Let's Bust a Recap : The Screwtape Letters

Cue the fanfare. With today's post, we have officially cleared 2022 out of the To Be Blogged stack. Life is good.

(All right, fine, in all honesty, there is actually one more book from 2022 hanging out in the stack, but it is being saved for a specific post to come so just let me have my moment!)

The Screwtape Letters turned out to be my second C.S. Lewis read of 2022. Right about now I could feed you some line about how after not managing to read any Lewis at all in 2021, I felt the need to double-down last year, but the truth is: my book club selected it for the month of October, and this was actually my third or fourth time reading it. The Screwtape Letters is probably C.S. Lewis' most famous work outside of the Chronicles of Narnia, and I chose this book for my thesis project in my high school senior English course. I spent a lot of time in the library that semester with this very copy of the book and piles of other resources on Clive Staples Lewis, sitting across the table from my friend Sydney (who is now in the aforementioned book club with me and who's project was on The Pilgrim's Progress in case you were wondering. Our teacher constantly confused the two of us because I'm pretty sure we were the only two in the class who chose religious works from the approved list—what I wouldn't do to get my hands on a copy of that list today—and now this parenthetical rabbit trail has officially gone off the rails. Can I get a show of hands in the comments if you find the scattered inner workings and random reminiscences of my mind amusing? Or is this absolutely insufferable to read?). Naturally, as I've already confessed on this very blog, I didn't finish reading it at that point in my life, but I've read it since, and it's one that hits me differently every time I read it.

Let's focus. The Screwtape Letters is an epistolary novel made up of thirty-one letters from a senior demon called Screwtape who is acting as a mentor to his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man. Lewis used this self-termed "demonic ventriloquism" to address Christian theological issues having to do with temptation and the resistance to it. Throughout the novel, Screwtape gives Wormwood detailed advice on various methods of undermining God's directives, interspersed with observations on human nature and the Bible. The result is a masterclass in satire, entertaining and enlightening readers the world over with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life and foibles. The letters were originally published weekly in an Anglican periodical during wartime from May to November in 1941. The book was published the next year in February of 1942. Later in 1959, Lewis wrote a short article entitled "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" which was published in the Saturday Evening Post, and nowadays, this is typically included with The Screwtape Letters.

In a foreword to "Screwtape Proposes a Toast", Lewis stated he had never written anything more easily or with less enjoyment than The Screwtape Letters. Although he received numerous requests throughout his life to add to the letters, he resolved never to write another one saying the process of writing them almost smothered him before he finished. Despite that, in writing The Screwtape Letters, Lewis inspired loads of other authors to prepare sequels or similar works of their own. Even apart from literature, The Screwtape Letters can be seen cropping up in all forms of pop culture from comics, to music, to political discourse. 

As I mentioned earlier, each time that I read The Screwtape Letters, a particular letter will usually stand out like a sore thumb and hit me in a new way. On this particular go-round with the demons, Screwtape's words in his seventeenth letter to Wormwood seemed to jump off the page, and I've been ruminating on them ever since. In this letter, Screwtape is postulating on the temptation of gluttony, and he gives Wormwood the demonic distinction between the gluttony of Delicacy and the gluttony of Excess. While we humans tend to think of gluttony only in terms of Excess, Screwtape makes the point that quantities do not matter, "provided we can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness, and self-concern". He goes on to explain that "because what [the human] wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognizes as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others. At the very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is practising temperance." 

I mean, right?! This hit me like a load of bricks. In our culture, we seems to be increasingly obsessed with every single thing that goes into our bellies. We have to count calories, or we have to eat clean, or we can't eat off plastic, or, or, or....the list goes on and on. While we're merely "trying to be healthy", the ultimate reality is that instead of keeping our attention on Christ, we're being ruled by our own bodies. The deception is subtle, but aren't the cunning ones the most devious?

In sum, I highly recommend The Screwtape Letters. It holds up to multiple re-readings, and if it doesn't spark some self-examination, I'm not sure what will. It's good fun while still packing a punch, and no matter when I read it, it usually sends a little chill down my spine at some point or other which makes it a particularly good read for the fall when witches and demons and the forces of darkness tend to abound. 

Next up in my pilgrimage through the work of C.S. Lewis: Miracles.