This season as we read through “The Screwtape Letters”, I’m using the Annotated Edition by Paul McCusker. Over the course of his career, Mr. McCusker has also been involved with many of the C.S. Lewis projects with Focus On The Family, including a production of The Screwtape Letters starring Andy Serkis. In today’s episode I ask him about all these different projects.
S4E10: “After Hours” with Paul McCusker (Download)
In anticipation of Season 4, Matt sat down and shared some of his favourite quotations from the book which we will be reading this Season, The Screwtape Letters…
There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a I brief sojourn in the Enemy’s camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour…
If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 2
Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 4
He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 8
…the Trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations, particularly those of sex
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 9
The Enemy’s demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 18
It is the business of these great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual “taste”. This they do by working through the small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 20
You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods.
You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 12
You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 9
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 12
Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 22
To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 29
You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 14
Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that “suits” him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 16
You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books.
The more often 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…
It has been well-known for some time that written exchanges between demons may, on occasion, be intercepted. A well-known collection of such communications was previously compiled and made available to the public back in the 1940’s. A new series of writings has recently come into my own possession. How this came about is not important, but I will be publishing them here over the coming months.
If you are familiar with the previously-released correspondence between Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood, you will no doubt recognize the author’s name on these new letters. They were penned by Screwtape’s “friend”, Slubgob, the head of Hell’s Training College for Demons.
In the years since the publishing of Screwtape’s letters, things in Hell have changed somewhat. Following some “anonymous” complaints about the operation of the Training College, the institution’s study program has received something of shake up. Would-be tempters are now sent “into the field” as part of their final year of training. Under the watchful eye of an experienced Tempter, the students are now assigned a “patient”, a human to tempt, in order to put into practice what they have learnt in the classroom. If a demon is successful, and secures the soul in his charge, he then qualifies for graduation and attains the sought-after rank of “Junior Tempter”. The letters which will be published here are Slubgob’s instructions to such a trainee, the undergraduate tempter named “Bogwash”.
The collection of Screwtape’s letters was prefixed with a warning and I would like to repeat that same warning here. Please remember that Satan has always been a liar and a deceiver. Likewise, not everything Slubgob says is true, even from his own twisted, upside-down perspective. Even demons are susceptible to self-deception and they can often be blinded by their hate of all that is good, true and beautiful.
