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 really 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 was: he was not the false self who seemed to enjoy “vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium’ (64) with his popular friends.

Screwtape is much concerned about the patient’s conversion. He is especially concerned that the patient is displaying signs of the virtue of humility. 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). 

In this chapter, Screwtape describes the devils’ attitude towards past, present, and future. Screwtape says that virtue lives in the past and in the present moment while sin is at home in the future.