Sept ‘25 1-to-1 Wiseletter (The Screwtape Letters)
In September's 1-to-1 Wiseletter, we'll be looking at a quote from the Screwtape Letters, a book containing notes written by a senior devil, Screwtape, in hell to his nephew, a lessor temptor named Wormwood.
Quote
The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know.
For a long time, I didn't think there was such a thing as evil. I don't think that's true anymore. But evil's weird. It's hard to pin down, but you know it when you see it.
St. Thomas Aquinas defined evil as the privation of good--the absence of good, in other words. Evil, according to the Thomists, is denatured. It doesn't have substance. It's negative, by nature. If it is anything, it's the process of corruption. A good way to think about it are the holes in the brain of an Alzheimer's victim. Or a cavity in a tooth. Corruption causes a substance to disorder and disintegrate. That's probably a good starting point.
The Screwtape Letters bring us beyond that starting point to the advanced intricacies of evil. Written by Lewis in wartime London in 1942, the letters focus on the fate of the soul of an unnamed Englishman. Uncle Screwtape mentors his nephew Wormwood on how to effectively corrupt the soul of this man, who they refer to as the "patient,"
The eerie part of this book is that Screwtape's counsel to Wormwood on engendering evil is to never take a direct approach. Tempting the patient into gambling, deceit, and violence is too easy to spot and thus resist and, moreover, not the ultimate outcome the devils seek. Hating national enemies like the Germans and acting out degenerative social behavior are, at best, amusing byproducts of hell's project.
What the devils really seek is the soul. They want the man's spiritual substance. They want this because the nature of evil is substance-less. Like a tumor, evil requires healthy tissue to grow. Once the healthy tissue is consumed or perverted and absorbed, the corruption must move on to find a fresh host.
And so the senior devil teaches Wormwood that the process of corruption is an intricate affair that requires cunning and patience above all.
One way to effectively win over the soul of a person is to embitter them toward their inner circle of people with whom they have daily contact and make them benevolent toward those on the outermost with whom they've never met.
This lesson is taught after an excited Wormwood reports back to his uncle that the patient feels and openly voices hatred for the enemy Germans. Young Wormwood thinks this news will please Screwtape. Hatred is progress, right? But uncle Screwtape scolds Wormwood for his naivety. That kind of hatred, Screwtape notes, is weak and fleeting. "The great thing," Screwtape teaches, "is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know."
A good example of this would be to make it important for a person to think the right thoughts, have the correct moral opinions, and say the right words about the war in Ukraine or the atrocities in Gaza or Donald Trump and at the same time make them fail to call their grandfather, help the old lady cross the street, give up their bus seat for a pregnant mother, pick up garbage on their sidewalk or start a conversation with a neighbor across the street.
Relegate the good to the remote and the abstract while making evil center and concrete. Let evil fester in the central level of the will while good fades out to some distant orbit of experience. That way, the person thinks of themselves as good, mentally masturbates moral self-congratulations, but feels, at best, distant and alienated, and, at worst, angry, resentful, and superior to their fellow man.
This should sound familiar. It's in the air we breathe today.
QUESTION
What's one way you can make the good concrete in your life?
Cheers,
John
