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Copywork
About This Passage
Here Screwtape maps the soul as concentric circles — will, intellect, and fantasy — and gives his architectural strategy: keep 'shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy,' where they are only admired and never acted on. The spatial metaphor lets a single image carry a whole argument about where a person truly changes: Screwtape admits a virtue is 'really fatal' to the devils only once it reaches the Will and is 'embodied in habits.'
Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles eve...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
In your own words, retell Screwtape's sixth letter to Wormwood in sequence. Which moves to misdirect the man's feelings does Screwtape treat as most important, and how do you know they are the ones that matter most?
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape gives Wormwood a 'general rule': keep the man 'unself-conscious' during his vices, but during his virtues 'bend his mind back on itself.' Why does making the man stop to admire 'My feelings are now growing more devout, or more charitable' actually weaken that goodness? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to explain.
- Screwtape writes that 'there is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy,' because the devils' business is 'to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.' Why is a mind crowded with contradictory fears about the future easier for Wormwood to control than a mind fixed on the present task? Point to how Screwtape describes the difference.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
In conflict with one another, so that both cannot be true at once.
Item 2
Great trouble or suffering that has to be endured.
Item 3
Imagined or supposed for the sake of argument; not real or proven.
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Critical Thinking
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