MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
You seem to be doing very little good at present. The use of his "love" to
distract his mind from the Enemy is, of course, obvious, but you reveal what
poor use you are making of it when you say that the whole question of
distraction and the wandering mind has now become one of the chief subjects of
his prayers. That means you have largely failed. When this, or any other
distraction, crosses his mind you ought to encourage him to thrust it away by
sheer will power and to try to continue the normal prayer as if nothing had
happened; once he accepts the distraction as his present problem and lays that
before the Enemy and makes it the main theme of his prayers and his endeavours,
then, so far from doing good, you have done harm. Anything, even a sin, which
has the total effect of moving him close up to the Enemy, makes against us in
the long run.
A promising line is the following. Now that he is in love, a new idea of earthly
happiness has arisen in his mind: and hence a new urgency in his purely
petitionary prayers—about this war and other such matters. Now is the time for
raising intellectual difficulties about prayer of that sort. False spirituality
is always to be encouraged. On the seemingly pious ground that "praise and
communion with God is the true prayer", humans can often be lured into direct
disobedience to the Enemy who (in His usual flat, commonplace, uninteresting
way) has definitely told them to pray for their daily bread and the recovery of
their sick. You will, of course, conceal from him the fact that the prayer for
daily bread, interpreted in a "spiritual sense", is really just as crudely
petitionary as it is in any other sense.
But since your patient has contracted the terrible habit of obedience, he will
probably continue such "crude" prayers whatever you do. But you can worry him
with the haunting suspicion that the practice is absurd and can have no
objective result. Don't forget to use the "heads I win, tails you lose"
argument. If the thing he prays for doesn't happen, then that is one more proof
that petitionary prayers don't work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be
able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and "therefore it
would have happened anyway", and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a
proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.
You, being a spirit, will find it difficult to understand how he gets into this
confusion. But you must remember that he takes Time for an ultimate reality. He
supposes that the Enemy, like himself, sees some things as present, remembers
others as past, and anticipates others as future; or even if he believes that
the Enemy does not see things that way, yet, in his heart of hearts, he regards
this as a peculiarity of the Enemy's mode of perception—he doesn't really think
(though he would say he did) that things as the Enemy sees them are things as
they are! If you tried to explain to him that men's prayers today are one of the
innumerable coordinates with which the Enemy harmonises the weather of tomorrow,
he would reply that then the Enemy always knew men were going to make those
prayers and, if so, they did not pray freely but were predestined to do so. And
he would add that the weather on a given day can be traced back through its
causes to the original creation of matter itself—so that the whole thing, both
on the human and on the material side, is given "from the word go".
What he ought to say, of course, is obvious to us; that the problem of adapting the
particular weather to the particular prayers is merely the appearance, at two
points in his temporal mode of perception, of the total problem of adapting the
whole spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its
entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their kind of
consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act
as a series of successive events. Why that creative act leaves room for their
free will is the problem of problems, the secret behind the Enemy's nonsense
about "Love". How it does so is no problem at all; for the Enemy does not
foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them
doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is
not to make him do it.
It may be replied that some meddlesome human writers, notably Boethius, have let
this secret out. But in the intellectual climate which we have at last succeeded
in producing throughout Western Europe, you needn't bother about that. Only the
learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are
of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by
inculcating The Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put
briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an
ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks
who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with
what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in
the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later
writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's
own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the
last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question".
To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said
could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour—this would be rejected as
unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all
the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others;
for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the
danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the
characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to our Father and the Historical
Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the
most ignorant mechanic who holds that "history is bunk",
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter TWENTYSEVEN
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