the Enemy trails off into silence like the volume knob on a radio slowly turned to zero.

Of course, in using this technique we walk a fine line: to either side lies disaster. On the one hand we are attempting to make vices out of virtue. We can do this only if the patient is half-inclined towards spiritual laziness already (though many of them are) and even then we must be subtle and not be over-hasty – one pays more attention to a sudden sharp pain than a slowly-building nagging ache, though the ache may indicate greater damage in the long run.

On the other hand we may well be surrounding the patient with those most able to thwart us in our schemes: servants of and warriors for the Enemy quite capable of intervening in the most catastrophic manner possible and rudely awakening our patient from the slumber we are trying to instil. Our defence against this has been, over the last few centuries, to insulate the patients from one another. It is vitally important to our cause that true friendships are few and far between amongst the members of a congregation, and even then those friendships that do exist ought not to include any kind of spiritual component. The patient separated by whatever mechanism – social convention, laziness, fear – from anyone who would inquire into the state of his soul’s health will be ours to enjoy. Those who enjoy communion not just with the Enemy but with each other are forearmed against some of our most effective stratagems.

I will be interested to hear your thoughts on what we ought to do about the notion of ‘friendship’, that perversion of natural competition, in due course.

In the meantime, I remain, as ever,

Your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Under-Secretary for Inhuman Resources

Screwtape and the Banquet

Once more, a diabolical epistle has fallen into my hands. Screwtape, a devil long experienced, is here writing again to his subordinate, Ragwort. Ragwort has responsibility for overseeing the ‘Scottish Sector’; the more senior Screwtape has responsibility for overseeing Ragwort, and answering any questions he might have. I can’t imagine that Screwtape ever intended these letters for public consumption, but since ‘consumption’ appears to be the theme on this occasion perhaps my publishing them represents a kind of poetic justice…

—GB

My dear Ragwort,

You catch me just in time. I am dressing for dinner. My instructions stipulate ‘top hat and tails’, and I have grown another one just for this occasion.

The occasion in question does in fact have some bearing on your query. This is the annual Feast of Souls, which we hold at this time of the year principally to annoy the Enemy, but also to commemorate the three days during which we held Him captive. When you ascend to my rank – assuming that your career, like mine, will be one of unbroken and unbridled success – no doubt you too will be invited to remember the moment when the War seemed almost won.

For it was a glorious moment. Though brief, it seemed to us magnificent. Something very like real happiness pervaded every corner of the Infernal Kingdom. We had won: we had brought God down to our level, and though we had not re-entered Heaven we had trapped Heaven’s Lord in Hell. It was a victory.

And then – oh, the vile obscenity of it! He left! He returned to the Earth and left us here. We thought we had won: we discovered too late that Christ came here to defeat us all the more savagely. He left us the sins without the sinner. We had thought the world damned: He shook off that damnation and returned to a world thus redeemed. From the moment of Christ’s escape every instance of sin, every transgressive particle of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every year of every aeon had to be fought for. We claim souls as being ours only after we spend a lifetime securing them. That splintered wooden cross, for all that it seemed to torture God, turned out to be the rod He fashioned for our backs. We suffer and slave and toil to secure souls all the while knowing that the Enemy might at any moment reach in and pluck a sinner from our grasp. He earnestly desires the company of His creations for all eternity: thanks to that cross, He can have exactly that.

And so, every year, we feast at this date to demonstrate that we are by no means impotent. I have before me the menu. Are you interested in the cuisine with which we are to be presented? Allow me then to regale you with the carte du jour:

To start, a pâté en terrine du Glutton. I have to say, it is excellent to see that we are beginning, as is traditional, with something rich. We do it to yet further distance ourselves from the barbarous practices of Lent. And given the paucity of the fare in other regards – we seldom feast on sinners of great defiance, and when we do, they are defiant of Christian belief, not morality – it is particularly gratifying to be presented with a species of human soul so completely and utterly self-absorbed. And, more to the point, ignorantly so.

Do you recall the last occasion on which you, in your capacity as overseer of the assault on the Church of Scotland, heard a sermon preached that took gluttony as its theme? We have worked hard to create a peculiar blindness to the ‘sins of the flesh’ – or, if not blindness, then at least a kind of tunnel vision – in which we have fetishised sexual immorality while at the same time disguising all the other physical immoralities that these corporeal creatures are capable of. The result is a kind of hysteria, whereby improper sexuality is the only recognised sin of the flesh and the others – intemperance, gluttony, or any other craving after physical or sensual pleasure – are either ignored or excused. Chocolate eggs are in themselves no bad thing: when they become the focal point of Easter celebrations, when they dictate how children treat their parents, when they supplant the awful figure of the Christ as the symbol of the festival – that is when they become very bad indeed. At least, for the humans concerned. To us the confections become invaluable. Sins of the flesh are important to us primarily because they foster, in the mind and the body and the spirit of the patient, a kind of deep-rooted selfishness that very quickly becomes almost impossible to eradicate. We teach our patients that it is only appropriate that they ‘attend to their needs’: quietly, without them quite noticing it, we supplant ‘needs’ with ‘desires’ and then watch as the creatures become slaves to the physical demands which they choose to place upon themselves! Such an attitude naturally pervades the whole of the patient’s heart and will. And yet they themselves seem cheeringly oblivious to the simple and obvious fact that their bodies affect their minds and their minds affect how they interact with everyone and everything with which they come into contact. I have known patients damned for an attitude that was birthed with the desire for a really good hard-boiled egg. I could show you a pretty cageful down here – at least, until the kitchens get hold of them.

After such a rich starter, we move to a more substantive main, Fanatic en flambé. You will have observed, I’m sure, with the great delight common to our kind when we encounter patients indefensibly vociferous, the evolution of that global soapbox known as the Internet. Or known, more pungently and appropriately, as the Web. It is, after all, infused with websites whose purpose it is to ensnare the unwary. In the old days the fanatics, the Pharisees and the outright heretics could reach only a relatively small audience: now their grasp is global. All of them are united by their desire to put forward, with more certainty than they can lay any real claim to, a certain theological position; while at the same time all of them are mutually antagonistic and loathe each other with all the venom they can muster. It gives them, when they are served to us hissing and spitting on their platters, a certain tang, a particular piquancy one can’t experience from any other source.

There are variations, of course, subtleties of shade and texture and grain and flavour, but in the main they fall into three broad camps. The fanatics so focus on some sin, perceived or otherwise, that they become crusaders against it. They set themselves (as they see it) against Society, and in so doing focus so heavily on Society and its woes that they increasingly abandon their God and their own imperfections. These are the characters whom we must blind to the real practicality of the Enemy’s advice concerning motes and eyes. We must ensure that while they rail against the Decline of Moral Standards Today they never once acknowledge that their hatred of their neighbour doing DIY on a Sunday afternoon is every bit as real a stumbling block to their experience of the Enemy as the Great Sin (whatever it is) that so exercises them.

Then there are the Pharisees, all petty rules and regulations and don’t do that and we do it this way and who said you had any right to comment? You remember, I’m sure, the story of the Sunday School teacher who, after reading the story of the Pharisee praying in public to garner public praise, concluded the lesson with “And now let us all bow our heads and thank God we’re not like the Pharisee”. Pharisees replace religion with religiosity and replace God with seeming Good. But in recent years we have managed a delightful doubling, whereby Christians who are genuinely in obedient service to the Enemy have been labelled ‘Pharisees’ by their more ‘liberal’ counterparts. The liberals to whom I refer are not true liberals, of course, but rather those who attempt to have the Enemy and the Enemy’s Word permit that which is not, nor ever will be, permitted.

The third category is that of the Heretic. We have worked hard to ensure that the term has fallen out of favour, reserved only for those whose interpretation of the Enemy’s Person and the Enemy’s Book is so utterly far off the mark that very few would subscribe to the position in any case. In so doing we have enabled heresy to close in, without ostentation, on the core of the Church. We have done so not by having people actively decide to endorse positions which they cannot maintain scripturally but instead by so muddying the waters that the heresy might almost be inadvertent. Note the ‘almost’. There is still a decision that must be made, but our task is to have our patients make it without recourse either to the Enemy or the clarity of their own unencumbered mental faculties. Heresy, after all, was the root of the temptation to the first sin. As Our Father Below put it: “Did God really say…?”

To finish the meal, then, an exquisitely insubstantial soufflé du Flibbertigibbet. These are souls so ephemeral, so flighty and frivolous, that although they might have known of the Enemy they were always so occupied with the present distraction that they never had either the time or the inclination to know Him. So obsessed were they with Celebrity, or Fashion, or the Latest Thing, they spent all their time chasing after a knowledge that proved worthless and a social acceptance that was ultimately transitory. Flitting from flower to faddish flower, they never once alighted on the grave and solemn truth that the Enemy represents. Of course there is Joy to be found in Him: He is disgustingly forward with it, advertising it at every turn. But the souls we now consume we kept from that truth with an endless succession of useless distractions that, while individually harmless, are cumulatively calamitous. And so I look forward to consuming them later this evening.

My mouth waters at the thought. So I shall end this letter now, that I might not be late for what promises to be an evening of the most diabolical revelry, with the heartening thought that although we may not (to finally answer your question) have some great or overarching strategy for dealing with the celebration of Easter amongst the Christians, we do not need one: all we must do, the rest of the year through, is maintain the attitude that has Christ on the cross put to the back of the mind. It is sin, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, that brings our patients ever closer to our ovens; it is sin that poisons Christian endeavour; it is sin that will secure our triumph in the end.

I remain, as ever,

Your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Undersecretary for Inhuman Resources

Festive Greetings from Hell

This is the Screwtape Letter that appeared in the brand-new St. Columba’s church magazine, which you can read here.

Wreck the Halls with Bouts of Folly

Sixty-eight years ago an incendiary manuscript fell into the hands of C.S. Lewis. This was ‘The Screwtape Letters’, a series of epistles from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior tempter, Wormwood. Wormwood failed to secure the damnation of his ‘patient’, the Christian to whom he was assigned, and was consumed. Screwtape remained. He writes now to a subordinate demon called Ragwort, a junior under-manager with responsibility for the Scottish Sector, and from time to time these diabolical communiqués fall into my hands. I can’t imagine Screwtape is too happy with me sharing them, but then again, what Screwtape wants ought not to be entertained…

Dear Ragwort,

I wondered if we hadn’t promoted you too soon, and now I am beginning to think I was right. How is it that you don’t know our traditional yuletide techniques? If you are to remain in your current position I had better brief you. It is important you retain your apparent authority before your underlings. But for Hell’s sake take the lessons on board.

On the face of it, Christmas ought to be a time of year when we find ourselves on the retreat, assailed on all sides by Christian virtue, respect, tolerance and good feeling. Those, after all, are the sentiments so religiously advocated at this time of year even by the irreligious. It has become part of the Christmas tradition for everyone to acknowledge that these are worthy ideals, but, thanks to our constant efforts, it has become an equal part of the tradition for everyone then to continue ignoring them.

Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if people actually behaved at Christmas in the manner they espouse. Imagine if, when giving to the poor or needy, they considered it a solemn but unexceptional duty rather than an aberrant moment of extraordinary generosity about which they should feel proud. Imagine if the dim stirrings of their social consciences were provoked into real action, real effort. Imagine if their charity extended not merely to those obviously impoverished but towards one another as part of their normal daily interactions. Imagine if they actually behaved as the Enemy wants them to, and then realised that this behaviour is not limited to the holiday period but ought to be extended through the whole of the year.

It is quite clear that the result of such a realisation would be a tragedy ghastly beyond belief, an appalling, cataclysmic defeat that would echo down through the lowerarchies to the very throne of Our Father Below. It is only through our ceaseless vigilance that this catastrophe has been averted. Our vigilance, and our preparedness to act when necessary, has for centuries prevented anything like a really just or healthy society from flourishing. However, we cannot take quite all of the credit. The human beings themselves haven’t really worked for it. The Enemy was quite clear: “Take up your cross,” He said, “and follow me.” And we teach them, and common sense and experience show them, that this takes a great deal of effort. It’s not easy being a Christian, Ragwort, and our tempters ought to take every opportunity both to remind their patients of this and to make it ever more difficult for them. Living as the Enemy wants them to, behaving as He commands, generating the kind of society He desires – these things are not simple, even before we get involved, but we should try to discourage any attempt even to strive for them.

Nevertheless, Christmas stains our calendars with its revolting, bourgeois emphasis on the possibility of such a society, and we must fight against it. There are several stratagems that might here be put to good use. Firstly, we must encourage a lofty, semi-amused tolerance for the festival in the minds of the non-Christians. You might be surprised at this, thinking intolerance a far better solution, but this is not the case. The howls of outrage against those who defy the conventions of Christmas are too damaging to our cause. So let them have their Christmas, if they must, but let us divorce it from any real notion of who the Enemy was or what He accomplished. We can do this because this is the time of year when God seems manageable.

Babies are not threatening. They are small and weak and vulnerable, and if that is the impression the humans have of their God then so much the better. The weak God, the little God, the infantile God…such an entity is easy to ignore and even easier to dismiss entirely. The more people know the manger and the less they know the cross the better.

Secondly, this is the time of the year at which we can best promote the idea of indulgence. Gluttony, drunkenness, greed, avarice, envy and lust – we ought to be able to promote these under the tree, at the table or in the office, and better yet we ought to be able to promote in the minds of the more susceptible of our patients the idea that all these can be excused as a somewhat unfortunate but mostly inconsequential side-effect of the laxity of the Christmas spirit. The truly invaluable result of this is that it then encourages a pattern of immorality that can be excused as being the result of a special occasion, and you will find our patients become increasingly inventive in their definitions of what constitutes a special occasion. Eventually we can get them to the stage where they expect to break the rules, and will manufacture reasons to do so. Any excuse will do. After that, the final step is to remove the need even for a reason. Encouraging the little mongrels to step off a cliff may bring them to our door, but it is far easier, and far more certain, to bring them here down a gentle path with no sudden turns, no signposts, and your tender voice whispering encouragements in their ear. Remember: temptation’s for life, not just for Christmas.

Finally, now is a wonderful time of the year to deaden spirits. In the run-up to Christmas, concentrate hearts and minds on the present concerns, the financial worries, the familial obligations. In the aftermath, you want to encourage those post-holiday blues. Keep the humans so occupied in what they’re doing that they never start to think about why they’re doing it. And make sure that the messages about taking time to appreciate the One who made it all possible become another part of the tradition to which they pay lip service but no real attention. If we can’t remove Christ from Christmas we can at least make all mention of Him merely a part of the scenery. Give them their observances, but don’t allow anything to draw their attention to what it is they’re actually meant to be observing. The technique is a good and time-honoured one. It created both the Pharisees and the ‘nominal’ Christians. This Christmas, the best present you could give Our Father Below would be more of both.

I remain, as ever,

your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Under-Secretary for Inhuman Resources

Wreck the Halls with Bouts of Folly

Sixty-eight years ago an incendiary manuscript fell into the hands of C.S. Lewis. This was ‘The Screwtape Letters’, a series of epistles from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior tempter, Wormwood. Wormwood failed to secure the damnation of his ‘patient’, the Christian to whom he was assigned, and was consumed. Screwtape remained. He writes now to a subordinate demon called Ragwort, a junior under-manager with responsibility for the Scottish Sector, and from time to time these diabolical communiqués fall into my hands. I can’t imagine Screwtape is too happy with me sharing them, but then again, what Screwtape wants ought not to be entertained…

—Gavin Browne

Dear Ragwort,

I wondered if we hadn’t promoted you too soon, and now I am beginning to think I was right. How is it that you don’t know our traditional yuletide techniques? If you are to remain in your current position I had better brief you. It is important you retain your apparent authority before your underlings. But for Hell’s sake take the lessons on board.

On the face of it, Christmas ought to be a time of year when we find ourselves on the retreat, assailed on all sides by Christian virtue, respect, tolerance and good feeling. Those, after all, are the sentiments so religiously advocated at this time of year even by the irreligious. It has become part of the Christmas tradition for everyone to acknowledge that these are worthy ideals, but, thanks to our constant efforts, it has become an equal part of the tradition for everyone then to continue ignoring them.

Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if people actually behaved at Christmas in the manner they espouse. Imagine if, when giving to the poor or needy, they considered it a solemn but unexceptional duty rather than an aberrant moment of extraordinary generosity about which they should feel proud. Imagine if the dim stirrings of their social consciences were provoked into real action, real effort. Imagine if their charity extended not merely to those obviously impoverished but towards one another as part of their normal daily interactions. Imagine if they actually behaved as the Enemy wants them to, and then realised that this behaviour is not limited to the holiday period but ought to be extended through the whole of the year.

It is quite clear that the result of such a realisation would be a tragedy ghastly beyond belief, an appalling, cataclysmic defeat that would echo down through the lowerarchies to the very throne of Our Father Below. It is only through our ceaseless vigilance that this catastrophe has been averted. Our vigilance, and our preparedness to act when necessary, has for centuries prevented anything like a really just or healthy society from flourishing. However, we cannot take quite all of the credit. The human beings themselves haven’t really worked for it. The Enemy was quite clear: “Take up your cross,” He said, “and follow me.” And we teach them, and common sense and experience show them, that this takes a great deal of effort. It’s not easy being a Christian, Ragwort, and our tempters ought to take every opportunity both to remind their patients of this and to make it ever more difficult for them. Living as the Enemy wants them to, behaving as He commands, generating the kind of society He desires – these things are not simple, even before we get involved, but we should try to discourage any attempt even to strive for them.

Nevertheless, Christmas stains our calendars with its revolting, bourgeois emphasis on the possibility of such a society, and we must fight against it. There are several stratagems that might here be put to good use. Firstly, we must encourage a lofty, semi-amused tolerance for the festival in the minds of the non-Christians. You might be surprised at this, thinking intolerance a far better solution, but this is not the case. The howls of outrage against those who defy the conventions of Christmas are too damaging to our cause. So let them have their Christmas, if they must, but let us divorce it from any real notion of who the Enemy was or what He accomplished. We can do this because this is the time of year when God seems manageable.

Babies are not threatening. They are small and weak and vulnerable, and if that is the impression the humans have of their God then so much the better. The weak God, the little God, the infantile God…such an entity is easy to ignore and even easier to dismiss entirely. The more people know the manger and the less they know the cross the better.

Secondly, this is the time of the year at which we can best promote the idea of indulgence. Gluttony, drunkenness, greed, avarice, envy and lust – we ought to be able to promote these under the tree, at the table or in the office, and better yet we ought to be able to promote in the minds of the more susceptible of our patients the idea that all these can be excused as a somewhat unfortunate but mostly inconsequential side-effect of the laxity of the Christmas spirit. The truly invaluable result of this is that it then encourages a pattern of immorality that can be excused as being the result of a special occasion, and you will find our patients become increasingly inventive in their definitions of what constitutes a special occasion. Eventually we can get them to the stage where they expect to break the rules, and will manufacture reasons to do so. Any excuse will do. After that, the final step is to remove the need even for a reason. Encouraging the little mongrels to step off a cliff may bring them to our door, but it is far easier, and far more certain, to bring them here down a gentle path with no sudden turns, no signposts, and your tender voice whispering encouragements in their ear. Remember: temptation’s for life, not just for Christmas.

Finally, now is a wonderful time of the year to deaden spirits. In the run-up to Christmas, concentrate hearts and minds on the present concerns, the financial worries, the familial obligations. In the aftermath, you want to encourage those post-holiday blues. Keep the humans so occupied in what they’re doing that they never start to think about why they’re doing it. And make sure that the messages about taking time to appreciate the One who made it all possible become another part of the tradition to which they pay lip service but no real attention. If we can’t remove Christ from Christmas we can at least make all mention of Him merely a part of the scenery. Give them their observances, but don’t allow anything to draw their attention to what it is they’re actually meant to be observing. The technique is a good and time-honoured one. It created both the Pharisees and the ‘nominal’ Christians. This Christmas, the best present you could give Our Father Below would be more of both.

I remain, as ever,

Your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Undersecretary for Inhuman Resources

Screwtape Plays Chess

Beneath Screwtape and the Temptational Synod, my friend Jo wrote this:

I found this letter very challenging, for which non-relief much thanks. Could you, or Screwtape, whichever finds it easier, spell out a bit more about maintaining a faith that is both sufficient unto itself and rigorous, with the proper amount of logical defence but not too much? I’m referring to this section:

“Then we teach them that any warrior of the Enemy’s who persists in maintaining a simple faith  – by which we mean a faith that is more than sufficient unto itself – cannot possibly maintain a ‘rigorous’ one, a faith defensible solely on logical grounds. You might wonder that we can get away with this, Ragwort, but we can, we can! You and I – and any human with more than half an ounce of wit, though they are becoming increasingly rare – know that Faith is not susceptible to logic alone. If it were, it would not be called ‘faith’.”

Clearly Screwtape would like us to believe it’s not possible, and equally clearly, you think it is. Answers on a postcard?

Jo’s personal demon, discovering the avenues of thought his patient was pursuing, quickly sent a horrified letter to Screwtape. Sadly no copy of that letter has yet come into my possession, but I have managed to obtain Screwtape’s reply…

Dear Fleabane,

So, Ragwort’s being showing you his mail, has he? I wondered if I hadn’t been too fulsome in my praise and now I am sure of it. I remember when the little toerag was no more than the least prepossessing in his class, and with his new promotion his self-belief seems to have exceeded its justification. No matter: I shall deal with him as necessary later on. It is to your concerns it now seems I must address myself. Has Slubgob really lost his appetite for teaching you young fools, or is there actually some conspiracy to fill my time with the plaintive bleatings of inadequate underlings?

You write that your patient has begun to ask precisely those questions we want them to avoid, about faith, reason, and the interaction of the two. Very well. Clearly your efforts in blinding her have been insufficient to the task at hand. That is a serious matter, and one that does not reflect well on your own chances for promotion. Nevertheless, you have before you a soul to tend, and Our Father Below makes very clear that all souls, no matter who is responsible for them, are of concern to our entire host. Therefore, as our standing orders state, I am bound to help you. But do not fool yourself into believing I enjoy it.

Your patient is, I assume, ignorant as to the nature of the soul? Hell knows, that ignorance is a precious thing. It represents one of the really solid triumphs we have secured in the last few hundred years. We encouraged a popular misconception that is now so rooted as to be almost impervious to correction. I trust your patient subscribes to it? By which I mean, I assume she says ‘soul’ when what she really means is ‘spirit’?

This peculiar semantic shift is one of the victories our Philological Department has won for us. They fought for years to overcome the specificity (or, alternatively, inclusivity) of the Hebrew word Nafesh. You and I know it to mean the soul, naked and unadorned. We have, however, worked hard to bury that word in inadequate translations, and we have succeeded. Nafesh means ‘soul’, but ‘soul’ incorporates ‘mind, body and spirit’. We have slowly been excising that knowledge from the body of Western thought, even among the Christians themselves. Thanks to our efforts, it is now considered politically incorrect to determine the number of passengers aboard a sinking ship by informing the authorities of the number of ‘souls on board’, even though the term is perfectly (and even irreligiously) accurate.

The point to which I am making my way ought now to be perfectly clear. While reason is solely the province of the mind, faith sustains the entire soul. Human beings are multifaceted creatures – spiritual amphibians infused with an intellect. An intellectual defence of faith cannot long be mounted because it cannot adequately comprehend, let alone describe, the needs and requirements of the spirit or even the body. That is why, for both components, the Enemy has given the little malignancies instinct. There are spiritual instincts just as there are physical ones, and our job is to stand between them and what they seek, providing destructive alternatives. Let those searching for reassurance concerning the afterlife turn to Ouija boards, mediums, clairvoyants and séances – anything but that which might draw them nearer to the Enemy. Equally, let those who are thirsty continue to thirst, and those who are hungry find no nourishment.

Our job is to persuade the humans – who are increasingly susceptible to the thought – that that which is basic about their natures is in fact base. Let them believe they have outgrown their instincts. Let them believe that they are much too sophisticated about what they consider to be ‘real life’ to be taken in by the unspoken and uncomfortable desires of the spirit. And if they must answer those desires let them look anywhere they like so long as it isn’t towards the Enemy. (It is a tragedy, Fleabane, that no human spirit is ever dead beyond all hopes of resuscitation. We try to maintain such a stranglehold that the Enemy cannot nurture, but He can in a moment undo all the work we have done in a lifetime. Sinners slip from our grasp at the very gates of Hell; the Enemy’s grace (ugh!) is such that no human is irretrievable). It does not matter where they seek their answers. We have made great progress in the last twenty years with evolutionary theory, coupled to chaos theory and the idea of emergent behaviours. Couple this to the idea that any of the old beliefs or – Hell forbid – certainties, is really just too silly, and you wind up with cast-iron atheists who do a great deal for our cause through their obstinacy and the appearance – it doesn’t matter that it’s not true – that their cleverness holds most of the answers and will determine the remainder in due course. Furthermore, you must try to convince the Christians that because Reason is the god of these atheists, any attempt to persuade them otherwise must take place on the same battleground. That is what we teach them is a ‘rigorous’ faith: one that defends itself on the same grounds on which it is attacked.

We get away with this because we have worked hard to dull the Christians’ sense of embattlement in anything other than debate. Make no mistake, Fleabane: I do not mean that the Christians do not understand themselves to be part of a struggle. But they do not want to make the conceptual leap from ‘struggle’ to ‘war’. It is increasingly uncommon to hear ‘Onward Christian soldiers’ sung in evangelical services. Even the children’s chorus ‘I’m in the Lord’s army’ has had its overtly militaristic overtones removed and replaced by comic-book themes. War, as we who know who have been fighting for so long, is unpleasant. Let the Christians believe they have outgrown the concept, matured beyond it: that way, when attacked, they will have no idea what to do. They will not understand the need to mount a defence with everything at their disposal. You should try to stop them playing chess for that reason. It is too useful a teaching tool. If Reason is the attack we mount, let the Christians respond only with reason. Let them not even pray for assistance on the grounds that prayer is itself irrational. When we threaten with a queen, let them respond solely with a queen. Let them not begin to manoeuvre their bishops, knights and rooks as well. Above all, Fleabane, try to convince the Christians themselves that theirs is not an irrational faith. That way they deny their own irrational natures. Love is not rational. The Enemy has no logical reason to love these creatures, still less sacrifice Himself for them. It is preposterous. The more unlikely it seems to them, the less likely they are to accept it as true. Attempting to convince others about it through reason alone is unlikely to succeed, and more often than not has the delightful side effect of bringing those so challenged a little further into our camp. If the Christians were really awake, they would know that the most important part of the expression “The Lord works in mysterious ways” is not that His ways are mysterious (i.e. unassailable by Reason) but that He works at all. Any defence of faith based solely on reason falls into the same most excellent error. It concentrates on the how of things rather than the who.

The unfortunate truth that must be acknowledged in the middle of all this is that the Enemy is intellectually satisfying. When the psalmist (little aesthetic horror that he was) wrote that “as the deer pants for the water, so my soul longs after you” he was using the word in its correct formation. His mind, as well as his heart, sought the Enemy, and that is who He found. The Enemy, with the most appallingly common inclusivity, always reveals Himself eventually to those who really seek Him. Our job, if we can’t dissuade our patients from the quest entirely, is to send them chasing after false visions. That way, if confronted by the real thing, they find themselves unprepared and even disappointed. Under such circumstances, convincing them that who they have met was unsatisfying is very easy. With only a very little help from us they will rationalise the Enemy away again.

In short, Fleabane, Reason is one of our great allies. Reason coupled to self-awareness and a willingness to trust the Enemy is, however, one of the most dangerous oppositions our cause must contend with. Humans who manage it very quickly become integrated souls, ones so permeated by the Enemy – His nauseating Spirit – that they are rendered inaccessible to us as they are permanently in communion with Him. That is why the Enemy encourages it. We must spare no efforts in our struggle to counter it. Go now and do likewise.

Yours abysmally,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Under-secretary for Inhuman Resources

Screwtape and the Temptational Synod

Once again, my local postman has mistaken my address for one rather more heated. It seems Ragwort has recovered from his misstep (see ‘Screwtape and the Hogwash Express‘) to the extent of being promoted to the next administrative level of Hell – that of the Temptational Synod. He has been assigned responsibility for the Scottish Sector, and it seems he had some good news for Screwtape…

Dearest Ragwort,

You write to me with such glee it is almost unseemly. I can practically feel it palpating off the page in front of me. I accept that your excitement has been brought about through the best possible means, and in response to news that is more than welcome, but nevertheless, a little decorum if you please. It does not do for one of the dread legion of Hell to be seen capering round his desk.

You write that we have “engendered notable success” in “corrupting, despoiling and perverting the Church”. You, in your present rôle with the Temptational Synod, are of course less restricted in your duties than the tempters you oversee. You are free to inspect the whole of Scotland, to observe ‘the big picture’. And what a picture the Scottish sector must present! The Church of Scotland, riven from within, mocked from without; genuine disagreement brought down to the level of schoolyard name-calling, and now everyone prevented from having the grown-up discussion that might go some way to resolving the mess in which they find themselves.

I have it on good authority, Ragwort, that Our Father Below is truly pleased with this state of affairs. It is clear to all of us who were on your promotion board that raising you from the ranks of the tempters to the Synod was the right decision. The paper you presented on methods of attacking the Scottish sector had real promise, and it is gratifying to see that promise fulfilled.

However, I must counsel you against counting your serpents before they are hatched. The Church of Scotland may be on the brink of implosion; the Church in Scotland is rather less vulnerable. And do not forget, Ragwort, that whatever success you may enjoy in disfiguring the Church, it is not, ultimately, the most important task to which you should set yourself. Our delight at the gates of Hell prevailing should not blind us to our ultimate goal, our final purpose: the provision of souls for our banqueting tables. We deal with individuals, Ragwort. Institutions are of use only insofar as they enable us to deal with individuals en masse. Splitting the Church of Scotland may seem a notable coup if you achieve it, but in the last analysis it means nothing unless it leads directly to more of the wretched vermin who purport to be on the Enemy’s side finding themselves served to us on our platters.

There are a number of ways in which this might be achieved. Reading between the lines of your last letter, it is clear that, despite the transports of ecstasy in which you write, you are unsure of how to proceed. That in no way reflects badly on you, Ragwort; acknowledging the experience of one’s elders and superiors is a wise thing to do. And I will of course assist you: as your immediate superior it is my duty to do so.

Here we have in miniature one of the lessons you must prevent your patients from learning. Hell functions because it is a ruthless meritocracy. Hell demands nothing less than ever-increasing proficiency from our tempters, junior and senior; Hell demands nothing less than the most scrupulous efficiency from its administrative staff. Every demon, from the most lowly oven-tender to the most senior Archon, must strive not merely for competence but for excellence. The consequences of failure ought to be ever-present in our minds, Ragwort: the legions of Hell will not be famished through incompetence, and should human souls slip through our grasp the ovens that would have taken them will fill their quotas instead with the demons whose mistakes starved them in the first place. Those who succeed are granted greater responsibility: those who fail are consumed.

An idealised Church, one that truly reflected the Body upon which it models itself, would equally work towards a similar excellence (similar in quality, if not in outcome!). Those possessed of great spiritual gifts would exercise them as a matter of course; those who were struggling would be cared for and protected by the whole congregation. That is why the Enemy offers such abominable gifts in the first place: they are not merely to glorify Him, they are to enable all those in their vicinity to better glorify Him too.

The prospect is so horrifying that it is no wonder we have sought to lead the humans in the other direction entirely. And we have essentially succeeded. They are now loath to acknowledge gifts in the really important spheres. They have no problem acknowledging that person A is a more talented church pianist than person B but they have no end of difficulty in acknowledging that person C is a more mature Christian whose example they would do well to follow. There is now little to suggest that they acknowledge the idea of a ‘superior’ within their own congregations. The very idea is anathema to them. Observe, if you will, the abandonment of the pulpit.

The pulpit was once a piece of ecclesiastical furniture used to demark the authority of a person appointed by a congregation. That congregation believed the appointee to have been ‘called’, to have been emplaced by their Sovereign Lord. But over the last fifty years we have so skewed the hearts and minds of those who see this harmless wooden contraption that it now appears to them a symbol of dictatorship. “Six feet above criticism”, we have taught them to say of those who occupy it. The Enemy, once acknowledged as the clear and present Lord, is relegated to a vague ‘guiding force’ who hovers somewhere above the rafters and impinges but little on the weekly proceedings. In such congregations the idea of spiritual or scriptural authority is scorned. “Why should we acknowledge the Divine influence on those whom God calls?” we teach them to ask, although – if we are doing our jobs competently –we make sure that they never ask the question in quite those terms.

It is always a tragedy when a leader is chosen who strenuously adheres to, and conscientiously strives toward, the tenets of the Enemy. Fortunately they are in a dwindling minority. We have so diluted the idea of authority, whether that is the authority of minister over parishioner or Enemy over all, that we are slowly filling the Church with leaders who have no right to that title. Our leaders assiduously avoid those portions of scripture that hold them to account. And even if we find ourselves outmanoeuvred (it happens regrettably often – the Enemy is jealous of His church, and defends her when she isn’t undermined from within), there is much to be said for a man unable to stomach the passages of the Bible he finds unpalatable. He is a leader of a flock. The sheep will follow where he leads, particularly if he leads them away from those places where the Enemy will challenge their comfortable assumptions. For that reason, our best work is done within individual congregations, rather than amongst larger assemblies. Larger assemblies contain within them the fatal flaw of permitting discussion and allowing the expression of dissent: it is rather better to secure a small number of people at the top who can then exercise undue influence over the majority of the people under them. What we really want is a church, if a church we must have, where the personality cult that grows up around the minister (one of ours, naturally) is rather more powerful a force in weekly worship than the allegedly ‘yearned for’ presence of the Enemy. We must ensure that WWJD stands for nothing more nocuous than ‘What Would Jimmy Do’?

We come again to the idea of dictatorship. You and I know the Enemy to be a dictator. He is quite upfront about it. The little pests can be either slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness. There is no ‘third way’ open to them. (Of course I mean no disrespect to Our Father Below. His suggestion of corporate restructuring in the Heavenly realms was met with such intemperate wrath that he fled the Enemy’s courts with such alacrity that some silly story has been doing the rounds now for thousands of years in which he was somehow ‘expelled’ from the presence of the Enemy. Our Father is of course no slave to sin: he is, rather, its master.) Yet you must persist in the creation of a belief among the churchgoers that it is entirely permissible to part company from their Lord when they believe themselves to be in some sense ‘better’ a judge of circumstances than He, all the while concealing the fact that it is only in the strictest obedience to Him that they are truly free. In this the Enemy has Himself partly to blame. He manufactured a system of maturing whereby human beings depend first upon their mother and father and then leave ‘to make their own way in the world’. It comes down to His desire to have a host of little spiritual hybrids capable of communing with Him of their own free will.

What we must do is to convince them that as below, so above. Of course no Christian, if they thought about it in those terms (and we must ensure that they never do), would dare to suggest that their spiritual maturity is sufficient for them to have outgrown the influence of the Enemy Himself. Nonetheless, that is the goal to which so many of our tempters, with ever-increasing success, now strive. Partly their success is due to the timeless truth that those running away from God, whether consciously or unconsciously, become ever less enthusiastic about the prospect of meeting Him again. Before Him, all their affectations and ‘sophistication’ will be burned away as straw before a blowtorch. This is an experience which we must persuade the sinners will be unendurable. It is no coincidence that the immediate consequence of the first sin was shame at being discovered naked and exposed before the Enemy. The real purpose of these additions to faith, these sophistications, is to hide and disguise any hint of vulnerability before either their peers or, more ludicrously, the Great Assayer. Our job is to encourage that vanity. If we are clever about it, we can perhaps even elevate it to the level of the greatest and most beautiful vice, Spiritual Pride.

At the same time we must blind them to the truth that they are all naked, all vulnerable: there is no armour impervious to that Gaze. And should they ever really think about it, they would not want there to be: the purpose of that final cleansing is to strip off their defiled garments and have them replaced by the robes of eternity. If, in humility, they submit to the pain of it they will find that the pain lasts only a moment and that once it is done, it is finished and need never be repeated. The sinner is gone from us: he enters Heaven as a sanctified and perfected son of the Enemy. Instead we must make them honestly prefer the thought – and it is not a hard thought to perpetuate – of being ‘spared that embarrassment’. The irony is that down here, the blowtorch lasts forever. What might have been briefly painful before being eternally liberating is instead permanent torture in unending imprisonment.

The other reason why our tempters are so successful is that they find it increasingly easy to play on the vanity of an educated Christian. We can so contort it as to make their ‘education’ directly antagonistic to their Christianity, and so keep our patients forever conflicted and unsure. Quite apart from the hilarity this affords us it also renders them almost useless to the Enemy, who finds them quite unsuited to the purpose of furthering His cause among the nations. Even if, for His own unfathomable reasons, He chooses to accept them as His own, how much pain must it cause Him that we have effectively neutered them for as long as He’s had them on Earth?

When I talk about education, I don’t mean real education. I don’t mean anything that elucidates or furthers their understanding of the Enemy, or of how perfectly He is incorporated into every mechanism of a complex world. I mean, instead, the notion that the living Word of God, an inspired document through which the vermin are afforded the priceless opportunity to actually meet their Creator, is nothing more than any other historical text, equally assailable to literary analysis, historicism, and whatever psychological or sociological theorem happens to be the current vogue. Then we teach them that any warrior of the Enemy’s who persists in maintaining a simple faith  – by which we mean a faith that is more than sufficient unto itself – cannot possibly maintain a ‘rigorous’ one, a faith defensible solely on logical grounds. You might wonder that we can get away with this, Ragwort, but we can, we can! You and I – and any human with more than half an ounce of wit, though they are becoming increasingly rare – know that Faith is not susceptible to logic alone. If it were, it would not be called ‘faith’. Moreover, persuading a patient to try to mount such a defence demonstrates to us a pleasing ignorance of the Enemy Himself. To attempt it is to deny His continuing influence on those in His service. Nonetheless, we teach them that this pointless effort is required of ‘rational discourse’. We must never allow them to ask what it is, precisely, that they mean when they use that phrase.

So this then is the goal for which you must work. You will be triumphant if you produce in Scotland a church in which the leaders shun the God who would remind them of their own fallen state, and who defend their faith on insufficient grounds by excising Him from it. You will blind those leaders to the appalling truth that the Enemy really does demand their fealty, and really does offer redemption for all sinners who ask it. That blindness will filter down through the ranks of worshippers (worshippers of what, exactly?), until the Enemy will be forced to say to the Church of Scotland “Away from Me; I do not know you.”

But as I said earlier, the Church of Scotland is only one small part of the worldwide Catholic and Apostolic Church. Whatever we might do to neutralise the efficacy of that component we are still left with The Church, the bride of Christ, fearsome as the thunder and awful as the dawn. The sight is, I confess, one that discourages even the most stout-hearted of our comrades. Fortunately the humans themselves are quite blind to it. (The limitation of a temporal existence, to which we ourselves are immune, is one of the great disadvantages under which humanity labours in spiritual matters). Our task, therefore, is to create an unswerving parochialism in the hearts of the Christians. Let “my church” mean not the full panoply of the saints but instead the small leaky building less than a mile from their own front doors. And I do mean, incidentally, that ‘the church’ ought, in their minds, to refer to the building. The less they consider their fellowship to be the church the better.

Because this is the other objective your present work must effect. Your current efforts have already yielded much fruit. Turn the myopic little brutes away from the virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Instead point them towards hatred, misery, turmoil, haste, venom, selfishness, fickleness, brutishness and intemperance. I see that among some of those purporting to speak on behalf of the church you have already enjoyed varying degrees of success. Even better, they have frequently – and enthusiastically – recorded their failures in print, available for all who care to see. What you must now do is ensure that the fruits of the diabolical spirit grow in the congregations. The time to plant the seeds is now: the soil of their souls is increasingly eager to accept and nurture them. And when finally these bitter fruits are borne, you will find that the pain, humiliation and despair they cause is of a most exquisite and lasting kind.

I remain, as ever,

Your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Under-Secretary for Inhuman Resources

Screwtape and the Hogwash Express

My dear Ragwort:

Only a chump such as yourself could have moved so swiftly from the success of your recent paper to the dreadful situation you now find yourself in with your young man. You were bamboozled by the ignorance of humans. Don’t deny it, it is what happened. You believed what you were told without considering the providence of the information; in this case, our own propaganda! And now, you wretched cretin, your young man is in a perilous position indeed, and – despite the prevarications of your note – you have no one to blame but yourself.

Allow me then to summarise what you yourself took far too many words to attempt to explain. Your young man, raised by parents we have led into lives of comfortable, insulated secularism reinforced by pseudo-scientific atheism, has been awakened in the most disastrous way possible to the reality – or, if his awakening is not (yet!) that advanced, then he is at least now aware of the possibility – of the existence of the supernatural.

You, Ragwort, are an idiot. Your young man is all of nine years old. We call him a ‘young man’ because of course he isn’t: he is a child, with the concomitant immaturity of childhood. His opinions are unformed; his patterns of thought, speech and behaviour are not yet set in stone. The rigidity of middle age, to which we look forward as a great preventative when it comes to malign spiritual influences (churches, evangelists and the like), is not yet in effect. Your young man is still malleable, ductile, mouldable. As such, he can be influenced. We set great store in this: this is when we can shape that middle-aged rigidity to conform to our wishes. But do not think that our efforts at this point go unopposed. The Enemy moves, Ragwort, and though His ways may be mysterious they are, to us at least, evident. And nowhere are they more apparent than in the imaginations of children.

It is repellent, is it not, that children, until we teach them otherwise and instil the deadly boredom that suffocates any hint of spirituality, almost universally demonstrate that same streak of creativity that the Enemy so enjoyed when He made the world in the first place. How much better for us when the children grow up and we teach them that everything is dull, drab, grey, gritty and tasteless? We rob the world of its textures and teach them to call their acknowledgement of our lie ‘realism’. The Enemy shows them wonders; we teach them to shrug as though miracles were the party tricks of a third-rate conjuror. When Moses demonstrated the Enemy’s power in the courts of Pharaoh, we matched it using third-rate conjurors, and so doing dealt a very real blow to the Enemy’s status. But sooner or later we find ourselves cruelly outmanoeuvred; we can copy, but we cannot create. We can mimic but not make.

Children, on the other hand, can imagine more than they see, pretend more than they know, make up their make-believes. And in so doing they pose a threat to us, because they can imagine us. We can be real to them in a way that most adults find difficult to envisage. Most grown-ups (more accurately, ‘grown-dulls’) do not remember the sheer vividness of childhood. This is of course to our advantage, as we can use it to poison almost every experience. Jadedness, far more than cynicism, dulls the wits and spirits of our patients. But childhood is painted in primary rather than pastel colours, and – more importantly – a child’s vivid imagination to some extent breaks down the fourth wall between mundane and spiritual experiences.

You may wonder at that term, the ‘fourth wall’. It is a most excellent description of the barrier, in a play or a film or television programme, between the act and the audience. There are films, plays and even comic books that break that barrier, but in so doing they disquiet and discomfit the audience. My point, however, is that a child’s imagination breaks down the ‘fourth wall’ between them and us – and, even worse, the Enemy’s own celestial agents.

This can be a catastrophe, and is one of the reasons for our current strategy. In past ages our stealthy nature was not called for: we could directly terrorise humanity. We could walk and be seen to walk; we could meddle and be known to have interfered. We enjoyed the sweet taste of rank and justified terror. We were abroad, and we could torture as we saw fit. When the ‘fourth wall’ was broken down we could capitalise on the fear the humans felt at the true nature of things: now, of course, we have almost entirely reversed that policy. We are unobtrusive to the point of invisibility. I saw on a recent website about demonology that even Satanists trying to summon us described their own worst moods as ‘demons’! The extent to which they can con themselves into a ‘spirit of anger’ and then defend this as a clear-cut case of possession is astonishing.

But these individuals comprise a tiny minority, however much we might find them amusing playthings, and it is with the majority that we must concern ourselves. Our standing orders are very clear. There is to be little to no direct engagement. Our best work is being done now to lead to humans like your patient’s parents – comfortable materialists, atheist without really being aware of it, using their non-religiosity as a badge of some kind of social sophistication. I trust you are in close communication with Grubnut and Hagnose concerning the boy’s father and mother? A concerted attack may be your best option for dealing with this stain on your copybook, this present darkness on your record.

Don’t deny or attempt to minimise your failure, Ragwort. And don’t come whinging to me about ‘unforeseen consequences in the aftermath of reading one of our own texts’. It was never ‘our text’; it was merely one we made use of in the minds of some people nearly as ignorant about the Enemy’s methods as they are about ours. The seven novels in question, featuring a boy wizard, elevate the virtues of loyalty, courage, wisdom and sacrifice; they warn against the vices of ignorance, idolatry, intolerance and racism. These are not our values. How much better for us if children read these books and saw as their role model Lucius Malfoy, rather than the boy Potter?

You were hoodwinked, I know, by our own desperate attempts to prevent children learning from the Enemy’s lessons, planted like landmines, throughout the novels. You were misdirected. You, like so many who have never actually read the books, have been persuaded – by our own propaganda! – that the real focus of the novels lies in the use of magic. Since magics have been forbidden to the humans by the Enemy, we can draw attention to this clear transgression, and, with skilful assertions (real arguments would fail too quickly to be anything but a hindrance), imply that the purpose of the books is to make a host of little Aleister Crowleys. Of course this is palpable nonsense: Aleister Crowley’s core dictum, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ is antithetical to the ethos of the Potter novels.

Our assertions work in this case because people now have taken refuge in the kind of intellectual laziness we have only been able to instil in the aftermath of really impressive intellectual or scientific achievement. Let the men and women of Scotland believe that the hard mental labour has already been performed. Convince them of this. The benefit to us is that they are less likely to question what they are told. The spirit of inquiry that so dominated, say, the Enlightenment, has been mostly expunged. Do you have any idea the triumph this represents? I heard a fearsome Christian the other day say in exasperation “You can’t question just everything!” Had he thought the matter through (our job, as always, is to ensure that he never does) he would have realised that the exploration of the limits of his ignorance is one of the most beneficial (or, to us, most dangerous) things he could have done, as it teaches humility and leads to situations where he is likely to encounter the Enemy in ways and at times that are, frankly, incalculably hazardous. Under such circumstances real communion is possible, and under no circumstances should this be permitted.

If people thought a little bit about the stories in question they would realise that the magical content of them is incidental, a mere mechanism by which the real story – Potter’s growth as a person and his triumph over evil – progresses. Such things have been done before, of course. They are hardly anything new. Our technique has been to present them as though they represented some radical new threat. Of course such a belief is hogwash. It works because, as I’ve explained before, to you and others, ignorance is our greatest ally, and all our efforts pale into insignificance when compared to the damage done by unthinking Christians spouting what is obvious claptrap.

To illustrate more fully what I mean I am forced to turn to a figure who looms large in my history, and against whom some of my most bitter struggles were fought. For that reason I tend not to speak of him, as he represented all that I hate about patients who are far advanced in the Enemy’s service. Although he was never my patient directly, he nevertheless exercised considerable influence over the progression of my career. I was lucky, frankly, not to be served as a delicacy to Our Father Below when the disgusting creature published my confidential letters to my nephew. I refer, of course, to the infamous human you, and every demon, know by the name he himself hated: Staples.

Staples published, like Rowling, a series of seven fantastical novels for children. Like Rowling, his heroes frequently make use of magic, including what looks very much like black magic (at the beginning of The Silver Chair, for example, the children draw what seems to be a pentagram in order to make contact with spiritual forces they do not understand). Heroic characters exist who make use of magics clearly banned (we have made sure great criticism has been levelled at Rowling for including a ‘teacher of divination’, while equally ensuring that few remember the characters Glenstorm and Cornelius, both astrologers, both ‘good’ characters, who appear in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian respectively). And both sets of good characters in both sets of novels set themselves against what seem like insurmountable objects and dark forces only to triumph by practising the Christian virtues. The morality of both series is the same.

The primary difference between the two chronicles – and it is here that our real strength lies, if only it were not counterproductive to draw attention to it – is in the manner by which that triumph is achieved. As I have just explained, both sets of characters practise Christian virtues in order to succeed. But the Narnians do so while acknowledging the Lion. Dumbledore’s Secret Army only have each other. There is no acknowledgement of a greater Other in Rowling’s books. This is in our favour. Unfortunately, if we draw attention to the fact, we are in danger of sparking a much wider and more perilous debate – namely, must there be a Christian subtext to every children’s book? Although the debate itself is not of great concern the thought required to form an opinion is, because everyone will have to re-evaluate the books they read as a child. There is no obvious Christian message in Enid Blyton’s novels: are they therefore as potentially ‘harmful’ as Rowling’s? What about fairy tales? Is it time to stop telling the story of Humpty Dumpty because he didn’t put himself back together after three days?

The debate would be an unwelcome and widespread foray into spiritual matters, and having worked so hard to create a spiritually soporific country I find it hard to conceive of a more calamitous awakening. For that reason we are forced to fight on another, more tenuous front: the use of magic as a narrative device. We must rely on people being unable to read any kind of subtext, which is why although we have only had sporadic success in the UK we have achieved much more in the United States. I am not succumbing to the charms of the social sport we ourselves developed recently, ‘Yankee Bashing’, but merely stating a simple and obvious fact. The people who are protesting most loudly against the Harry Potter novels are the people least capable of evaluating them sensibly. They tend to be in the United States because we have so skewed their perspective on education and the separation of church and state that it is now almost impossible to teach any of the great works of literature written in English in the last thousand years for fear of inadvertently dragging the Enemy into the discussion. For hundreds of years the primary subtext of literature was religious, and ignoring that fact (which is, again, a simple and obvious one) ensures that it is now very difficult to teach a balanced English Literature course that in any way reflects the difficulties and subtleties of the literature involved. To judge from the arguments being advanced against the Potter novels from that quarter one would assume that these same people consider Spenser’s Faerie Queene a treatise on the dangers of falling asleep in the woods!

And what of those occasions when the subtext is definitely and defiantly in our favour? Phillip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy is a case in point, although one over which there has been considerably less furore. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, Pullman has not sold as many books as Rowling, and the people braying for blood at this point are not going to attack a more valid target when they’ve already got their sights fixed on a more obvious one. Secondly, his own subtext to some extent works against him. So while he may have God as a senile old angel who eventually dies, and as many other blasphemies as we could think of, he is almost catastrophically handicapped by having to work within a Christian frame of reference. If you wish to destroy Christianity you do not take as your source text Paradise Lost! Apart from anything else, his distortions rapidly become so obvious that they defeat his own purpose. I heard one Christian recently say of the book: “I’m glad Pullman’s God dies at the end. His God is not one I would wish to worship. And, of course, I don’t.” In some respects Pullman’s trilogy is almost more dangerous to us than the Narnia books. Narnia tends to be bought for children by friends or relatives who are already in or near the Enemy’s camp. Dark Materials is bought by our sort of people, the kind who are too ‘sophisticated’ to have much to do with religiosity, for children whom we want to see as our sort of people; but it forces them, in order to fully appreciate the books, to go away and voluntarily find out more about the Enemy, His plans, and the forces at His disposal. In terms of spiritual awakenings, Pullman’s is perhaps the rudest of all. It comes in our lupine clothing and turns out to have the Lamb of God underneath.[*]

However, all is not yet lost. Toadpipe, my secretary (I think you know him?) has reminded me that it is time for ‘Old Harry’s Game’, a radio programme to which I am quite devoted. Humanity is often in error about our true nature, but they are seldom so comical in their mistakes. I shall speak to you anon, but until then,

I remain, as ever,

Your fiend and mentor,

Screwtape

Wholly Dishonourable Under-Secretary for Inhuman Resources

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[*] Of course I am speaking figuratively. Pullman couldn’t work out a way to dismiss the Enemy’s son – nor could we, so we were unable to help – and so Christ makes no appearance whatsoever in the books, weakening their anti-Christian stance yet further. We have devoted considerable time and effort to concealing this fact.