A Thousand Battles

“Pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil’.” Matthew 6: 9-13

Fig 1 | Screwtape as illustrated by William Papas,

“Know thyself, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

This semester, the GRACE Sunday School class has been living inside The Screwtape Letters—C.S. Lewis’s unsettling, often darkly humorous meditation on temptation, resistance, and the quiet strategies of spiritual warfare. Written as a series of letters from Screwtape, a seasoned demon, to his nephew Wormwood, the novel offers counsel on how best to secure the slow unraveling of an ordinary man’s faith. First published in 1942, amid the instability of what Lewis simply called the “European War,” the book feels less like a relic of its time and more like a mirror held uncomfortably close to our own.

The man at the center of these letters, referred to only as “the Patient”, does not spiral into dramatic sin. Instead, he becomes a Christian. He falls in love. He forms friendships rooted in faith. He prays. He shows up. And yet, Wormwood persists, endlessly searching for small openings, subtle distractions, minor resentments. Gentle distortions that might pull him just far enough off course.

Midway through the novel, war presses in more concretely. Air raids are imminent. Death is no longer theoretical. The Patient’s attention narrows to the present moment: devotion to God, love of neighbor, fidelity to what is directly in front of him. And here, Screwtape grows anxious. If the man dies now, fully awake to the gravity of his life, the demons lose him. Survival, however, holds promise. Time is their ally.

Screwtape explains that souls are rarely destroyed all at once. Far more effective is erosion—the wearing down that comes through routine disappointment, deferred hope, and the slow dulling of desire. Prosperity, he notes, is equally useful. Comfort binds a person to the world. A growing sense of importance, reputation, productivity—these create the illusion of being at home here. The world settles in quietly, until it no longer feels foreign at all.

“If he dies now, you lose him. If he survives the war, there is always hope”. Screwtape continues, “You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it–all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition. If, on the other hand, the middle years prove prosperous, our position is even stronger. Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is ‘finding his place in it’, while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circles of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home on earth, which is just what we want. You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the middle-aged and old.” - C.S Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter 28

Lewis’s insight is not that temptation is loud or spectacular. It is that it is patient. It traffics in distraction, exaggeration, and half-truths. It redirects attention inward—toward image, status, security, and control—while assuring us that nothing of consequence is happening. The lie is not always that something evil is good, but that something trivial is urgent.

There are no ordinary actions. There are no ordinary people. And Christians, precisely because they are oriented toward something beyond themselves, are prime targets for this slow, nearly invisible corrosion. Scripture is clear: the devil is a liar. And lies rarely arrive announcing themselves as such.

So know yourself. Know your enemy. Do not sentimentalize him. Lewis is blunt on this point, and rightly so. The enemy does not offer sympathy, only strategy.