# Screwtape Proposes a Toast



## ComeFrom? (May 21, 2004)

I finished reading C.S. Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters." It was really an interesting, thought provoking book. It was completed in around 1941. 20 years later many were asking Lewis if he would write more letters adding on to the original book or another series like Screwtape. He said he would not. Twenty years later Saturday Evening Post ask if he would write something similar so they could print it in their next issue. Instead of writing 'Letters' he wrote, "Screwtape Proposes a Toast." His young nephew, "Wormwood" eventually failed in capturing the soul of the person (referred to as his 'patient') he was assigned to on Earth and as a result Wormwood, well, was&#8230; or became part of the banquet&#8230;so to speak. I have been further inspired, encouraged and strengthened in my Christian faith from reading this book. I recommend it to those who have yet to read it. Remember Lewis died in 1963, he was an English Christian literary giant of the twentieth century. Some of the adjectives and descriptive meanings and many 'clauses' are not defined (for me anyway) but you will be able to understand those that imply positive and those that imply negative. Oh yea, it's also very funny. Enjoy. CF?

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"Screwtape Proposes a Toast," by C.S. Lewis:

The scene is in Hell at the annual dinner of the Tempters' Training College for young devils. The principal, Dr. Slubgob, has just proposed the health of the guests. Screwtape, who is the guest of honor, rises to reply:

Mr. Principal, your Imminence, your Disgrace, my Thorns, Shadies, and Gentledevils: It is customary on these occasions for the speaker to address himself chiefly to those among you who have graduated and who will very soon be posted to official Temptships on Earth. It is a custom I willingly obey. I well remember with what trepidation I awaited my own first appointment. I hope and believe that each one of you has the same uneasiness tonight. Your career is before you. Hell expects and demands that it should be - as Mine was - one of unbroken success. If it is not, you know what awaits you.

I have no wish to reduce the wholesomeness and realistic element of terror, the unremitting anxiety, which must act as the lash and spur to your endeavors. How often you will envy the humans their faculty to sleep! Yet at the same time I would wish to put before you a moderately encouraging view of strategical situation as a whole.

Your dreaded Principal has included in a speech full of points something like an apology for the banquet which he has set before us. Well, gentledevils, no one blames _him_. But it would be vain to deny that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality. Not all the most skillful of our tormentors could make them better than insipid.

Oh to get one's teeth into a Farinata, a Henry VIII or even a Hitler! There was real crackling there; something to crunch; a rage, an egotism, a cruelty only just less than robust than our own. It put up a delicious resistance to being devoured. It warmed your innards when you got it down.


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## ComeFrom? (May 21, 2004)

*Page 2*

Instead of this, what have we had tonight? There was a municipal authority with the Graft sauce. But personally I could not detect in him the flavor of a really passionate and brutal avarice such as delighted one in the great tycoons of the last century. Was he not an unmistakably a Little Man - a creature of the petty rake-off pocketed with petty joke in private and denied with the stalest platitudes of his public utterances - a grubby little nonentity who had drifted into corruption, only just realizing that he was corrupt and chiefly because everyone else did it? Then there was the lukewarm Casserole of Adulterers. Could you find in it any trace of as fully inflamed, defiant, rebellious, insatiable lust? I couldn't. They al tasted to me like under-sexed morons who had blundered or trickled into the wrong beds in automatic response to sexy advertisements, or to make themselves modern and emancipated or to reassure themselves about their virility or their 'normalcy', or even because they had nothing else to do. Frankly, to me who have tasted Messalina and Casanova, they were nauseating. The Trade Unionist garnished with Claptrap was perhaps a shade better. He had done some real harm. Had had, not quite unknowingly, worked for bloodshed, famine and the extinction of liberty. Yes, in a way. But what a way! He thought of those ultimate objectives so little. Toeing the party line, self-importance and above all mere routine, were what really dominated his life.

But now comes the point. Gastronomically, all this is deplorable. But I hope none of us puts gastronomy first. Is it not, in another and far more serious way, full of hope and promise?

Consider, first, the mere quantity. The quality may be wretched; but we never had souls (of a sort) in more abundance.

And then the triumph. We are tempted to say that such souls (or such residual puddles of what once was soul) are hardly worth damning. Yes, but the Enemy (for whatever inscrutable and perverse reason) thought them worth trying to save. Believe me, He did. You youngsters who have not yet been on active service have no idea with what labor, with what delicate skill, each of these miserable creatures was finally captured.

The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbiness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible.

In each individual choice of what the Enemy would call the 'wrong' turning such creatures are at first hardly, if at all, in a state of full spiritual responsibility. They do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking. Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them. And of course we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur; what would be a _bribe_ in someone else's profession is a _tip_ or a _present_ in theirs. The first job of their Tempters was to harden these choices of the Hell-ward roads into a habit by steady repetition. But then (and this was all important) to turn the habit into a principle - a principle the creature is prepared to defend. After that all will go well.


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## ComeFrom? (May 21, 2004)

*Page 3*

Conformity to the social environment, at first merely instinctive or even mechanical - how should jelly not conform? - now becomes an unacknowledged creed or ideal of Togetherness or Being like Folks. Mere ignorance of the law they break now turns into a vague theory expressed by calling it _conventional_ or _puritan_ or _bourgeois_ 'mortality'. Thus gradually there comes to exist at the center of the creature a hard, tight, settled core of resolution to go on being what it is, and even to resist moods that might tend to alter it. It is a very small core; not at all reflective (they are too ignorant) nor defiant (their emotional and imaginative poverty excludes that); almost in a way like a very small cancer. Here at last is a real and deliberate rejection of what the Enemy calls Grace.

These then are two welcome phenomena. First, the abundance of our captures; however tasteless our fare, we are in no danger o famine. And secondly, the triumph; the skill of our Tempters has never stood higher. But the third moral, which I have not yet drawn, is the most important of all.

The sort of souls on whose despair and ruin we have - well, I won't say feasted, but at any rate subsisted - tonight are increasing in numbers and will continue to increase. Our advices from Lower Command assure us that this is so; our directives warn us to orient all tactics in view of this situation. 

The 'great' sinners, those in whom vivid and genial passions have been pushed beyond the bounds and in whom an immense concentration of will has been devoted to objects which the Enemy really, really hates will not disappear. But they will grow rarer. Our catches will be ever more numerous; but they will consist increasingly of trash - trash which we should once have thrown to Cerberus and the hellhounds as unfit for diabolical consumption. As the great sinners grow fewer, and the majority lose all individuality, the great sinners become far more effective agents for us. Every great dictator or even demagogue - almost every film-star or crooner - can now draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him. They give themselves (what there is of them) to him; in him, to us. There may come a time when we shall have no need to bother about _individual_ temptation at all, except for a few. Catch the bell-wether and his whole flock comes after him.

But do you realize how we have succeeded in reducing so many of the human race to the level of ciphers? This has not come about be accident. It has been our answer- and a magnificent answer it is - to one of the most serious challenges we ever had to face.

Let me recall to your minds what the human situation was in the letter half of the nineteenth century - the period at which I ceased practicing Tempter and was rewarded with an administrative post. The great movement towards liberty and equality among men had by then borne solid fruit and grown mature. Slavery had been abolished. The American War of Independence had been won. The French Revolution had succeeded. Religious toleration was almost everywhere on the increase. In that movement there had originally been many elements which were in our favor.


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## ComeFrom? (May 21, 2004)

Much Atheism, much Anti-Clericalism, much envy and thirst for revenge, even some (rather absurd) attempts to revive Paganism, were mixed in it.

But by the latter part of the century the situation was much simpler, and so much more ominous. In the English sector (where I saw most of my front-line service) horrible thing had happened. The Enemy, with His usual sleight of hand, had largely appropriated this progressive or liberalizing movement and perverted it to His own ends. Very little of its old anti-Christianity remained. The dangerous phenomenon called Christian Socialism was rampant. Thanks to our father below the threat was averted. Our counterattack was on two levels. On the deepest level our dealers contrived the implicit movement from its earliest days. Hidden in this heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, you remember, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn't know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, _via_ Hegel, (another indispensable propagandist on our side) we easily contrived both the **** and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a tool shed in his own garden.

Such was our counter-attack on one level. You, who are mere beginners, will not be entrusted with work of that kind. You will be attached as Tempters to private persons. Against them, or through them, our counter-attack takes a different form.

Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won't. It will never occur to them that _Democracy_ if properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course, must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: 'whether 'democratic behavior' means the behavior that democracies like or the behavior that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men _are_ equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word _Democracy_ to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of all human feelings. You can get him to practice, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.

The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say _I'm as good as you._


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## ComeFrom? (May 21, 2004)

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The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the center of his good, solid resounding lie. I don't mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty and good sense than in height and waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says _I'm as good as you_ believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.

And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, and choice of food. "Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I - it must be vile, upstage and la-di-dah affection. Here's a fellow who says he doesn't like hot dogs - thinks himself too good for them no doubt. Here's a man who hasn't turned on the jukebox - he must be one of those highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were the right sort of chaps they'd be like me. They've no business to be different. It's undemocratic.'

Now this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name Envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years. But up until now they always regarded as the most comical of vices. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it - make it respectable and even laudable - by the incantatory use of the word democratic.

Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labor more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from it for fear of being _undemocratic._ I am credibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their Being like Folks; that people who would really wish to be - and are offered the Grace which would enable them to be - honest, chaste, or temperate, refuse it. To accept might make them Different, might offend again the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals.

All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: 'Oh God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!' Thanks to our labors, this will increasingly mean, 'Make me a minx, a moron and a parasite'.


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## ComeFrom? (May 21, 2004)

*Page 6*

But that is a mere by-product. What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence - moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how Democracy (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them 'tyrants' then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of corn and with his cane snicked off the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral is plain. Allow no pre-eminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practice, in a sense, 'democracy'. But now 'democracy' can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.

I have said that to secure the damnation of these little souls, these creatures that have almost ceased to be individuals, is a laborious and tricky work. But if the proper pins and skills are expended, you can be fairly confident of the result. The great sinners _seem_ easier to catch. But then they are incalculable. After you have played them for seventy years, the Enemy may snatch them from your claws in the seventy-first. They are capable, you see, of real repentance. They are conscience of real guilt. They are, if things take the wrong turn, as ready to defy the social pressures around them for the Enemy's sake as they were to defy them from ours. It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.

My own experience, as I have said, was mainly n the English sector, and I still get more news from it than from any other. It may be that what I am going to say will not apply so fully to the sectors in which some of you are operating. But you can make the necessary adjustments when you get there.

In that promising land of spirit of _I'm as good as you_ has already become something more than a generally social influence. It begins to works itself into their educational system. How far its operations there have gone at the present moment, I would not like to say with certainty. Nor does it matter. Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments; especially as we ourselves will play our part in the developing. The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic'. These differences between the pupils - for they are obviously and nakedly _individual_ differences - must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not.


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## ComeFrom? (May 21, 2004)

*Page 7*

At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them for example, make mud-pies and call it modeling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a _trauma_ - Beelzebub, what a useful word!! - by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age-group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coaeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON THE MAT.

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when _I'm as good as you_ has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers - or should I say, nurses? - will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us.

Of course this would not follow unless all education became state education. But it will. That is part of the same movement. Penal taxes, designated for the purpose, are liquidating the Middle Class, the class who were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have their children privately educated. The removal of this class, besides linking up with the abolition of education, is, fortunately, an inevitable effect of the spirit that says, _I'm as good as you_. This was, after all, the social group which gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists and administrators. If ever there was a bunch of tall stalks that needed their tops knocked off, it was surely they. As an English politician remarked not long ago, 'A democracy does not want great men.'

It would be idle to ask of such a creature whether by _want_ it means 'need' or 'like'. But you had better be clear. For here Aristotle's question comes up again.

We in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of Democracy in the strict sense of the word; the political arrangement so called. Like all forms of government it often works to our advantage; but a whole less often than other forms. And what we must realize is that 'democracy' in a diabolical sense (I'm as good as you, Being like Folks, Togetherness) is the finest instrument we could have possibly have for extirpating political Democracies from the face of the earth.

For 'democracy' or the 'democratic spirit' (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of sub-literates, morally flaccid from lack of disciple in youth, full of cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and soft from lifelong pampering. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be. For humans when such a nation meets in conflict a nation where children have been made to work at school, where talent is placed in high posts, and where the ignorant mass are allowed no say at all in public affairs, only one result is possible.


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## ComeFrom? (May 21, 2004)

*Page 8*

It is our function to encourage the behavior, the manners, the whole attitude of the mind, which democracies naturally like to enjoy, because these are the very things which, if unchecked, will destroy democracy. You would almost wonder that even humans don't see it themselves. Even if they don't read Aristotle you would have thought the French Revolution would have taught them that the behavior aristocrats naturally like is not the behavior that preserves aristocracy. They might then have applied the same principle to all forms of government.

But I would not end on that note. I would not - Hell forbid! - encourage in your own minds that delusion which you must carefully foster in the minds of your human victims. I mean the delusion that the fate of nations is _in itself_ more important than that of individual souls. The overthrow of free peoples and the multiplication of slave states are for us a means (besides, of course, being fun); but the real end is the destruction of the individual. For only individuals can be saved or damned, can become sons of the Enemy or food for us. The ultimate value, for us, of any revolution, war or famine lies in the individual anguish, treachery, hatred, rage and despair which it may produce. _I'm as good as you_ is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies. But it has far deeper value as an end in itself, as a state of mind, which necessarily excluding humility, charity, contentment and all the pleasures of gratitude and admiration, turns a human being away from almost every road which might finally lead him to Heaven.

But now for the pleasantest part of my duty. It falls to my lot to propose on behalf of the guests the health of Principal Slubgob and the Tempters' Training College. Fill you glasses. What is this I see? What is this delicious bouquet I inhale? Can it be? Mr. Principal, I unsay all my hard words about dinner. I see and smell, that even under wartime conditions the College cellar still has a few dozen of sound old vintage _Pharisee_. Well, well, well. This is like old times. Hold it beneath your nostrils for a moment, gentledevils. Hold it up to the light. Look at those fiery streaks that writhe and tangle in its dark heart, as if they were contending. And so they are. You know how this wine is blended? Different types of Pharisee have been harvested, trodden and fermented together to produce its subtle flavor. Types that were almost antagonistic to one another on earth. Some were all rules and relics and rosaries; others were all drab clothes, long faces and pretty traditional abstinences from wine or cards or the theater. Both had in common their self-righteousness and the almost infinite distance between their actual outlook and anything the Enemy really is or commands. The wickedness of other religions was the really live doctrine in the religion of each; slander was its gospel and denigration its litany. How they hated each other up there where the sun shone! How much more they hate each other now that they are forever conjoined but not reconciled. Their astonishment, their resentment, at the combination, their festering of their eternally impenitent spite, passing into our spiritual digestion, will work like fire. Dark fire. All said and done, my friends, it will be an ill day for us if what humans mean by 'religion' ever vanishes from Earth. It can still send us the truly delicious sins. The fine flower of unholiness can grow only in the close neighborhood of the Holy. Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the altar.

_Your Imminence, your Disgraces, my Thorns, Shadies, and Gentledevils: I give you the toast of - Principal Slubgob and the College!!_


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