The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis

“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.” –Martin Luther

“The devil… the prowde spirite… cannot endure to be mocked.” –Thomas More
And with these two quotes begins the Screwtape Letter, a book published in 1942 by C.S. Lewis that examines the concept/ existence of the devil . The book is structured unlike any other I have read- it is a series of letters from an experienced devil, Screwtape, and his understudy devil, Wormwood. Lewis used the letters as a way to imagine what a devil would say and how he would instruct someone to tempt and corrupt humans.

Lewis himself was a Christian who wrote prolifically and taught at both Oxford and Cambridge, where he became the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English in 1954, a position he held until his death in 1963. During his life he wrote such classics as Mere Christianity and the secular sensation, The Chronicles of Narnia. If you didn’t read that book series when you were growing up, you heard about it- if not, you saw the movie last year.

The book, as I said, is a series of letters from Screwtape to Wormwood. Wormwood is a devil in training, hard at work trying steal a soul. We never hear from Wormwood directly, as all of the letters in the book are from Screwtape, but we are aware that there is “off camera” action between each of the letters. Each letter begins by Screwtape discussing how Wormwood’s last effort to steal the soul went, and his suggestions for what to follow up with. In the process, we learn much about the belief system of both Lewis, as informed by the history of western literature and philosophy, but also of a nation, England, during what he calls the European War.

The time period in which it was written and published cannot be overemphasized, I believe. For a book about the fate of the eternal soul, being written as Hitler was coming to power probably had much to do with the moral and philosophical ambiguities that swirled around both those who lived in Germany and those who decided it was time to take up arms and kill them.

Lewis offers a view not only of good and evil but of how our beliefs around good and evil influence the power that those beliefs have on our day to day actions. He shows us the forces that dictate our decisions and reveals, to Christian and non-Christian alike, the weaknesses that make us human and how those weaknesses, if we do not live a self-aware life, can destroy us.

“If wit and wisdom, style and scholarship are requisites to passage through the pearly gates, Mr. Lewis will be among the angels,” said the New Yorker, a fine tribute to a fine man who wrote a fine book. If you want insight into how Lewis viewed the attack of the devil’s legions on essentially good souls, where he saw the danger coming from, this book goes after it with exactly that kind of wit and wisdom.