THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS

by C. S. LEWIS

Letter # 4
“Discerning the Enemy’s Schemes Against our Prayer Life”

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
(0) The amateurish suggestions in your last letter warn me that it is high time for me to write to you fully on
the painful subject of prayer. You might have spared the comment that my advice about his prayers for his
mother it "proved singularly unfortunate". That is not the sort of thing that a nephew should write to neither
his uncle— nor a junior tempter to the under-secretary of a department. It also reveals an unpleasant desire to
shift responsibility; you must learn to pay for your own blunders.
(1) The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether.
When the patient is an adult recently re-converted to the Enemy's party, like your man, this is best done by
encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood.
In reaction against that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal,
and unregularized; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a
vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part. One of their
poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray "with moving lips and bended knees" but merely
"composed his spirit to love" and indulged "a sense of supplication". That is exactly the sort of prayer we
want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practiced by those who are very
far advanced in the Enemy's service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time. At
the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they
constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do
affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our
best work is done by keeping things out.
(2) If this fails, you must fall back on a subtler misdirection of his intention. Whenever they are attending to
the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to
turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to
produce feelings there by the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them,
instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for themselves and not notice that this is what they are
doing. When they meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When they say they are
praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven. 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.
(3) But of course the Enemy will not meantime be idle. Wherever there is prayer, there is danger of His own
immediate action. He is cynically indifferent to the dignity of His position, and ours, as pure spirits, and to
human animals on their knees He pours out self-knowledge in a quite shameless fashion. But even if He
defeats your first attempt at misdirection, we have a subtler weapon. The humans do not start from that direct
perception of Him which we, unhappily, cannot avoid. They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that
stabbing and searing glare which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives. If you look into your
patient's mind when he is praying, you will not find that. If you examine the object to which he is attending,
you will find that it is a composite object containing many quite ridiculous ingredients. There will be images
derived from pictures of the Enemy as He appeared during the discreditable episode known as the
Incarnation: there will be vaguer—perhaps quite savage and puerile—images associated with the other two
Persons. There will even be some of his own reverence (and of bodily sensations accompanying it)
objectified and attributed to the object revered. I have known cases where what the patient called his "God"
was actually located—up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a
crucifix on the wall. But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it—to
the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him. You may even encourage him to attach
great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before
his imagination during the whole prayer. For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if ever he consciously
directs his prayers "Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be", our situation is, for
the moment, desperate. Once all his thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with
a full recognition of their merely subjective nature, and the man trusts himself to the completely real,
external, invisible Presence, there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it—
why, then it is that the incalculable may occur. In avoiding this situation—this real nakedness of the soul in
prayer—you will be helped by the fact that the humans themselves do not desire it as much as they suppose.
There's such a thing as getting more than they bargained for!
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE

Analysis Questions
1. In Paragraph 1, what significance is there in the comments of Screwtape where he encourages a
prayer that is spontaneous, inward, informal and unregularized? Do you agree or disagree that
this kind of prayer would be encouraged by God’s enemies? Compare Matthew 6:5-9; 1
Thessalonians 5:17.
2. In Paragraph 1, why does Screwtape encourage the patient to produce in himself a devotional
mood? What is wrong or right about this? Does God care? And why the focus to keep his
concentration of the will and intelligence having no part? Does bodily position make a
difference? Compare Matthew 26:39; Luke 22:41-44; Gen 17:3; 1 Kings 8:54; Luke 18:10-13;
2 Samuel 7:18.
3. In Paragraph 2, why does Screwtape desire for the patient to try and produce feelings as it relates
to prayer? How do feelings benefit or take away from prayer?
4. In Paragraph 2, how does trying to feel forgiven or brave or chartiable detract from our prayers
for those exact things? Is there a challenge discerning between human motivated fruit versus
Spirit-motivated fruit?
5. In Paragraph 2 (last sentence), Screwtape tells his nephew to focus on feelings. Do you think we
often judge the quality of our relationship with God by how we feel? Read 1 Kings 18-19. How
does Elijah’s experience compare with Screwtape’s statement? What can we learn from both?
6. In paragraph 3, Screwtape makes much of the fact that human beings “do not start from a direct
perception” of God. Read Exodus 33:17-23; 1 Cor 13:8-12; 1 John 4:12. What do these texts
suggest about we see God?
7. In Paragraph 3, why does Screwtape say that we do not desire the real nakedness of the soul as
much as we suppose? Is it true? How does this vulnerability affect us really getting to the nitty
gritty in prayer?