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Copywork
About This Passage
Here Screwtape names the chapter's most chilling tactic: turning real love into prayer for an invented person. The long sentence builds from 'crude and often erroneous' ideas to the widening 'cleavage,' and the em-dash that pins the real mother to 'the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table' teaches how a writer makes an abstraction suddenly concrete.
In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize Screwtape's third letter, then explain what Lewis most wants the reader to notice about how faith can fail at home. What techniques does Screwtape rely on to achieve that effect?
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape's first method is to keep the man's attention on 'advanced and spiritual' duties so he ignores 'the most elementary' ones. Why does directing a man toward higher virtues actually serve Screwtape's purpose, and what does this reveal about 'the horror and neglect of the obvious'? Point to the reasoning in the letter to Wormwood.
- Screwtape boasts he has had patients who could turn 'from impassioned prayer for a wife's or son's soul to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.' What does this extreme example expose about why a religion aimed at imagined people becomes dangerous? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to defend your reading.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
To make a problem or feeling worse.
Item 2
Persuaded or led to do or feel something.
Item 3
Filled with strong feeling or emotion.
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Critical Thinking
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