Illustrated Summary of Screwtape Proposes a Toast by C.S. Lewis

Often C.S. Lewis was asked to write more Screwtape letters, but he resolved not to because of the stifling experience of writing from a devil’s perspective. As the years went by, however, he would think of subjects that "seemed somehow to demand Screwtapian treatment"—especially education—so the idea of something like a speech or address hovered in his mind. In this blog post I quote directly from what became "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" while summarizing it and adding lively illustrations.

Lewis explains in the 1960 and 1962 prefaces to The Screwtape Letters that, when invited, he decided to write "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" as a magazine article for an American publication, but it put him in an awkward position as an Englishman: "In the 'Toast' the main subject is education.... The tendency in education that I was deploring has gone further in America than anywhere else.... I thought it neither good manners nor good tactics to make my point quite nakedly.... Screwtape in fact describes American education; he affects to be holding up English education as the awful example." Anyone interested in education at any time will benefit from reading, thinking about, and applying Screwtape’s outlook as a "photographic negative," to quote Lewis: "his whites are our blacks and whatever he welcomes we ought to dread."

The Scene

The scene is in Hell at the annual dinner of the Tempters' Training College for devils. The principal, Dr. Slubgob, has just proposed the health of the guests. Screwtape, a very experienced devil, who is the guest of honor, rises to reply with the speech he has prepared.

The Speech

 

“Mr. Principal, your Imminence, your Disgraces, my Thorns, Shadies, and Gentledevils:

"It is customary ... for the speaker to address himself chiefly to those among you who have just graduated and who will very soon be posted to official Tempterships on Earth.... I have no wish to reduce the wholesome and realistic element of terror, the unremitting anxiety, that must act as the lash and spur to your endeavors. How often you will envy the humans their faculty of sleep! Yet at the same time I ... put before you a moderately encouraging view of the strategic situation as a whole.

"Your dreaded Principal has [given] ... something like an apology for the banquet... .It would be vain to deny that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality.... There was a municipal authority with Graft sauce.... I could not detect in him the flavor of a really passionate and brutal avarice such as delighted one in the great tycoons of the [nineteenth] century. Was he not unmistakeably ... a grubby little nonentity who had drifted into corruption, only just realizing that he was corrupt, and chiefly because everyone else did it? Then there was the lukewarm Casserole of Adulterers. Could you find in it any trace of a fully inflamed, defiant, rebellious, insatiable lust?... They all tasted to me like" they had blundered or been tricked "into the wrong beds in automatic response to sexy advertisements, or ... to reassure themselves about their virility or their 'normalcy,' or even because they had nothing else to do.... The Trade Unionist stuffed with sedition was perhaps a shade better. He had done some real harm. He had, not quite unknowingly, worked for bloodshed, famine, and the extinction of liberty.... But ... he thought of those ultimate objectives so little. Toeing the party line, self-importance, and above all mere routine, were what really dominated in his life.

"But now comes the point.... Consider, first, the mere quantity. The quality may be wretched; but we never had souls ... in more abundance. And then the triumph.... You youngsters who have not yet been on active service have no idea with what labor, with what delicate skill, each of these miserable creatures was finally captured.... Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them.... We have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur; what would be a bribe in someone else's profession is a tip or a present in theirs. The job of their Tempters was first ... to harden these choices ... into a habit by steady repetition. But then (and this was all-important) to turn the habit into a principle—a principle the creature is prepared to defend.... Thus gradually there comes to exist at the center of the creature a hard, tight, settled core of resolution to go on being what it is, and even to resist moods that might tend to alter it....

"The 'great' sinners, those in whom vivid and genial passions have been pushed beyond the bounds and in whom an immense concentration of will has been devoted to objects that the Enemy abhors, will not disappear. But they will grow rarer.... The great sinners ... are made out of the very same material as those horrible phenomena the great Saints. The virtual disappearance of such material may mean insipid meals for us. But is it not utter frustration and famine for the Enemy? He did not create the humans—He did not become one of them and die among them by torture—in order to produce ... 'failed' humans. He wanted to make Saints; gods; things like Himself.... As the great sinners grow fewer, and the majority lose all individuality, the great sinners become far more effective agents for us. Every dictator or even demagogue—almost every film star or [singer]—can now draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him. They give themselves (what there is of them) to him; in him, to us. There may come a time when we shall have no need to bother about individual temptation at all, except for the few....

"This has not come about by accident. It has been our answer ... to one of the most serious challenges we ever had to face.... In the latter half of the nineteenth century ... the great movement towards liberty and equality among men had by then borne solid fruits and grown mature. Slavery had been abolished. The American War of Independence had been won. The French Revolution had succeeded.... There had originally been many elements that were in our favor. Much Atheism, much Anti-clericalism, much envy and thirst for revenge ... were mixed in it.... On the one hand it was a bitter blow to us—it still is—that any ... who had been hungry should be fed or ... had long worn chains should have them struck off. But on the other hand, there was in the movement so much rejection of faith, so much materialism, secularism, and hatred, that we felt we were bound to encourage it.... But in the English sector ... a horrible thing had happened. The Enemy ... had largely appropriated this progressive or liberalizing movement and perverted it to His own ends. Very little of its old anti-Christianity remained.... Factory owners of the good old type who grew rich on sweated labor, instead of being assassinated by their [workers] ... were being frowned upon by their own class. The rich were increasingly giving up their powers, not in the face of revolution and compulsion, but in obedience to their own consciences. As for the poor who benefited by this ... instead of using their new liberties ... for massacre, rape, and looting, or even for perpetual intoxication, they were perversely engaged in becoming cleaner, more orderly, more thrifty, better educated, and even more virtuous....

"Thanks to Our Father Below, the threat was averted.... Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy ... only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn't know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point ... we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state.... Democracy is the word with which you must lead [your victims] through the nose.... They should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning.... Democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and ... has only the most remote ... connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether 'democratic behavior' means the behavior that democracies like or the behavior that will preserve a democracy.... They need not be the same....

"Use the word purely as an incantation.... It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition ... to a factual belief that all men are equal. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction ... the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of all human feelings ... that which prompts a man to say I'm as good as you.... You thus induce him to enthrone at the center of his life a good solid, resounding lie. I don't mean merely .. .that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself.... What it expresses is ... the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority that the patient refuses to accept. And therefore resents ... every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: 'Here is someone who ... says he doesn't like hot dogs—thinks himself too good for them, no doubt.... If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they'd be like me. They've no business to be different. It's undemocratic.'

"Now, this useful phenomenon is ... by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to the humans for thousands of years.... Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others.... You can sanction it .. .by the incantory use of the word democratic.... Those who are in any or every way inferior can labor more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all.... Those who come ... nearer to a full humanity actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic.... People who would really wish to be—and are offered the Grace that would enable them to be—honest, chaste, or temperate refuse it. To accept might make them Different ... take them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration with the Group....

"I want to fix your attention on ... the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence—moral, cultural, social, or intellectual.... 'Democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships.... You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them 'tyrants' then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose ... above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects.... Now 'democracy' can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own.... The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own....

"The spirit of I'm as good as you has already become something more than a ... social influence. It begins to work itself into their educational system.... The basic principle" is that dense and lazy students "must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic'.... Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud pies.... Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have ... 'parity of esteem'.... Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma ... what a useful word!—by being left behind....

Really?

"We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I'm as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish.... We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men.... Of course, this would not follow unless all education became state education. But it will.... Penal taxes, designed for that purpose, are liquidating the Middle Class ... the social group that gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators. If ever there was a bunch of tall stalks that needed their tops knocked off, it was surely they....

"We, in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the strict sense of that word.... Like all forms of government, it often works to our advantage, but on the whole less often than other forms.... 'Democracy' in the diabolical sense (I'm as good as you...) is the finest instrument ... for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth." It "leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of sub-literates, full of the cocksureness that flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first hint of criticism.... When such a nation meets in conflict a nation where children have been made to work at school, where talent is placed in high posts, and where the ignorant masses are allowed no say at all in public affairs, only one result is possible....

"But I would not end on that note. I would not—Hell forbid! encourage in your own minds that delusion which you must carefully foster in the minds of your human victims ... that the fate of nations is in itself more important than that of individual souls.... Only individuals can be saved or damned, can become sons of the Enemy or food for us.... I'm as good as you is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies. But it has a far deeper value as an end in itself, as a state of mind which, necessarily excluding humility, charity, contentment, and all the pleasures of gratitude or admiration, turns a human being away from almost every road which might finally lead him to Heaven....

"Now for the pleasantest part of my duty ... to propose ... the health of Principal Slubgob and the Tempters' Training College. Fill your glasses.... I see, and smell, that...the College cellar still has a few dozen of sound old vintage Pharisee.... Hold it up to the light. Look at those fiery streaks.... Different types of Pharisee have been harvested, trodden, and fermented together.... Some were all rules and relics and rosaries; others were all drab clothes, long faces, and petty ... abstinences from wine or cards or the theater. Both had in common their self-righteousness and the almost infinite distance between their actual outlook and anything the Enemy really is or commands.... It will be an ill day for us if what most humans mean by 'religion' ever vanishes from the Earth.... Your Imminence, your Disgraces, my Thorns, Shadies, and Gentledevils: I give you the toast of Principal Slubgob and the College!" 


Let's let C.S. Lewis as Lewis, not Screwtape, have the last word: "In my view there is a sense in which education ought to be democratic and another sense in which it ought not. It ought to be ... available, without distinction of sex, color, class, race, or religion, to all who can—and will—diligently accept it. But ... there must be no attempt to establish a factitious egalitarianism between the idlers and dunces on the one hand and the clever and industrious on the other. A modern nation needs a very large class of genuinely educated people and it is the primary function of schools and universities to supply them. To lower standards or disguise inequalities is fatal.... Do not be in the least afraid that those who live out their school days—which should be brief—on the back bench of the lowest class will suffer any trauma when they see promotion and honors and official approval going to the diligent minority.... All the distinctions they really care about—the popularity and the success in games—go not to it but to them.... Our real problem is to see that they impede as little as possible the purposes for which school really exists" (1962 preface).

"Screwtape Proposes a Toast" appears at the end of most copies of The Screwtape Letters. Click here for an illustrated summary of all the Screwtape letters:*

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PS. If you have gotten this far and have read all things Screwtape penned by C.S. Lewis, you are in a good position to enjoy this hilarious takeoff of C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters that pokes fun at unrealistic expectations, soulmate nonsense, romance novels, soap operas—ANYTHING to get a married couple's minds off this sensible advice J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his son: “No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial."—Screwtape Proposes A Divorce

Screwtape Proposes A Divorce

Screwtape Proposes A Divorce