Screwtape on Ripeness

My Dear Wormwood,

What a time to be in the field, tempting souls! I am absolutely envious. Even a tempter of your modest skill and experience with more souls than you can handle! I don’t need to hear your complaints. You are not overworked, you are in the midst of a feast, with souls throwing themselves at you. Enjoy it.

You have a society obsessed with sex, with both genders frustrated with their inability to get any at all. Both men and women focusing their frustrations and anger on the faults of the opposite sex! What a perfect hell! They are practically doing your work for you! They are obsessed with money, and yet are poor. They are fixated on status, but have no real friends – they only know what social media tells them. To say nothing of politics, business and other endeavors.

Remember, just as the Church focuses the Saints on having the Spirit of God, we want the people to have the Spirit of Contention. Notice how people with the Spirit of God are directed both consciously and unconsciously. All they do benefits them and their fellows, even if they don’t see it. Likewise, those with the spirit of contention will do our work, regardless of where they are or what they are doing, or even what team they are on. And here lies the brilliance: they rarely recognize which spirit they serve. They think they are defending justice, or principle, or even love of country, when in fact they are imitating us! That, my boy, is what our spirit will do.

There are some in politics who suppose they can guess who would win in a conflict. But demons of understanding, like myself, know that as long as we are animating their feeling and thought, they will fight to the last man, until there is literally no one left to fight, like the Jaredites.

We are even approaching the point where the Spirit of God stops striving with them, and doesn’t even attempt to influence them. To see just how close we are to this most infernal condition, just notice how angry people are. And how they are just getting angrier. Soon it won’t even matter why. They will just act on their anger. We will have hell on earth!

There is, of course, also a promise by our enemy that He will put his spirit and power, actual power, on his saints. But we will deal with them shortly enough.

Now, the question you may ask yourself, just how long can things go this well? Why doesn’t God immediately put an end to it all? Why didn’t He stop it decades ago when we started this campaign?

The Enemy, from the very Beginning, has had a fanatical dedication to Free Agency. A truly free agency means freedom of both choice and consequences of those choices. That is why we make every effort to both make people powerless and to disconnect choice and consequence. Without consequence, there is no real freedom of choice, therefore the Enemy Above insists on it. So long as choice and consequence are severed in his imagination, he will never believe himself bound — until the chains have already rusted shut.

Most often, the Enemy waits until their illusions are exhausted, until they have followed their idols into the swamp and are left with nothing but mud. He will not intervene while they can still mutter, “It might have worked, if only I had been left alone.” No, He lets them have it good and hard, until the results are undeniable.

Consider the so-called Sexual Revolution: it promised freedom, yet delivered isolation and suspicion. Or the petty anger: at first it feels like power, but over years it ripens into a permanent spirit of resentment and hostility.

God doesn’t typically destroy the wicked until they are ripe in iniquity. But why?

What is ripeness? Is that not the full result of actions and desires? He insists they see the full consequence of their actions. In His strange arithmetic, ripeness means that sin has borne its final fruit, that no shred of self-deception remains.

While He waits (and waits, and waits!), we are granted years—sometimes centuries—of undisturbed labor. And when the Judgment finally comes, the wretches cannot complain that they were cut short. They cannot say, “We would have succeeded if given more time.” The very stench of their rotten harvest proves them liars before they open their mouths.

They chose their own fate, their own judgment.

Do not be deceived, my dear Wormwood, into supposing that disaster alone secures the patient for Our Father Below. It is true that ruin is a kind of ripeness, but it is also the Enemy’s last and most dangerous trick. When a man finds himself with nothing left—health gone, family scattered, reputation in tatters, and no illusions or believable lies—he may suddenly look upward. Many of the most infuriating escapes have come from precisely such moments. I need hardly remind you that the Enemy has a perverse habit of stooping lower than we can imagine in order to drag His wretches back to Himself.

As long as your patient is filled with the spirit of contention, he will be focused like a rabid dog, on the faults any around him. Even if he defeated all of his enemies, he would then turn on his friends.

Until we reach that perfect state of unrelenting anger, we will need to be careful of him (or her, or it, etc) seeing their position for what it really is. We will need to keep them focused on others faults, with unrealistic expectations. We need to keep them in a state of opposition and hostility. Those are all hellish. But if he has the spirit of contention, every one of those, and others, will just come naturally. And hell will be the place they are most at home.

Before I close, a trivial administrative note. Owing to our many successes, quotas have been raised. You are, of course, expected to double your output. I realize you are a little fatigued, but surely this is no hardship, nothing to complain about. If you do what you love, it isn’t work, right?  Just spend a few extra minutes every day and I am sure someone of your mostly adequate skill will have no problems at all. With everything ripening so nicely, you’ll hardly notice the additional burden. Now do be diligent, and don’t let weariness make you careless.

Your nice and affectionate uncle Screwtape