The Screwtape Letters

The young man has had a conversion experience, and Screwtape is critical of how Wormwood let things get out of control. Screwtape blames Wormwood for allowing his patient to have “two real positive Pleasures” (64): reading a book he liked and taking a walk through the countryside to an old mill. These experiences brought the young man back to a sense of who he really is: He is not the false self who seemed to enjoy “vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium” with his popular friends (64). Screwtape differentiates between the kind of self-forgetfulness the devils seek, which involves the suppression of one’s true personality, and the kind that God seeks, which involves an abandonment of self-preoccupation.

Screwtape is concerned about the patient’s conversion. He is especially concerned that the patient is displaying signs of the virtue of humility, whereas when he first began practicing Christianity, he had lofty ambitions. Screwtape does, however, have a strategy: “Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove! I’m being humble,’ and almost immediately pride—pride at his humility—will appear” (69).