A Tale of Temptation for Our Times

Joseph Loconte

Thoughts on ‘The Screwtape Letters’

It was during the Second World War, when the prospects of a humane and democratic future for Europe looked dim, that C. S. Lewis wrote his diabolical classic, The Screwtape Letters. It might be supposed that the daily atrocities unleashed by that conflict provided fodder for the imagination of this Oxford don. Indeed, an early reviewer concluded that Lewis was “earnest in his belief in devils, and as anxious to unmask their strategy against souls as our intelligence department to detect the designs of Hitler.” Others assumed that his account of the psychology of temptation was the fruit of long years in the study of moral theology.

Characteristically, Lewis offered an explanation much closer to home. “They forget that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works,” he wrote. “‘My heart’—I need no other’s—‘showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly.’”

The book’s themes—the bond between faith and reason, the lust to dominate, the immeasurable worth of every human soul—not only invite our attention: Their recovery may be the tonic our own spiritually troubled age most requires.

Thus the stage version of The Screwtape Letters, fresh from a popular run in New York and now playing at the Lansburgh Theatre in Washington, D.C., is an especially welcome treat. Lewis’s imaginative work consists of thirty-one letters from Screwtape, a senior devil in Hell’s civil service, addressed to Wormwood, a devil-in-training. The apprentice is charged with tempting a young man—“the patient”—in order to secure his soul for Hell. The stage production stars Max McLean in the title role and Karen Eleanor Wight as Toadpipe, his doting, slithering servant-demon. Directed by Jeffrey Fiske, the play deftly captures the book’s chilling insights into the nature of spiritual corruption.

As Lewis was never shy in pointing out, Christianity is widely viewed as a hopelessly “puritan” religion, a belief system that regards all pleasures with suspicion, fear, or loathing. The church has confirmed this prejudice a thousand times over, from its medieval debasement of marriage to the fundamentalist campaigns against alcohol. It surely remains one of the most stubborn obstacles to faith in our own day. In a way that few theologians have achieved, Lewis the layman artfully exposes this error as nothing less than a distortion of the character of God.

“Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground,” warns Screwtape. “He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which he has forbidden.” Here is plain talk, informed by Scripture, about the human condition—the denial or perversion of which has produced untold human misery.

The theatrical version of Screwtape reprises another timely theme of Lewis’s work: the fact that, since at least the Enlightenment, critics of Christianity have falsely assumed that thinking and believing are mutually exclusive activities. People may “cling” to faith out of bitterness and economic hardship, for example, as presidential hopeful Barack Obama recently suggested. They assuredly do not arrive at a place of belief, or remain there for long, with the help of rational thought.

These assumptions have helped to produce massive confusion about the relationship between faith, facts, and reason—a state of affairs for which Screwtape and his co-conspirators take credit. Thanks to their calculated efforts, we are told, most people don’t think of religious doctrines as “true” or “false,” but rather as “outworn,” “conventional,” “ruthless,” or worse. “Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church,” advises Screwtape. “Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.”

The last thing these devils want, we learn, is to awaken the patient’s reason; for that might set him along the honest path, where fictions are exposed and facts may finally penetrate the heart.

“For this I came into the world, to testify to the truth,” Jesus told Pontius Pilate at his trial. “Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” A look at such atheist tracts as Sam Harris’s The End of Faith suggests that Hell’s strategy of sneering at the very concept of truth can always find willing dupes and demagogues.

Perhaps the most poignant aspect of Lewis’s drama, hauntingly portrayed on stage, is the dreadful contrast between the children of Light and the children of Darkness. Hell has a hunger that cannot be sated; it is bent on devouring every human soul. Screwtape’s sleepless ambition is to possess, consume, and feast upon the tortured spirits of his victims. This is the object of all his machinations. “To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense.” That’s a fair description, by the way, of the nature of al Qaeda and its terrorist allies. There is something deeply grotesque about the willingness to target children for assassination, to enlist mothers as suicide bombers, to videotape ritualistic beheadings. The intent, of course, is to establish control over the lives of millions. Yet for all the talk about the “root causes” of religious extremism—poverty, globalization, U.S. foreign policy, etc.—we hear little about the spiritual dimension to this threat.

Compare all that to the motives of “the Enemy,” as admitted by Screwtape. God wants individuals united to him, people remade in his image, yet distinct and fully themselves. They are not seized through force or deception, but rather they exercise the freedom to choose God and the joy of his presence. “He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like his own, not because he has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to his,” Screwtape complains. “We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons.”

Here is the deep mystery about God and his dealings with men and women, the secret that even angels long to look into. It is the “appalling truth” that bewilders Screwtape and all the inhabitants of Hell. It is the mystery of the cross. In the stage version, Screwtape stammers to confess it: “He . . . He . . . He . . . loves them!” It is too much to bear. The devil catches himself, vacillates, equivocates, and recants. “But what is he really up to?”

A reviewer, writing in 1943, called The Screwtape Letters “a spectacular and satisfactory nova in the bleak sky of satire.” Thanks to an intelligent script and fine performances, the nova has reappeared. The light it brings may yet confound the skeptics, who see the sorrows of everyday life as proof of divine indifference. They conclude that Screwtape’s lament—“what is he really up to?”—can have no rational answer.

But for those who call themselves Christians, who know something of the love of God, the answer is revealed in his Son. Such knowledge is neither complete nor free of grief or struggle. Yet it brings hope—real hope—that shakes the gates of Hell and claims, by grace, the promise of Heaven.  

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy and a senior fellow at The Trinity Forum. Performances of The Screwtape Letters will continue at the Lansburgh Theatre until May 18.

Don't miss our feature article from actor Max McLean on playing Screwtape on stage.

Provocations, Arts and Culture, Good and Evil, Mon 28 Apr 2008