Paved with Good Intentions: A Demon's Road Map to Your Soul
By C. S. Lewis
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Temptation and Deception Made Easy
The demon Wormwood first became famous through his correspondence with his uncle Screwtape, published in The Screwtape Letters. We are now privileged to peruse his field notebook from that demonic training session, complete with scribbles, notes, and excerpts from his uncle's letters. Wormwood's instructions, mission statements, and maxims for special occasions create a "best of Screwtape" that offers witty and cutting strategies for how best to corrupt a brand new Christian and steal him from the "Enemy" -- God.
If the best defense is to know your opponent's game book, this is a must read for all those who want to retain their souls.
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a fellow and tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954 when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement.
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Reviews for Paved with Good Intentions
14 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The only thing I had a bit of trouble with was understanding the type of language used at the time the book was written.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Basically a short, quick, compendium of insights taken mostly from The Screwtape Letters, but also from various other C.S. Lewis works (like Mere Christianity, Pain, Divorce, etc.)
Quick, easy read. Some interesting thoughts, but if you've read C.S. Lewis before, all covered in his various other works. (The compendium is made by his estate too, so thats an interesting note.)
Book preview
Paved with Good Intentions - C. S. Lewis
INTRODUCTION
It seemed an innocuous discovery, an obscure notebook with highlighted passages surrounded by scribbles in a crabbed hand. On closer inspection its purposes become clear, its intentions less innocent. It belonged once to a fiend named Wormwood and represents his training under his demon uncle Screwtape. The notebook contains bits of correspondence, annotations, remarks, and the occasional cross-reference. It is, in short, a demon’s personal field book, full of instructions, techniques, practices, and observations. A working manual of temptation. A handbook of corruption and destruction. A window into a world of distortion and deception.
There is a current bit of wisdom circulating in our culture of addiction: How do you know when an addict is lying? Answer: His lips are moving. Of course, one could find any number of substitutes for addict
: politician, teenager, corporate executive, cable news host, lawyer. We howl in protest, He lied!
with the same outrage of a New York tourist complaining about a rigged game of three-card monte: He cheated!
And of course we aren’t really surprised. We know that the game is rigged and we know that we’re being lied to—unless we’ve wrapped ourselves too comfortably in denial (another lovely word from the world of addiction!).
So it is apparently with the Devil: he is a liar. If his lips are moving, he is lying. And as becomes apparent in this fiendish little souvenir, he is happy to employ any strategy to separate humans from the Enemy
(God), be they direct lies, diversions, half-truths: deceptions all. His goal is to numb, to corrupt, to erode virtue into vice—any means necessary to move us slowly, inexorably away from the Creator and toward the created.
The question becomes, Do we believe he is lying to us? Do we believe our game is rigged? Or are we so far gone that we cannot recognize these deceptions and think we’re just fine, thank you very much. Before you answer (before you lie to yourself!), permit yourself a moment or two to review this demon’s notes. Then make up your own mind.
—Patricia S. Klein
FIELD NOTE
Our Mission Statement
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.
Re: The Church as a Tool
Use the Church itself as a weapon against the Human’s Christian faith
One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. At his present stage, you see, he has an idea of ‘Christians’ in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. His mind is full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real—though of course an unconscious—difficulty to him. Never let it come