Screwtape in our midst
C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters” was first published in the U.S. 80 years ago. Screwtape is an important bureaucrat in the “Lowerarchy” of Hell. Over the course of 31 letters, he advises and counsels his inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, as the junior tempter tries to deliver a man’s soul to the “Father Below.”
The resulting tale, told from a demon’s point of view, is a series of lessons and instructions on how to keep humans separated from “the Enemy,” aka God.
For those who have read this book before, our modern times and current events warrant a re-read. You will not only be reminded of Lewis’ satirical brilliance, but also be surprised at its continuing relevance all these decades later.
For those who have never read it, now is a supremely perfect moment to become acquainted with a masterpiece that eloquently entwines British wit with breathtaking logic regarding the human condition.
Either way, I also recommend streaming an audiobook if that helps facilitate things. Award-winning narrator Geoffrey Howard will now forever be the vocal incarnation of Screwtape for me.
Reading what Lewis wrote eight decades ago, and feeling as though he could have written it this morning, does more than teach the value of timeless principles. It also fortifies our understanding of the unchanging nature of human beings, and how forces of good and evil vie within us.
Each letter Screwtape writes is in response to developments communicated by Wormwood about the man whose damnation he’s been tasked with securing. Lewis perfectly captures and conveys Screwtape’s broad persona as a crafty and seasoned predator on human souls, an efficient insider who knows how to get things done in Hell, and a true believer who absolutely reviles goodness and virtue.
Screwtape writes as a learned mentor, imparting sacred truths to Wormwood as situations arise.
Regarding the presence of both benevolence and malice in the soul of his nephew’s patient, Screwtape coaches on accentuating the latter.
“The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know,” Screwtape writes. “The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.”
Screwtape closes that letter with a clincher: “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.”
In another letter, Screwtape emphasizes that “tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind.”
Nearly all vices are rooted in the future, he writes. “Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the present … Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
To disrupt the patient’s faith life fellowship, Screwtape tells Wormwood to use “Fashions in thought” which easily distract men from their real dangers.
“We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood.”
Steering souls to always ask the wrong questions about motives and justifications that direct their actions—“Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that history is going?”—will lead them to neglect the relevant questions: “Is it righteous? Is it prudent? Is it possible?”
Trying to temper his young demon’s eagerness to report spectacular wickedness, Screwtape offers sage advice about the powerful, cumulative effect of small sins in separating man from the Enemy.
“Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick,” he cautions Wormwood. “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
These few excerpts are paltry morsels; the book is a smorgasbord banquet.
Summer reading gets all the glam, but that’s for lighter fare, as a sideshow to sun and fun. Desolate winter weather, which induces our energies inward, invites more contemplative reading.
With 31 letters, Screwtape could easily be a one-month read: roughly a letter a day. Each letter is about the same length as this column. Across the various subjects of life, and the vast temptations associated with them, Lewis will make you laugh, think, wonder and reconsider.
However, old Screwtape is afoot, even here and now. In Letter 27, he stresses the crucial importance of cutting old generations of authors off from the new, “for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.”
To regard an old author’s musings as a source of knowledge possibly capable of modifying your thoughts or behavior today is best “rejected as unutterably simple-minded.”
Screwtape’s suggested alternative: Watch the news instead.