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Copywork
About This Passage
Screwtape concedes that the human longing for Heaven is too deep-rooted to be erased, so the devils' best move is not to kill it but to misdirect it — persuading people that some earthly programme will finally build paradise here. Copying this sentence shows how a genuine, holy desire can be harnessed to an impossible worldly hope.
So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics ...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct Screwtape's twenty-eighth letter to Wormwood in sequence — the rebuke for hoping the man dies, the surprising wish to keep him alive so 'time itself' becomes the devils' ally, the strategy of wearing a soul down by attrition through middle age, the admission of an 'appetite for Heaven' that keeps undoing their work, and the countermeasure of promising an earthly paradise. Then state the single corruption you take to organize the letter.
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape rebukes Wormwood for hoping the man dies, since 'if he dies now, you lose him,' and insists the devils want him alive so 'you have time itself for your ally.' Is the devils' surest danger to a soul best understood as a single dramatic temptation or as the slow erosion of a long ordinary life — and what in the letter to Wormwood helps you decide, and why?
- In an earlier letter the devils wanted men to value Christianity as 'a means' to 'social justice' rather than for its truth; here they harness the 'appetite for Heaven' by promising 'earth can be turned into Heaven... by politics or eugenics or science.' Reading the two letters together, how does Hell repeatedly take a genuine longing or good and bend it toward an earthly end, and why is a misdirected good desire more useful to the devils than a desire simply destroyed? Use details from this letter and the earlier one to Wormwood to develop your answer.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Long-established and deeply rooted; not easily changed.
Item 2
Dull and tiresome because unvarying.
Item 3
A time of hardship, difficulty, or misfortune.
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Critical Thinking
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