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Copywork
About This Passage
This is Screwtape's clinical diagnosis of the fault he intends to exploit, and its precision is worth slow attention. Notice how carefully he qualifies it: it is 'unobtrusive' and 'little,' an almost invisible flaw; it is sociological — shared by 'nearly all' who grow up 'in an intelligent circle united by a clearly defined belief' — and so absorbed rather than chosen; and it is 'untroubled,' a smugness so settled it never disturbs the conscience. Its content is exact too: not hatred of outsiders, but a quiet 'assumption' that those who disagree are 'too stupid and ridiculous' to take seriously. The whole danger lies in that calm certainty held without examination, the conviction one's own circle is simply right and everyone outside it faintly absurd. Copying this balanced, semicolon-hinged sentence trains a writer to name a fault with surgical care — locating exactly how large, how chosen, and how conscious it is.
It is an unobtrusive little vice which she shares with nearly all women who have grown up in an intelligent circle united by a clearly defined belief; and it consists in a quite untroubled assumption ...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct the argument of Screwtape's twenty-fourth letter to Wormwood in sequence — the clinical diagnosis of the girl's 'unobtrusive little vice,' the plan to make the dazzled novice copy and exaggerate it into Spiritual Pride, the charity and love really lifting him beyond his level, the silent redefinition of 'we Christians' as 'my set,' and the insistence that he never examine his self-congratulation. Then state the single corruption you take to organize the letter, and consider why Lewis treats spiritual pride as subtler and graver than the more obvious sins.
Discussion Questions
- Lewis attributes the girl's certainty largely to 'the mere colour she has taken from her surroundings,' likening it to a child sure only her family's fish-knives are 'real.' Is Lewis arguing that a belief absorbed from one's upbringing is thereby discredited, or only that its social origin is no evidence of its truth and breeds a dangerous complacency — and what in the letter to Wormwood helps you decide, and why?
- In an earlier letter Screwtape resolved that, where a good cannot be removed from a life, 'we must corrupt it,' even 'transforming yourself into an angel of light'; here the genuine good of charitable Christian fellowship is to be converted into Spiritual Pride. Reading the two letters together, is Hell's signature move better described as opposing goods or as parasitically corrupting them from within — and why does the answer bear on how one should guard one's best experiences? Use details from this letter and the earlier one to Wormwood, and explain why your reading is stronger.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
People who rule a society in the name of religion.
Item 2
A firmly held belief or certainty.
Item 3
As openly declared or claimed; avowedly.
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Critical Thinking
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