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Copywork
About This Passage
Here Screwtape pushes Hell's axiom to its logical floor, and the passage rewards copying because it shows an argument descending by analogy. An object, he says, is itself only by 'excluding' all others; a self does the same; among beasts the 'absorption' is literal eating; among devils it is the sucking of one will into another. Each step makes existence more nakedly a matter of one thing consuming another, until the chilling summary lands: '"To be" means "to be in competition."' Copying this trains a writer to follow a premise without flinching to the place it actually leads — which is exactly how Lewis lets the reader feel what such a philosophy leaves out.
Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same....
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct Screwtape's eighteenth letter to Wormwood in sequence — the philosophy of Hell, the Enemy's opposite philosophy, the organism and family, and the parody of love taught in marriage's place. Then name the central conviction toward which it builds: that reality at its root is loving communion, which Hell can only deny, parody, or invert.
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape rests the whole 'philosophy of Hell' on the axiom that '"to be" means "to be in competition."' What makes this competitive account of existence sound hard-headed and even scientific, and what does the Enemy's organism, whose parts 'cooperate,' reveal that the account cannot explain? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to defend your reading.
- Screwtape admits the romantic idea of 'being in love' is 'our parody of an idea that came from the Enemy,' the same counterfeiting move by which an earlier letter dressed pride as humility. Why do the devils so often prefer forging a fake of a good thing to attacking it outright, and how does a convincing parody do its work? Use details from this letter and the earlier one to Wormwood to develop your answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
To avoid or escape, especially by cleverness or evasion of a truth.
Item 2
Something that cannot be or cannot be done.
Item 3
Tediously unchanging; repeated without variation.
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Critical Thinking
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