The Gospels were not written to make Christians

This excerpt from The Screwtape Letters may be written in the voice of the demon Screwtape, but it sure sounds like C.S. Lewis.

Indeed materials for a full biography [of Jesus] have been withheld from men. The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin which they already had... The ‘Gospels’ come later and were written not to make Christians but to edify Christians already made.

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 126.

Technorati Tags: Screwtape Letters,C.S. Lewis,historical Jesus,gospels

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #27

My dear Wormwood,

But since your patient has contracted the terrible habit of obedience, he will probably continue such ‘crude’ prayers whatever you do. But you can worry him with the haunting suspicion that the practice is absurd and can have no objective result. Don’t forget to use the ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ argument. If the thing he prays for doesn’t happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don’t work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and ‘therefore it would have happened anyway’, and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 148.

Technorati Tags: Screwtape Letters,C.S. Lewis,prayer,Simpsons

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #25

My dear Wormwood,

.... We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 139.

Technorati Tags: Screwtape Letters,C.S. Lewis,Simpsons,Everyday Man,future

The trouble of being "merely Christian" according to Screwtape (Letter 25 snippet)

My dear Wormwood,

The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call ‘Christianity And’. You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing....

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 135.

Technorati Tags: C.S. Lewis,Screwtape Letters,Stonecutters,Masons,Mere Christianity

Snippet from Screwtape Letter 23: C.S. Lewis on the historical Jesus

My dear Wormwood....

You will find that a good many Christian-political writers think that Christianity began going wrong, and departing from the doctrine its Founder, at a very early stage. Now this idea must be used by us to encourage once again the conception of a ‘historical Jesus’ to be found by clearing away later ‘accretions and perversions’ and then to be contrasted with the whole Christian tradition. In the last generation we promoted the construction of such a ‘historical Jesus’ on liberal and humanitarian lines; we are now putting forward a new ‘historical Jesus’ on Marxian, catastrophic, and revolutionary lines. The advantages of these constructions, which we intend to change every thirty years or so, are manifold. In the first place they all tend to direct men’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each ‘historical Jesus’ is unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to; each new ‘historical Jesus’ therefore has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another, and by that sort of guessing (brilliant is the adjective we teach humans to apply to it) on which no one would risk ten shillings in ordinary life,  but which is enough to produce a crop of new Napoleons, new Shakespeares, and new Swifts, in every publisher’s autumn list. In the second place, all such constructions place the importance of their historical Jesus in some peculiar theory He is supposed to have promulgated. He has to be a ‘great man’ in the modern sense of the word—one standing at the terminus of some centrifugal and unbalanced line of thought —a crank vending a panacea. We thus distract men’s minds from who He is, and what He did....

The ‘historical Jesus’ then, however dangerous He may seem to be to us at some particular point, is always to be encouraged....

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

 

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 123-124, 126.

Technorati Tags: C.S. Lewis,Simpsons,Jesus,historical Jesus,Screwtape Letters

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #21

My dear Wormwood,

Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury.... Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him.    It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tête-a -tête with the friend), that throw him out of gear. Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright. 

 

You have here a delicate task. The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defence. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels....

When I speak of preserving this assumption in his mind, therefore, the last thing I mean you to do is to furnish him with arguments in its defence. There aren’t any. Your task is purely negative. Don’t let his thoughts come anywhere near it. Wrap a darkness about it, and in the centre of that darkness let his sense of ownership-in-Time lie silent, uninspected, and operative.

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 111-113.

Technorati Tags: C.S. Lewis,Screwtape Letters,time

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #20

My dear Wormwood,
 
    I note with great displeasure that the Enemy has, for the time being, put a forcible end to your direct attacks on the patient's chastity. You ought to have known that He always does in the end, and you ought to have stopped before you reached that stage. For as things are, your man has now discovered the dangerous truth that these attacks don't last forever; consequently you cannot use again what is, after all, our best weapon - the belief of ignorant humans, that there is no hope of getting rid of us except by yielding. I suppose you've tried persuading him that chastity is unhealthy? ....

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 105.
Technorati Tags: C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, chastity

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #18

My dear Wormwood,

Even under Slubgob you must have learned at college the routine technique of sexual temptation, and since, for us spirits, this whole subject is one of considerable tedium (though necessary as part of our training) I will pass it over. But on the larger issues involved I think you have a good deal to learn.

The Enemy’s demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy. Ever since our Father’s first great victory, we have rendered the former very difficult to them. The latter, for the last few centuries, we have been closing up as a way of escape. We have done this through the poets and novelists by persuading the humans that a curious, and usually shortlived, experience which they call ‘being in love’ is the only respectable ground for marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding....

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 93.

Technorati Tags: Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis, sexuality, marriage, love

Screwtape on believing

But I must warn you that he has one fatal defect: he really  believes. And this may yet mar all.

  —SCREWTAPE 

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 84.

Technorati Tags: Ned Flanders,C.S. Lewis,Screwtape Letters

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #16

My dear Wormwood,

.... You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it.

  May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realise that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.... the search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil....

Your affectionate uncle,

SCREWTAPE

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 81-82.

Technorati Tags: Simpsons,church,CS Lewis,Screwtape Letters,C.S. Lewis

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #14

My dear Wormwood,

  I see only one thing to do at the moment. Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove! I’m being humble’, and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt—and so on, through as many stages as you please. But don’t try this too long, for fear you awake his sense of humour and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed.

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 69-70.

Technorati Tags: CS Lewis,Screwtape Letters,pride,humility

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #13

My dear Wormwood,

It seems to me that you take a great many pages to tell a very simple story. The long and the short of it is that you have let the man slip through your fingers. The situation is very grave, and I really see no reason why I should try to shield you from the consequences of your inefficiency. A repentance and renewal of what the other side call ‘grace’ on the scale which you describe is a defeat of the first order. It amounts to a second conversion—and probably on a deeper level than the first....

.... It remains to consider how we can retrieve this disaster. The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilising the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel,

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 63, 66-67.

Technorati Tags: Screwtape Letters,C.S. Lewis

Screwtape on the road to hell

Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.                     —SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 49-52.

Technorati Tags: Screwtape Letters,C.S. Lewis,poker,hell,Stonecutters

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #10

My dear Wormwood,

I was delighted to hear from Triptweeze that your patient has made some very desirable new acquaintances and that you seem to have used this event in a really promising manner. I gather that the middle-aged married couple who called at his office are just the sort of people we want him to know—rich, smart, superficially intellectual, and brightly sceptical about everything in the world....

The first thing is to delay as long as possible the moment at which he realises this new pleasure as a temptation. Since the Enemy’s servants have been preaching about ‘the World’ as one of the great standard temptations for two thousand years, this might seem difficult to do. But fortunately they have said very little about it for the last few decades. In modern Christian writings, though I see much (indeed more than I like) about Mammon, I see few of the old warnings about Worldly Vanities, the Choice of Friends, and the Value of Time. All that, your patient would probably classify as ‘Puritanism’—and may I remark in passing that the value we have given to that word is one of the really solid triumphs of the last hundred years? By it we rescue annually thousands of humans from temperance, chastity, and sobriety of life.

Sooner or later, however, the real nature of his new friends must become clear to him, and then your tactics must depend on the patient’s intelligence....

.... Finally, if all else fails, you can persuade him, in defiance of conscience, to continue the new acquaintance on the ground that he is, in some unspecified way, doing these people ‘good’ by the mere fact of drinking their cocktails and laughing at their jokes, and that to cease to do so would be ‘priggish’, ‘intolerant’, and (of course) ‘Puritanical’.

Your affectionate Uncle,

SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 49-52.

Technorati Tags: Screwtape Letters,C.S. Lewis,Simpsons,friends

Screwtape on pretending

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary.
—SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 50.

Technorati Tags: C.S. Lewis,Screwtape Letters,Stonecutters,CS Lewis

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #9

My dear Wormwood,

I hope my last letter has convinced you that the trough of dullness or ‘dryness’ through which your patient is going at present will not, of itself, give you his soul, but needs to be properly exploited. What forms the exploitation should take I will now consider....

.... But there is an even better way of exploiting the trough; I mean through the patient’s own thoughts about it. As always, the first step is to keep knowledge out of his mind. Do not let him suspect the law of undulation. Let him assume that the first ardours of his conversion might have been expected to last, and ought to have lasted, forever, and that his present dryness is an equally permanent condition. Having once got this misconception well fixed in his head, you may then proceed in various ways. It all depends on whether your man is of the desponding type who can be tempted to despair or of the wishful-thinking type who can be assured that all is well. The former type is getting rare among the humans. If your patient should happen to belong to it, everything is easy. You have only got to keep him out of the way of experienced Christians (an easy task now-adays), to direct his attention to the appropriate passages in scripture, and then to set him to work on the desperate design of recovering his old feelings by sheer will-power, and the game is ours. If he is of the more hopeful type your job is to make him acquiesce in the present low temperature of his spirit and gradually become content with it, persuading himself that it is not so low after all. In a week or two you will be making him doubt whether the first days of his Christianity were not, perhaps, a little excessive. Talk to him about ‘moderation in all things’. If you can once get him to the point of thinking that ‘religion is all very well up to a point’, you can feel quite happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing....

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 43, 45-46.

Technorati Tags: C.S. Lewis,Screwtape Letters,undulation,spirituality,Homer Simpson,Ned Flanders

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #8

My dear Wormwood,

So you ‘have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away’, have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob’at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite....

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 37-38.

Technorati Tags: C.S. Lewis,Screwtape Letters,undulation,spirituality

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #3

My dear Wormwood,

I am very pleased by what you tell me about this man’s relations with his mother. But you must press your advantage. The Enemy will be working from the centre outwards, gradually bringing more and more of the patient’s conduct under the new standard, and may reach his behaviour to the old lady at any moment. You want to get in first.... The following methods are useful.
  1. Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the states of his own mind—or rather to that very expurgated version of them which is all you should allow him to see. Encourage this. Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious.  You must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office....

Your affection uncle,
SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 11-12.

Technorati Tags: Screwtape Letters,C.S. Lewis,conversion

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from letter #2

My dear Wormwood,

I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. Do not indulge the hope that you will escape the usual penalties; indeed, in your better moments, I trust you would hardly even wish to do so. In the meantime we must make the best of the situation. There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the Enemy’s camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour.
One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew.... ....Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His ‘free’ lovers and servants—’sons’ is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals. Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to ‘do it on their own’. And there lies our opportunity. But also, remember there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt....

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 5-8.

Technorati Tags: C.S. Lewis,C.S.Lewis,Screwtape Letters,church,disappointment

The Screwtape Letters: A snippet from Letter #1

My dear Wormwood,

I note what you say about guiding your patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïve? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’, but as ‘academic’ or 'practical', ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think that it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about....

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 1-2.

Technorati Tags: C.S.Lewis,C.S. Lewis,Screwtape Letters,jargon,materialism