This letter opens with Screwtape suddenly, nervously backpedaling — worried he’s accidentally admitted, in a previous letter, that God actually loves human beings. He scrambles to explain it away: pure carelessness, a slip of the pen, nothing that should reach the authorities. What follows is almost darkly comic — Screwtape recounting hell’s own founding myth, in which their leader demanded God explain His real motive for creating humanity, got only the “cock-and-bull story” of disinterested love in return, and stormed off in disgust rather than accept an answer he couldn’t parse. Hell, as Screwtape describes it, has been trying to reverse-engineer God’s actual angle ever since — certain there must be a hidden motive, certain that real, freely-given love “doesn’t make sense,” and utterly unable, after all this research, to prove it.
Then Wormwood apparently asked a much simpler question — is falling in love good for a human, or bad? — and Screwtape’s answer is the real point of the letter. Wrong question. Let humans argue forever about whether love, patriotism, celibacy, or candles on the altar are inherently good or bad; there’s no answer to give, because nothing is good or bad in the abstract. What matters is only the tendency of a state of mind, in a given person, at a given moment, to move him nearer to God or nearer to hell. An arrogant, body-despising man can be pushed toward rejecting love entirely, and then hit later with something crueler once his sexuality has been stripped of anything humanizing. A gullible, romantic man can be fed cheap fiction until he believes love is both irresistible and automatically noble — useful less for casual unchastity than for producing long, tragic, “meaningful” affairs. Falling in love, Screwtape concludes flatly, is neither good nor bad in itself. It’s raw material — like health, sickness, war, or peace — and the only real question is which side gets to use it.
Where This Shows Up Now
It’s the modern instinct to sort every experience — a relationship, a feeling, a circumstance — into a simple “good” or “bad” category, rather than asking what it’s actually doing to you right now. It’s the danger of either despising romantic feeling as unserious or treating it as automatically sacred — both extremes miss that the feeling itself is neutral, and character is built in what’s done with it. It’s recognizing that the same emotion, the same circumstance, can be used for real growth or real harm depending entirely on the direction a person lets it take them.
For Discussion
- Screwtape says nothing is good or bad in itself — only its tendency to move a person one direction or another. Does that framing change how you think about a strong emotion or desire you’re currently experiencing?
- Is there something in your life you’ve labeled simply “good” or “bad” that might actually be more like raw material, dependent on what you do with it?
- Where do you see extremes — either despising something natural like love, or treating it as automatically sacred — doing real damage in how people actually live?
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