The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (Prologue)
More thoughts to complement the book club
I’ve read Screwtape several times and always wanted to share my thoughts on it. While I could offer a plethora of excuses and blame procrastination, that would just be affirming that I am susceptible to the temptations of distraction.
This is true. I am very susceptible to distraction.
Therefore, I’d like to thank the official C.S. Lewis Substack for starting a book club and discussion just when I decided to put more effort into this Substack thing.
I’m into the book club, but there’s so much more I want to say.
First Impressions of Screwtape
I don’t recall the first time I read this book, but I do remember the strong feeling of flabbergasted.
It was early in my Christian journey, I know that. I grew up Catholic, got to college and rejected God completely, then came back to him in my mid-thirties. When I was saved for real, I read (and still do) the Bible and everything I could get my hands on. I came across Lewis, read Screwtape, and realized what a dupe I was.
In my arrogance, I’d played right into the hands of the enemy.
What strikes me is that Lewis wrote this in the 1940s, a time when there was no television or internet, yet the themes and strategies Screwtape teaches to his nephew Wormwood still apply in our world today. In fact, they apply even more poignantly because there are more opportunities for distraction, emotional manipulation, and instant gratification that take us away from God.
An Image of Hell
Let me share a particularly hard-slapping insight where Lewis explains what he understood hell to be:
“We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance and resentment.
My symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern…an official society held together entirely by fear and greed. On the surface, manners are normally suave… (but) Everyone wishes everyone else’s discrediting, demotion, and ruin; everyone is an expert in the confidential report, the pretended alliance, the stab in the back.”
This culture we find ourselves in now is based on the art of the grievance. The more victimized one can claim to be, the more advancement and recognition achieved. To do any of this at someone else’s expense is icing on the cake, and if one can pretend they had nothing to do with someone else’s fall from grace, all the better. Social media makes these practices so easy now, it hardly takes any tempting.
And this was just in the introduction.
Bad Angels
Lewis took an interesting approach when portraying demons. Throughout history, he noted that humans like to portray angels as human-like and pure-looking while demons are depicted more animal-like. We humans have a hard time imagining what a created being might be like if it’s different from us. We arrogantly assume we are the template for living creatures. Therefore, Lewis didn’t concern himself with their appearance as he figured we would never know, nor could we ever know.
He did point out that Satan, or the devil, is not God’s equal. What occurs is not a war between good and evil as so often portrayed. God wins. God has won. But along the way, Satan is going to make a mess of things and he has particular methods of doing so. These methods have stood the test of time and accomplish the goal of pulling people away from God.
Lewis suggested that demons, or “bad angels,” are driven by two motives. The first is fear of punishment and the second is an insatiable hunger to dominate and consume others. This second motive is an excessive want that is never satisfied, because in the Christian heart, God is the only one who can fill that empty hole. Without God, even Christians can be tempted to use sinful behaviors to fill that hole.
What This Means to Me
This was one of the first books I read that presented the demonic point of view. Lewis had a hard time writing this. He had to take on the persona of evil in order to show how evil impacts humans, but he cautioned readers that this wasn’t about showing us what demons are like because he couldn’t really know.
“…the purpose was not to speculate about diabolical life, but to throw light from a new angle on the life of men.”
Is Lewis’s Screwtape real? Are the tactics used by the “bad angels” real? This is a work of fiction after all.
It got me thinking about how we are so gullible. We are fickle and subject to pride. When presented with hard choices, so many of us choose the easy way, the way to instant gratification. Short term “good feels” desired above all else. Thus, human nature is what it is and always has been so it doesn’t matter if the demon tactics are real or not.
What I originally learned (and still learn) from this book is that we are weak and very tasty targets. The question I had to ask myself, especially considering my past life, was whether I wanted to continue being an easy target.
What I decided is that I need to choose every day to resist the devil and cling to God. The way to resist temptation is to fill the hole in my soul with the one who created it in the first place.
I pray that you do the same.
As the book club continues through the letters of Screwtape to Wormwood, I’ll be posting more thoughts. Share with friends, join this discussion, and receive new posts.