MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
Now that it is certain the German humans will bombard your patient's town and
that his duties will keep him in the thick of the danger, we must consider our
policy. Are we to aim at cowardice—or at courage, with consequent pride—or at
hatred of the Germans?
Well, I am afraid it is no good trying to make him brave. Our research
department has not yet discovered (though success is hourly expected) how to
produce any virtue. This is a serious handicap. To be greatly and effectively
wicked a man needs some virtue. What would Attila have been without his courage,
or Shylock without self-denial as regards the flesh? But as we cannot supply
these qualities ourselves, we can only use them as supplied by the Enemy—and
this means leaving Him a kind of foothold in those men whom, otherwise, we have
made most securely our own. A very unsatisfactory arrangement, but, I trust, we
shall one day learn to do better.
Hatred we can manage. The tension of human nerves during noise, danger, and
fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion and it is only a question of
guiding this susceptibility into the right channels. If conscience resists,
muddle him. Let him say that he feels hatred not on his own behalf but on that
of the women and children, and that a Christian is told to forgive his own, not
other people's enemies. In other words let him consider himself sufficiently
identified with the women and children to feel hatred on their behalf, but not
sufficiently identified to regard their enemies as his own and therefore proper
objects of forgiveness.
But hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is
purely painful—horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember;
Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a
frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears,
the more he will hate. And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame. To make a
deep wound in his charity, you should therefore first defeat his courage.
Now this is a ticklish business. We have made men proud of most vices, but not
of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, the Enemy permits a
war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so
obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone,
and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. The
danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real
self-knowledge and self-loathing with consequent repentance and humility. And in
fact, in the last war, thousands of humans, by discovering their own cowardice,
discovered the whole moral world for the first time. In peace we can make many
of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them
in a guise to which even we cannot blind them.
There is here a cruel dilemma before us. If we promoted justice and charity among men, we should be playing directly into the Enemy's hands; but if we guide them to the opposite behaviour, this sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a
revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands
of men from moral stupor.
This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy's motives for creating a dangerous
world—a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as
you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every
virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A
chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest
or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
It is therefore possible to lose as much as we gain by making your man a coward;
he may learn too much about himself! There is, of course, always the chance, not
of chloroforming the shame, but of aggravating it and producing Despair. This
would be a great triumph.
It would show that he had believed in, and accepted, the Enemy's forgiveness of his other sins only because he himself did not fully feel their sinfulness—that in respect of the one vice which he really understands in its full depth of dishonour he cannot seek, nor credit, the
Mercy. But I fear you have already let him get too far in the Enemy's school,
and he knows that Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it.
As to the actual technique of temptations to cowardice, not much need be said.
The main point is that precautions have a tendency to increase fear. The
precautions publicly enjoined on your patient, however, soon become a matter of
routine and this effect disappears. What you must do is to keep running in his
mind (side by side with the conscious intention of doing his duty) the vague
idea of all sorts of things he can do or not do, inside the framework of the
duty, which seem to make him a little safer.
Get his mind off the simple rule ("I've got to stay here and do so-and-so") into a series of imaginary life lines ("If A happened—though I very much hope it won't—I could do B—and if the worst came to the worst, I could always do C"). Superstitions, if not recognised as
such, can be awakened. The point is to keep him feeling that he has something,
other than the Enemy and courage the Enemy supplies, to fall back on, so that
what was intended to be a total commitment to duty becomes honeycombed all
through with little unconscious reservations. By building up a series of
imaginary expedients to prevent "the worst coming to the worst" you may produce,
at that level of his will which he is not aware of, a determination that the
worst shall not come to the worst.
Then, at the moment of real terror, rush it out into his nerves and muscles and you may get the fatal act done before he knows what you're about. For remember, the act of cowardice is all that matters; the emotion of fear is, in itself, no sin and, though we enjoy it, does us no
good,
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter TWENTYNINE
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