The war has hit a lull, and so has the patient’s anxiety. Screwtape uses the moment to lay out one of the book’s most structural ideas: where, exactly, should a tempter want a person’s attention to live in time?
God, Screwtape says, wants people focused on two things only — eternity itself, and the present moment, because the present is the only point where time actually touches eternity. It’s the one place a person has real freedom, real duty, real grace, all happening at once. Hell’s job, therefore, is to pull people away from both. The past has limited use as a distraction, since it’s fixed and knowable and therefore resembles eternity too closely. The future is the real prize — completely unknown, completely unreal until it arrives, and already the natural home of every anxious, grasping human instinct. Screwtape draws a genuinely striking line here: gratitude looks to the past, love looks to the present, but fear, greed, lust, and ambition all look forward. Even lust, he notes almost clinically, is really a sin of anticipation — by the time the actual pleasure arrives, the sinning part is already finished; the pleasure itself, ironically, belongs to God, since He’s the one who made pleasure at all.
None of this means God forbids thinking about tomorrow. Planning tomorrow’s work is today’s duty, and its material is borrowed from the future, but the duty itself lives in the present. The difference, Screwtape says, is whether a person works for the future and then hands the outcome over to God and returns to today — or whether he becomes what Screwtape calls hag-ridden by the future, haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell on earth, willing to compromise his actual present integrity for the sake of some outcome he may not live to see. Hell wants a whole race chasing the rainbow’s end, never present enough to be honest, kind, or happy now, endlessly burning up every real gift being offered them today as fuel for an imagined tomorrow.
And then Screwtape adds a wrinkle worth catching: even “living in the present” can be a disguised form of the same trap, if the real reason for someone’s calm is a quiet confidence that the future will turn out fine — that’s not presence, that’s just optimism about tomorrow wearing presence as a costume, and it sets a person up for a harder fall later. The only version of presence Screwtape actually fears is a person who knows real hardship might be coming, prays for the strength to meet it, and returns his attention to today anyway — because that’s where duty, grace, and pleasure actually live.
Where This Shows Up Now
It’s the anxious mental rehearsal of futures that may never happen, at the cost of the actual day in front of you. It’s ambition or fear quietly running the show while gratitude and love — which only really operate in the past and present — go untended. It’s the difference between calm that comes from trusting today’s grace and calm that’s really just an unexamined bet that tomorrow will be easy.
For Discussion
- Where does your own mind tend to live — rehearsing the future, replaying the past, or actually present to today?
- Screwtape says fear, greed, lust, and ambition all point forward. Does that ring true when you examine your own anxious thoughts?
- What would it look like this week to do tomorrow’s necessary planning, then genuinely hand the outcome over and return your attention to today?
← Letter 14: By Jove, I’m Being Humble · The Wormwood Files (index) · Letter 16: Becoming a Connoisseur of Churches →
Reading along? The Screwtape Letters is often available free or at a steep discount on Kindle. The price varies by edition, so check before you buy.
Leave a Reply