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Copywork
About This Passage
Screwtape opens by insisting that gluttony is no joke, and his explanation is a small masterpiece of strategy. The devils' great success has not been to make people gorge but to silence the very idea that gluttony is a sin — to 'deaden the human conscience' so thoroughly that no sermon names it and no conscience feels it. The trick was to shift all attention to 'gluttony of Delicacy, not gluttony of Excess,' so that fussiness escapes the category of greed entirely. Copying these sentences shows a writer how an argument can be won by redefinition: change what a word is allowed to mean, and a whole vice can walk about unrecognised.
The contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of catching souls, in your last letter, only shows your ignorance. One of the great achievements of the last hundred years has been to de...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
In your own words, reconstruct Screwtape's seventeenth letter to Wormwood in sequence — his defense of gluttony, the kind he prizes, the old woman who embodies it, the male version, and his real aim. Then name the central claim: that the danger of gluttony lies not in quantity but in a self-will that masquerades as restraint.
Discussion Questions
- Lewis could have simply warned against greed. Instead he has Screwtape prize 'gluttony of Delicacy' — fussiness — above 'gluttony of Excess.' What makes fussiness easy to excuse as harmless or even refined, and why does Screwtape value it more than plain overeating? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to defend your reading.
- The old woman is sure she 'is practising temperance' at the very moment she indulges her appetite. What allows a person to honestly mistake a vice for the opposite virtue, and why does that disguise make the fault almost impossible to repent of? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to develop your answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Devotion to the pleasures of the body and the senses.
Item 2
The inner sense that tells right from wrong.
Item 3
A disguise that hides something by making it look harmless.
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Critical Thinking
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