Cattle Who Become Food; Servants Who Become Sons

“Cattle Who Become Food; Servants Who Become Sons” is Screwtape’s compact image for the opposition between Hell’s appetite for human beings and God’s desire for free, distinct persons united to Him. Its contrast supplies a theological counterpoint to the demons’ model of existence as competition: Hell would absorb the human will, while God’s purpose, as Screwtape grudgingly describes it, is to give life rather than consume it.

The Two Models of Human Existence

Screwtape presents the distinction while explaining why periods of spiritual dryness may serve God’s purpose. Hell treats a human being primarily as food: its aim is to draw the human will into its own and enlarge its realm of selfhood at the other’s expense. God’s aim is different. Human wills are to conform freely to His, so that people become like Him without being absorbed or erased. The image of cattle destined to become food and servants who become sons makes the difference concrete: one system consumes; the other brings about a relation of kinship and continuing distinction.

The contrast follows from the two sides’ opposed accounts of love and freedom. Hell assumes that one self’s good cannot be another’s, and that gaining means another loses. On this account, existence itself is competition, and taking another will into one’s own is an intensified form of possession. God’s supposed aim—that distinct beings should share one another’s good—looks contradictory from within that logic. Screwtape’s language therefore inadvertently reveals the limit of his own account: he can describe divine love as an impossible claim, but cannot explain why it would be offered or what God would gain from it.

Dryness, Freedom, and Formation

The image also clarifies Screwtape’s account of spiritual low periods. Human beings move through emotional and bodily peaks and troughs; the patient’s present dryness is a natural fluctuation, not proof that a demon has caused it. Screwtape warns Wormwood that God may make particular use of such troughs, even more than periods of spiritual sweetness. When conscious reassurance and emotional pleasure recede, a person can be left to carry out duties by the will alone.

That withdrawal matters because, in Screwtape’s account, God cannot secure the desired union by simply overwhelming human choice. A presence so irresistible that it cancelled the will would defeat the purpose of forming persons who remain themselves. God may begin with faint experiences of presence and the ease of early resistance to temptation, but eventually the person must continue without those supports. The resulting obedience is not the absorption Hell wants: it is a freely sustained relation. Even stumbles do not invalidate the effort to walk, and prayers in spiritual dryness may be especially pleasing because they persist without the earlier emotional reward.

War as a Test of the Contrast

Screwtape’s later advice about an impending German bombardment tests the abstract distinction in a setting of danger. He considers whether Wormwood should try to produce cowardice, pride in courage, or hatred of Germans. Demons cannot manufacture virtue, he admits; they can only exploit qualities supplied by God. Courage may therefore become a foothold for the very power Hell opposes, even when it appears in a person the demons would otherwise claim.

Fear and hatred offer a more promising route for temptation. Screwtape proposes joining hatred to fear: fear is painful, while hatred can provide compensation for it and dull shame. He advises Wormwood to weaken courage first, while warning that cowardice can expose a person to self-knowledge, repentance, and humility. Danger forces moral choices into view. Courage, Screwtape argues, is the form every virtue takes when tested; mercy or honesty that disappears as soon as it becomes risky is conditional. The war thus makes the difference between possession and formation practical: the test is not whether the patient feels fear, but what he does when duty becomes dangerous.

After the patient’s first raid, Screwtape reports that the attempt has gone badly for Hell. The patient is frightened and thinks himself a coward, but he has done everything his duty required and perhaps more. His irritation at a dog, excessive smoking, and forgotten prayer are the small failures the demons can claim; they do not outweigh his conduct. Fear has not stopped him from acting, and his lack of pride means that fulfilling his duty has not simply become a new form of self-congratulation.

Narrative Irony and Significance

The formulation belongs to a demon’s letter, not to an impartial theological exposition. The book warns that Screwtape lies and that his judgments may be distorted by wishful thinking. His account must therefore be read with attention to its self-exposure: he insists that humans are food, yet repeatedly describes an opposing purpose that values their freedom and continued existence. His own difficulty explaining what God could gain from loving them underscores the distance between a world organized around acquisition and one organized around gift.

The distinction also gives the book’s moral reversals a shared measure. Hell’s ideal is not merely that the patient commit particular wrongs; it is that he become material for another will. The alternative is not the erasure of individuality, but a freely chosen relation in which a person may become more fully himself through union with God. In that contrast, the paired images of food and sonship make freedom, rather than appetite or power, the decisive difference between the two kingdoms.