Screwtape Letters

I have just started re-reading C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, a collection of fictitious letters from Screwtape, a senior devil in Satan's "organization," to his nephew Wormwood, a junior grade devil who is charged with keeping his "patient" (a human) from becoming a Christian (and, thus, going over to the side of the "Enemy"). Although the book was written back in the early 1940s, it contains some profound insights into the human psyche and our culture.

In Screwtape's first letter to Wormwood, he advises him to keep his "patient" from thinking, because, if he thinks, he is more likely to become a Christian and convert to the side of the Enemy. Rather, Wormwood is to keep his senses bombarded with images in rapid succession. (Note: this was written before TV had become what it is today! How much more would Screwtape speak these words today!) This is what Screwtape says:

"By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it 'real life' and don't let him ask what he means by 'real.'

"You begin to see the point?....[Humans] find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar [i.e., the abstract and universal] while the familiar [i.e., the concrete and particular] is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see [i.e., the abstract and universal]....If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable 'real life.' But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all..."