The Historical Point of View

The Historical Point of View is Screwtape’s name for a scholarly habit that studies where an idea came from and how it has been received while evading whether it is true. In his account, this approach cuts readers off from the past as a source of knowledge and helps turn historical change into an authority over present moral choices. The letters present it as part of a broader demonic effort to keep human attention away from what is true, prudent, and possible here and now, though their claims must be read with the book’s warning that Screwtape is a liar.

Definition and Method

Screwtape explains the method through the questions it trains scholars to ask about an ancient writer. Instead of considering whether the writer’s claim is true, they ask who influenced the writer, how the claim fits with other works, what stage of development it represents, how it affected later writers, how it has been misunderstood, and what critics have said about it in recent years. The accumulation of context can appear exacting, but its defining omission is the possibility that an old text might teach its reader something or alter their thinking and conduct.

The method’s power lies less in making a direct argument against the past than in changing what counts as an acceptable question. To regard an ancient author as a possible source of knowledge is dismissed as simple-minded; the scholar can then remain busy with intellectual history without submitting present judgment to what the author says. The past is treated as an object to classify rather than a voice capable of correcting the present.

Use as a Demonic Strategy

Screwtape places the method within a wider effort to redirect attention from immediate moral questions. People should, he says, ask whether a proposed action is righteous, prudent, and possible. The rival questions—whether it is progressive or reactionary, or whether it accords with the general movement of the time—seem to invite historical understanding but instead defer judgment to an unknowable future. Because the future is shaped in part by present choices, it cannot supply an independent answer to the choices that will shape it.

That evasion creates a vacuum in which conduct can be bent without the person first resolving the relevant moral issue. Screwtape connects the strategy to fashionable thought that directs people to imagine the future as a promised land reached by favored heroes. It also depends on blurring distinctions among change: people once recognized that some changes were better, some worse, and some indifferent; the demonic vocabulary replaces the descriptive word “unchanged” with the emotionally charged “stagnant.” A judgment about what has changed thereby starts to carry a verdict about whether it is good.

Severing Generations and Making the Future a Standard

Screwtape calls it important to cut each generation off from the others, because an open exchange between ages would allow one period’s characteristic errors to be corrected by another’s characteristic truths. He claims that this separation is achieved not by preventing scholarship but by shaping it: even highly learned readers can study old books without being nourished by them. He invokes Boethius as an example of a writer who disclosed an important secret, then argues that the intellectual climate makes such disclosure ineffective because scholars are trained to historicize rather than learn.

The treatment of the past complements the letters’ account of the future. Screwtape elsewhere argues that the Enemy directs human attention toward eternity and the Present, where people can act, obey conscience, and receive what is given. The future, by contrast, is unknown and unrealized. The Historical Point of View makes historical direction seem like a warrant for action, reinforcing attention to what may come at the expense of what can be judged and done now.

Limits and Irony

Screwtape’s explanation is not a neutral account of historical scholarship. The book’s introductory warning says that the devil is a liar and that not everything Screwtape says should be assumed true even from his own perspective. His account therefore reveals the aims of a tempter more securely than it establishes that scholars generally behave as he claims. Its sharpest evidence is the procedure he describes: a question about truth is displaced by questions about influence, development, reception, and current critical opinion.

The expression is also implicated in the irony it names. Screwtape condemns habits of thought that substitute fashionable judgments for direct evaluation, yet he himself organizes human ideas by their usefulness to Hell and presents sweeping historical claims as tactical instruction. His confidence cannot simply be adopted as the book’s verdict. The episode instead makes readers attend to the difference between describing the history of a claim and evaluating its truth, while warning that the former can be used either to illuminate a judgment or to keep judgment at a distance.