Work record
The Screwtape Letters
1942 · Early 20th Century · Novel · English
Abstract
Background. An Oxford don and recent convert, Lewis conceived in the summer of 1940 a set of letters from an old devil to a young one and published them week by week in a church paper during the Blitz year.
Plot. Only the uncle's side survives. His nephew's young Englishman turns Christian at once, then slides among clever unbelieving friends, recovers through repentance, and falls in love with a devout girl whose family strengthens him. Through it all the uncle grows angrier, is denounced by his own nephew, and at last records that a bomb has carried the young man straight into glory.
Method. Everything is reversed: God is the adversary, vice is prudence, and the devil's fears are the reader's guide to the good. The bureaucratic tone of memoranda and departmental rivalry turns Hell into an office of mutual hunger.
Themes. Gradual drift, anxiety about tomorrow, the natural ebb and flow of devotion, pride disguised as humility, fashionable additions to faith, and the goodness of ordinary pleasures which Hell can spoil but never make.
Significance. It made its author famous on both sides of the Atlantic, became a model for satire spoken by a tempter, and remains one of the most read Christian books of its century.
Main characters
- Screwtape: Senior devil and Undersecretary, the sole voice of the letters
- Wormwood: Nephew and novice tempter whose replies are never shown
- The patient: Unnamed young English convert, the object of Wormwood's work
- The patient's mother: Fussy elderly woman, a source of household friction
- The young woman: Devout girl whom the patient loves, with a household Screwtape loathes
- Toadpipe: Secretary who takes over the pen in Letter XXII
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Summary
The Screwtape Letters is a book of thirty-one letters written by Screwtape, a senior devil in the bureaucracy of Hell, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter on his first assignment. Wormwood's charge is a young Englishman, never named and called only the patient, who lives with his mother at the outbreak of the Second World War. Screwtape refers to God as the Enemy and to Satan as Our Father Below, and his advice, offered with weary condescension and affectionate menace, shows temptation from the tempter's side. In the first letter Screwtape tells Wormwood to keep the patient's mind on ordinary, everyday things and away from argument, since real reasoning might lead him toward the Enemy. In the second letter Wormwood has already failed: the patient has become a Christian. Screwtape is not discouraged. He advises Wormwood to make the patient despise the ordinary people in his pew, to turn his prayers toward his own feelings, and to sharpen domestic irritations with his mother. When war begins, Screwtape warns that its suffering may drive men toward God and urges Wormwood to fasten the patient's anxiety on imagined futures rather than present duties. He explains the law of Undulation, the natural rise and fall of human enthusiasm, and teaches Wormwood to exploit the troughs. The patient falls in with a smart, worldly couple who mock his faith, and for a time he drifts; then he repents after a walk to an old mill and recovers himself. Screwtape discourses on humility, on keeping men in the future rather than the present, on choosing churches to suit one's taste, on the mother's fussy gluttony of delicacy, on love and marriage, on humor and flippancy, and on the safest road to Hell, which is gradual. When the patient falls in love with a devout young woman and is drawn into her warm Christian household, Screwtape is so enraged that he turns into a large centipede and his secretary Toadpipe finishes the letter. Wormwood, meanwhile, reports his uncle to the Secret Police for an unguarded remark that the Enemy really loves humans. The last letters follow the patient through the air raids on his town, where he does his duty despite fear. In the final letter Screwtape reports that the patient has been killed in a raid and has passed straight into the presence of God and the company of the angels, beyond Wormwood's reach. Screwtape closes by promising his nephew to Hell's hunger for failed tempters. The letters first appeared weekly in the Anglican paper The Guardian from May to November 1941, and Geoffrey Bles published the book in February 1942, dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis added Screwtape Proposes a Toast in 1959, collected with a new preface in 1961.
Virtues in this work
- Humility: Screwtape's long effort in Letter XIV to make the patient proud of his own humility shows by inversion that true humility is self-forgetfulness.
- Fortitude: The patient does his duty through the air raids despite fear, which Screwtape admits is a defeat for Wormwood.
- Charity: The young woman's household, full of ordinary Christian love, so enrages Screwtape that he turns into a centipede in Letter XXII.
- Temperance: Screwtape's account of the mother's gluttony of delicacy in Letter XVII shows that intemperance can lie in fussiness over small portions as well as in excess.
Plot or Argument
- Letters I-II: The patient converts
Screwtape recommends distracting the patient with ordinary things rather than argument; by the second letter the patient has become a Christian, and Screwtape turns to spoiling his first experience of church.
- Letters III-VII: Home, prayer and the coming of war
Wormwood is told to feed petty friction with the patient's mother, to direct prayer toward the patient's own moods, and, as war begins, to keep him anxious about the future and uncertain whether to be a patriot or a pacifist for the wrong reasons.
- Letters VIII-XI: Undulation and worldly friends
Screwtape explains the natural rise and fall of human feeling and the use of spiritual dry periods; the patient falls in with a fashionable, skeptical couple, and Screwtape analyzes joy, fun, the joke and flippancy.
- Letters XII-XVII: Small sins and religious fashions
Screwtape praises the gradual road to Hell, despairs when the patient repents after a country walk, and turns to false humility, living in the future, church-shopping and the gluttony of delicacy shown by the patient's mother.
- Letters XVIII-XXII: Love and the young woman
Screwtape lectures on sex, marriage and being in love; Wormwood informs on his uncle; the patient falls in love with a Christian girl, and Screwtape, in fury, becomes a centipede while Toadpipe completes the letter.
- Letters XXIII-XXVII: Her household and his mind
With the patient among the girl's family, Screwtape tries the historical Jesus, spiritual pride, the craving for novelty, a false unselfishness between lovers, and doubts about the use of prayer.
- Letters XXVIII-XXXI: Air raids and death
Screwtape hopes the patient will live long enough to grow worldly, studies cowardice and fatigue under bombing, and finally reports the patient's death in a raid and his entry into Heaven, then turns on Wormwood.
Characters
- Screwtape, letter-writer
A senior devil and Undersecretary in Hell's bureaucracy whose urbane, cynical advice makes up the whole book.
- Wormwood, Screwtape's nephew
Inexperienced junior tempter assigned to the patient, eager for spectacular wickedness and inclined to blunder.
- The patient, Wormwood's charge
An unnamed young Englishman who becomes a Christian, wavers, recovers, falls in love, and dies in an air raid.
- The patient's mother, the patient's mother
Elderly woman whose fussiness over small portions of food Screwtape calls the gluttony of delicacy.
- The young woman, the patient's beloved
Devout Christian girl whose love and family draw the patient deeper into faith.
- Toadpipe, Screwtape's secretary
Completes Letter XXII after Screwtape turns into a centipede.
- Slubgob, head of the Tempters' Training College
Principal of the school where Wormwood was trained, mentioned with disdain by Screwtape.
- Our Father Below, Screwtape's name for Satan
The master of Hell, never seen, whose purposes Screwtape claims to serve.
- The Enemy, Screwtape's name for God
The Creator, whom the devils cannot understand and whose love for humans they find incomprehensible.
Lessons
Temptation through the small and ordinary
Screwtape prefers small, dull sins that edge the patient away from God over grand crimes that might alarm him. Lewis shows that a life can be lost by drift as surely as by rebellion, and that the tempter's best allies are habit, distraction and inattention.
- Why does Screwtape tell Wormwood in Letter XII that small sins are enough?
- Which of the tactics in the early letters would work best on someone your age, and why?
- Is drift really more dangerous than open wickedness?
Reading by inversion
Because the speaker is a devil, every piece of praise is a warning and every complaint is good news. The reader must keep turning Screwtape's values upside down, and the book trains a habit of moral attention by making its readers do this work.
- Find a passage where Screwtape's fear tells you what is truly good for the patient.
- How can you tell when Screwtape is lying to Wormwood, or to himself?
- What does the book gain by never letting the Enemy speak directly?
The present moment and the future
Screwtape wants humans to live in anxiety about the future or nostalgia for the past, because the present is where duty, grace and eternity meet. Lewis turns the wartime fear of invasion and bombing into a lesson about attending to the task in front of one.
- Why does Screwtape want the patient anxious about what might happen in the war?
- How does the patient's conduct in the air raids show that Screwtape's plan failed?
Ordinary goods as the Enemy's ground
Screwtape is defeated by a country walk, a book read for pleasure, a family supper and a love affair, which bring the patient back to reality and to God. Lewis treats real pleasures as gifts from God that the devils can only distort, never create.
- Why does Screwtape say that real pleasure is dangerous to the devils' cause?
- What does the patient's walk to the old mill in Letter XIII do for him?
- Why does the girl's household frighten Screwtape so much?
Context
Lewis wrote the letters in 1940-1941, during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, when English readers faced conscription, air raids and the possibility of invasion. The patient's world of ration-era households, fire-watching and air-raid duty is the world of the book's first readers. Lewis was then a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and newly known as a Christian writer after The Problem of Pain (1940).
Composition
Lewis wrote to his brother in July 1940 that he had conceived the idea of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil on his first patient. The thirty-one letters ran weekly in The Guardian, an Anglican church paper, from May to November 1941; the preface is dated 5 July 1941. Geoffrey Bles published the book in February 1942 with a dedication to J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis wrote Screwtape Proposes a Toast, an after-dinner speech at the Tempters' Training College, in 1959, and the 1961 edition added it with a new preface.
Reception
The book was reprinted many times during the war and made Lewis famous in Britain and the United States; it remains his most widely read book for adults after Mere Christianity. It established a popular form of moral satire told from the devil's point of view and has been adapted for the stage and as audio drama.
Comparisons
- the-pilgrims-progress
Bunyan shows the pilgrim's road from the traveler's side; Lewis shows the same road from the tempter's office, with Screwtape's gradual slope answering Bunyan's By-path Meadow.
- paradise-lost
Lewis's own Preface to Paradise Lost argued that Milton's Satan is absurd and self-deceived rather than heroic, and Screwtape is that argument dramatized as a vain, bureaucratic devil.
- the-divine-comedy
Dante's Hell is ordered by kinds of sin; Lewis's is ordered like a government office, and both treat damnation as the soul's own chosen shrinking.
- the-brothers-karamazov
Ivan's conversation with a shabby, ironic devil anticipates Screwtape's mixture of urbanity and pettiness, and both books treat the devil as a parasite on human pride.
- letters-and-papers-from-prison
Two Christian books of wartime letters, one fictional and comic from Oxford, one real from a Berlin cell, both asking how faith works amid air raids and fear.
- pensees
Pascal's diversion, the habit of filling life with distraction so as not to face God and death, is exactly the policy Screwtape urges in his first letter.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils.”
Frequently cited
“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
For Students
A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.
Reading Guide
Watch for
- The vocabulary of inversion: God is the Enemy, Satan is Our Father Below, and Heaven's victories are Hell's disasters. Keep translating as you read.
- Letter II, where the patient has already become a Christian, and how Screwtape immediately shifts from preventing faith to spoiling it through the people in the pew.
- The law of Undulation in Letter VIII and the claim that humans are amphibians, half spirit and half animal.
- Moments when Screwtape loses control: the slip about the Enemy's love that Wormwood reports to the Secret Police, and his transformation into a centipede in Letter XXII.
- How the war enters the book, from anxiety over the future in Letter VI to the air raids of the last letters and the patient's death in Letter XXXI.
Key terms and names
- The Enemy
- Screwtape's name for God. The devils cannot understand why the Enemy wants humans to become free, loving creatures rather than food for themselves.
- Our Father Below
- Screwtape's name for Satan, whose service is described in the language of rank, departments and reports.
- The patient
- The young Englishman assigned to Wormwood. Lewis never names him, so that any reader can see himself in the role.
- Law of Undulation
- Screwtape's term in Letter VIII for the rise and fall of human feeling and zeal. The Enemy uses the troughs to grow the patient's faith; the tempter wants him to think them permanent.
- Gluttony of delicacy
- Screwtape's phrase in Letter XVII for the patient's mother's sin: not eating too much, but insisting peevishly on small, exactly prepared portions.
- Christianity And
- Screwtape's plan in Letter XXV to make faith one ingredient among others, such as a social cause or a fashion, so that the addition becomes the real object of devotion.
- The Tempters' Training College
- The school in Hell, run by Slubgob, where Wormwood learned his trade; it is also the setting of Screwtape Proposes a Toast.
Seminar Questions
- Comprehension In Letter I, why does Screwtape want Wormwood to keep the patient away from argument and focused on ordinary things?
- Comprehension What happens to the patient between Letter I and Letter II, and how does Screwtape propose to use the people at the patient's church?
- Comprehension How does the patient die in Letter XXXI, and what does Screwtape say he saw at that moment?
- Interpretation Screwtape claims that small sins are as useful as large ones in Letter XII. What does this reveal about how Lewis understood sin and its effects over time?
- Interpretation Why does the patient's walk to the old mill in Letter XIII alarm Screwtape, and what does it suggest about pleasure and reality?
- Interpretation Screwtape loses control twice, once in a slip about the Enemy's love and once by becoming a centipede. What do these moments reveal about the nature of Hell?
- Interpretation Why does Lewis never give the patient or the young woman a name?
- Big Question Lewis's preface warns against both disbelief in devils and excessive interest in them. Is it possible to write a book about devils that avoids both errors, and does this one succeed?
Faith Connections
- 1 Peter 5:8-9 (Scripture)
Peter warns that the devil prowls like a roaring lion and calls believers to be sober and resist him. Screwtape's devils are less lions than clerks, but the call to vigilance is the same, and the patient's ordinary faithfulness is his resistance.
- Ephesians 6:10-18 (Scripture)
Paul says the Christian's struggle is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual powers. Lewis gives that struggle a comic, bureaucratic face while keeping its stakes deadly serious.
- Matthew 6:34 (Scripture)
Jesus tells his hearers not to be anxious about tomorrow. Screwtape's strategy in Letters VI and XV is the exact opposite: keep the patient living in fearful futures and away from the present.
- Augustine, City of God XI-XII (Church Fathers)
Augustine teaches that evil has no substance of its own but is a privation of good. Screwtape admits the same when he complains that the devils can produce no pleasure of their own and can only twist what the Enemy has made.
Logic and Rhetoric
Central argument: Hell's aim is to separate a soul from God by whatever means work. Large sins alarm the conscience, while small distractions, irritations and anxieties pass unnoticed. Therefore the tempter's best strategy is gradual drift, using ordinary life against the soul. But ordinary life belongs to God: a walk, a friendship, a love, a duty done in fear all return the patient to reality. Therefore the devils, who can only distort what God has made, are defeated by the very ordinariness they hoped to exploit.
Rhetorical device: irony through an unreliable narrator. In Letter XII Screwtape calls the gradual road the safest road to Hell, meaning it as practical advice to Wormwood; the reader hears the same sentence as a warning, so that the devil's counsel instructs against itself throughout the book.
Debate: Resolved: Writing from the devil's point of view teaches virtue more effectively than writing from the saint's.
Writing Prompts
Essay: Using at least three letters, argue whether the patient is saved chiefly by his own choices, by other people, or by grace working through ordinary circumstances.
Comparison with The Pilgrim's Progress: Bunyan tells the Christian life as a journey seen by the pilgrim; Lewis tells it as a campaign seen by the enemy. Compare how each book represents temptation and argue which perspective better reveals the danger of gradual drift.
Medical Lens
Though a work of moral theology, the book is full of shrewd psychology that a psychiatrist will recognize. Screwtape's law of Undulation describes the ordinary rise and fall of mood, zeal and energy and distinguishes these natural troughs from spiritual failure; Lewis's point that dryness is normal rather than a sign of loss has been read alongside later distinctions between low mood and depressive illness, though Lewis offers no clinical account. The letters on anxiety and the future anticipate cognitive accounts of worry as rehearsal of imagined catastrophes, and the air-raid letters describe fear, fatigue and irritability under bombing as wartime civilians knew them. Screwtape's insistence that humans are amphibians, half spirit and half animal, and that bodily posture affects prayer, is a compact mind-body argument. The mother's gluttony of delicacy, a tyranny of insisting on very small, exactly prepared portions, is a sketch of food fussiness as a moral rather than medical matter. These parallels are interpretive readings, not claims about Lewis's intentions.
- Letter VI
Screwtape urges Wormwood to keep the patient in suspense and anxiety about wartime dangers that may never come, rather than in present duty.
- Letters VIII-IX
The law of Undulation: humans as creatures of body and spirit pass through natural peaks and troughs of feeling, which tempters try to exploit during dry periods.
- Letter IV
Screwtape advises turning prayer toward the patient's own feelings and notes that bodily posture in prayer affects the soul.
- Letter XVII
The patient's mother demands tiny, exactly prepared portions and makes the household miserable; Screwtape calls this gluttony of delicacy.
- Letters XXIX-XXX
Fear, cowardice, fatigue and short temper during air raids, and Screwtape's attempts to use exhaustion against the patient.
- Letter XXXI
The patient's sudden death in an air raid, described from the devils' side as a soul passing beyond their reach.
Creative Prompts
- Fiction
Write a thirty-second letter from Screwtape to a new junior tempter whose patient is a high school student today, keeping Lewis's inverted values and Screwtape's voice.
- Essay
Screwtape loses because of a country walk, a girl's family and an air raid. Argue what Lewis believed actually defeats temptation, using at least three letters.
- Dialogue
Write the reply Wormwood might have sent after Letter XXII, defending himself and explaining why the patient fell in love.
- Classroom
Make a two-column chart of Screwtape's advice in Letters I-XII: in one column, what he recommends; in the other, the virtue his advice reveals by inversion.
Further Reading
- Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis
- The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis
Lewis's dream-vision of Hell and Heaven, written soon after Screwtape.
- A Preface to Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis
Lewis's 1942 lectures on Milton, including his reading of Satan.
- The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis
- C. S. Lewis: A Biography, Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper
Verification notes
Serialization in The Guardian (May-November 1941), Bles publication in February 1942, the Tolkien dedication, the thirty-one letters, the characters, and Screwtape Proposes a Toast (1959) were checked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters. The preface sentence and the preface date of July 5, 1941 were checked at https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2018/07/03/preface-to-the-screwtape-letters/, which reproduces the preface. The Letter XII sentence was checked at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters (with page reference) and in reproductions at https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/column/52839/the-screwtape-letters-the-road-to-heaven-or-hell and https://www.stgeorgesonline.com/2016/03/10/screwtapes-safest-road-hell/. Letter numbers for individual topics are given from knowledge of the text and LitCharts summaries; plot outline is well established.
- Text is under copyright; check quotations against an authorized edition before publication.
- Letter numbers assigned to individual topics (e.g. anxiety in Letter VI, Christianity And in Letter XXV, the old mill in Letter XIII).
- The exact nature of the patient's wartime service (air-raid duty at home is assumed from the final letters).
- Date and wording of Lewis's July 1940 letter to his brother describing the idea.
- That Wormwood's report to the Secret Police follows the remark in Letter XIX.