MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I hope my last letter has convinced you that the trough of dulness or "dryness"
through which your patient is going at present will not, of itself, give you his
soul, but needs to be properly exploited. What forms the exploitation should
take I will now consider.
In the first place I have always found that the Trough periods of the human
undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations,
particularly those of sex. This may surprise you, because, of course, there is
more physical energy, and therefore more potential appetite, at the Peak
periods; but you must remember that the powers of resistance are then also at
their highest. The health and spirits which you want to use in producing lust
can also, alas, be very easily used for work or play or thought or innocuous
merriment. The attack has a much better chance of success when the man's whole
inner world is drab and cold and empty. And it is also to be noted that the
Trough sexuality is subtly different in quality from that of the Peak—much less
likely to lead to the milk and water phenomenon which the humans call "being in
love", much more easily drawn into perversions, much less contaminated by those
generous and imaginative and even spiritual concomitants which often render
human sexuality so disappointing. It is the same with other desires of the
flesh.
You are much more likely to make your man a sound drunkard by pressing
drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary than by encouraging him to
use it as a means of merriment among his friends when he is happy and expansive.
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and
normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy's ground. I know we
have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not
ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to
produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures
which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has
forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any
pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and
least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure
is the formula. It is more certain; and it's better style. To get the man's soul
and give him nothing in return—that is what really gladdens our Father's heart.
And the troughs are the time for beginning the process.
But there is an even better way of exploiting the Trough; I mean through the
patient's own thoughts about it. As always, the first step is to keep knowledge
out of his mind. Do not let him suspect the law of undulation. Let him assume
that the first ardours of his conversion might have been expected to last, and
ought to have lasted, forever, and that his present dryness is an equally
permanent condition. Having once got this misconception well fixed in his head,
you may then proceed in various ways. It all depends on whether your man is of
the desponding type who can be tempted to despair, or of the wishful-thinking
type who can be assured that all is well. The former type is getting rare among
the humans. If your patient should happen to belong to it, everything is easy.
You have only got to keep him out of the way of experienced Christians (an easy
task now-a-days), to direct his attention to the appropriate passages in
scripture, and then to set him to work on the desperate design of recovering his
old feelings by sheer will-power, and the game is ours.
If he is of the more hopeful type, your job is to make him acquiesce in the present low temperature of his spirit and gradually become content with it, persuading himself that it
is not so low after all. In a week or two you will be making him doubt whether
the first days of his Christianity were not, perhaps, a little excessive. Talk
to him about "moderation in all things". If you can once get him to the point of
thinking that "religion is all very well up to a point", you can feel quite
happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at
all—and more amusing.
Another possibility is that of direct attack on his faith. When you have caused
him to assume that the trough is permanent, can you not persuade him that "his
religious phase" is just going to die away like all his previous phases? Of
course there is no conceivable way of getting by reason from the proposition "I
am losing interest in this" to the proposition "This is false". But, as I said
before, it is jargon, not reason, you must rely on. The mere word phase will
very likely do the trick. I assume that the creature has been through several of
them before—they all have—and that he always feels superior and patronising to
the ones he has emerged from, not because he has really criticised them but
simply because they are in the past. (You keep him well fed on hazy ideas of
Progress and Development and the Historical Point of View, I trust, and give him
lots of modern Biographies to read? The people in them are always emerging from
Phases, aren't they?)
You see the idea? Keep his mind off the plain antithesis between True and False.
Nice shadowy expressions—"It was a phase"—"I've been through all that"—and don't
forget the blessed word "Adolescent",
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter NINE
SCREWTAPE