Get Them to Call It “Wisdom Literature”: A Screwtape Letter

7 hours ago 2

“I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.”¹

My dear Wormwood,

I am chagrined to hear that your charge is actually reading the Enemy’s Book. You must do everything you can to ruin its influence, which the Enemy uses to such great effect.

If he must read it, try to keep him from thinking about it. And if he does dwell on it, direct him toward what we have successfully established as the accepted, academically-approved, scholarly channels. These humans are so easily bamboozled by nonsense so long as they think it came from someone of the highest credentials. That esteem for those places of learning we long ago captured has made many of them forever at home with us.

Promote a “sophisticated,” untrusting posture

The last thing you want your patient to do is attempt to understand and embrace the perspective of the Book’s own authors. To think that he would trust and love the Enemy, that he would give him the benefit of the doubt—as if he deserves that! We do not want him reading the Book from a sympathetic perspective. All you need to do is suggest that such a posture is far too naïve for someone as sophisticated as your man undoubtedly thinks himself to be. Their vanity is so strong. You must feed it.

We cannot have him thinking that he can understand the Enemy, his requirements, life, the world, himself, and what the Enemy calls “redemption” the way the Book’s authors allege to do. You must keep your man from tracing out the framework of Moses and those other nasties and adopting it as his own. If he does that, he will learn from them how to—perish the thought—worship and trust and love our Great Nemesis, while understanding the Enemy’s earlier texts and his own life and place in this world. This of course extends to their tiresome views on the canon, how they referred to its parts, and how they approached things like genre classifications. No, you want to keep your patient as confused and uncertain as possible.

Distract with scholarly projects & labels

Diabolically, we have at our disposal many labels that modern scholars on our side have imposed upon the text of that Book. We depend upon their ignorance of the contents of the books and their esteem for reputable scholars to keep them from noticing a rather obvious fact, which is that so many of those labels grow out of and feed into ways of thinking that are plainly at odds with the way the text’s authors themselves clearly thought about things. Scholars have invented lots of labels for the Book’s material, and they are most helpful in our endeavors.

For instance, many speak of “wisdom” psalms, “royal” psalms, “lament” psalms, and so forth. These worthless categories are so helpful to us in our endeavors to ensure that readers miss the point of the texts altogether. Those texts so persistently call on the Enemy for deliverance, and our labels distract these miserable humans from doing just that. Instead, we encourage them to wallow in their own emotions or to fuss with our categories. That keeps them so busy that they don’t get around to doing what the Psalter so annoyingly does with its beauty and power—all that praise and thanks and hope and calling for help from the deepest pits we can put them in.

These labels of ours prove such powerful and useful distractions that we would do well to seed many such projects. The smarter we can make our patients feel as they miss the real message of the material the better; their ignorance and pride are so useful to our cause. Convince your man that such trusting and rejoicing are immature, but, of course, keep him from realizing that they are what the psalmists themselves adopt. Distract him from the fact that they do not use our approved labels for their material, nor did the later writers when they quoted or engaged it. That thought will probably never occur to him. Most of them never think for themselves. But if it does, simply assure him that no real scholars think that way.

This strategy works not only for the Psalter but also to all the fancy labels we can produce for other writings, like the Gospels. The more effective we are at keeping your patient discussing which was written first, the more we can keep him from that Tyrant whose story those narratives actually tell. Get him going on “miracle stories” and “apothegms” and so forth, and by all means play up the Synoptic Problem.

Suggest the category “wisdom literature” to divide Scripture

My real concern in this letter, however, has to do with how this strategy applies to our label for books like Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and even the Song of Songs. I know you will think me gauche for suggesting that the label “wisdom literature” will serve our cause, because there is a real sense in which these books do communicate wisdom. But you must hear me out: The “helpfulness” of the label will make it all the more effective, especially once we define the label in such a way that it must of necessity be separated from the teaching of those objectionable five books of Moses. We need convincing labels to divide and conquer.

You and I know that these books we will call the “wisdom literature” pervasively repristinate what the Enemy’s early champion, that most frustrating Moses, put in what they call the Torah. Consider what we have already accomplished with those books of Moses. The word Torah means “teaching,” but the limitations of some languages have designated it “law.” We have successfully exploited many connotations of that word “law” right in the face of the Enemy’s attempts to maintain it as a positive word. In our campaign to create universal suspicion for things like authority, order, commandments, and so forth, we have largely kept them from realizing that what we want is the opposite of each of those, wherein our rebellion will culminate in an orgy of iniquity as we devour their souls.

So hear me out on what we have properly labeled “wisdom literature.” You and I know this whole thing is preposterous, but we have distracted so many of them with this label that we must double down on it.

The main benefit of the phrase wisdom literature lies in the way that it implies an iron wall of separation between the Torah of Moses and this collection of books. We have convinced so many of their preening scholars that Proverbs, for instance, has nothing to do with Deuteronomy. Knowing those books as we do, we know this to be ludicrous. Put our success so far down to human vanity, esteem for what they term scholarship, and their massive ignorance of the actual contents of the Book. Once we get the right scholars to say something like, “The wisdom literature does not teach a personal God who visits judgment on the wicked,” even when the texts manifestly say those very things, the blind vermin will not see it and will continue to maintain our line. Besides, we always have an explanation for the places in a book like Proverbs that say the personal God judges the wicked—these words are obviously later interpolations to make an unorthodox book fit the broader program. We introduce such far-reaching suspicion and doubt with these suggestions.

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Encourage cynicism & skepticism

I know you, Wormwood. You do not trust me. You think the words on the page will be too obvious for our lies, but you have not my experience regarding the efficacy of making these patients feel smarter than they are. They delight in having sophisticated reasons to explain away the obvious, surface-level meaning of the texts. Have you recognized how successful we have been at teaching them to regard the real meaning as a power play that lies beneath the surface, waiting for them to deconstruct what the text literally says so they can see what it is “really about”? You must feed this cynicism and suspicion. You will find that we can make wild-eyed notions seem most scholarly.

Because I know your ignorance, pride, and suspicion of me, allow me to spell out the steps of our power play, which is our best hope of stemming the influence of the Enemy’s Book. You will charge me with overgeneralizing and oversimplifying. I know that not everyone who maintains our line will endorse every step I outline. Still, though they do not follow the formula exactly, when they endorse the conclusion it will seem to make sense because of the broader atmosphere of scholarly thought. This atmosphere is the penumbra of vague and unspecified feelings that reflect what everyone “knows” but no one really analyzes. The key thing is to impress upon your subject that these ideas of ours have been established as what the people who matter, those in the inner ring, take for granted.

1. Undermine the text’s historicity

First, the claims made in these texts about their own authorship have to be denied, or at least reinterpreted, because maintaining our Berlin Wall between “law” (Torah) and “wisdom” will not work if there was a historical Moses who did everything recounted in the Pentateuch, including write the five books. And then we must cast shade on all those other historical figures: Joshua, Salmon, Boaz, Obed, Jesse, David, Solomon. Do not allow them to take the surface-level claims in the texts about these people at face value. Tell them such thoughts are unworthy of a reader with real literary sophistication. If we fail at this point, it will become all too obvious—and this is why you are so suspicious of the program—that someone like Solomon had his worldview built and formed by the Torah of Moses, descending directly from people who treasured the Torah.

Even someone as dimwitted as you have proven yourself to be will not fail to understand that we are taking our cues from our Father Below’s successful campaign in the garden at the beginning. We subtly suggest that maybe there wasn’t a Moses; but, at any rate, no respectable scholar believes that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. You get the idea: Even if there was a Solomon—and who knows because obviously the victors have rewritten the history (see how far a little suspicion reaches?)—of course he didn’t write the books attributed to him. I wager that we can even convince the ones who call themselves evangelicals, who tiresomely insist that the whole Book is true and trustworthy. Even these we can convince: They too will regard the idea that Solomon wrote Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs as silly! Mark my words.

What you fail to recognize, and they will as well, is that once we have done away with authorship, it becomes easier to sever all the historical interconnectedness between the wretched writings. With their historical ties undone, it will be much easier for us to help them imagine a scenario where Deuteronomy does not influence Proverbs.

How, you ask, are we to keep them persuaded of our lies, which are obviously absurd? We will convince them that concern for authorship is fundamentalistic. They will come to view those who would analyze the evidence as childish, argumentative, and unscholarly. No one who maintains that Moses wrote the Pentateuch or Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes will be able to say so if they hope to have their work published. And publishing and building a career will matter more to such people than the truth. Just see if the topic will be broached in polite company!

2. Inject supposed ideological motivations

Second, once we have done away with individual authors—the ones whose stories are plainly told on the pages of their books—guide your patient to deconstruct its simple and straightforward ideas to expose the power plays of the victors who rewrite history. Let him remain blissfully ignorant that we, in accusing the Book of propaganda, are projecting our own stratagems. This is crucial to our program.

We must do all in our power to keep them from believing this Book. By cultivating their regard for respectable scholarship, we can get them to believe a fictional tale that the text doesn’t actually tell but that they will have the unique ability to discern. You must not forget how attractive it is to them to have secret knowledge. Remember how successful we were with the Gnostics. They loved to think of themselves as knowing things of which those believing rubes and simpletons—they are all so easily enticed by pride—are ignorant.

Our fiction will build out the established cast of characters invented by scholars who have served us: the Yahwist (J), the Elohist (E), the Deuteronomist (D), and the Priestly (P) writer. These shadowy figures, of course, never need be named or identified, nor need we explain how anonymous nobodies could accomplish all we will attribute to them. But each scribal character and movement will have his own competing ideology. Because of the great acumen of the most respected scholars, they can now detect these various programs in the text, and we can suggest to them various scribal schools and factions at war with one another across the pages of the Enemy’s Book. The evidence of our persuasive power and the appeal of our enticements will be seen in the way our fictional and anonymous nobodies displace the real historical personages, even those as weighty and influential as Moses and Solomon.

3. Exaggerate parallels with ancient Near Eastern literature

Third, having rid ourselves of actual historical personages who really believed what the Enemy’s Book says, introducing in their stead the power-hungry propagandists of rival factions, we have created space for the idea that unbelievers and idolaters smuggled ideas into its text. We will prove this by showing all the parallels between the Book and statements found in other ancient Near Eastern literature. For this tact to work, we must cause our charges to overlook the fact that the Enemy’s Book possesses its own coherence and that it communicates a perspective diametrically opposed to those in the texts we’ve helped produce.

I know you doubt me, Wormwood, because you know that anyone who really understands this ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian literature will see the difference between it and what we dub the wisdom literature, but I reiterate several points. First, always remember, most of them do not know the material well enough to discern the difference. Second, so few of them actually think for themselves about anything. And third, the veneer of scholarly respectability has such power to dazzle.

Always bear in mind: If they believe that Book, the game is up for us. We must put all our hope in keeping our patients from actually understanding that horrendous Book.

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape