They say the ironic 'The Screwtape Letters' by C. S. Lewis helps more people in the modern world find their place in
Christianity than 'The Lives Of The Saints'. Why not? New times call for new forms of preaching. It is very
condescending to imitate the great English writer, who brilliantly worked in many genres. But it was too tempting
to try to imagine what modern Russia would look like, for a master of temptations from the infernal world. Well,
here's my humble attempt. And may Clive Lewis forgive me.
The huge stadium under the endless, absolutely black sky rejoiced. Inexpressible noise, consisting of insane
laughter, screams, dirty curses, raged like a volcano. Crowds of naked ugly gnomes, part of whose torment is a
feeling of impotent shame from awareness of their own infernal physical deformity, had been prepared for a
grandiose lynching of the newly arrived victim. Their faces looked like ugly ritual masks, on which some crazy
maniac, depicted all possible vices: gluttony, lust, stupid anger ... Participation in this hellish ritual brought them
some satisfaction of passions, relief of suffering through rage.
“So, the show starts up,” the devil shouted into the microphone on the stage. “Let this bitch feel that hell is
accepting her with a laugh. Let her be fully aware that she has entered the kingdom of noise, where she would not have a single chance to be left alone. That her whole future fate is to be ashamed of herself, of you, of her
appearance!”
A slender girl appeared on the scaffold. She has not yet taken the form of a gnome. She looked like something in between a half-dead person, and a mummy starting to decay. However, it was clear she was a beauty in the past.
The crowd screamed even more loudly.
"Bitch, dirty prostitute, you should be ashamed..!"
Screwtape closed the window. Such spectacles bored him centuries ago.
“Hmm, let her understand we are not only putting handkerchiefs for sinners here at night, as in the novel ‘The
Master and Margarita’,” he thought. “This Russian fool, with a once pretty face, imagined herself to be a sort of
wizard of the forest, Olesya, and decided to enter their local elite. She seduced a new Russian reach man, arranged a 'honeymoon' for him, using our ancient French medicine. In fact, she would add poison to her lover's breakfast in the morning and treat him with an antidote in the evening. If he did not spend the night with her, strong (I am not afraid of this word) suffering awaited him. Of course, she did not know that our wards had developed the potion in such a way that it was deadly for women. A simple touch is enough. Kills not immediately, not noticeably for weeks. But in the end, once, and you're in a coffin. She killed herself with her own poison. History is as eternal as the world. Boring. Well, let's see the news from Russia.”
Screwtape with a grin approached the old Soviet TV KVN (a monitor`s size- a tea saucer), which stood in his
seemingly luxurious, immersed in gold and velvet, apartments. Anyway, they looked like that thanks to magic. As you know, hell is a very unattractive place. He preferred KVN because he was annoyed by the clumsy technical attempts of insects, to put a glamorous gloss on a gray, all built-in black and white, very shallow reality.
The presenter with a fishwife appearance broadcast,
“Russian President Vladimir Putin announces the death of the liberal idea.”
Screwtape chuckled, remembering a phrase from advice he once gave to his negligent nephew Wormwood, "and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants, we make Liberalism the prime bogey."
The presenter, meanwhile, continued,
“Patriarch Kirill awarded the officials of the Moscow mayor's office with orders and icons.”
“The secrets of the world behind the scenes are revealed. The Trotskyists have become the neoconservatives of the United States, and are forming Satan's transgender army. Details will be reported directly from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.”
“Learning English is detrimental to our youth. This conclusion was reached by representatives of the Orthodox
community.”
“Patriotic youth arm themselves with urine and purge the country from the ‘gay plague'. The actions include
entering apartments with exclamations, ‘What, have you become ashamed? And if mom finds out? And if friends find out? And if the neighbors find out?’”
“The Western secret services and Satanists are behind the Halloween holiday in Moscow.”
“The reality show ‘Behind the Window’ will now take place at the monastery. True Orthodoxy and privacy are
incompatible.”
“Biophysics news. The energy tower under construction will allow worshipers to experience a sense of true grace and standing before God. Its energy in prisons will cause deep depression and panic attacks in prisoners.”
“Culture News. Details of how, with the help of the film "Joker" in the West, they are trying, in the wake of sexual deviations, to legalize mental illness and provoke a protest movement. Meanwhile, in Russia, the addiction to such movement is recognized by the Ministry of Health as a mental illness.”
“Watch our film "Kasyanov's Day" about opposition politicians, after the news program. Politics and sex in one
bottle. Repetitive bed scenes involving older people will allow you to experience a deep sense of moral outrage ona subconscious level.”
“Now for the details…”
Screwtape turned off the TV box. “The picture, in general, is clear. You don't have to go into details. Well, we need to write a letter to this idiot Wormwood, otherwise, he will go to prison a second time and miss a bunch of souls for Our Father."
Dear Wormwood,
I am glad that you are early released for time served, just got out of the joint with a clear conscience. Excuse me for this style, but this is how they express themselves in the country where you now have to work. You thought you were sentenced to life. No matter how it is. We cannot waste our stuff. I hope the nightmare and horror of a life sentence have been a good lesson for you.
Now about the main thing. Much that I have taught you will not be useful in Russia. You see, the colleagues leading the local project prefer to use outright terror and intimidation. Not the most efficient approach in my opinion. The fact is that our Enemy shows mercy to those who have been weak and vulnerable, and whose free will has been violated. In addition, those who did overcome it become saints. I hate this word. There was only one saint in history. And that is Christ. The rest, one way or another, succumbed to our temptations.
But the fact is, all our research projects are consistently bursting at the seams. So we decided to listen to people's advice. The fact is we just know that a person is experiencing pain, and we can also roughly guess the degree of its intensity. This is an interesting field for research.
Unfortunately, all the attempts of your predecessor to work with the ‘target individual’ ended in failure. And I can only give you an introductory briefing. You will become an object of study here too, your reactions on the job, together with people, are very important for our master. As they say in this country, “A healthy collective is a great power!” Unfortunately, we will have to live together in a hellish communal apartment with these insects.
So let's get started.
First, keeping the subject away from the church is not difficult. In any case, in its local version. We have done a
great job. Our gibberish about the importance of "strengthening the state", "building a common house", "the
church as an important tool for" is firmly entrenched in the heads of local clergy. You will figure out in this boredom in the place.
I am, however, a little surprised by this ... cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, it is known what nightmares were performed here with believers in the last century. Perhaps there was no such nonsense even in the Middle Ages (such as the illusion of people, in fact, at the early stage of the Renaissance). On the other hand, their amazing willingness to become state servants even without outright terror.
Many of them are sincerely convinced that after decades of atheism all are fair tools. Even in a television program that our subject liked, they use the outdated technique "Miracle as an argument." To be honest, I myself laughed together with your client when they played a videotape of an icon with a winking Christ. This was followed by an "explanation" that in such an idiotic way, God wanted to blow up the brains of the father of the family and save him. But this, like the trolling of the new Orthodox diocese in Ukraine, seems to play into our hands. It is unlikely that after the proposed version of Orthodoxy, the subject will rush to the local church, in which, moreover, the secret of confession does not matter. However, if he does, we will also benefit. After all, he has no illusions on this score. Catch-22, which, in my opinion, our colleagues are overusing. When people are offered outright nonsense, many of them begin to think.
Secondly, they did a great job, adhering to the thesis, "Only what they see on TV happens for people." And again they crossed all the limits. Overconfident gibberish, deep fakes cannot be overrated either. Moreover, when their goals and tasks are obvious. In particular, insects should not suspect that this is all "black noise". Its purpose is not to teach something, but not to allow them to think about the essential.
Third, you should resist the local temptation to “think on a global scale”. Higher-level demons work with specific human souls. Remember, even the Bible is about the human soul. This whole history, kings, wars ... these are secondary.
Fourth, pay attention to his relationship with his mother. They crossed their all limits too. Of course, I gave advice that there should always be irritation in a relationship with her. But the lower-ranking demons have invented so many idiotic tricks for this. As a result, she turned into a kind of mad, swollen old woman. Your target read the Gospel, and they're both Christ and the Apostle Paul advise to stay away from such persons. And, damn it, where did this Clive find our correspondence? It was clearly not without the help of our Enemy.
I wrote of course “ build up in that house a good, settled habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks.” But I did not write that mothers should be turned into something that even Mahatma Gandhi could not bear. Of course, a
tremendous amount of work has been done with her, and your colleague, who is leading her, will receive an award. But it will be difficult work for you. I don’t know what “helping hand” to your subject in this situation can be offered? Apparently, colleagues from the Russian branch listened to too much advice of our allies among insects. But they are not the best human material. They follow the principles of punitive psychiatry. They think that if one arranged a madness in a person, he will be ready to cling to any figure, as a child to a parent. And any worldview can be easily “blow up”. Philosophy and religion are just words for them, sometimes useful for seducing.
Fifth, you must remember that temptation in the full sense of the word, works just if we use the potential of
personal egoism. And in Russia, they have adopted methods of modeling situations of fear, helplessness, and
dependence. You can't work on a serious level like a karateka who imagines himself a guru. He hired hooligans who beat up his students, after which many of them showed special zeal in the classroom. Terror, of course, can be effective, but within certain limits. Our colleagues overestimated the techniques of insect-advisors. And they did not even take into account their psychoanalysis, turning everything and everyone around into "dangerous objects". You cannot chase a person for many years like a rat in a maze, while purging all his vanity and hopes. What can we offer him? Power? Money? Sex? Fame? A career as a political official which has always been deeply parallel to him and a little funny? He had lost interest in all of this long ago. A lot of these were not interesting for him from the beginning.
And he was, by the way, very suitable material for us: in his youth living in the West and working, ironically in the Russian language. For me, so a very simple target to lead. As their poet, Sergei Yesenin wrote, "Everyone is raving about New York, everyone is drawn to San Francisco." Already 40 million Russians live outside this ... Third Rome, as some of them call their little village. And, damn it, why did they organize him depression since childhood, if atthe same time he was not able to come up with an idea fix, became obsessed with it? Remove the threat, give hope... Such trick is from the first grade of our school.
Of course, our advisors-insects may believe that in a situation which was arranged for him, he must seek support and cling to anything. This delusion is very useful for us in terms of leading them personally. But we, the demons, have accumulated a great experience for many thousands of years. Believing that everyone can be broken through the knee, is allowed only to those who break through the knee. And the point. At the Last Judgment, they will be accused of this, and it is not a fact that the results of it will incriminate those who were broken.
Sixth, in this corner of the world village, for some reason, our gibberish about “the importance of bringing oneself to the altar of the state, for the benefit of future generations,” and so on, work especially effectively. They can now justify in such a way, anything they want. In addition, they are accustomed to expect magical results from science.“I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalize and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is in effect, belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in, while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy,” I wrote to you once. They manage to cope with the task without us. There is fascism of science of some kind, as I call it. All their biophysics with overconfident gibberish, is, in fact, a new form of occultism. It doesn't matter how they call it. Do not strain yourself on this score. They will do much better. People know better what they buy in this area.
Our task remains the same: first to kill with kindness, and then by open terror and intimidation, to break the
resistance and take over their souls.
And the last thing, Wormwood. We, demons of temptations, have made many mistakes. Even our father, who
tempted Jesus Christ. First, he underestimated his opponent. And secondly, he used a too primitive manipulative
technique. He pushed his suggestions at the moment of maximum vulnerability when Jesus was hungry after forty days of fasting. But what can I say, even with Buddha we were a total failure, and he ended up at the Gate of the Enemy's Kingdom.
Personally, it seems to me in this corner of the world village, the manipulative textbook is used too much: first, they make a person a victim, and then ‘save’. The will of our Enemy is to make a person never fully feels at home in the earthly life. And they seem to be especially working for it. But these are the lyrics. The art of temptation is a set ofexperiments that need constant correction. So, to the success of our hopeless business!
In general, you will have to work on a project that, in my opinion, is not very successful. It seems to me it is not
entirely correct to show a person hell, before luring him there.