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Copywork
About This Passage
This is Lewis's positive definition of Humility, set against the counterfeit Screwtape has been peddling. Notice the craft: rather than asserting an abstraction, Lewis fixes the ideal in a concrete imagined scene — a man who could build the world's best cathedral, know it the best, and rejoice without a flicker of self-congratulation, glad in his own gift as freely as in 'a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.' Copying these two sentences trains the hand in a long, balanced periodic style and shows a writer how an argument can define a virtue not by negation but by a single vivid picture of the freedom it bestows.
The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or o...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
In your own words, reconstruct Screwtape's fourteenth letter to Wormwood in sequence — the alarm at the man's new humility, the trick of making him notice it, the redefinition of Humility, and the Enemy's contrasting aim. Then name the central claim: that the direction of a man's attention, not the height of his self-estimate, is the real issue.
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape labours to 'conceal from the patient the true end of Humility,' wanting him to take it for 'a low opinion of his own talents' rather than 'self-forgetfulness.' Is humility better understood as thinking little of your gifts or as forgetting yourself altogether — and why does the letter to Wormwood teach one rather than the other? Use Screwtape's own words to defend your reading.
- Screwtape's cleverest stroke is to make the man 'value an opinion for some quality other than truth.' Why does building humility on that move introduce 'an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue'? Use details from the letter to Wormwood to develop your answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Inspiring fear or respect through being powerful or hard to overcome.
Item 2
A state of utter self-abasement or wretched lowness.
Item 3
Boastful, excessive pride in one's own worth or achievements.
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Critical Thinking
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