MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I am delighted to hear that your patient's age and profession make it possible,
but by no means certain, that he will be called up for military service. We want
him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with
contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear.
There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind
against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business
is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.
Your patient will, of course, have picked up the notion that he must submit with
patience to the Enemy's will. What the Enemy means by this is primarily that he
should accept with patience the tribulation which has actually been dealt out to
him—the present anxiety and suspense. It is about this that he is to say "Thy
will be done", and for the daily task of bearing this that the daily bread will
be provided. It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the
present fear as his appointed cross but only of the things he is afraid of.
Let him regard them as his crosses: let him forget that, since they are
incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practise
fortitude and patience to them all in advance. For real resignation, at the same
moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible, and
the Enemy does not greatly assist those who are trying to attain it: resignation
to present and actual suffering, even where that suffering consists of fear, is
far easier and is usually helped by this direct action.
An important spiritual law is here involved. I have explained that you can
weaken his prayers by diverting his attention from the Enemy Himself to his own
states of mind about the Enemy. On the other hand fear becomes easier to master
when the patient's mind is diverted from the thing feared to the fear itself,
considered as a present and undesirable state of his own mind; and when he
regards the fear as his appointed cross he will inevitably think of it as a
state of mind. One can therefore formulate the general rule; in all activities
of mind which favour our cause, encourage the patient to be un-selfconscious and
to concentrate on the object, but in all activities favourable to the Enemy bend
his mind back on itself. Let an insult or a woman's body so fix his attention
outward that he does not reflect "I am now entering into the state called
Anger—or the state called Lust". Contrariwise let the reflection "My feelings
are now growing more devout, or more charitable" so fix his attention inward
that he no longer looks beyond himself to see our Enemy or his own neighbours.
As regards his more general attitude to the war, you must not rely too much on
those feelings of hatred which the humans are so fond of discussing in
Christian, or anti-Christian, periodicals. In his anguish, the patient can, of
course, be encouraged to revenge himself by some vindictive feelings directed
towards the German leaders, and that is good so far as it goes. But it is
usually a sort of melodramatic or mythical hatred directed against imaginary
scapegoats. He has never met these people in real life—they are lay figures
modelled on what he gets from newspapers. The results of such fanciful hatred
are often most disappointing, and of all humans the English are in this respect
the most deplorable milksops.
They are creatures of that miserable sort who loudly proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and cigarettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back door. Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate
neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the
remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly
real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming
his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is
growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the
train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the
innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly
hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the
Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are
finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward
into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there
embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don't, of course,
mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of
resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the
Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect
or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our
Father's house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there,
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter SIX
SCREWTAPE