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About This Passage
Here Screwtape reveals why he distrusts even harmless hobbies. A person who loves a thing 'for its own sake' — caring nothing for what others think — has 'innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness,' and is therefore 'forearmed' against the devils' subtlest attacks. Copying this passage shows a writer how an argument can move from a concession ('nothing of virtue in them') to a surprising conclusion: that honest, unshowy enjoyment is itself a kind of armour.
Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
In your own words, retell Screwtape's thirteenth letter to Wormwood in sequence. Why is he furious, and how can you tell that the reality of the man's pleasures, not their pleasantness, is what alarms him?
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape calls the man's recovery 'a second conversion—and probably on a deeper level than the first,' a 'defeat of the first order.' Is the man's repentance dangerous to the devils chiefly because it reverses his direction or because it goes 'deeper than the first' — and which does Lewis stress? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to defend your reading.
- Screwtape explains that Pains and Pleasures are 'unmistakably real' and so give 'a touchstone of reality,' which is why a real pleasure 'kills by contrast all the trumpery' of the World. Why does Lewis make direct experience of the real, rather than argument, the thing that exposes the World's counterfeits? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to develop your answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Suffocating; cutting off the ability to breathe.
Item 2
Failure to work or perform well; wastefulness.
Item 3
An observable event or occurrence, especially a notable one.
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Critical Thinking
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