The Screwtape Letters Analysis
- The Screwtape Letters is an epistolary novel that takes the form of thirty-one letters from a senior demon named Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood.
- Embedded in the letters is the story of one man's spiritual journey. “The patient” never speaks for himself, but readers nevertheless follow him as he matures from a weak, morally suspect man into a brave and loyal Christian.
- In building the world of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis makes use of many satirical reversals. Satan replaces God as "Our Father," God becomes the enemy, and the hierarchy of Heaven is replaced with the "Lowerarchy" of Hell.
Analysis
Written from a senior devil’s point of view, The Screwtape Letters consists of thirty-one letters that focus on different issues in the art of temptation. The letters, which were first published serially in a weekly magazine in 1941, are linked by the ongoing narrative of the young man’s ups and downs during his spiritual journey. In 1961, a new chapter to the book, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” was appended. In it, Screwtape addresses a graduating class at the Tempters’ Training College. Screwtape expresses delight in the increase of tyrannical regimes and the suppression of free peoples as a major way of destroying human beings’ dignity and individuality. He also expounds on the distortions of the concept of equality in modern democracy: The idea that people should all be the same, without distinctive differences, has led to a wonderfully destructive mediocrity that penalizes excellence, especially in the area of education.
C. S. Lewis, a literature professor at Oxford and Cambridge, was a prolific writer whose various works fall into quite different categories, including literary criticism, philosophy, essays, poetry, theology, letters, and various genres of the novel. TheScrewtape Letters, the third of his fourteen novels, established Lewis’s reputation on both sides of the Atlantic and was soon considered a classic. The novel’s popularity led to Lewis’s appearance on the cover of Time on September 8, 1947, with the grinning figure of a devil (with horns and a pitchfork) depicted behind Lewis’s left shoulder. The inscription on Time’s cover read, “Oxford’s C. S. Lewis, His Heresy: Christianity.”
A professed atheist for almost twenty years, Lewis converted to belief in God in 1929 and gradually came to accept all the traditional doctrines of Christian faith, including the existence of heaven, hell, angels, devils, and sin. He believed devils were supernatural beings, former angels who became enemies of God and therefore enemies of human beings and of all of God’s creation. In this novel, however, Lewis’s focus is not on a theological presentation of hell and devils but on the psychology of human beings and their moral choices.
With Screwtape as the first-person narrator, this epistolary novel derives much of its irony and satire from the inversion of traditionally accepted values. Evil becomes good and good becomes evil. The development of virtues is considered fatal, while the development of vices and sinful habits is highly desirable; love is despicable, and hate is heart-warming. The reversal occurs not just on the moral level but on the linguistic level as well. The spiritual “Enemy” or “Oppressor” is no longer the devil but God. Satan is called “Our Father Below,” and the spiritual reward in this “Lowerarchy” is not the “Beatific Vision” but the “Miserific Vision.”
Lewis does not offer a description of the geography of his fictional realm or of the devils who inhabit it but attempts instead to satirize Hell’s spiritual atmosphere. He depicts it as a massive bureaucracy that includes an Intelligence Department for research, a Tempters’ Training College, and a House of Correction for Incompetent Tempters. Similar to a totalitarian state, Hell has a bureaucratic headquarters that keeps dossiers on human beings and has its own Infernal Police to monitor the speech and activities of devils as they engage in their various tasks. This bureaucracy is characterized by envy, competition, resentment, ambition, self-glorification, and self-advancement. Although the devils are united in their quest to capture human souls, there are no friendships and thus no real unity among them. Lewis’s petty, back-stabbing Hell is based on a choice of self over others—which is the basis of some moral choices people make—so his...
(This entire section contains 1036 words.)
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Hell sheds light primarily on the human condition.
Although Lewis’s Hell is presented as a bureaucracy, it is also a place of punishment in which sinners undergo the same fate regardless of their sin: consumption by devils. This spiritual cannibalism graphically demonstrates Lewis’s concept of the effect of sin. In yielding to temptation and sin, people yield their wills to the will of Hell, and, in yielding their wills, they yield their freedom. Lewis’s symbolic rendering of the absorption of a weaker self by a stronger self is meant to reflect the loss of individuality and identity that occurs through wrong moral choices.
Another source of satiric humor is Lewis’s penetrating critique of human pettiness and selfishness. The temptations advocated by Screwtape at times are linked to the traditional categories of the seven capital sins (pride, anger, envy, avarice, sloth, gluttony, and lust), but they also run the gamut of daily, trivial ways that people focus on themselves or elevate themselves to the detriment of others. At times, Lewis offers humorous but familiar instances of selfishness, such as the example of the woman who inconveniences her hostess by declining a prepared meal and asking instead to have only tea and toast, with very exact specifications about their preparation.
In addition to human foibles, Lewis also critiques social and cultural trends that detrimentally influence people’s moral choices. A tendency to dismiss the past as full of ignorance means that the wisdom of the ancients is lost. Disdain for objectivity and Reason (almost always capitalized by Lewis) means that human beings, when faced with a new proposition or idea, tend to ask if it is progressive or old-fashioned, rather than asking if it is true or false. Lewis also cautions in several places against a glib acceptance of language used by politicians and media because often their goal is not to inform the public but to shape public opinion and perception.
Lewis is well known for clearly and simply explaining orthodox Christian doctrine, but in his fiction he does so in ways that are fresh and creative, as he translates traditional theological language into vernacular language. In The Screwtape Letters, his presentation of Christian morality and theology is lively and amusing, partly because of his unique, unorthodox narrative point of view but also because he understands the human condition so well. One does not need to accept Lewis’s theological premises in order to appreciate his analysis of human behavior and cultural issues because his examples of self-centeredness and uncritical thinking are accessible to many readers.