C. S. Lewis #4
“The Screwtape Letters”
Luke 4.1-13
C. S. Lewis’ book The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe begins with the premise that a wonderful world called Narnia has fallen under the spell of an evil witch who has usurped the role of Narnia’s rightful Ruler and set herself up as Queen. Like his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis took evil seriously, having seen so much of it in the bitter wars that ravaged Europe. It led Lewis to conclude in Mere Christianity that we are living in “enemy occupied territory.” His awareness of the existence and power of evil and his willingness to take scripture’s portrait of an evil one seriously led to the creation of one of his most popular works, The Screwtape Letters. Satan for millennia has known how we think; in The Screwtape Letters Lewis gives us a glimpse into how he thinks.
We know from a letter written to his brother Warnie the actual moment and circumstances when the book was first conceived. Friday evening, July 19, 1940, Jack and his friend, physician and fellow Inkling Dr. “Humphrey” Havard were listening to a radio speech by Adolph Hitler. Lewis wrote, “I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people, but it is a positive revelation to me how while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waiver just a little… Statements which I know to be untrue all but convince me, at any rate for the moment, if only the man says them unflinchingly.” That Sunday morning in church (“one could wish these things came more seasonably”) he came up with the idea for a book he felt would be “both useful and entertaining” called From One Devil to Another. It would contain letters from an older devil to a younger one that would explore the psychology of temptation “from the other point of view.” The book was finished by the end of the year, but originally appeared as a series of weekly installments from May to November 1941 in a church publication called The Guardian.
The key to reading and understanding the book is this: Everything is backwards. Not everyone understood that. One pastor cancelled his subscription to the Guardian writing because much of the advice given in the letters seemed not only erroneous but positively diabolical. That is, of course, the point. When Screwtape uses the words “Our Father” he is talking about Satan. When he rails against or puzzles over the strategies of “the Enemy” he is talking about God. That may be why Lewis wrote, “Though I have never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment… The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done. It would have smothered my readers if I had prolonged it.” (1) So remember, it’s all backwards. Once you get that, the book becomes an amazing and often an amusing study of how evil works in human life.
Humor is an intentional part of it, not because Lewis takes sin or Satan lightly. But, quoting Martin Luther, Lewis reminds us, “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” Likewise Thomas More, “The devil… the proud spirit… cannot endure to be mocked.” Lewis, incidentally, dedicates the book to his friend in Christ, J. R. R. Tolkien.
There are four key truths that underlie the entire book. First, Satan really exists. This fact is assumed throughout scripture and is reinforced by the words and deeds of Jesus. 1 John 3.8 say, “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil.” In his original preface to Screwtape Lewis says, “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician [that is, people interested in the occult] with the same delight.” (2)
A second truth that Lewis assumes in Screwtape and throughout his work is that Satan is God’s enemy but not God’s equal, another biblical truth. In a subsequent preface, Lewis writes, “The commonest question [I am asked about Screwtape] is whether I really ‘believe in the Devil.’ Now, if by ‘the Devil’ you mean a power opposite to God and, like God, self-existent from all eternity, the answer is certainly No. There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. No being could attain ‘perfect badness’ opposite to the perfect goodness of God; for when you have taken away every kind of good thing (intelligence, will, memory, energy, and existence itself) there would be none of him left. The proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. I believe in angels, and I believe some of these, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God and, as a corollary, to us. These we may call devil… Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.” (3)
Third, Satan is a liar. In John 8.44 Jesus says of the devil, “When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” Lewis notes that “Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle.” (4)
Finally, reading Screwtape reminds us that Satan just doesn’t get it. Satan and his demons are so narcissistic, so utterly into themselves, that they can’t understand anyone who isn’t. So in Letter 19 Screwtape writes, “I slipped by mere carelessness into saying that the Enemy [by which he means God] really loves the humans. That, of course, is an impossibility… All His talk about Love must be a disguise for something else– He must have some real motive for creating them and taking so much trouble about them… We know that he cannot really love: Nobody can: it doesn’t make sense. If we could only find out what He is really up to! Hypothesis after hypothesis has been tried, and still we can’t find out.” (5)
With that as a background, what are some of the tools and tactics Satan uses to undermine us? In Letter 1 and elsewhere Screwtape tells Wormwood to encourage lots of jargon and emotion in his patient. “Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church… By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?” (6) Lewis knew, having come to Christ through a careful reasoning process, that reason is on the side of the Christian faith.
In Letters 2 & 3, annoyed that the patient has become a Christian, Screwtape encourages using life’s little annoyances against him both at home and church: “Your patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool. Provided that any of [the people at church] sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous… Work hard… on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman.” (7)
Remarkably, he encourages prayer and the more spiritual the better: “Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced spiritual ones. Aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who had ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office… We have ways of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very ‘spiritual…” (8)
While Wormwood is excited about war, Screwtape is disinterested for the most part in most human events, seeing war as a means God might use to help the patient think more deeply about his life.
In Letter 16 Screwtape counsels that if Wormwood can’t cure the patient’s habit church-going, he should corrupt it. “The next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him,” Screwtape writes, “until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches… The search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil." (9)
Keep him religious, Screwtape says, but take the focus off Jesus Christ and put it somewhere else. “Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours– and the more ‘religious’ (on those terms) the more securely ours.” (10)
If he insists on thinking about Jesus, make that Jesus as imaginary as you possibly can. How? “Encourage once again the conception of a ‘historical Jesus’ to be found by clearing away later ‘accretions and perversions’ and then to be contrasted with the whole Christian tradition.” Why? “They all tend to direct men’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each ‘historical Jesus’ is unhistorical. The documents [i.e. scripture] say what they say and cannot be added to; each new ‘historical Jesus’ therefore has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another… We thus distract men’s minds from who He is, and what He did.” (11)
Screwtape has lots of other suggestions on how to undermine marriages, for instance, by focusing on feelings of being in love rather than on choosing to love, on how to use monotony, boredom, the horror of the Same Old Thing, fads, fashion, and an ever changing view of female beauty to make women unhappy with the way God made them and “directing the desires of men to something which does not exist– making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible." (12)
It doesn’t have to be a one big sin that destroys us, just an accumulation of lots of so called “little things.” “Like all young tempters you are anxious to report spectacular wickedness,” Screwtape writes his nephew. “But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. 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 Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards will do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one– the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts…” (13) I wonder if we’d know if we were on it? Probably not, which is, of course, the Evil One’s greatest desire.
In the end the patient dies, much to Screwtape’s great disappointment, because the patient died in Jesus Christ. Despite the incessant assault against his soul, the patient was welcomed into his true home by the loving God whose grace had saved him. In this work of fiction, Lewis invites us to consider an unalterable fact about our lives, that one day we too will die, and on that day the truth about who we are and Who Gid is will be revealed. On that day, it will not be jargon and emotion (Screwtape’s tools), but truth that will matter. That day will come with a certainty. Are you ready for that day?
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Endnotes
(1) C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised MacMillan pb edition, (Collier), pp. xiii-xiv.
(2) C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, (HarperSanFrancisco), p. ix.
(3) C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised MacMillan paperback edition, p. vii.
(4) C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, (HarperSanFrancisco), p. ix.
(5) C. S. Lewis, Ibid., pp. 99-101.
(6) C. S. Lewis, Ibid., pp. 1-2.
(7) C. S. Lewis, Ibid., pp. 6-7.
(8) C. S. Lewis, Ibid., pp. 11.12.
(9) C. S. Lewis, Ibid., pp. 81-82.
(10) C. S. Lewis, Ibid., pp. 34-35.
(11) C. S. Lewis, Ibid., pp. 124-125.
(12) C. S. Lewis, Ibid., p. 107.
(13) C. S. Lewis, Ibid., pp. 60-61.
