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Page 1 of 6 Vol. 37, No. 9 _ September 2006  In this discussion of C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, my intention is simply to introduce readers to the book, discuss some of its content and theology, but to try do so without totally spoiling the book’s plot and ending. It has occurred to me that this may be impossible. Thus, if you have not yet read The Screwtape Letters, in order not to reduce your enjoyment, you may want to read it before you read this newsletter. However, I have had several people tell me this article does not in any way subtract from a personal reading of the book. So, if you are one of the few uninitiated to Screwtape, you may dare to read on, but in my opinion, you do so at some risk of spoiling your personal reading of the book. A second intention is to introduce readers to several books which are similar to Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters.
In this discussion of C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, my intention is simply to introduce readers to the book, discuss some of its content and theology, but to try do so without totally spoiling the book’s plot and ending. It has occurred to me that this may be impossible. Thus, if you have not yet read The Screwtape Letters, in order not to reduce your enjoyment, you may want to read it before you read this newsletter. However, I have had several people tell me this article does not in any way subtract from a personal reading of the book. So, if you are one of the few uninitiated to Screwtape, you may dare to read on, but in my opinion, you do so at some risk of spoiling your personal reading of the book. A second intention is to introduce readers to several books which are similar to Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters was first published in book form in London by Geoffrey Bles in 1942 and in America by Macmillan (New York) in 1943. The letters were originally published in the British newspaper, The Guardian, in a slightly different version, from May 2 to November 28, 1941. The collection purports to be the letters from a senior devil, Screwtape - an Under Secretary for the Infernal Lowerarchy, as well as Wormwood’s supervisor - to his subordinate nephew Wormwood, a very inexperienced and junior Tempter who has been given an earthly assignment. The reader does not see Wormwood’s letters to Screwtape, but the contents can be inferred from Screwtape’s replies. Screwtape provides his nephew with advice on how to go about securing the damnation of a human, known only as "the Patient." In the context of hell, God is referred to as "the Enemy." Although perhaps not as popular as his Narnia series, or quoted as much as Mere Christianity, Lewis himself claimed The Screwtape Letters was both easy and distasteful to write, which is why he vowed never to write a sequel. However, in 1959, four years before his death, Lewis did write an essay entitled "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," which appeared first in The Saturday Evening Post. In this brief sequel Screwtape gives an after-dinner speech to the Tempters’ Training College for Young Devils. In the preface to the original paperback edition, Lewis stated the most common question he received, in response to the letters of readers of these letters, concerned whether or not he really believed in "the Devil." In answer to this question, Lewis stated he did not believe in the devil in the sense of him being a power opposite to God and, like God, self-existent from all eternity, because, he said, there is no uncreated being but God alone. Lewis wrote: God has no opposite. No being could attain a "perfect badness" opposite to the perfect goodness of God; for when you have taken away every kind of good thing (intelligence, will, memory, energy, and existence itself) there would be none of him left. The proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. That is to say, I believe in angels, and I believe that some of these, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God and, as a corollary, to us. These we may call devils (Lewis, preface, The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, G. K. Hall & Co., 1979, vii). In a new preface to The Screwtape Letters written in 1960, Lewis specifically defined Satan ("the Devil") as "the leader or dictator of devils" and the opposite, not of God (which would be dualism), but of the angel Michael. Lewis is much more articulate in his thinking about Satan in Mere Christianity, in which he followed the traditional theology of his day, believing that Satan had rebelled against God because of pride and "wanting to be the center," thus going his own way and choosing not to be subject to the control of God (see under "Satan," by Perry C. Bramlett, in The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, edited by Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West, Jr., Zondervan 1998, 360-361).
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