Khari’s Reviews > The Screwtape Letters > Status Update

If you just remembered the guilt you will feel afterwards, the loss of your freedom, the loss of trust you have built with others, the love of others who are praying for your freedom, the love of God who wants you to be free, you might just hesitate to run after that addiction. What does the devil do? Keep all those things that you KNOW from your mind.

Screwtape: "It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out."

I have never thought of it that way, but it's true. Say for instance that you are an addict, and you are tempted to do your addiction, your mind is full of the pleasure you expect from that addiction.

Screwtape: "Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the words, while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most over-sensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention."

That is a trap that is very easy to fall into.

Screwtape: "I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment's notice from impassioned prayer for a wife's or son's 'soul' to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm."

This is really true. The opposite side of the coin, and far darker truth of what James meant when he talks about blessing someone but not taking care of their physical needs.

"Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords."

There's something to contemplate.

Hell being a place where you can do nothing but be faced with your own mistakes and how you ended up there. That does not sound pleasant.

"All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour."

That is an incredibly frightening thought.

"Best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is 'the results of modern investigation'."

This is even more true than it used to be. One of my students asked me how I could know anything when I didn't have tiktok. He asked that question seriously. He believes everything. Every conspiracy.