A Matter of Faith
Many of us live a much unbothered life for someone living with a sworn enemy. He has but a single goal to achieve — our destruction in the most terrible sense of the word. But we march on in life as if there is no one laying traps on every step of ours, as if we do not have the capacity to be tempted, as if the Devil does not exist, and as if we do not believe…
We cannot see him, surely, but that should hardly be an issue for someone who proclaims a belief in Allah Ta’ala and Al-Ghayb (The Unseen). The Enemy may be beyond the reach of our senses, but he is not beyond the reach of our perceptions. Indeed, he is not even that far from us, and runs through our very own blood vessels. Thankfully, Allah Ta’ala Himself is even closer to us than our jugular vein.
But imagine for one second — for I can hardly command you to believe — that you really and truly have this sworn enemy. I think we all will very much like to know what dirty tricks and games he is up to, right? Well, C.S. Lewis somehow cracked the code — or at least a part of it. In 1941, he wrote a series of letters in The Guardian but they were not signed by him, or even seem to be written by him! Rather, they are addressed to Wormwood by his uncle Screwtape, or as perhaps Screwtape himself would like to mention, from the Under-Secretary of a department to a Junior Tempter (capitalization my own). They follow the course of time when the nephew is trying to tempt a young man all the way to Perdition. Screwtape closely monitors Wormwood’s progress and accordingly advises, censures, or, on rare occasions, praises him.
The letters are a thing of beauty, to put it briefly. And to put it not-so-briefly, they are eye-opening, shocking, and extra-ordinary. One wonders what kind of piercing insight Lewis had to put forward such a piece of writing. His is the Christian Devil (if only the Devil was even Christian!) but his absolute abhorrence for Man (he calls us “vermin”), his perseverance to “secure” the “patient’s” soul — to have it as “a brim-full living chalice of despair and horror and astonishment which you can raise to your lips as often as you please” — and his hatred for the relationship between God and Man are not that unfamiliar to those familiar with Iblees.
Tricks and Treats from Hell
Let’s now visit our dear devil Uncle Screwtape’s busy work-desk as he writes to Wormwood.
- In Letter I, he shows how to manipulate a person’s intellectual endeavours while he seeks the Truth. He writes:
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 it is strong, or stark, or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
And also,
But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is “the results of modern investigation”
- But the patient becomes a Christian. Screwtape finds “grave displeasure” in this but is not deterred much for he thinks that possibility for their victory is very much alive. He now seeks to capitalize on the emotion we all feel when we find ourselves a good religion and now are a part of it. It is the feeling where now that we are the guided one must think ourselves above the non-believers for obvious reasons, but also above the old believers for they do not have that “freshness” of faith that we do and because they are such ordinary people. Screwtape advises Wormwood to keep the patient’s attention on the peculiarities of his fellow churchgoers:
All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question “If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?”
And also,
At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy’s ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these “smug”, commonplace neighbours at all.
- In Letter III, he reveals another way to destroy the patient’s character: working on sabotaging his relationship with his mother, who has a dedicated tempter assigned to her too. Screwtape asks Wormwood to coordinate with Glubose (mother’s tempter) and build up tension between the two patients through mundane affairs.
Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother’s eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy — if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption.
And also,
Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention.
- Meanwhile, a certain European war breaks out and now the question arises whether to drive the patient to be a patriot or a pacifist. Screwtape is also somewhat apprehensive about the conditions which a war brings.
I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged.
Also,
Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part.
He continues later,
Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.
- When he receives the news from Wormwood that the patient’s “religious phase may be dying” because he no longer appears that enthusiastic about it all, Screwtape immediately scolds and later warns him to not take such “undulations” for granted.
Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
- But then, he advises that if Wormwood can keep his patient’s mind fixed on the despair of the low times in his faith, he can try another trick.
When you have caused him to assume that the trough is permanent, can you not persuade him that “his religious phase” is just going to die away like all his previous phases? Of course there is no conceivable way of getting by reason from the proposition “I am losing interest in this” to the proposition “This is false”. But, as I said before, it is jargon, not reason, you must rely on. The mere word “phase” will very likely do the trick. I assume that the creature has been through several of them before — they all have — and that he always feels superior and patronising to the ones he has emerged from, not because he has really criticised them but simply because they are in the past.
- And then in Letter X, the devil describes “just the sort of people we want him [the patient] to know”.
…rich, smart, superficially intellectual, and brightly sceptical about everything in the world. I gather they are even vaguely pacifist, not on moral grounds but from an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men and from a dash of purely fashionable and literary communism.
- In Letter XII, he wonderfully describes the great potential in the habit of “doing nothing”.
And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
And then he highlights the sheer destructive power of “small sins”,
It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. 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.
- He trains Wormwood to exploit our anxiety about the Future.
But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future — haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth — ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other — dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see.
- In Letter XVIII, Screwtape educates his nephew about the “philosophy of Hell”.
The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. “To be” means “to be in competition”.
- Screwtape appears to be a rather good human psychologist as he attempts to explain the emotion of anger to Wormwood in Letter XXI.
Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.
- As the patient finds himself a good Christian girl, Screwtape loses his temper with Wormwood once again. He is not at all happy with the kind of people she and her family are. Reports from Wormwood continue to be shaded with more gloom for Screwtape as he tries to underline the main issue.
The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian…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.
He continues,
But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate this horror of the Same Old Thing into a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in the will…The Enemy loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking “Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?” they will neglect the relevant questions.
And again, with an emphasis on the use of jargon, he points out,
For the descriptive adjective “unchanged” we have substituted the emotional adjective “stagnant”.
- The devils also seem persistent in their efforts — accompanying us through the stages of lives, looking for opportunities that are long lives afford amply.
The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it — all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition.
But in the end, the patient dies a Christian, and Screwtape’s wrath then knows no bounds.
You have let a soul slip through your fingers. The howl of sharpened famine for that loss re-echoes at this moment through all the levels of the Kingdom of Noise down to the very Throne itself.
And he continues to lament with cries that seem to be coming from the very depths of Hell.
Knowing Your Enemy
C.S. Lewis warns in the preface to not take everything Screwtape says as true because after all, “the devil is a liar”. But, can we not take lessons from the way Screwtape thinks? Can we not manipulate him the way he wants to manipulate us? Should we not know him or the lies and deceit with which he weaves his diabolical webs around us? He is evil, surely, but not even evil exists without good to balance it, just like all things in Nature. Iqbal noted the utility of a powerful enemy in his poem Secrets of the Self,
Why complain of enemies?
I will declare the truth: thine enemy is thy friend;
His existence crowns thee with glory
Whosoever knows the states of the self
Considers a powerful enemy to be a blessing of God
To the seed of Man the enemy is a rain-cloud
He awakens its potentialities
Even after knowing that we cannot afford to ignore him, we still do — such is the forgetfulness of Man. Such are the tricks of the Devil.
