The more he fears, the more he will hate.
And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame.
To make a deep wound in his charity, you should therefore first defeat his courage.
Now this is a ticklish business.
We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice.
Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, the Enemy permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame.
The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing with consequent repentance and humility.
And in fact, in the last war, thousands of humans, by discovering their own cowardice, discovered the whole moral world for the first time.
In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them.
There is here a cruel dilemma before us.
If we promoted justice and charity among men, we should be playing directly into the Enemy's hands; but if we guide them to the opposite behaviour, this sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor.
This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy's motives for creating a dangerous world--a world in which moral issues really come to the point.
He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.
A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.
Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
It is therefore possible to lose as much as we gain by making your man a coward; he may learn too much about himself!
There is, of course, always the chance, not of chloroforming the shame, but of aggravating it and producing Despair.
This would be a great triumph.
It would show that he had believed in, and accepted, the Enemy's forgiveness of his other sins only because he himself did not fully feel their sinfulness--that in respect of the one vice which he really understands in its full depth of dishonour he cannot seek, nor credit, the Mercy.
But I fear you have already let him get too far in the Enemy's school, and he knows that Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it.
As to the actual technique of temptations to cowardice, not much need be said.
The main point is that precautions have a tendency to increase fear.
The precautions publicly enjoined on your patient, however, soon become a matter of routine and this effect disappears.
What you must do is to keep running in his mind (side by side with the conscious intention of doing his duty) the vague idea of all sorts of things he can do or not do, inside the framework of the duty, which seem to make him a little safer.
Get his mind off the simple rule ("I've got to stay here and do so-and-so") into a series of imaginary life lines ("If A happened--though I very much hope it won't--I could do B--and if the worst came to the worst, I could always do C").
Superstitions, if not recognised as such, can be awakened.
The point is to keep him feeling that he has something, other than the Enemy and courage the Enemy supplies, to fall back on, so that what was intended to be a total commitment to duty becomes honeycombed all through with little unconscious reservations.
By building up a series of imaginary expedients to prevent "the worst coming to the worst" you may produce, at that level of his will which he is not aware of, a determination that the worst shall not come to the worst.
Then, at the moment of real terror, rush it out into his nerves and muscles and you may get the fatal act done before he knows what you're about.
For remember, the act of cowardice is all that matters; the emotion of fear is, in itself, no sin and, though we enjoy it, does us no good,
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE XXX
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I sometimes wonder whether you think you have been sent into the world for your own amusement.
I gather, not from your miserably inadequate report but from that of the Infernal Police, that the patient's behaviour during the first raid has been the worst possible.
He has been very frightened and thinks himself a great coward and therefore feels no pride; but he has done everything his duty demanded and perhaps a bit more.
Against this disaster all you can produce on the credit side is a burst of ill temper with a dog that tripped him up, some excessive cigarette smoking, and the forgetting of a prayer.
What is the use of whining to me about your difficulties?
If you are proceeding on the Enemy's idea of "justice" and suggesting that your opportunities and intentions should be taken into account, then I am not sure that a charge of heresy does not lie against you.
At any rate, you will soon find that the justice of Hell is purely realistic, and concerned only with results.
Bring us back food, or be food yourself.
The only constructive passage in your letter is where you say that you still expect good results from the patient's fatigue.
That is well enough.
But it won't fall into your hands.
Fatigue can produce extreme gentleness, and quiet of mind, and even something like vision.
If you have often seen men led by it into anger, malice and impatience, that is because those men have had efficient tempters.
The paradoxical thing is that moderate fatigue is a better soil for peevishness than absolute exhaustion.
This depends partly on physical causes, but partly on something else.
It is not fatigue simply as such that produces the anger, but unexpected demands on a man already tired.
Whatever men expect they soon come to think they have a right to: the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury.