All 3 Uses of
essential
in
The Screwtape Letters
- The Enemy's human partisans have all been plainly told by Him that suffering is an essential part of what He calls Redemption; so that a faith which is destroyed by a war or a pestilence cannot really have been worth the trouble of destroying.†
Chpt 5essential = necessary or important or relating to the basic nature of something
- All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father's house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there, Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE VII MY DEAR WORMWOOD, I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in ignorance of your own existence.†
Chpt 7 *
- We have quite removed from men's minds what that pestilent fellow Paul used to teach about food and other unessentials—namely, that the human without scruples should always give in to the human with scruples.†
Chpt 16unessentials = things that are not absolutely necessarystandard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unessentials means not and reverses the meaning of essentials. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
Definition:
necessary or important; or a basic and defining part of something