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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 ad 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 'spirit- ual 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 prayg for doesn t happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers dont 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 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 137 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 antici- pates 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 2 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 co-ordinates with which the Enemy barmonises 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 138 to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its entirety operates at everv point of space and time, or rather that their kind of conscious- ness 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 S0 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 through- out 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 139 what he said in other books, consistent with and what phase in the writer'$ development, or in the general history of thought; it illus- and how it affected later writers, and trates, how often it has been misunderstood (specially learned' man' $ own colleagues) and by the what the general course of criticism on it has the last ten years, and what is the been for state of the question" To regard the present as a possible source of know- ancient writer tto anticipate that what he said could ledge thoughts or your be- possibly modify your haviour this would be rejected as unutterably And since we cannot deceive simple-minded: the whole human race all the time; it is most important thus to cut every generation off from for where learning makes a free all others; commerce between the ages there is always the that the characteristic errors of one may dengorrected the characteristic truths of by another_ But thanks be to our Father and the Point of View, great scholars are Historical as little nourished by the past as the most now mechanic who holds that 'history is ignorant bunk" Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE I40
Your affectionate uncle,
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