C.S. Lewis

The Screwtape Letters

The dedication of this book is to J.R.R. Tolkien.

The Screwtape Letters was a bit hard to read. Lewis is a genius and I am not, so the peon struggled at times. However, the book was frighteningly insightful. FRIGHTENINGLY. Such a good review of what makes man tick and what evil consumes him, but balanced by salt and light. The whole book involves the battle between good and evil for the prize of one man's soul. He is referred to as the "patient".

From the inside dust jacket:
"...a series of letters written by Screwtape to Wormwood, his nephew, who is a junior devil on earth."

Delicious: "Jargon, not argument is your best ally in keeping him from the Church."

Things I particularly liked:

Pg. 20: "You must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office."
Kind of funny, but truly a huge flaw so many of us have.

Pg. 21: "...his attention will be kept on what he regards as [his mother's] sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself."

Pg. 21: "...you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls."

Pg. 27: "For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if he ever consciously directs his prayers "Not to what I think Thou art but to what Thy knowest Thyself to be", our situations is, for the moment, desperate."

The above quote is a big one for me in recent years. The shift away from "feeling" is entirely novel for me. But I believe it's so important for a genuine relationship with God. Feelings are so temporal and so dominated by physical and other factors. How distracting it is to attempt to "feel" one's way to God. How distracting and how wrong.

On Pg. 32 Lewis paints an interesting picture of nursing homes and medical staff of yesteryear, of withholding information to spare people emotional pain. These days a doctor will tell you quite plainly that you're done for, so I thought this was a quaint smile on the past.

Pg. 32: "...a faith which is destroyed by a war or a pestilence cannot really have been worth the trouble of destroying."

The above sounds so easily true, but it is actually a terribly, unspeakably difficult truth.

Pg. 45 and 46: Apparently C.S. Lewis doesn't favor election. I wonder what my election-favoring, C.S. Lewis-loving friends would think of this.

Pg. 51: "If you can once get him to the point of thinking that 'religion is all very well up to a point,' you can feel quite happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us [hell-dwellers] as no religion at all - and more amusing."

Pg. 73: Lewis introduces the novel concept of humility being twisted to the devil's advantage by man trying to deny his own talents, an impossible thing that occupies him with futility and frustration... while the idea, God's idea of humility, is an honest acknowledgement of say, one's looks or intellect and then a quick, forgetting of it... for as we know these gifts are from above and we are only blessed to have them for a while. Nothing to be proud of and everything to be grateful for.

Pg. 76: "Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind."

Pg. 103: On the topic of the publicity given the nude female form (which in press is airbrushed, "propped up", and starved) Lewis says men's desires are being directed to something which does not exist... making related aesthetics entirely crucial yet simultaneously utterly impossible! Ah, the devil's work!

Pg. 104: "...there is another type [of woman] which he desires brutally, and desires to desire brutally... the man would wish that she was not someone else's wife and be sorry that he could not love her lawfully... by our art [the attraction] can be made to play on the raw nerve of his private obsession."
Something about this was intensely ugly and true.

And regarding losing the patient to marriage in lieu of promiscuity:

"...there are other, and more indirect methods of using a man's sexuality to his undoing. And, by the way, they are not only efficient, but delightful; the unhappiness produced is of a very lasting and exquisite kind."

Pg. 109: "We produce this sense of ownership...the finely graded differences that run from 'my boots' through 'my dog', 'my servant', 'my wife', 'my father', 'my master' and 'my country', to 'my God'. They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of 'my boots', the 'my' of ownership. Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by 'my Teddy-bear'... 'the bear I can pull to pieces if I like.' And '...we have taught men to say 'My God' in a sense not really very different... meaning 'The God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit.'"

This is so true and probably the most important passage of this book. It is seen practiced by the masses daily. It is a wonder that Lewis could even give such explicit word to the phenomenon. I can not say enough about this particular excerpt/concept.

Pg. 112: Wormwood's is a "Miserific Vision"! LOL!

Pg. 137: This reminds me of a friend's reasoning:
"If the thing he prays for doesn't happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don't work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and 'therefore it would have happened anyway,' thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective."
This takes some kind of genius to deduce. This is why the Screwtape Letters floored me again and again.

Pg. 138: Interesting concept of the spiritual universe v. the corporeal universe.

Pg. 141: "...I did not want to have your rather infantile rhapsodies about the death of men..."
I just like the way this sounded!

Pg. 143: "Prosperity knits a man to the world."
Why is this not a saying? I mean, really. Why do I not see this on bumperstickers and T-shirts? And listen to what Lewis follows it with:
"He feels that he is 'finding his place in [the world]', when really it is finding its place in him."
Each turn of the page finds a giant nugget of truth smacking you in the face like a 4-ton flounder. It is not good to feel at home here. In hungering for God our resolve and perspective on release (death) are healthier.

Pg. 144: I see Time as the "creeping death" although it is described here as experience.

Pg. 153: "...let his inner resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it 'for a reasonable period' - and let the reasonable period be shorter than the trial is likely to last. It need not be much shorter, in attacks on patience, chastity and fortitude, the fun is to make the man yield just when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight."

Floored. It also made me cry.

The biggest thing The Screwtape Letters did for me was to put word to many of my internal ponderings. It also clarified some of the blurred edges of my thought and united me to another human with whom I could identify. There is much to think about, much to remember, much to do.

Visit Lewis' grave.