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THE CHAPTERS
Screwtape's main points from each chapter in how to temp a human to Hell's side.
Chapter 1
Use jargon to keep a human from the church.
Keep the human focused on the "stream of immediate sense experience."
Devils are real spirits, angels were previously human.
The Enemy uses arguments and reason to persuade humans to the good, devils use "real life" and hedonism.
Chapters: Key Points: Intro
Chapter 2
Patient has turned into a Christian.
Other churchgoers are weird or ordinary and makes him think church is ridiculous.
Believes Christians are pictorial - focus on images of church and Christianity.
Disappoint him in church because it is not the image in his mind of what it should look like.
Transition from dreaming aspiration of church to laborious doing (prayer, focus, attendance).
Keep the question of other people's vices as proof of hypocrisy out of his mind.
Want him to feel superior for having less sins.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 3
Keep patient focused on himself, his inner self, his own mind.
Make him neglect the obvious.
Mother is sick. Keep him focused on the idea and state of his mother's soul, not on her physical condition.
This creates an imaginary mother in his head that he prays for which does not actually help the real one.
Use the annoyance and irritation of other people in home. Creates domestic hatred. Judgement of each other.
Family distrust, jealousy, annoyance, hatred.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 4
Keep patient from seriously praying, but rather, a vaguely devotional mood with haphazard prayers.
Humans are animals, so whatever their bodies do affects their souls.
Keep things out of his mind.
Misdirection of intention.
Keep him watching his own mind and trying to produce feelings by his own will.
He may want to ask for charity, but make him try to manufacture charitable feelings.
Make him estimate the value of each prayer by his success in producing the desired feeling.
Keep him praying on the object or image of the Enemy.
You do not want the nakedness of the soul in prayer.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 5
Start of another human war.
Wormwood, stay focused on end goal instead of current pleasures of watching humans kill each other.
Humans thinking of others, turning to Enemy for saving.
Nursing homes are useful - they promise life to the dying and encourage the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence.
Continued remembrance that death in war lessens contented worldliness (happiness with material and ordinary life rather than spiritual experience).
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 6
Want patient to be in maximum uncertainty so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear.
Enemy wants men to be concerned with what they do, our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.
In activities of the mind that favor our cause, encourage patient to be unselfconscious and to concentrate on the object. In activities favorable to the Enemy, bend his mind back on itself.
Malice becomes real and benevolence becomes imaginary.
Man is a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, intellect in the middle, and fantasy being the outermost.
Move the virtues into fantasy. Keep virtues out of will.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 7
Keep patient ignorant of your existence. Devils are comical figures in human imagination, not helpful to have him think of you as that.
Perfect work is the Materialist Magician: a man worshipping what he vaguely calls "forces" while denying the existence of "spirits."
Patriot vs Pacifist. Extremes other than devotion are encouraged. Conscientious objector is good. Make sure he treats the Patriotism or Pacifism as part of his religion.
Once you have made the world an end, and faith a means, you have won the man. It makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 8
Humans are amphibians - half animal, half spirit.
As a spirit, he inhabits the eternal world, as animal, he inhabits time.
To be in time means to change.
Law of Undulation: troughs and peaks, back and forth.
As long as he is on earth, he will have periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness that will alternate between periods of numbness and poverty.
To us, a human is primarily food. Our aim is absorption of its will into ours. Increase of our self at the expense of theirs.
We want cattle who can finally become food, Enemy wants servants who can finally become sons.
Enemy wants world full of beings united to Him but distinct.
He cannot tempt to virtue as we do to vice.
Enemy leaves man to figure out life by himself, and he feels forsaken in the harsh world, but he still believes and obeys.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 9
When in peak of Undulation, it is not a good time to sexually tempt a human because he is resistant even though he has more physical energy.
This can lead to falling in love.
You want to tempt when he is in a trough because it can lead to perversions.
Pleasure was made by Enemy, we make them take it too far and mistreat it.
Keep the Law of Undulation out of his mind; make a trough seem permanent. Use jargon: "phases" that seem to have no end.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 10
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
Make patient act and believe different things in different groups of people.
This will increase his vanity, pleasure in dishonesty, and inconsistency.
Treacherous to multiple groups.
He becomes focused on people other than his mother and work. Then, more domestic tension.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 11
Laughter comes from: Joy, Fun, Joke Proper, or Flippancy.
Joy is similar to music, when seeing family on a holiday, and happiness.
Fun is emotional froth arising from play instinct.
Joke Proper does not have to be bawdy.
Flippancy is best, economical. Only a clever human can make a real joke about virtue. He talks about everything with little seriousness and seems ridiculous.
Humans take sense of humor seriously. One of only deficiencies they feel shame about.
Humor for them is all consoling and all excusing grace of life. Destroys shame.
Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 12
Work slowly on patient. Create a dim uneasiness.
All humans have reluctance to think about enemy when they have guilt.
They want to be distracted.
Makes them cut off from real happiness.
Wastes time on dull things.
Does neither what he should or what he likes. Does nothing.
Safest road to Hell is gradual one.
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Chapter 13
Patient has had deeper second conversion. You allowed him two real pleasures.
You want him to have imaginary pains.
To detach him from Enemy, get him to detach from himself. You failed.
Enemy wants humans to be distinct but also part of Him. He hates to see them drift away from their own nature for any other reason other than to Him.
Eradicate any strong personal taste that is not an actual sin.
Make him want not what he actually likes, but what his society says is best or right.
Keep him from acting. Active habits are strengthened while passive ones are weakened.The more often he feels without acting, the less able to ever act and the less able to feel.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 14
Pride in humility.
Make him think humility is a kind of opinion of his own talents and character.
Especially, make him value an opinion for some quality there than truth; adds dishonesty and fantasy.
Make him downplay his strengths.
Enemy wants man to be proud of his talents just as much as proud of other's talents.
He wants belief that every human is an excellent being. We want to get man's mind off the subject of his own value altogether.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 15
In war, tortured fear and stupid confidence are both good.
Humans live in time, Enemy destines them to eternity.
He wants them to attend to eternity itself and the present.
Present is time at which time and eternity meet.
We want them focused on future: fear and hope, unrealities, least like eternity.
Fear, avarice, lust, ambition look to future.
We want humans in pursuit of rainbow's end.
Never honest, kind, happy now, but probably will be in the future.
We want anxiety or hope about the war in present. Both lead to belief that the future will be better.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 16
Cannot stop patient from going to church, so keep him looking for a church that "suits" him.
This makes it so that each church is a kind of club with its own differences and agendas.
They all focus on different things.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 17
Gluttony of delicacy is better than gluttony of excess.
Quantities do not matter when we can use a human belly and palate to produce impatience, self-centeredness, uncharitableness, and more reason to quarrel.
Causes patient to be troublesome to other people.
The belly dominates their life.
Focused on past experiences that he considered properly done.
Causes daily disappointment.
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Chapter 18
Sexual temptation.
Enemy wants abstinence or monogamy.
We created the idea that being in love is needed for marriage.
To be means to be in competition.
Good of one is supposed to be good for another; like love.
Enemy makes humans cooperate.
A family is distinct but also united in a more conscious and responsible way.
Sex is transcendental relation set up between humans which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.
We want humans to marry for love when Enemy meant love to come after marriage.
Human cannot find love, then no marriage, all alone.
Marrying for love may make them marry a lower class person which is good.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 19
Nature is competition, thus love is a contradiction.
Enemy loves humans, but that is impossible. He is one and they are distinct. His good is not their good.
Nothing matters except the tendency of a given state of mind to move toward us or Him.
Love is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically deserving reward.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 20
The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom they would be spiritually helpful, and that would result in happy and fertile marriages.
Direct men's desires to the unreal.
Make women try to fit different, unreal looks.
Makes the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and demands more impossible expectations.
Man is haunted by at least two imaginary women: the terrestrial woman and infernal Venus. The terrestrial woman is mixed with charity, readily obedient to marriage, and full of reverence and naturalness. The infernal Venus is the one he desires brutally and draws him away from marriage. She is often a prostitute or mistress.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 21
In a period of sexual temptation, attack his irritability.
Men are angered by misfortune conceived as injury.
Anger leads to ill temperedness.
Time he expects for himself, but loses to someone else is a good way of angering.
Create false sense of ownership, like to time.
Man's belief that he owns his own body.
Sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion.
Humans do not own anything.
Eventually, it will either be us or Enemy who owns everything.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 22
Patient is in love with a devout Christian girl.
Moonstruck by virginity.
He's a hedonist at heart.
Music and silence are bad, noise is the grand dynamism.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 23
If you cannot remove Christianity from his life, you must corrupt it.
Social implication of religion: every group has a different "historical Jesus."
Make sophists.
Destroy the devotional life.
Instead of a Creator adored by His creatures, you will have a leader with a following who creates his own approved character.
Makes men treat Christianity as a means to their own advancement.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 24
Cause untroubled assumption that the outsiders who do not share the same beliefs as patient are really too stupid and ridiculous to understand them.
Spiritual pride.
Pride in one Christian group over other groups.
Makes Christianity a mysterious religion in which he feels himself one of the initiates.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 25
Christianity And.
Make each Christian group have another thing connected to their faith. Thus, Christians with a difference.
Horror of the Same Old Thing. Humans need change. Change is pleasurable, but so is permanence. Rhythm.
Demand for novelty balanced with need of familiarity.
Law of Diminishing Returns. novelty costs money, so avarice and unhappiness comes with it.
Nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in the will.
Future as a promised land which favored heroes can attain.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 26
Courtship leads to domestic hatred.
The enchantment of unsatisfied desire produces results which the humans can be made to mistake for the results of charity.
Unselfishness - teach man to surrender his benefits not because others may enjoy them, but because he is unselfish in forgoing them.
Erotic enchantment produces a mutual complaisance in which each is really pleased to give in to the wishes of another.
Mutual self sacrifice in marriage: end by doing what neither wants, but both feel self righteous in forgoing what they individually want to do. Secret grudge against the other for the acceptance of their sacrifice.
Generous Conflict Illusion: one says he is unselfish and insists on doing what other want. They insist on doing what he wants.
Pride in being unselfish.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 27
Patient's prayers are on his wandering mind and distractions.
Anything, including a sin, that has the effect of moving him toward the Enemy does not help us.
False spirituality: praise and communion with Enemy instead of praying for daily bread and the ending of other's suffering.
Worry him with the suspicion that the practice is absurd and can have no objective result.
If the thing he prays for does not happen, then that is one more proof that prayers do not work. If it does happen, he will be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, therefore it would have happened anyways.
Patient takes Time as ultimate reality. If his prayers affect the weather of tomorrow, then the Enemy must have known what the prayer was to be. Thus, predestined.
Creation in its entirety does not follow time. Human's consciousness forced them to encounter the life as a series of successive events.
How does free will fit in?
The Enemy does not foresee a human's free actions in a future, but sees them in His unbounded Now.
To watch a man do something is not to make him do it.
Historical Point of View: ancient authors believed to have wisdom, truthfulness not questioned.
Where learning makes a free exchange between the ages, there is the danger of past errors of one being corrected by the truths of another.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 28
You do not want the patient to die now because he will go to the Enemy.
The long, dull monotonous years of middle-aged property or adversity are excellent times to cause humans to turn to our side.
It is hard for humans to persevere; wear a soul out by attrition.
Make him seek worldliness, attention, fame, and pride.
Humans want heaven, make them believe that the earth can be turned into heaven at some future date by politics, eugenics, science, psychology, or whatnot.
Experience is the mother of illusion.
Human birth is the qualification for human death and death is a gate to the other kind of life.
Lots of humans die in birth and youth. The Enemy must want a few to actually have experience of resisting us through an earthy life of sixty or seventy years.
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Chapter 29
Cowardice, courage with pride, or hatred of Germans?
Hell's Research Department does not know how to produce any virtue.
An evil man needs some virtue.
Hatred is best combined with fear. Cowardice is purely painful. More fear, more hate. Hatred is often the compensation for a frightened man.
Danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, is that we produce real seal-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility.
Need to keep running in the patients's mind a vague idea of all sorts of things he can do or not do inside the framework of the duty, which seem to make him a little safer.
Imaginary life lines.
Superstitions can be awakened.
Keep him feeling that he has something other than the enemy and courage to fall back on, so that what was intended to be a total commitment to duty becomes mixed with little unconscious reservations.
Act of cowardice is all that matters, fear does us no good.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 30
Justice of Hell is purely realistic and concerned only with results. Bring us back food, or be food yourself.
Paradoxical thing is that moderate fatigue is a better soil for frustration than absolute exhaustion.
Unexpected demands on a man already tired.
Whatever the man expects, he soon comes to think he has a right to as well: the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury.
The best results from the patient's fatigue will come if you feed him false hopes.
Make him focus on bearing whatever comes to him " for a reasonable period," but make the period shorter than the actual length of the trial.
Scenes of war and death are not helpful to an intellectual attack. They make him feel that the world is always war and death and that religion is a fantasy.
He becomes fogged on the word "real." Real as bare physical facts, or real as emotional effects from those facts.
Rule: experiences which make humans happier or better, then the physical facts are real and spiritual elements are subjective; in experiences that disappoint or corrupt, then the spiritual elements are real and to ignore them is to be an escapist.
In birth, the blood and pain are real and the rejoicing is subjective. Death, terror, and ugliness reveal what death really means.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
Chapter 31
The patient was killed and went to heaven.
The howl for sharpened famine for that loss reechoes at this moment through all the levels of the Kingdom of Noise down to the very Throne itself.
Recognition made him free from your company almost before the limbs of his corpse became quiet.
Chapters: Key Points: Text
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