• From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.

    This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus by inflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing we have recently made the Arts, for example, less dangerous to us than perhaps, they have ever been, ‘low-brow’ and ‘high-brow’ artists alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh, excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tête-à-tête with the friend), that throw him out of gear.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    the man would wish that she was not someone else’s wife and be sorry that he could not love her lawfully.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    You will find, if you look carefully into any human’s heart, that he is haunted by at least two imaginary women a terrestrial and an infernal Venus, and that his desire differs qualitatively according to its object. There is one type for which his desire is such as to be naturally amenable to the Enemy readily mixed with charity, readily obedient to marriage, coloured all through with that golden light of reverence and naturalness which we detest; there is another type which he desires brutally, and desires to desire brutally, a type best used to draw him away from marriage altogether but which, even within marriage, he would tend to treat as a slave, an idol, or an accomplice. His love for the first might involve what the Enemy calls evil, but only accidentally; the man would wish that she was not someone else’s wife and be sorry that he could not love her lawfully. But in the second type, the felt evil is what he wants; it is that ‘tang’ in the flavour which he is after. In the face, it is the visible animality, or sulkiness, or craft, or cruelty which he likes, and in the body, something quite different from what he ordinarily calls Beauty, something he may even, in a sane hour, describe as ugliness, but which, by our art, can be made to play on the raw nerve of his private obsession.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    As regards the male taste we have varied a good deal. At one time we have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men’s vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, we have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present we are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and we now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female’s chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    I suppose you’ve tried persuading him that chastity is unhealthy?
    …

    for if we can’t use his sexuality to make him unchaste we must try to use it for the promotion of a desirable marriage.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    I note with great displeasure that the Enemy has, for the time being, put a forcible end to your direct attacks on the patient’s chastity. You ought to have known that He always does in the end,

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis