Discussion Tread: Wormwood’s Approach
Kyle Panchot
APOL 330: C.S. Lewis and the Apologetic Imagination
26 June 2025
Wormwood’s approach as adviced by his uncle Screwtape. Throughout the first fifteen chapters, Screwtape’s advised strategy changes from initially trying to have the patient avoid thoughts of truth and reality, which may lead him to think more about God. However, after the patient has a conversion experience, Screwtape suggests it may actually be beneficial for him to remain in the church, provided he does not solely turn towards God but divides his life between his faith and secular life. He encourages the patient to adopt a superficial and contrived view of God and the church, all the while allowing minor sins to gradually erode his relationship with God. Screwtape advises, “It is, therefore, most important to keep the patient…in a condition where he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him.”¹
Initially, Screwtape finds Wormwood to be somewhat overzealous and warns him against large, obvious attacks that may put his human on the defensive. Instead, he encourages more subtle attacks, having the patient focus his attention on worldly matters like longing for the past and hopes for the future. This strategy distracts him from contemplating deeper truths. Screwtape writes, “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
This tendency toward subtle forms of temptation rather than large, obvious ones is a recurring theme in the book. For example, Screwtape advises Wormwood that there is no need for the patient to commit murder when smaller vices will do: “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”³
Early in the patient’s conversion, Screwtape advises Wormwood not to engage the patient in direct argument but rather to divert his attention to materialism, fearing that argument might sharpen his focus on truth and thereby draw him closer to God. “By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?”⁴
Later, Screwtape is pleased when Wormwood’s patient acquires new friends with a worldly outlook. He instructs Wormwood to encourage the patient to compartmentalize his life into religious and secular spheres. Screwtape notes, “Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours.”⁵
Prayer is also subtly corrupted. The patient is encouraged to engage in prayers lacking genuine concentration of will and intellect, instead focusing on vague feelings about God rather than on God as He actually is. Screwtape explains, “Keep him praying to it—to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him.”⁶
The concept of love is similarly distorted. The patient is guided to focus exclusively on the feelings of being 'in love' rather than love as genuinely willing the good of the other. Screwtape writes that they must lead the patient to believe that “only the feeling of being in love justifies marriage.”⁷
Screwtape emphasizes that very small sins, accumulating over time, gradually edge one away from the light. “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one.”³
These themes resonate strongly in our current day. For example, films and TV frequently emphasize love at first sight and the emotional thrill of romance, simultaneously undermining marriage and family values. Similarly, society's emphasis on materialism promotes the pursuit of possessions as a path to happiness. Society also attempts to recast pride from a vice into a virtue, encouraging people to believe that repentance is unnecessary and advocating pride in oneself regardless of faults.
In conclusion, the overarching theme of Screwtape’s strategy is not necessarily the use of significant temptations, but rather persistent, subtle nudges that incrementally lead one away from the light and into darkness.
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C. S. Lewis, *The Screwtape Letters* (New York: HarperOne, 2001), Letter 3.
Ibid., Letter 4.
Ibid., Letter 12.
Ibid., Letter 1.
Ibid., Letter 7.
Ibid., Letter 4.
Ibid., Letter 18.
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