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In response to C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters Jason Heim Mr. Kramer AP English 12 January 2007 A Dimension of Reality, Or Imagination? All great writers have the ability to take something mysterious and abstract and turn it into something understandable to readers. This ability is not common to all writers and is manifested in distinctive, unique styles of writing.
Often, these authors do not write with the intention of bringing readers to some spectacular epiphany, but to get across a point or purpose they feel very strongly about. This is the situation in the case of C. S. Lewis, author of many acclaimed works of Christian literature. In all his works, Lewis writes with distinct purpose and has a message in every one of his books. Lewis does not care about whether people like his works, only that they understand his purpose; he says he did not enjoy writing the Screwtape Letters, and was actually annoyed with the books popularity (Walsh 33).
Lewis purpose in the Screwtape Letters is to help explain what he believes to be the real and practical world of spiritual warfare. Lewis does this from an interesting perspective that of Hell. Lewis wants readers to awaken to the realization that there is a war going on over their souls by reading the letters of Screwtape, a hellish demon, to his nephew, Wormwood, who is a human tempter. To understand even the basic premise of The Screwtape Letters, the reader must know exactly what spiritual warfare is.
Spiritual warfare is a biblical concept: For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms and And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven (New International Version, Ephesians 6: 12; Revelation 12: 7 - 9). This war is waged on followers of the Christian God and exists not in the material world, but in the spiritual. The major weapon of Satan's spiritual war is that of temptation. Satan has reason to be encouraged in the battle because the Bible says that no one escapes temptation: No temptation has seized you except what is common to man.
And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it. The Scriptures can claim that God has the ability to deliver his followers from temptation because he even allowed his son, Jesus, to be tempted as a man on earth: Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil (New International Version, 1 Corinthians 10: 13; Matthew 4: 1). All temptations come from Satan, or, as the Bible refers to him, the Devil. Satan does not tempt followers of God just for his pleasure and amusement; he has a very malicious and direct purpose. His objective is to cause Christians to consciously rebel against God by giving in to temptation and sin.
This is the process that leads Satan to his ultimate goal: to cause those who believe in God to stray from him and not to inherit eternal life. In The Screwtape Letters, the story centers around an elderly demon named Screwtape. Screwtape is well advanced in his ability to tempt humans, and has now moved on to consulting and giving advice to younger tempters. One such tempter is Screwtape's nephew, Wormwood. The book is a series of letters from Screwtape to Wormwood giving him advice as to how his patient, as he refers to the human, should be attacked. These letters also consist of Screwtape's analysis of Wormwood's actions and his recommendations on how to adjust to the movements of God, or as he is referred to, the Enemy.
C. S. Lewis said he wrote Screwtape in fiction and imagination, but to serve a purpose and a cause that was very real to him (Lewis IX). Lewis purpose in writing The Screwtape Letters represents a concept that is foreign to many people, but for him it is something that needs to be addressed and considered.
Authors of various criticisms on Lewis take aim at the purpose of Screwtape, according to Lewis scholars: to show how the life of man looks from the viewpoint of Hell, to throw light on Heaven from this unusual perspective (Hooper 270), to Throw light on mens lives (Kilby 30), and to shake society from disbelief in the supernatural (Gibson 102). Instead of writing from the perspective of Heaven or the human mind, Lewis chooses the viewpoint of Hell-bound demons because he thinks reading from it will most benefit readers in their understanding of the spiritual warrant. This makes good sense in the context of war where it is more beneficial to know the tactics of ones enemies rather than to receive praise from ones comrades. Lewis does not want readers to get hung up on the actions and situation of the Patient. Rather, he wants readers to realize that there are spiritual consequences for every mistake, no matter how small or insignificant the mistake seems to be: The events in the life of the Patient are not meant to be of great interest: the main interest is meant to be the immortal consequences of seemingly small and insignificant choices in the every-day life of Everyman (Hooper 270).
Lewis aims to magnify the ramifications of every moral decision of the common man. This echoes the belief that Lewis holds strongly, that every living being is destined for everlasting life and that every moment of life is a preparation for that condition (Kilby 180). Lewis believes that every moment of human life is a preparation for an eternal life, either in Heaven or in Hell. He writes The Screwtape Letters on the foundation of this belief and others previously discussed.
The first of countless temptation strategies is communicated in the books opening letter. Screwtape instructs Wormwood to create in the Patient a false sense of modesty (Kilby 12). There are two ways in which to accomplish this goal. The first is to make all the Patients prayers superficial in their mood: what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part. This type of prayer, Screwtape says, resembles the silent prayer of well-advanced Christians, which makes it easy to trick beginners into thinking their prayers are sincere: and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practiced by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy's service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time (Lewis 15 - 16). Screwtape's other advice in creating false modesty is to turn the Patients attention from the work of God to bettering himself by trying to measure successful prayers on the feeling he gets, as opposed to the nature and content of his prayers.
Screwtape knows that if the Patient gets caught up in creating the right feeling for himself about his prayers, then he will begin to lose the quality of prayer: Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling (Lewis 15 - 17). Controlling the human mind during prayer is very important to Screwtape and the cause of temptation. Prayer is a delicate thing to Screwtape, and it requires careful handling. Later in the same letter, he gives further instructions to Wormwood regarding the topic.
He tells Wormwood to distract the Patients prayer life by shifting the focus of his prayers. He tells Wormwood that the meaningless prayer is important and always to be encouraged. He warns Wormwood, however, against coming on too strong, for the Enemy is always near and ready to immediately act on the prayer of the Patient. Wormwood is told to create this image inside the Patients consciousness of a God who encourages the use of objects to accentuate prayer, and, therefore, pray to the objects themselves (Lewis 18). In all of this, Screwtape wants Wormwood to control the Patients prayers: When the patient prays for charity, let him start trying to manufacture charitable feelings in himself (Kilby 38). Essentially, Wormwood is to take all prayers for good things and twist them so that the Patient really is praying for himself and not others.
Letter 2 introduces some historical context in the beginning of World War II. Screwtape eagerly instructs Wormwood that he must feed off of the negative reactions the Patient has to the war. Above all, Screwtape adamantly commands Wormwood to not let the Patient die, because then his soul is lost forever to the Enemy; keeping him alive is their only hope of capturing his soul. Screwtape tells Wormwood to begin planting the seed of a possible military draft in the Patients thoughts. This is a simple tactic to make him worry about himself and take his mind off of God. The Patient consequently hates the war, and has malice for it; Wormwood is to take this malice and hatred and steer it toward the Patients immediate neighbors so as to create dissension between him and them (Lewis 24 - 25, 28).
The Patient only recently has become a Christian, and Screwtape fully expects him to start what he calls undulations in his spiritual life. In simple terms, Screwtape recognizes that followers of the Enemy have highs and lows, troughs and peaks, in their spirit. Screwtape urges Wormwood to use the Patients return from his initial spiritual high to his advantage. He gives three strategies on how to do this. The first is for Wormwood to exploit the Patients sexuality through various temptations; the Enemy, however, wards off these attacks and Wormwood is unsuccessful in that area. The next strategy is to attack during the Patients first spiritual low when his resistance to temptation is proportionally low.
Screwtape believes that resistance is directly related to spiritual well-being; when a human is spiritually high, resistance is equally high, and vice versa. Lastly and possibly most dangerously, Wormwood is to convince the Patient that his current spiritual low is permanent, there is no hope for recovery, and that God has abandoned him (Lewis 43, 45). Toward the beginning of the war, the Patient begins to interact with a group of secular people, with whom he quickly becomes friends. The tactic of Wormwood is to blind the Patient to the immorality of his new friends and to make him ignorant.
Wormwood is only to allow this when the Patient is alone and not in the company of his new friends: If he is a big enough fool you can get him to realize the character of the friends only while they are absent. If Wormwood can accomplish this, then when the friends are in his company, their presence can be made to sweep away all criticism (Lewis 51). Wormwood's objective is to keep the Patient from confronting his friends even after he becomes aware that their lives are in direct contradiction with his Christian life. The final utilization of the new friends is to make them influence the Patient into being one person around them and a completely different one while around other Christians.
Screwtape encourages the creation of another personality: If this succeeds, he can be induced to live, as I have known many humans live, for quite long periods, two parallel lives; he will not only appear to be, but actually be, a different man in each of the circles he frequents (Lewis 50 - 51). Amid all the sin and temptation encouraged by Wormwood, Screwtape reiterates how important it is that the Patient not realize how much he is falling away from God; things have been going well in regards to damning his soul, and to allow him to realize his evil ways would be an awful setback to the cause of the demons. In Letter 12, Screwtape gives Wormwood a favorable and pleasing evaluation of his work. He notes how the Patient is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space. This is to say that he is gradually and ignorantly falling away from God. The immediate goal of Wormwood is to keep him from become aware of his real condition, for fear that he might turn from it: My only fear is lest in attempting to hurry the patient you awaken him to a sense of his real position (Lewis 57).
One way of keeping the Patient from coming to this realization is to convince him that everything is normal and that nothing is wrong or out of the ordinary: As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago (Lewis 57 - 58). Instead of encouraging the abandonment of church and Christian activities, Screwtape is pleased that the Patient is still a churchgoer and practitioner of Christianity because he can easily be made to think that his spiritual condition is good when in reality it is diminishing rapidly. Sooner than later, the Patient can be made to dislike and dread his religious duties: In this state your patient will not omit, but he will increasingly dislike, his religious duties He will want his prayers to be unreal, for he will dread nothing so much as effective contact with the Enemy (Lewis 57 - 59). The warning that Screwtape gives is this do not come on too strong, because once the Patient realizes the error of his ways, the cause of eternal damnation suffers a major setback. Sure enough, Wormwood likely comes on too strong; the Patient soon awakens to his condition and repents.
Screwtape makes it sound like this is Wormwood's fault by the fact that he allowed the Patient to do two truly enjoyable things enjoy a good book and take a quite, contemplative, recuperative walk. Screwtape, however, does not despair or give up; he tells Wormwood that the Patients coming to repentance is one thing, and acting on it is another. The Patient has come to and realized repentance, but Wormwood's goal is to keep him from acting on it: The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it (Lewis 63 - 64).
Screwtape's emphasis on this point cannot be overlooked. Humans can be made to realize a good thing directly in their reach, but as long as complacency rules and no action is taken, that good thing is worthless. After the letter highlighting the Patients repentance, things start to snowball for the demons. In Letter 14, the Patient discovers a new-found humility that frightens Screwtape. Strangely, Screwtape wants Wormwood to make the Patient very aware of his humility because he will then become prideful: The patient was to be made to confess that he is humble, the surest way of destroying his humility (Kilby 39). Screwtape knows from experience that when recognizing self-humility, humans instantly become prideful: Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, By jove!
Im being humble, and almost immediately pride pride at his own humility will appear. Ultimately, the Patient is to be blinded from the true end of humility and Gods purpose for it (Lewis 69). Next, Screwtape turns to the earthly habit of consumerism. He wants Wormwood to turn the Patient into a consumer at heart, especially in church. Screwtape instructs Wormwood to encourage the idea that the Patient should shop churches until he finds one that suits his desires. This causes him to spend his time critiquing the church instead of learning from it: the search for a suitable church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil (Lewis 81 - 82).
Either this, or cause him to quit attending church altogether. Screwtape will be satisfied with either case; the one thing that is unacceptable to Screwtape is to allow the man to realize that he is a pupil and to assume a receptive attitude at church (Lewis 82 - 83). Screwtape advises Wormwood to implement the curiosity about answers to certain questions within the Patients mind. Screwtape believes that if the Patient wonders about and focuses on the specific answer to an insignificant question, that he will waste his time and exasperate himself. Screwtape addresses this subject in Chapter 19 when talking about being in love and other things: Leave them to discuss whether Love, or patriotism, or celibacy, or candles on altars, or teetotalism, or education, are good or bad.
Cant you see theres no answer? No matter the situation or circumstances, Screwtape asserts the idea that the decisions the mind makes bear no weight; Screwtape is much more concerned with taking advantage of a particular state of mind in a human: Nothing matters at all except the tendency of a given state of mind, in given circumstances, to move a particular patient at a particular moment nearer to the Enemy or nearer to us (Lewis 101 - 102). Screwtape is solely concerned with the fact that, at any given moment, the human state of mind can either be swayed toward God or evil, and wants Wormwood to capture it for purposes of his work. Screwtape's twentieth letter to Wormwood is laced with displeasure that the Enemy has, for the time being, put a forcible end to your direct attacks on the patients chastity (Lewis 105). He notes that at this point the Patient has realized that sexual temptations are not enduring. More importantly, by letting him realize that he can conquer these temptations, Wormwood has lost the integral tactic of temptation that the only way to relieve the pressure of attacks on chastity is to give in to them.
Screwtape rebukes Wormwood for losing this: consequently you cannot use again what is, after all, our best weapon the belief of ignorant humans, that there is no hope of getting rid of us except by yielding (Lewis 105). By keeping the Patient ignorant from this powerful tactic, Wormwood is able to do as he wishes in terms of tempting without much resistance. When the Patient awakens to the realization that God has the power to interrupt or completely stop the attacks, he becomes more confident that he can persevere through them in the future. His faith is strengthened in this reality. One of the most deceptive and dangerous attacks encouraged by Screwtape centers around the concept of time.
In Chapter 21, Screwtape encourages Wormwood to employ this attack: Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor, or the friends talkative wife, that throw him out of gear (Lewis 111). The power of this attack is vested in the Patients entitlement and assumed ownership of his time. Wormwood is encouraged to facilitate this mentality in his Patient by keeping him ignorant: They anger him because he regards...
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