C. S. LEWIS DAILY: AUGUST 15

Screwtape strategizes with Wormwood, using Time as a weapon: I had noticed, of course, that the humans were having a lull in their European war—what they naïvely call ‘The War’!—and am not surprised that there is a corresponding lull in the patient’s anxieties. Do we want to encourage this, or to keep him worried? Tortured …

C. S. LEWIS DAILY: AUGUST 14

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: On why we are not to know what is coming next. 3 August 1959 I have your letter of 30 July. It has puzzled me. I understood that you were going to the doctors for heart trouble. How and why do the psychiatrists come into the picture? But since they have …

C. S. LEWIS DAILY: AUGUST 13

We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism – the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good. But we have hardly yet begun what may be called Hedonics, the science or philosophy of Pleasure. And I submit that the first step in Hedonics is to knock the Jailer down and …

C. S. LEWIS DAILY: AUGUST 12

If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and …

C. S. LEWIS DAILY: AUGUST 11

On self The more we get what we now call “ourselves” out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. . . I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call “me” can be …

C. S. LEWIS DAILY: AUGUST 10

I read in a religious paper, ‘Nothing is more important than to teach children to use the sign of the cross.’ Nothing? Not compassion, nor veracity, nor justice? From Letters to Malcolm

C. S. LEWIS DAILY: AUGUST 9

TO EDWARD LOFSTROM: On what Lewis attempted in The Chronicles of Narnia; on the character of the man Jesus—his tenderness, ferocity, and even humor; and on the need to do one’s duty while having patience with God. 16 January 1959 1. I am afraid I don’t know the answer to your question about books of …

C. S. LEWIS DAILY: AUGUST 8

On goodness Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you …

C. S. LEWIS DAILY: AUGUST 7

If there are species, and rational species, other than man, are any or all of them, like us, fallen? This is the point non-Christians always seem to forget. They seem to think that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity. But of course it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and …

C. S. LEWIS DAILY: AUGUST 6

If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married’, then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to …