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[The Enemy] would rather [a] man thought himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one.

Screwtape writes these lines during the fourteenth letter. He is advising Wormwood on how to deal with the Patient’s troubling humility. Screwtape suggests that humility, more than most virtues, can lead a person into self-contradiction. By prompting the Patient to think of himself as humble, Wormwood can make him proud. With the above quotation, Screwtape imagines the Enemy (God) as being a certain amount of immodesty or pride in human beings. Lewis’s approach to Christianity is pragmatic. Screwtape argues that God, too, believes in pragmatism—in doing what is most useful to achieve a desired end. The desired end Lewis imagines for his readers is to be good Christians, and the useless activity Lewis warns them against is wasting too much energy on themselves. This self-obsession may seem like an effort to be humble, to get rid of sinful pride, but in reality the sin for these people becomes spending so much time and energy on questions that have no bearing on the well-being of other people. If people could forget themselves, The Screwtape Letters argue, they would do more to help others.

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