Khari’s Reviews > The Screwtape Letters > Status Update

Screwtape: "Fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone interests us) is already over. The pleasure is just part of the process which we regret and would exclude if we could do so without losing the sin; it is the part contributed by [God], and...experienced in [the] present. The sin, which is our contribution, looked forward."

Screwtape: "Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased."

{God] would rather the man though himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one.

"All virtues are less formidable...once the man is aware that he has them."

Well, piffle, that's almost the same thing I wrote in my review of Bonhoeffer. And here I thought I had come up with the idea on my own. This is both the good thing and the bad thing of reading good books when you are young, their thought seeps into you, even if you don't recognize it until you see it again.

Screwtape: "No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will...active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel."

Screwtape: "You should always try to make the patient abandon the food or books he really likes in favor of the 'best' people, the 'right' food, the 'important' books."

"The safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

Screwtape: "He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles...Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."

"The prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best."

Screwtape: "The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing."