# The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis - Blinkist What’s in it for me? View a human life through a devil’s eyes. One summer day in 1940, C. S. Lewis was attending the afternoon service in his small Oxford church when he was struck with the idea for The Screwtape Letters. As he wrote to his brother, he imagined a book consisting of letters written from one devil to another. According to Lewis, “The idea would be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view. ” A year later, in 1941, Lewis began publishing installments of The Screwtape Letters serially in the Guardian, a now-defunct Anglican newspaper. Thirty-one letters in total make up the collection. All of them are written, supposedly, by the fictional devil Screwtape as he coaches, chastises, and sometimes threatens his young nephew Wormwood, who’s attempting to secure the damnation of an unnamed Englishman. Along the way, readers encounter a wide breadth of topics, primarily about sin and virtue, and learn how devils may be trying to tempt each one of us. Although undoubtedly Christian in content, The Screwtape Letters is nourishing reading for anyone trying to live a more virtuous life. This Blink won’t cover all 31 of Screwtape’s letters, but we’ll make it through many of the most important topics. You might even let out the occasional nervous chuckle when you recognize some of your own sins. The preface of The Screwtape Letters, which is signed by C. S. Faith and Reason Lewis himself, begins with a warning: that humans tend to fall into two main errors concerning devils. The first is disbelieving in their existence entirely. The second is believing in them so much that one becomes unhealthily obsessed. Naturally, the devils themselves are pleased about both errors. Materialists, disbelieving in devils, are unlikely to believe in God. And magicians, who become fascinated by devils, end up doing their bidding. Next, Lewis warns readers that devils are liars. As such, the correspondence which he’s about to present should be taken with a grain of salt. The overall message is clear: readers may be wary of or amused by devils, but there’s no reason to put them on a pedestal. With that, the letters begin. The first gives readers a brief sense of the characters. The author of the letters is Screwtape, a senior devil with an authoritative, occasionally biting tone. The recipient is his nephew Wormwood, a junior devil still naive and unskilled in the ways of temptation. Finally, there’s an Englishman called “the patient. ” Wormwood’s task is to draw this “patient” into damnation, away from heaven, so he can become food for “Our Father Below” –⁠ also known as Satan. At the very beginning, the patient hasn’t yet converted to Christianity. But Wormwood is already making a mistake: believing that he can keep the patient away from God through logical reasoning alone. These days, Screwtape writes, people don’t think of doctrines as “true” or “false. ” Instead, they apply adjectives like “outdated” or “contemporary,” “academic” or “practical” –⁠ you get the idea. What matters is that the patient feels righteous about his beliefs –⁠ that’s all he really cares about, anyway. Why not use argument? Well, because devils aren’t the only ones who can argue –⁠ God can too. And once a person’s capacity for reason wakes up, it’s difficult to control where it takes them from there. Real Life “Real life” –⁠ an expression humans use so often without thinking about what it truly means. And thank goodness they don’t! It’s an incredibly useful one for hell, because by “real life,” people tend to mean everyday, quotidian matters: the newspaper, their lunch, the bus, and so on –⁠ certainly not spiritual matters or feelings. This is what hell wants. The humans’ attention must ever be kept on their immediate sensory experiences and not on God. Apparently, this isn’t so easily done, though, because, by the second letter, Wormwood has already made his first major blunder. He’s allowed his patient to convert to Christianity! While terrible,⁠ the devils can still try to make the best of a bad situation. Fortunately, the Church itself is today an ally of hell. There, the difference between reality and imagination can easily be exploited. This is because the patient’s thoughts on religion are still lofty and “spiritual. ” But when he goes to Church, these high-minded feelings will be contrasted with the sight of the shabby facade and the greasy-faced grocer offering him a liturgy. But Wormwood should keep in mind that it isn’t always preferable to fix a person’s mind on the “real” over the intangible. Instead, he should follow a general rule: in any activities which favor hell, the patient should be encouraged to be un-self-conscious and concentrate on the activity itself. For instance, if he’s admiring a woman’s body, he should focus solely on her body and not a reflection like “I am currently entering a state called Lust. ” On the other hand, in any activity which favors heaven, the patient’s focus should be turned inward, toward whatever illusions his mind conjures up. He should be encouraged to pray, for example, for the state of his mother’s soul –⁠ whatever he incorrectly imagines it to be –⁠ instead of for her recovery from rheumatism. This will help ensure that his prayers for the imagined mother never alter his treatment of the real one. Peaks and Troughs At the beginning of the eighth letter, Screwtape bemoans the state of the training college in hell. Ever since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, the whole program has gone to the dogs. Wormwood writes that he has “great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away. ” The patient, you see, has been in a vaguely depressive mood as of late, and Wormwood hopes he will soon give up on Christianity. But he’s forgotten –⁠ or Slubgob never taught him –⁠ something very important: the law of undulation. This law simply states that humans are constantly undulating between peaks and troughs in their lives. Their affection for their friends, their appetites, their interest in their work, and so on –⁠ all of these things alternate between periods of vibrancy and periods of numbness. Troughs certainly don’t automatically favor hell. In fact, God often relies on the troughs for his own purposes. How? Well, God cannot force anyone to love him –⁠ he can only woo them to his side. So, during trough periods, he disappears. He waits to see if his creations can make it through the troughs without him. If they do, that will prove whether their will to join him is really there. Because for God, the goal is simple: to fill the universe with replicas of himself, whose wills freely conform to his. Despite this unfortunate truth, trough periods can be of use for hell too, if exploited correctly. Screwtape details how in letter nine. During the troughs, he writes, people’s inner worlds feel to them cold and empty. It’s at this point that their normal, healthy pleasures can be twisted into perversions. Devils can’t actually create pleasures –⁠ that’s the provenance of God alone. But they can distort them. Take sexuality, for instance. Normally, the pleasure of sex is a heavenly one. But during a trough, a person is less likely to fall in love as a result of sex. His numbness can twist a sexual desire into a sexual perversion. It’s the same with other physical pleasures, like drinking and eating. Hell’s formula here is “an ever-increasing craving for an ever-diminishing pleasure. ” In short, people should be made to crave more and more of something yet enjoy it less and less. They then become pleasure-seeking machines, hell-bent on chasing fleeting desires. Vanity and Pleasure In letter ten, Screwtape has learned that Wormwood’s patient has made friends with a middle-aged married couple. Screwtape is delighted by this news –⁠ the couple are rich, smart, superficially intellectual, and highly skeptical. What could be better? In these people’s company, the patient’s vanity can easily be preyed upon. He’ll feel a sense of social pressure to laugh at their jokes and agree with their arguments. If his friends say something cynical, he’ll act cynical. If they mock religion, he’ll mock it with them. Eventually, he’ll really feel these derisive feelings, even if at first he’s just pretending. After all, as Screwtape says, ”All mortals turn into the thing they are pretending to be. ” Perhaps Wormwood can even get the patient to live two parallel lives. He can take a vain pleasure in kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday, knowing the grocer couldn’t possibly understand the urbane, intellectual world of his married friends. Likewise, he can enjoy coffee and blasphemy with the intellectuals, secure in the knowledge that he’s secretly aware of a “deeper,” “spiritual” world. Meanwhile, he’s the only one that’s truly complete and balanced. His vanity will elevate him in his own eyes while he, in fact, betrays everyone. Unfortunately, though, Wormwood is ultimately unable to execute this plan. Instead, by the 13th letter, he’s done the unthinkable: allowed the patient to read an enjoyable book and take a pleasant walk alone! A truly terrible blunder, because these are two real Pleasures. Like Pains, Pleasures give someone a link to reality, a feeling of comfort and returning to oneself. Wormwood should have continued to disguise vanity as a pleasure because real Pleasures –⁠ the deepest likings and impulses of a person –⁠ are God’s weapons. Ultimately, God values the individuality of every person –⁠ he wants them to embrace and embody their nature. Hell, by contrast, is supposed to guide them away from their nature. Wormwood will really need something akin to grace to get him out of this mess. Pride Letter 14 begins with another bout of bad news. Wormwood has written Screwtape that his patient is no longer making any of those confident resolutions which marked his original conversion. He no longer promises to be virtuous forever nor expects to receive grace for life. Instead, he merely prays for the strength to meet the daily and hourly temptation! The patient has, in other words, become humble. In this case, there’s only one thing to do –⁠ draw his attention to his humility so that he recognizes it for what it is. The knowledge of one’s virtues inevitably leads to taking pride in the virtue –⁠ and that pride, naturally, cancels out the humility. But the patient must not be allowed to discover the true end of Humility: self-forgetfulness –⁠ that is, freedom from bias in one’s own favor. To illustrate, say a man has designed the best cathedral in the world. He can know it to be the best and even take joy in that achievement. However, he should be able to imagine a world in which this achievement belongs to someone else –⁠ and yet be no more or less happy about it. This is humility: recognizing all creatures as glorious beings, not just oneself. Additionally, perhaps the patient can be goaded into Spiritual Pride. This is simply the idea that one’s own spiritual community is “correct,” and that all others are stupid and ridiculous. Screwtape proclaims Spiritual Pride to be the “strongest and most beautiful of the vices” –⁠ though he doesn’t explain why. By exploiting the human capacity for this sin, Wormwood can begin to make his patient group himself with a “we” –⁠ “We Christians,” in the first place. His underlying meaning, however, should really be “my set” of Christians –⁠ by which he should mean “the people whom it is my right to associate with. ” His focus should be on the very specific group of Christians he finds himself among, and he should feel a subtle sense of self-congratulation that he’s part of this “inner circle. ” Ultimately, this would render his Christianity innocuous –⁠ an excellent outcome for hell. Love Ah, the modern concept of “being in love. ” It’s one of hell’s greatest successes, according to Screwtape. When it comes to sexual temptation, the Enemy –⁠ that is, God –⁠ has thankfully presented humans with a dilemma. He demands either complete abstinence or permanent monogamy. Abstinence is already very difficult for humans, and monogamy is becoming even more so,⁠ thanks to the experience they now call “being in love. ” Today, this feeling is considered the sole legitimate basis for a marriage. Moreover, marriage is supposed to make the feeling permanent. If not, the only solution is divorce. Underpinning this idea of Love is, in fact, the whole philosophy of hell. That philosophy is that all beings are separate –⁠ that one self is not another self. That my good is not your good. That my gain is your loss. That being equals competition. This is, of course, the opposite of heaven’s philosophy, which is that all beings are ultimately one, while also, paradoxically, being many. That the good of one self is the good of another. That being equals cooperation. This is God’s idea of Love. Importantly, God’s love has little to do with what people now refer to as “being in love,” but the humans usually forget that. He described a married couple as “one flesh” –⁠ but not “a couple who married because they were in love. ” What God really meant by this was sex. If a couple has sex, a transcendental relationship is created whether they like it or not. This relation is meant to produce affection over time –⁠ to be the result of marriage rather than the reason for it. Christianity And Speaking of love, in letter 22, Screwtape learns of yet another disastrous occurrence: Wormwood’s patient has met a woman! And a virginal, kind-hearted Christian woman at that. She makes Screwtape want to vomit. Adding insult to injury, the patient has also gotten to know the woman’s family and circle. The house she lives in reeks of devoutness, and everyone that spends a weekend there comes away stinking of heaven. Even the cat and dog are tainted with the odor! The whole matter angers Screwtape so much that, mid-letter, he inadvertently transforms into a giant centipede. In letter 23, he’s back to normal and has some advice for Wormwood on how to fix this terrible situation. He should try to exploit the fine line between theology and politics. In each era, hell has gotten many Christian political writers to develop an idea of a “historical Jesus” that differs from the current conception of his doctrine. In the last generation, this “historical Jesus” was used to suit the liberal and humanitarian purpose; in this generation, it serves a Marxist, revolutionary doctrine. All of these constructions are designed so that people become devoted to and distracted by a “historical Jesus” that doesn’t really exist. This ties into an important concept introduced in Screwtape’s 25th letter. Incidentally, it’s also the title of another of Lewis’s most famous books. It’s called mere Christianity, and it stands in opposition to what Screwtape calls Christianity And. Christianity And is Christianity paired with some social, moral, or other issue. Some examples Screwtape gives are Christianity and Vegetarianism or Christianity and the New Psychology. These issues are whatever is fashionable, just with a Christian flavor. This makes Christianity less impactful and steers it away from its real, simple values like charity and truth –⁠ that is, “mere Christianity. War Early on in the letters, Screwtape discovers that Wormwood is enthused about the prospect of the Second World War, which is taking place in the background. The obviously naive Wormwood believes that war can only be a good thing for the causes of hell. However, as Screwtape points out in the fifth letter, that isn’t the case. In fact, war often has bad consequences for hell. For one, it often turns people to God. It also inspires some people to sacrifice their lives. Although God doesn’t support war, he still tends to reward people who give their lives to causes. War is only useful if the devils twist it to their purpose accordingly. This can be done by drawing the patient into extremism –⁠ in this case, either patriotism or pacifism. Both serve essentially the same purpose: getting the patient to believe in the righteousness of his own clique, sect, or belief. If that happens, he certainly won’t be thinking about the righteousness of God. As Screwtape puts it: “All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy” –⁠ by whom he means God –⁠ “are to be encouraged. ” Fear can also be a useful emotion here. Cowardice is the only vice that is purely painful, and the more he fears, the more he will hate. Hatred is an excellent way to dent a person’s charity. Does Wormwood succeed in the end? Unfortunately for hell, no –⁠ he fails miserably. In the final letter, readers find out that Wormwood’s patient has died in a bombing raid and gone to heaven. As he opened his eyes, he felt as if he had peeled off an old, wet garment and set foot into a gloriously hot pool. He saw angels and, of course, God –⁠ “that ghastly luminosity. ” From the world of bombs, screams, and falling houses, he was cleansed. As for Wormwood? Well… one of the laws of hell is “Bring us back food, or be food yourself. ”  This means exactly what you think. Though it’s not depicted in the letters, Wormwood will become food for his –⁠ suddenly ravenous –⁠ uncle Screwtape, and potentially some other devils, to devour. Final Summary Throughout the entirety of The Screwtape Letters, readers view human foibles through a devilish lens as senior devil Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood on how to damn his patient to hell. The letters cover many themes, but the underlying one is that humans are constantly being tempted, and that the devils’ ways are at work everywhere one might look. Despite this, the devils’ tactics are frequently unsuccessful, because humans have a way of overcoming their struggles and ultimately emerging on the side of God.