"The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil"
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Lewis skewers a temptation we rarely dramatize because it looks so respectable: the slow, beige seduction of the merely livable life. “Long, dull, monotonous” lands like a drumbeat, not just describing time but mimicking it. The sentence feels repetitive on purpose; you can almost hear the calendar pages turning. That stylistic choice is the subtext. Evil doesn’t need fireworks. It thrives in steady weather.
The brilliance is the pairing of “prosperity” and “adversity.” Lewis refuses our favorite moral math where hardship ennobles and comfort corrupts. Either condition can become spiritually narcotic if it dulls vigilance. Middle age is the key pressure point: a season when most big choices have been made, routines harden into identity, and the drama of becoming turns into the management of staying. That’s when the devil doesn’t have to lure you into vice; he can simply let you coast into indifference.
“Excellent campaigning weather” is wry, almost bureaucratic. Lewis frames damnation as a political operation: patient, organized, opportunistic. No battlefield heroics, just door-to-door persuasion conducted through fatigue, distraction, and the quiet rewriting of standards. In the mid-century Christian context Lewis wrote from (and especially in works like The Screwtape Letters), this is a warning against the modern spiritual hazard of comfort-without-meaning: the life where nothing is obviously wrong, so nothing urgent feels worth resisting.
It’s a diagnosis of how a soul is lost by inches, not leaps.
The brilliance is the pairing of “prosperity” and “adversity.” Lewis refuses our favorite moral math where hardship ennobles and comfort corrupts. Either condition can become spiritually narcotic if it dulls vigilance. Middle age is the key pressure point: a season when most big choices have been made, routines harden into identity, and the drama of becoming turns into the management of staying. That’s when the devil doesn’t have to lure you into vice; he can simply let you coast into indifference.
“Excellent campaigning weather” is wry, almost bureaucratic. Lewis frames damnation as a political operation: patient, organized, opportunistic. No battlefield heroics, just door-to-door persuasion conducted through fatigue, distraction, and the quiet rewriting of standards. In the mid-century Christian context Lewis wrote from (and especially in works like The Screwtape Letters), this is a warning against the modern spiritual hazard of comfort-without-meaning: the life where nothing is obviously wrong, so nothing urgent feels worth resisting.
It’s a diagnosis of how a soul is lost by inches, not leaps.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
|---|---|
| Source | C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942) — epistolary novel; the cited line appears in standard editions of this work. |
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