The Screwtape Letters

The Screwtape Letters Review

The Screwtape Letters is a trick that should not work as well as it does. The conceit — thirty-one letters from a senior demon to his inexperienced nephew, offering tactical advice on how to prevent a human soul from reaching God — requires the reader to maintain a continuous inversion: everything Screwtape advocates, Lewis opposes; everything Screwtape fears, Lewis recommends. The device risks becoming tedious, or preachy, or merely clever. It is none of these things. It is one of the finest pieces of religious writing of the twentieth century, and it is funny.

The book’s central insight is that damnation is not achieved through dramatic means. Screwtape is contemptuous of crude temptation: getting a human to commit spectacular sins is unreliable and often counterproductive. Far better is distraction — keeping the patient so occupied with small irritations, social anxieties, and the pleasures of indolence that he never examines his life at all. The human who never thinks seriously about anything, who fills every quiet moment with noise, who is always meaning to settle his affairs but never quite does: this is Screwtape’s ideal client. It is a portrait that has not dated.

The letters on domestic life are perhaps the most penetrating. Screwtape analyses the relationship between the patient and his mother with clinical precision: how small resentments accumulate, how people use affection as a cover for control, how families conduct lifetimes of subtle warfare while maintaining the form of love. The observation that the tone of voice carries more venom than any content, and that a malicious intonation is deniable in ways that explicit unkindness is not, is characteristic Lewis: he locates the moral problem exactly where it actually lives, not in the obvious place.

The voice Lewis created for Screwtape is a literary achievement in itself: urbane, superior, slightly peevish when Wormwood disappoints him, capable of sudden savagery when his authority is questioned. The bureaucratic hell Lewis imagines — all committees and hierarchies and departmental rivalries — is a satire of institutional life as much as a theological position, and it remains sharp. Published in 1942, The Screwtape Letters reached an audience in wartime Britain that was acutely aware of the mechanisms of propaganda and moral corruption, and it gave them a language for recognising those mechanisms in their own interior lives.

The Wartime Context

Published in February 1942, The Screwtape Letters first appeared as a weekly serial in the Anglican newspaper The Guardian during the darkest stretch of the Second World War, before being collected into the volume that has never since been out of print. The timing matters. Lewis was writing for an audience living under the threat of invasion and the reality of the Blitz, people for whom questions of courage, fear, distraction, and the moral life were not abstractions. Screwtape’s running commentary on how the war itself can be turned to a tempter’s advantage — how it can produce either heroism or mere anxiety, either clarity about what matters or a paralysing absorption in survival — would have landed with particular force on its first readers. The book made Lewis a public figure; it was his growing fame as a Christian writer, consolidated by Screwtape and by his wartime radio broadcasts, that would eventually lead to the BBC talks gathered as Mere Christianity.

A Book Dedicated to Tolkien

Lewis dedicated The Screwtape Letters to his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, a gesture that acknowledges the central place Tolkien held in his life and thought. The two men were the leading figures of the Inklings, the Oxford literary circle in which both read their works in progress aloud — Lewis his Narnia and his apologetics, Tolkien the slowly accumulating chapters of The Lord of the Rings. It was partly Tolkien’s long, patient argument, on a famous night’s walk along Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College, that helped move Lewis from theism to Christianity in 1931. The dedication of Screwtape, one of Lewis’s most popular and characteristic works, to the man who had done so much to shape the belief the book defends, is therefore more than a courtesy; it is a small monument to one of the great literary friendships of the twentieth century.

Apologetics by Inversion

What makes The Screwtape Letters unusual among works of Christian apologetics is its method. Lewis does not argue for the faith directly; he dramatises its negative, letting a devil describe the spiritual life from the outside, as a problem to be managed. The form lets him say things that direct exhortation could not. A sermon urging readers to pray would risk piety; Screwtape complaining that his patient has begun to pray sincerely, and advising Wormwood on how to make the prayers vague, self-regarding, and ineffective, teaches the same lesson while disarming the reader’s resistance. The book belongs to a recognisable satirical tradition — the reader must constantly translate Screwtape’s recommendations into their opposites — but Lewis’s particular achievement is to make that translation feel less like decoding a puzzle than like recognising, with discomfort, the actual texture of one’s own evasions and self-deceptions.

Its Enduring Popularity

More than eighty years after publication, The Screwtape Letters remains one of Lewis’s most widely read books, rivalled in popularity only by Mere Christianity and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Its appeal extends well beyond the explicitly religious readership: the psychological acuity of its observations about distraction, resentment, vanity, and the small corruptions of ordinary life gives it purchase on readers who do not share Lewis’s theology at all. The book has been adapted for the stage and recorded by performers who relish Screwtape’s oily, superior voice, and Lewis himself later added a companion piece, Screwtape Proposes a Toast. That a wartime newspaper serial cast as a demon’s correspondence should have proved his most durably popular work of fiction outside Narnia is a measure of how completely the conceit succeeds.