Screwtape is disappointed — Wormwood reports that the patient’s wandering mind during prayer has itself become a subject of his prayers, and Screwtape sees this as a failure, not a success. The right move, he explains, was to get the patient to treat the distraction as his real problem, laying it honestly before God — anything, even something that looks like a defeat, that pushes a person closer to God works against hell in the long run. The better tactic would have been encouraging him to simply push the distraction aside by will and continue praying as if nothing happened.
Then Screwtape pivots to something subtler: the patient, newly in love, is praying urgently about the war and other concrete outcomes — real petitionary requests. Screwtape wants to attack this with intellectual doubt, and hands Wormwood one of the cleanest bad-faith arguments in the whole book: if the prayer isn’t answered, that proves prayer doesn’t work; if it is answered, point to the physical chain of causes that explain it and say “it would have happened anyway” — so either outcome becomes proof against prayer. Underneath that trick sits a deeper philosophical move Screwtape clearly relishes: exploiting the patient’s assumption that God experiences time the same linear way humans do, so that a prayer prayed today “causing” a good outcome tomorrow feels logically absurd once you factor in predestination and physical causation traced back to creation itself. Screwtape hints at — without fully explaining — the actual resolution: that God exists outside time altogether, seeing every free human choice not as future but as present, in what theologians call the eternal Now, so that watching a man make a choice is not the same as forcing him to make it.
Screwtape isn’t worried the patient will figure this out, though — because hell has successfully cut off an entire generation of scholars from the wisdom of earlier centuries through what he calls the Historical Point of View: training the learned to ask only who influenced an old writer, what phase of thought he represents, how he’s been received critically — anything except whether what he said might actually be true. Old books, full of exactly the correction modern confusion needs, sit unread by the very people equipped to read them, dismissed as historical curiosities rather than sources of real knowledge.
Where This Shows Up Now
It’s treating a struggle in prayer or faith as a problem to hide from God rather than bring honestly to Him. It’s the unfalsifiable logic that quietly convinces people prayer “doesn’t work” no matter what happens — heads hell wins, tails hell wins. It’s the modern instinct to study old ideas only as historical artifacts — interesting, dated, safely irrelevant — rather than as possible sources of real wisdom that might actually challenge how you live.
For Discussion
- Do you tend to hide your distractions and doubts from God in prayer, or bring them honestly as the actual subject of the prayer?
- Screwtape’s “heads I win, tails you lose” argument against answered and unanswered prayer — have you ever caught yourself reasoning that way, in either direction?
- Is there an old book, tradition, or thinker you’ve dismissed as merely historical that might actually have something true to say to your present life?
← Letter 26: Having Tea in the Garden · The Wormwood Files (index) · Letter 28: Time Is Hell’s Best Ally →
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