Robert Ordway retrieves an ancient danger in a modern device.

C. S. Lewis published The Screwtape Letters in 1942, during World War II, when men faced extreme adversity and hard times. The fictional book is about a senior demon, Screwtape, who writes instructional letters to his inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, detailing psychological tactics to tempt a human man away from God and into damnation. The layman believes the path to hell is through the sin of hardened behavior such as stealing and killing, but the devil knows ease is his preferred method of success. “Indeed,” the senior devil Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood in the twelfth letter, “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

In the time of Lewis, Screwtape’s “gentle slope” strategy had to be improvised with the mediums of the day, including newspapers, radio, and idle conversation. Today, it has been optimally engineered, shrunken down, and placed in the pocket of nearly every man, woman, and child in the Western world. Reread the Letters with a smartphone on the desk beside you and the book looks more like a product roadmap.

Hell’s strategy, as Screwtape lays it out, runs along two tracks. The first bends the soul’s attention inward slowly until the self becomes the object of worship. The second dissipates attention outward into what Screwtape calls “Nothing.” It’s not pleasure, not even sin in any sense, but a drift toward aimlessness that consumes a life without anyone ever choosing it. The tracks seem like opposites, as one concentrates attention and the other scatters it. They share the same destination, however, because both accomplish the only thing Hell needs: keeping the soul from looking at God.

The smartphone is the first device in history that runs both tracks at once.

How does one avoid these two deadly paths of self-worship or aimless wandering? Ordway shows the way:

Attention is the raw material of worship, so in many ways, we become what we behold. The smartphone proposes two objects of beholding, the self and the void, and it will alternate between them indefinitely. The older and more rooted discipline proposes a third direction: outward, toward creation, neighbor, and God, on ground the Enemy of our enemy has held all along.

Which way will we go?