The Screwtape Letters

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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.