The Screwtape Letters is an epistolary novel: a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon, as he mentors and advises his nephew, junior tempter Wormwood.
It is commonly referred to as a Christian allegory or apologetic, but I don’t agree with either designation. I don’t believe Lewis was describing something unreal to explain something real. I believe he was describing something quite real, with fictional characters, that occurs very nearly as he describes it. Oh, I doubt there are physical letters exchanged between demons, but I believe the methods of deceit, confusion, despair, and temptation they use are very similar to what takes place in the unseen spiritual realm. Neither does Lewis seem to be making a defense of Christianity.
Further, I don’t think of this as a novel even, at least not in intent. I think it is more of an instructional warning of the intents and wiles of the demonic hordes.
I don’t feel adequate to synopsize beyond one central point: Screwtape does not take much satisfaction when Wormwood gets his ‘patient’ to merely sin. The senior demon is more concerned with getting humans to disbelieve.
Excepts, all the words of Screwtape to Wormwood:
Do remember you are there to fuddle him [the patient]. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!
Keep his mind off the plain antithesis between True and False.
Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous – that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick.
Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours.
Looking round your patient’s new friends I find that the best point of attack would be the borderline between theology and politics.
We thus distract men’s minds from who He [Jesus] is, and what He did. We first make Him solely a teacher, and then conceal the very substantial agreement between His teachings and those of all other great moral teachers.
…you soon have merely a leader acclaimed by a partisan, and finally a distinguished character approved by a judicious historian.
…the strongest and most beautiful of the vices – Spiritual Pride.
What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call ‘Christianity and’. You know – Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform.
So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or ‘science’ or psychology, or what not.
END Excerpts
I’ve wanted to read this for years. It was fascinating. Lewis said of it…
Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment.
I can understand that. He dedicates it to his friend J. R. R. Tolkien. The version I read includes the addendum Screwtape Proposes a Toast, added years after the initial publication.
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
This novel satisfies the “Double Letters” category (title must contain double letters) in the What’s in a Name 2024 challenge.
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