6/20/2023 0 Comments Screwtape letters![]() My house is in the northeast section of Morioh, where all the villas are, and I am not married. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach! He knew he’d had a narrow escape, and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safe guard against the aberrations of mere logic.” He is now safe in Our Father’s house.ĭo remember you are there to fuddle him. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. Once he was in the street the battle was won. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning,” the patient brightened up considerably and by the time I had added “Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind,” he was already halfway to the door. At least I think that must have been His line, for when I said, “Quite. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control, and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument, I should have been undone. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. Never having been a human (oh, that abominable advantage of the Enemy’s!) you don’t realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. ![]() 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. 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. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons, we have largely altered that. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. ![]() 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. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. I note what you say about guiding your patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend.
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