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Copywork
About This Passage
Here Screwtape, in the middle of an insult, draws a picture of the Enemy that would scandalize many religious people: a Maker who 'has filled His world full of pleasures' and is perfectly content to watch humans spend whole days on the most ordinary, bodily, unspectacular things. The catalog is the heart of it — 'sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working' — a single sweep that sets praying beside washing and working beside playing, as though all of them were equally welcome to Him. To the devils this is contemptible vulgarity; to the reader it quietly redefines holiness, suggesting that the spiritual life is not a flight from ordinary human pleasures but the right enjoyment of them. Copying these two sentences trains a writer to build a deliberately mixed list whose very ordinariness is the argument, and to feel how one plain catalog can overturn a false idea of holiness.
He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working.
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct the argument of Screwtape's twenty-second letter to Wormwood in sequence — his fury at the man's love and at a household of 'disinterested love' he cannot decode, his sneer that the Enemy is a 'vulgar' 'hedonist' whose austerity is mere 'foam,' his hatred of music and silence and worship of Noise, and his loss of control into a centipede that his secretary rebrands as 'glorious.' Then state the central claim about human nature you think the letter is making, and notice how steadily the devil's own words turn into evidence against him.
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape sneers that the Enemy is 'vulgar,' with 'a bourgeois mind,' for filling His world with pleasures and not minding when humans spend whole days 'sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working.' Is Lewis using the devil's contempt to argue that holiness embraces ordinary pleasure rather than fleeing it, or does some real tension between spiritual seriousness and bodily delight remain unresolved? What in the letter to Wormwood helps you decide, and why?
- In an earlier letter Screwtape kept the man from honest reasoning by distraction rather than argument; here the devils combat conscience with 'Noise' that 'defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires.' Reading the two letters together, is Hell's reliance on distraction and Noise evidence that its position cannot survive honest argument, or merely one tactic among many it could win by other means? Use details from both letters to Wormwood, and explain why your reading is stronger.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Causing disgust and hatred; utterly detestable.
Item 2
Full of strength, energy, and force.
Item 3
Impossible to break apart or dissolve.
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Critical Thinking
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