One Of My Favorite Books: ‘The Screwtape Letters’

It’s Christmas break, so it seems like an appropriate time to discuss one of my favorite books: “The Screwtape Letters,” by C.S. Lewis. The book is all at once a deep rumination on religion, a high comedy rooted in the hilarity of both humanity’s flaws and Satan’s foibles, a tragedy about the nature of death, and a tale of redemption and everlasting life. It is a spectacularly good book. When you read “ The Screwtape Letters ,” there are a lot of truly funny moments. Lewis himself said, though, “Of all my books there was only one I did not take pleasure in writing,” calling it ‘dry and gritty going.’ “At the time, I was thinking of objections to the Christian life and decided to put them in the form ‘That’s what the devil would say.’ But making goods ‘bad’ and bads ‘good’ gets to be fatiguing.” The book is wildly entertaining because he is obviously writing in the voice of one of Satan’s minions. In Christian theology, Satan has a will of his own, and he’s rebelling against God, which makes him a really fascinating character. Lewis opens the book with a couple of epigraphs, one by Martin Luther: “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield the texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn,” and one by Sir Thomas More: “The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.” The book is written from the perspective of Screwtape as letters to his nephew, Wormwood. Wormwood has been given the on-the-ground task of convincing a young man away from his incipient Christianity and Screwtape’s job to advise Wormwood on the best way to procure the young man’s soul. This gives Lewis extraordinary leeway to stick and move with Satan, to make fun, to mock, to play with the entire idea. And what emerges is a great work of literature. There are a bunch of large-scale arguments that Lewis makes in “The Screwtape Letters.” The first one is that Satan’s best weapon is the “real world.” That is correct. If you talk to secular people, they’ll always say that the spiritual world and God are unreal. The real world is the material world. But then, when you ask them about what’s important to them, they’ll talk about their feelings, which, of course, are inherently unreal in the same way the spiritual world is unreal. This is a point that Lewis makes: the definition of “real” is capacious and changing on a regular basis among secularists. Lewis believes that man’s draw to the divine can be rooted in reason, and that reason actually guides you toward something beyond yourself. It guides you toward the transcendent. That’s an idea that I heartily agree with. I believe that the notion of free will and free choice in the universe guides you toward the idea that there must be something beyond us, that there’s a logic to the universe that guides...

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