Introduction
The Screwtape Letters is a work of fiction by C. S. Lewis as a set of correspondences from the master demon Screwtape to his protégé Wormwood. Wormwood is interested in the daily affairs of his “patient” to trip him up and bring him into the hands of “Our Father Below”. The story is relatable to all of us who have experienced temptation. Screwtape is a well written literary villain because he has a strong point of view, gives you the sense that you have met this person before, and he’s fun to hate. But what the devil is he up to? Screwtape’s motives and methods are purposefully deceptive, convoluted, and at times counterintuitive. The question of whether Screwtape even has a coherent point of view is questionable. It’s unclear whether the forces of chaos are capable of formulating and executing a plan or if having a goal or purpose at all is part of their methods. Lewis himself warns us against thinking too hard about this question in the preface:
Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle.
And yet, out of Lewis’s work emerges an insightful take on the Christian doctrine of personal transformation and Hell in books such as Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, and The Screwtape Letters. This paper will argue that Lewis presents the tactics of the demons as primarily about personal transformation into the image of the demonic.
Small Choices Adding Up
Lewis writes of the devil not from an academic point of view, but from the view of his everyday experience with temptation. From the annotated version of The Screwtape Letters, he comments on how he came up with the story:
Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years’ study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works. ‘My heart’—I need no others—‘showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly’.
In our imagination and popular culture, we see the Devil as a big scary monster. Often, he is half beast with red skin and yellow eyes. He is a terrifying predator crouching at the door waiting to devour us. But the letters to Wormwood do not exactly read like a Stephen King horror novel like you might expect. The demons are presented as a whole bureaucracy of spiritual beings who tempt us from within our own heart. If this is a horror movie then the phone call is coming from inside the house!
The heart, representing the basic core of a person, is what Screwtape is after. Screwtape is most interested in the domestic life of his patient, how he runs his day-to-day affairs, and the intimate details of his life. The primary focus of the demonic is how the patient spends his time, what he pays attention to, and how he treats the people around him.
The demonic strategy is to get us focused on ourselves—preoccupied with ourselves—as opposed to turning outward in love of God and neighbor. (Swafford)
Screwtape is locked in a battle for the man’s soul with “The Enemy” (God) and the primary battleground is his attention in ordinary moments. In letter one, we see The Enemy turning an atheist’s thoughts towards God in a way that Screwtape is panicked. Screwtape’s response is to make the man think of lunch and then distract him with the ordinary things of daily life, advising Wormwood to keep pressing home on the ordinariness of things rather than paying attention to those things that may point to higher realities of the invisible world.
Screwtape plays a repeated game day after day with the patient to exert a strong influence on the man’s habits, namely the particular things he pays attention to. In letter two, the man in the museum has become a Christian. But even while the patient professes to believe in God, Screwtape does not give up hope, because he knows that he still has influence over where the real battle is being fought, saying all the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favor. No matter what the man professes to believe or how strong and emotional of an initial experience of conversion he had, what truly matters are those small little daily choices that the man makes over and over on a daily basis. The conversion experience was the beginning of the journey but not the end. Becoming a Christian is not just a matter of intellectually believing certain things but requires a change of heart and that is a difficult process that takes time. Personal transformation comes from a daily grind of small challenges.
In Mere Christianity, Lewis explains why the little choices we make matter.
Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself.
This is why Screwtape does not want the man to consider the transcendent. Meditation on otherworldly truth and beauty will turn the man into a creature who desires to be in harmony with God, so Screwtape throws a lot of junk into the man’s mind to prevent that from happening. Rather Screwtape knows that if he can get the man to make his kinds of choices over and over, this will have a transformative effect on the man to form him in the likeness of the devils. Every day and with every choice we go one way or another.
In the third letter, Screwtape shows us what kinds of choices he wants the patient to make with regards to his domestic life. His plan is first to take his attention off the actual person in front of him and those domestic duties he has to her and instead get him to focus more on an inner projection of her that he builds inside his own mind. Once the man’s thoughts are sufficiently unhooked from reality, he’s encouraged to then think about her in the most negative light that he possibly can and interpret everything as an either an attempt to annoy him or something that exposes a character flaw. This ultimately accomplishes two ends.
It prevents the practice of self-sacrificial love towards his mother. To endure someone’s annoyances is a daily practice that may make him more into the likeness of God. After all, everyone is a little annoying, and so giving people a little grace for their annoying behavior is necessary to have a relationship with someone. God gives us grace for our annoyances, so doing the same for others is an imitation of the character of God and the more we do it, the more we become like Him. The second is because this behavior is in imitation of the demons who do not like people, and therefore their goal is to destroy the very concept of the other by thinking of other people only in terms of ourselves, which ultimately renders any relationship impossible, including the one with God. If we think of people instrumentally in terms of how they are useful to us, we’ll eventually come to the conclusion that nobody is useful to us and then we’ll be alone forever.
What is Love?
In letter 19, we learn Screwtape’s real attitude towards love. He just doesn’t understand it.
If, as I have clearly shown, all selves are by their very nature in competition, and therefore the Enemy’s idea of Love is a contradiction in terms, what becomes of my reiterated warning that He really loves the human vermin and really desires their freedom and continued existence?
Now it’s clear that Screwtape only views relationships in terms of power dynamics. Screwtape simply can’t believe that there is no ulterior motive on the part of God apart from simply to have a continued relationship with another person. And worse than that, God loves us even though we have the freedom to reject Him and often do great harm to our relationship by turning away in our sin. We add nothing to the infinite perfect Creator God by our existence. He offers His love as a free gift and suffers and even dies for our sin on the Cross. Let’s give the Devil his due and admit that God’s love for people is one of the greatest mysteries in the universe.
To Screwtape, relationship is not a gift to offer, but a means to an end. He states his attitude towards humans is that they are food. When you eat something, it ceases to be itself and it becomes part of you. A human is merely potential to absorb and bring under his control for his own purposes. A person’s individuality, freedom, and will are only obstacles to overcome by any means including manipulation, deception, and seduction. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine someone willing to go along with Screwtape’s plans if he did not use these tactics. The end of the bargain is that Screwtape gets everything in return for giving the patient absolutely nothing. The sort of personal transformation Screwtape seeks for his patient is purely destructive of his human personhood and there is no upside whatsoever.
Rather Christian love is self-abandoning to regard the other with love as the other. It’s a love that does not consume but preserves both the lover and the beloved as its end. In The Four Loves, Lewis describes this as gift-love or agape meaning to love someone else purely as a gift and not for a particular need. While we are given longing for God and experience that love as a need, the ultimate end of love is to be a gift. Giving a gift, especially one of love, is a courageous act because you can be rejected. Love is always an act of vulnerability in that way. In The Four Loves, Lewis writes:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.
To love like God, even to a small extent, is difficult to do because it is painful. The more you love the more pain you expose yourself to. Slowly learning to love those around us more every day through small changes is the task of Christian living.
The Doctrine of Hell
For Lewis, Hell is not necessarily a place of divine retribution, but the result of a series of choices that someone makes during their life which have as their final effect the destruction of someone’s soul until there is very little left of their humanity. Lewis’s image of Hell is most clearly displayed in his novel The Great Divorce. In this story, a bus makes a stop in Hell so that those on the bus may persuade the ones in Hell to come to Heaven. But each soul in Hell has their own particular reason to refuse the love of God and remain stuck where they are. Thus, God in His mercy gives the unrepentant a place where they can be away from the love of God as long as they want. Lewis puts it poetically in the novel:
“there are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’”
In the novel, the people are presented as having resentments and vices that they have built up and nurtured over their entire lifetime. We can imagine that these are the souls who have been successfully won by Screwtape. By falling for his traps over and over again, the souls in hell have been transformed into creatures who actually desire to be there. In a sense you could say that Hell is locked from the inside. Hell exists to honor the final choice they made slowly every day over the course of their lives.
Conclusion
In the preface of the book, Lewis mentions that there are two traps that we can fall into when considering the demonic powers. One of the traps is to believe that they don’t exist. But the other is to become so preoccupied with them that they become our only focus. We should keep in mind that at the end of time, the demons will be relegated to the darkness forever because they are not able to enter the Kingdom of God. Screwtape’s time is limited and being rid of him forever is simply a matter of enduring to the end. For each of us, there will come a last temptation before Screwtape bothers us no more. While Screwtape is the sort of villain you love to hate, the whole creation is groaning for the time we can finally be rid of him. Praise the Lord.
Screwtape’s tactics are just a cheap imitation of those used by God. By making our daily choices to come closer to the Lord, we can by the grace of God become more and more conformed into the image of Christ every day. Screwtape is worth studying because by his tactics, we can clearly contrast what he does with God. God’s transformation does not happen by manipulation or seduction, but by the free choice to accept the gift of God’s love. It does not consume us, but it distinguishes us. By conforming to the image of Christ, our individuality shines as we become more authentically who we are meant to be relative to the purposes of God’s plan. From Mere Christianity:
If we let him—for we can prevent him, if we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness.
Lewis’s total work presents a picture of life as transformational, redemptive, and one worthy of virtue. His stories present a mythology that presents the Christian moral, aesthetic, and spiritual worldview. In Lewis’s work in The Screwtape Letters we see the presentation of the idea that the future state of our soul depends crucially on what we repeatedly do. Repeatedly choosing evil actions has a degenerative effect on our soul. Repeatedly choosing good builds up our humanity to what it’s truly meant to be.