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Copywork
About This Passage
Here Lewis isolates the precise mechanism of the Historical Point of View: not the suppression of old books but the redefinition of how to read them, so that being actually taught by a dead author is dismissed as naive. Copying this sentence sharpens the distinction between studying a text and submitting to its truth.
To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct the argument of Screwtape's twenty-seventh letter to Wormwood in sequence — the attack on petitionary prayer through 'false spirituality,' the unfalsifiable 'heads I win, tails you lose' argument, the analysis of the man's confusion about time and the Enemy's 'unbounded Now,' and the boast about the Historical Point of View that severs each age from all others. Then state the single corruption you take to organize the letter, and weigh how Hell's subtlest work targets the instruments of reason rather than any particular conclusion.
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape's 'heads I win, tails you lose' argument treats a denied prayer and a granted prayer as equally good proof that prayer is ineffective. Is the worth of an argument better measured by how persuasive it feels or by whether any conceivable evidence could count against it — and what in the letter to Wormwood helps you decide, and why?
- In his very first letter Screwtape labored to keep the man from ever asking whether an idea was true, steering him toward the 'practical'; here the Historical Point of View makes 'the one question he never asks' about an old statement 'whether it is true.' Reading the two letters together, is Hell's defining strategy the spreading of falsehood or the quiet removal of truth from the questions people actually ask — and why does the distinction matter for how one should educate oneself? 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
Final and most fundamental; the deepest reality behind all else.
Item 2
To expect or look forward to something as still to come.
Item 3
Outwardly devout or religious, sometimes only in appearance.
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Critical Thinking
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