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About This Passage
This is the Enemy's whole philosophy, stated by His enemy, and it rewards slow copying because every sentence overturns Hell's axiom. Where Hell insists that one self excludes another, the Enemy aims at what Screwtape can only call 'a contradiction': that things be 'many, yet somehow also one,' so that 'the good of one self is to be the good of another.' Notice the final, contemptuous admission — that this 'monotonous panacea' is found 'under all He does and even all He is.' Copying this shows a writer how an opponent, trying to dismiss an idea, can accidentally confess how total and central it really is.
Now the Enemy’s philosophy is nothing more nor less than one continued attempt to evade this very obvious truth. He aims at a contradiction. Things are to be many, yet somehow also one. The good of on...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
In your own words, reconstruct Screwtape's eighteenth letter to Wormwood in sequence — the philosophy of Hell, the Enemy's opposite philosophy, the organism and the family, and the parody of love that the devils push in its place. Then name the central claim: that reality at its root is loving communion, which Hell can only deny or counterfeit.
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape builds the whole 'philosophy of Hell' on the axiom that '"to be" means "to be in competition."' What makes this competitive view of existence sound hard-headed and realistic, and what does the Enemy's organism, whose parts 'cooperate,' reveal that this view cannot account for? 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 trick by which an earlier letter dressed pride as humility. Why do the devils so often prefer to forge a fake of a good thing rather than attack it outright, and how does a parody do its damage? Use details from this letter and the earlier one to Wormwood to develop your answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A starting principle accepted as obviously true, on which an argument is built.
Item 2
A statement or situation that seems to assert two opposite things at once.
Item 3
A supposed cure-all; one remedy claimed to solve everything.
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Critical Thinking
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