MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
So you "have great hopes that the patient's religious phase is dying away", have
you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old
Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the
law of Undulation?
Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy's determination to
produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father
to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world,
but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be
directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in
continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to
constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which
they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched
your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department
of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his
physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of
emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of
numbness and poverty.
The dryness and dulness through which your patient is now
going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a
natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.
To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to
make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in
His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even
more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer
and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is
primarily good; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of
our own area of selfhood at its expense.
But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really
does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of
Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively
like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely
conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants
who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are
empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in
which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants
a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.
And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the
Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls
in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the
Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of
His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt
presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do)
would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble
idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but
yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is
prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with
communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with
emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this
state of affairs to last long.
Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more
than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He
wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those
which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting,
because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered
with the better. He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to
learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to
walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived,
Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer
desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe
from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been
forsaken, and still obeys.
But of course the troughs afford opportunities to our side also. Next week I
will give you some hints on how to exploit them,
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter EIGHT
SCREWTAPE