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Copywork
About This Passage
Here Screwtape states the moral relativism on which the whole tempter's craft depends, and it rewards copying because the reasoning is seductive and false at once. He waves away the question of whether love, patriotism, or anything else is 'good' or 'bad' as having 'no answer,' insisting that all that matters is the 'tendency' of a state to move a particular soul toward Hell or away. Copying this passage trains a writer to notice how a single move — treating every good as morally neutral 'raw material' — quietly dissolves the very idea of good, and to see that a creed which judges things only by their usefulness has already decided that nothing is worth anything in itself.
Leave them to discuss whether ‘Love’, or patriotism, or celibacy, or candles on altars, or teetotalism, or education, are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Can’t you see there’s no answer? Nothing matters at all excep...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct Screwtape's nineteenth letter to Wormwood in sequence — the nervous retraction of the heresy that the Enemy loves, the insoluble hunt for a hidden motive, the slip that 'His throne depends on the secret,' and the turn to whether being in love is good or bad. Then name the central conviction: that Hell endures only by refusing to believe in disinterested love.
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape insists the Enemy's love 'must be a disguise for something else,' hiding a 'real motive.' What makes the idea of love-for-its-own-sake genuinely unthinkable to the devils, and why does that refusal commit them to an endless hunt for a secret that is not there? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to defend your reading.
- Screwtape lets slip that 'His throne depends on the secret,' and that if the devils understood love, 'the war would be over.' Why might Hell's whole rebellion rest not on power but on a single refusal to believe self-giving love is real? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to develop your answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
In itself, by its very nature, apart from anything outside it.
Item 2
Deserving reward or praise.
Item 3
First raised or proposed for discussion.
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Critical Thinking
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