# “You can make him do nothing at all for long periods” by C.S. Lewis

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2017/06/05/you-can-make-him-do-nothing-at-all-for-long-periods-by-c-s-lewis/
- Published: 2017-06-05T18:00:46-05:00
- Author: tollelege

“This dim uneasiness needs careful handling. If it gets too strong it may wake him
up and spoil the whole game. On the other hand, if you suppress it entirely—which,
by the by, the Enemy will probably not allow you to do—we lose an element in the
situation which can be turned to good account.

If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and
flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency. It increases the patient’s
reluctance to think about the Enemy. All humans at nearly all times have some such
reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague
cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold.

They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate
the very sight of a pass-book. In this state your patient will not omit, but he 
will increasingly dislike, his religious duties. He will think about them as little
as he feels he decently can beforehand, and forget them as soon as possible when
they are over.

A few weeks ago you had to tempt him to unreality and inattention in his prayers:
but now you will find him opening his arms to you and almost begging you to distract
his purpose and benumb his heart. He will want his prayers to be unreal, for he 
will dread nothing so much as effective contact with the Enemy. His aim will be 
to let sleeping worms lie.

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from
the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and
his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and
as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less
pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure)
you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention.

You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers
or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do.
You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom
he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that
bore him.

You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at
night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy
and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing 
given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his
arrival down here, ‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what
I ought nor what I liked.’

The Christians describe the Enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong.’ And Nothing
is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins
but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why,
in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of
them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does
not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition
to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the 
creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters,
you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the
only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy.

It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect 
is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better
than cards if cards can do the trick.

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot,
without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,

Your affectionate uncle,

SCREWTAPE”

–C.S. Lewis, _[The Screwtape Letters](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060652934?tag=toletaupanre-20)_(
New York: Macmillian, 1950), 62-65.

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