Screwtape's Letters to Wormwood - Part 2

This continues Chapter 14 of The Screwtape Letters (C. S. Lewis). Uncle Screwtape, a leading elder demon, is teaching and instructing his nephew,Wormwood,  a young demon, whose assignment is to keep a certain young man from advancing in his Christian life.


My dear Wormwood,

(con't...on Humility)

     By this virtue, as by all the others, our Enemy wants to turn the man's attention away from self to Him, and to the man's neighbors.

     All the abjection and self-hatred are designed, in the long run, solely for this end;  unless they attend this end they do us little harm; and they may even do us good if they keep the man concerned with himself, and above all, if self-contempt can be made the starting point for contempt of others, thus for gloom, cynicism, and cruelty.

     You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility.

     Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind if opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character.  Some talents, I gather, he already has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be.

     No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point.

     The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into his heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue.

     By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever folk trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have a chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.

     To anticipate the Enemy's strategy, we must consider his aims.

     The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in this fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.


[Note: I think the last paragraph touches me the most - no room for jealousy - just rejoicing at things done to honor the Name of our gracious God - no matter who did them!]

(con't in Part 3)