MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
It seems to me that you take a great many pages to tell a very simple story. The
long and the short of it is that you have let the man slip through your fingers.
The situation is very grave, and I really see no reason why I should try to
shield you from the consequences or your inefficiency. A repentance and renewal
of what the other side call "grace" on the scale which you describe is a defeat
of the first order. It amounts to a second conversion—and probably on a deeper
level than the first.
As you ought to have known, the asphyxiating cloud which prevented your
attacking the patient on his walk back from the old mill, is a well-known
phenomenon. It is the Enemy's most barbarous weapon, and generally appears when
He is directly present to the patient under certain modes not yet fully
classified. Some humans are permanently surrounded by it and therefore
inaccessible to us.
And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the
patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order
to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. In the second place, you
allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there—a walk through
country he really likes, and taken alone. In other words you allowed him two
real positive Pleasures. Were you so ignorant as not to see the danger of this?
The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real,
and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of
reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method—by
making him a kind of Childe Harold or Werther submerged in self-pity for
imaginary distresses—you would try to protect him at all costs from any real
pain; because, of course, five minutes' genuine toothache would reveal the
romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem. But
you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off
vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures.
How can you have failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn't you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery
which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value? And that the sort of
pleasure which the book and the walk gave him was the most dangerous of all?
That it would peel off from his sensibility the kind of crust you have been
forming on it, and make him feel that he was coming home, recovering himself?
As a preliminary to detaching him from the Enemy, you wanted to detach him from
himself, and had made some progress in doing so. Now, all that is undone.
Of course I know that the Enemy also wants to detach men from themselves, but in
a different way. Remember always, that He really likes the little vermin, and
sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them. When He talks of
their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will;
once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and
boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more
themselves than ever. Hence, while He is delighted to see them sacrificing even
their innocent wills to His, He hates to see them drifting away from their own
nature for any other reason. And we should always encourage them to do so.
The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the
starting-point, with which the Enemy has furnished him. To get him away from
those is therefore always a point gained; even in things indifferent it is
always desirable substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or
fashion, for a human's own real likings and dislikings. I myself would carry
this very far. I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong
personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite
trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking
cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue them; but there is a
sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I
distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the
world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about
it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of
attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or
books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the
"important" books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to
social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions.
It remains to consider how we can retrieve this disaster. The great thing is to
prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it
does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little
brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it;
that is often an excellent way of sterilising the seeds which the Enemy plants
in a human soul. Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his
imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As
one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but
passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he
will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to
feel,
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter THIRTEEN
SCREWTAPE