Notes on "The Screwtape Letters"

Notes from C.S. Lewis's "The Screwtape Letters":

Transition from dreamy aspiration to labourious doing.

Prayer
� The best thing is to make sure that they don�t pray.
� Make them forget that what their bodies do affects their souls... thus make them think that bodily position/posture doesn�t matter in prayer. They like to forget that they are animals.
� Turn their gaze away from God to themselves, that they may hope to manufacture feelings... for example, to try to feel forgiven. When they pray for courage, they try to feel courageous.
� Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling.

Contented worldliness is a great weapon against them

�I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought or what I liked.�

Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination & affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will.
Active habits are strengthened by repetition.
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.

Make them think that humility is not self-forgetfulness and devotion to God and others, but as a certain low opinion of himself & his talents.

Let him value opinion rather than truth.

God would have them be concerned with either the present (for the present intersects with the eternal) or eternity (that is, concerned with him). Thus, the they must be consumed with unrealities, the past (which is frozen) or the future (which is the most unlike eternity).

The more �claims on life� that a man has, the more bitter he will be when frustrated. For example, he sees his time as his own, and sees it as being stolen from him. Let them feel that their time is their own, their own personal birthright. Thus he sees �his� time given to his employer, and to worship. Do not let them see that time is gift.

A human cannot truly say �mine� about anything. Men think that they own their bodies and can do with them as they please. God would have men mean by �mine� �the recipient of affection in which I stand in a special relation to� but �that over which I rule.� God says �mine� of all things.

Work on the �horror of the same old thing.� God has endowed creation with both newness and sameness... he has endowed humanity with both a love of change and a love of permanence... it is called rhythm, which unites both. Thus, the change of seasons, for example, both new and the same. It is corrupted into a desire for absolute novelty.

A �false unselfishness� often leads to further sins such as holding grudges, feelings of self-righteousness and anger that their �unselfishness� was not recognized. If people were just open about what they wanted and then discussed their differing wants, there would be no problem. But people feign unselfishness by pretending to want what others want.

Encourage them to believe not because it is true, but for some other reason.

The greatest sin to be encouraged is spiritual pride.

God wants men to ask simple questions: is it righteous? prudent? possible? We prefer that they ask complex questions without answers.

We make them think of unchanged as being stagnant. We have trained them to think of the future as something to be attained, rather than something that every attains equally at 60 minutes per hour.

We condition historical scholars to ask all sorts or questions except whether it is true.