Reading The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters are a minor revelation. You see yourself in them. You wonder who the junior demon in charge of you might be. Mercy, but Lewis’ teaching demon, Screwtape, knows us so well.
Self-Congratulation After Conversion
Screwtape knows how, once we convert, or revert, we tend to congratulate God (“the Enemy”) on his good taste in choosing us, and to reason that’s quite enough holy effort on our part for the moment; we “believe we have run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy’s ledger by allowing ourselves” to be shepherded in. " 'By Jove, I’m being humble,' " we tend to say.
Waiting to Feel Spiritual -- Which Causes Problems
Above all Screwtape notices, first, we want to feel spiritual. Rather than do a charitable act or a courageous act, we want to feel beautifully charitable and brave first, and then act properly, in a silver haze of Christian joy. But waiting to feel spiritual helps postpone the simplest action. And it helps push forward the business of Hell, which is to make man “hag-ridden by the Future.” Never let a man realize, Screwtape advises, that every hour of his time is a free gift of God. That therefore it makes no sense to begrudge the time claimed by charity or duty.
Lewis’ Delicious Prose & Screwtape’s Rage
There are many delicious moments in the book and I am only slightly more than halfway through it. Of course the prose is delicious. I love Screwtape’s rage at the Enemy’s vulgar delight in His creatures. “He is at their elbow in a moment …. He has a bourgeois mind…" I love his near apoplexy at the sight of a new character, a Christian young woman who is the human hero’s love interest. She is “a demure, virginal, monosyllabic little brute ... in the heat of composition I find that I have inadvertently allowed myself to assume the form of a large centipede.”
Lewis’ Tools—and What He Leaves Out
C.S. Lewis’ two analytical tools brought to bear on the human personality are raw logic and either a great novelist’s or a greatly experienced pastor’s raw knowledge. What he had to leave out, being famously a convert to Christianity but a Protestant, were the tools of the saints, the whole Magisterium, and the Virgin Mary. If Screwtape was near apoplexy over the “monosyllabic little brute” of a girlfriend, he would have had worse trouble with the Mother of God.
Hooking the Modern Skeptic, then ...
Still, for modern readers, Lewis' starting with Screwtape may make a more persuasive beginning than starting with belief. Maybe no skeptic wants to face a color plate of the Divine Mercy or whatever on page one. And already at the end of the first Letter, Lewis delivers a master stroke that will stay with you.
... the Master Stroke
Screwtape describes a modern, skeptic soul, a man reading in the British Library. A solid atheist — and after twenty years “his thoughts beginning to go the wrong way.” Well, a bit of distracting hunger and some healthy scoffing at what comes into a man’s head when he’s shut up with his books and away from “real life” did the trick, Screwtape recalls. Later on the patient talked about real life saving us from these dry aberrations of mere logic. And, “He is now safe in Our Father’s house.”
Nancy Wilschke is a lifelong writer and revert to the Catholic faith, whose journey spans early literary ambitions, family life, and a profound spiritual rediscovery. Her book Walking With Mary, Praying for the Unborn offers both a cultural witness and a prayerful act of reparation in defense of life.
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