The patient might get called up for military service — or might not — and Screwtape is delighted by exactly that uncertainty. He doesn’t want Wormwood to push the patient toward fear of any one specific outcome. He wants the man’s mind stuffed with contradictory pictures of the future, all at once, because pure suspense does more damage than any single fear could. A person worrying about a dozen incompatible futures can’t actually surrender any of them to God — real resignation only works on the fear that’s actually happening right now, not on a pile of hypotheticals held “just in case.”
Buried in that instruction is a small, sharp spiritual rule Screwtape states almost like a law of physics: when an activity favors hell, keep the patient’s mind turned outward onto the object — the insult, the temptation — so he never pauses to notice “I am now entering anger” or “I am now entering lust.” But when an activity favors Heaven, bend his attention back onto himself instead. Let him think “my feelings are growing more devout” until he’s admiring his own spiritual state instead of actually looking at God or his neighbor. Self-awareness, in other words, is turned into a tool depending entirely on which direction it’s pointed.
Then the letter arrives at its sharpest image. Screwtape isn’t worried about stirring up real hatred for a faraway enemy — the English, he notes almost mockingly, are hopeless at sustaining that kind of hatred once a real wounded man shows up needing tea and sympathy. What he actually wants is more precise and more useful: aim the man’s malice at the people closest to him — his mother, his coworker, the man on the train — while letting his benevolence drift outward toward strangers and abstractions he’ll never actually meet. That way the malice stays real, lived, and daily, while the benevolence stays comfortably imaginary, costing him nothing. Screwtape even draws it as concentric circles — will at the center, then intellect, then fantasy — and the whole strategy is to keep virtue pushed outward into the harmless outer ring of fantasy while keeping the sharper vices lodged in the will, where they actually shape a life.
Once again, nothing exotic. Just where, exactly, a person’s kindness and irritation happen to be aimed.
Where This Shows Up Now
It’s caring passionately about a cause or a group of people far away while being short and impatient with the person actually in the room. It’s the ease of feeling compassion for strangers on the news compared to the difficulty of being patient with a coworker or family member every single day. It’s anxiety about a dozen possible futures making it impossible to actually be present to today’s real, smaller difficulty.
For Discussion
- Where in your life is your compassion aimed at people far away, while your patience runs thin with the people closest to you?
- Screwtape’s rule about self-awareness — helpful when turned outward, harmful when turned inward on your own virtue — is that something you recognize in your own prayer or reflection?
- What’s a hypothetical future you’re currently carrying anxiety about, that’s crowding out your ability to be present to what’s actually happening today?
← Letter 5: Why War Doesn’t Help Hell · The Wormwood Files (index) · Letter 7: When the Cause Becomes the Religion →
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