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Copywork
About This Passage
This paragraph exposes a limit on Hell's power: the devils have taught men to take pride in nearly every vice, but cowardice resists that treatment, because calamity keeps making courage 'obviously lovely.' Copying the passage lets a student trace Screwtape's reasoning about why one vice still reliably produces shame, and why that shame is precisely the danger the devils must manage.
Now this is a ticklish business. We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, the Enemy permits a war or an earthquake or some other calam...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct the argument of Screwtape's twenty-ninth letter to Wormwood: the policy choice among cowardice, courage, and hatred; the admission that the devils cannot produce virtue; the conversion of fear into hatred; the risk that cowardice breeds self-knowledge; the claim that courage is the form of every virtue at the testing point; and the closing tactic of unconscious reservations. Then name the single thesis you think governs the letter, and weigh how Lewis uses a tempter's voice to advance it.
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape distinguishes 'the emotion of fear,' which is 'in itself, no sin,' from 'the act of cowardice,' which 'is all that matters.' What theory of moral responsibility does this distinction assume, and how does it bear on whether we can be blamed for feelings we did not choose? Use details from the letter to Wormwood to develop your view.
- Screwtape calls courage 'the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.' Why might courage be the condition under which any other virtue becomes actual rather than merely professed, and what does the example of Pilate add to the claim? Use details from the letter to Wormwood.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Moral purity, especially restraint of bodily appetite.
Item 2
Habitual moral failings or corruptions of character.
Item 3
Private, unspoken limits or doubts that hold something back.
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Critical Thinking
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