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Copywork
About This Passage
This is the theological heart of the letter, and one of the most quoted sentences Lewis ever wrote. Screwtape explains why the Enemy refuses His own omnipotence: 'the Irresistible and the Indisputable' would override a will and so destroy the very freedom love requires. Copying it teaches a writer how a careful argument can build, clause by clause, to an aphorism — 'He cannot ravish. He can only woo' — that states a whole theology of freedom in seven words.
You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible a...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct the argument of Screwtape's eighth letter in sequence, then identify the single conviction about love and freedom toward which it builds. How can you tell that the climax is the forsaken soul who still obeys, not the law of Undulation that opens the letter?
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape derives the 'law of Undulation' from the claim that humans are 'amphibians—half spirit and half animal,' so that 'to be in time means to change.' Why does Lewis make temporality itself, rather than sin, the source of the soul's dry troughs, and what does that distinction protect a believer from concluding in a low season? Use Screwtape's words to Wormwood to defend your reading.
- Screwtape opposes the devils' aim — 'the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense' — to the Enemy's wish for sons 'united to Him but still distinct.' Why does Lewis make the question of whether love absorbs or preserves the other the deepest division between the two sides? Point to the words that distinguish the two aims.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
In terms of kind or quality rather than amount.
Item 2
Made less intense, severe, or harsh.
Item 3
Lacking nobility; dishonorable or base.
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Critical Thinking
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