The Screwtape Letters

I preached this sermon on January 15, 2006, at our evening contemporary service. It was part of a series on CS Lewis. This was my attempt to give the congregation a taste of "The Screwtape Letters," one of Lewis' classic books. Since "Screwtape" is told from the perspective of a "tempter" engaged in a struggle for the soul of a human "patient," I wrote my own "Screwtape letter" and used long quotes from the book.

My dear Verminette,

Congratulations on your recent graduation from the Tempters Training College. In a short few weeks you will be taking on your first real assignment and beginning the momentous task of guiding a real human patient away from the Enemy and into the embrace of Our Father Below. I am sure that this experience will more than confirm your early promise and that you will be well on your way to continuing our family’s proud tradition of achievement for the Kingdom of Noise. I certainly need not tell you of the consequences you will suffer if you should fail.

As you begin to guide your patient in pursuit of the Miserific Vision, I am sending you this little book entitled The Screwtape Letters, purportedly authored by one of the Enemy’s most famous advocates, CS Lewis.

As you will see when you begin to read it, however, the book consists of letters sent by Screwtape--one of our finest Tempters and now a very highly placed assistant to Our Father Below--to his nephew Wormwood, then a beginning Tempter like yourself.

No one knows how these letters came to be in Lewis’s possession—he says in the foreward to the book that he has “no intention of explaining how this correspondence fell into his hands,” and probably we shall never know.

However, these letters do offer some of Screwtape’s most profound and practical suggestions for securing the effective damnation of a patient. Had the unfortunate Wormwood taken them more to heart—but then, I have no wish to frighten you, any more than is necessary to focus your mind.

As an aside, I must tell you that I find it difficult to imagine how any of the hairless bipeds manages to make any sense of this book. How strange it must be for them to read Screwtape’s sly, ironic, and scathing social and theological commentary, as he speaks of their God as The Enemy, and of our Master as The Father Below. And how disconcerting for them to gain a glimpse of the methods—ordinary and simple as they are—by which we gradually lead them from the Enemy’s music and light into the Noise and Darkness of Hell.

My dear Verminette, if you are wise enough to read this book you will discover Screwtape’s masterful elaboration of what differentiates Our Father Below from our Enemy.

To quote Screwtape, “To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His.

"We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full ad flows over. Our aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.”

Imagine, Verminette—our Enemy actually loves the hairless bipeds and seeks to unite with them instead of consume them! What a horrifying thought.

Verminette, the Screwtape Letters will give you many examples of techniques and strategies you can put to practical use on your own patient. You will see in the letters that the state of the patient’s soul fluctuates as he experiences conversion to Christianity, doubt, dangerous friendships, war and love. Screwtape examines each of these experiences and the opportunities each provides for Wormwood’s patient to turn to our Enemy or to slip to our Father Below.

In particular, Screwtape recommends that Wormwood promote in his patient gluttony, sexual immorality, the distraction of immediate sensory experiences, skepticism, fear, boredom, living in the future, and the corrupting of spirituality.

Some of these strategies may be familiar to you, Verminette. But you may not be familiar with some of the others. Living in the future, for example. You should pay particular attention to Screwtape’s analysis of this technique and why it can be so effective in tempting patients to Our Father Below.

Screwtape says, “The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

"Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear.

"Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present: fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.”

Another unusual strategy Screwtape advocates is the corruption of the patient’s well-meaning spirituality. In one of the earlier letters Screwtape advises Wormwood that “One of our great allies at present is the Church itself.”

“Do not misunderstand me,” he goes on to say. “I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate.

"When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print.

"When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like “the body of Christ” and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.

"At his present stage, you see, he has an idea of Christians in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. His mind is full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real—though of course an unconscious—- difficulty to him.”

Screwtape tells Wormwood, “Never let it come to the surface; never let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.”

Verminette, this letter is already too long and I have just begun to describe the valuable lessons you will find in “The Screwtape Letters.” I do hope that I have been able to give you a taste of the book and whetted your appetite for reading it in full. Please do attend to its lessons, particularly the fate of Wormwood. Should you also let a soul slip through your fingers, you will know his fate in a distinctly personal way.

Your affectionate auntie,

Nightshade