Editor’s Note: A stage performance of “The Screwtape Letters” that was scheduled for Sept. 30 at the Abilene Convention Center has been cancelled. Dr. Larry Fink, retired English professor at Hardin-Simmons University, wrote the following commentary for Spirit of Abilene. In it, he asks the question, “So, why do people love this book, and why should you read it? …It’s wildly imaginative. And it’s wickedly funny, but also, theologically profound.

By LARRY E. FINK

In 1970, Kris Kristofferson released a ballad called “To Beat the Devil.” In it, a down-and-out musician steps into a Nashville bar and has a memorable conversation:

I saw that there was just one old man sittin’ at the bar.
And in the mirror I could see him checkin’ me and my guitar.
An’ he turned and said: “Come up here boy, and show us what you are.”
I said: “I’m dry.” He bought me a beer.

He nodded at my guitar and said: “It’s a tough life, ain’t it?”
I just looked at him. He said: “You ain’t makin’ any money, are you?”
I said: “You’ve been readin’ my mail.”

He just smiled and said: “Let me see that guitar.
“I’ve got something you oughta hear.”
Then he laid it on me:

The musician listens to the old man’s song, and closes with these lines:

If you don’t want to join him
You gotta beat him
I ain’t saying I beat the devil
But I drank his beer for nothing,
Then I stole his song.

Thanks to C.S. Lewis, we can read the devil’s mail—some of it, anyway—the letters “collected” in Lewis’ epistolary fantasy novel, The Screwtape Letters. Epistolary novel? A novel in the form of letters. One of the very first novels—Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded—was such a work. Published in 1740—a huge best seller in its day, and still entertaining. 

I call Screwtape a fantasy novel simply because the narrator is a supernatural being. Like the best fiction—realistic or fantastic—the book deals with serious moral and spiritual themes. In it the author invents much, beginning with the idea that fallen angels write letters to each other and that they have relatives. Screwtape’s letters are written to his nephew,  a novice tempter named Wormwood. If it’s a novel, what’s the plot? Without giving much away, it’s about Wormwood’s efforts to lure a new Christian back into the infernal fold, with the help of his uncle’s advice.

One Lewis expert (Walter Hooper) estimates that Lewis wrote, perhaps, as many as ten thousand letters in his lifetime. So, on one hand, this form was natural for him. But, Lewis explains, “Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment.” “The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp.” The result? One of his best-selling titles. When a portrait of him filled the cover of TIME magazine, five years after Screwtape was published, the painter pictured him with an angel on one shoulder and a devil—Uncle Screwtape?—on the other. (Caption under the portrait: “OXFORD’S C.S. LEWIS His heresy: Christianity.”)

Lewis offers valuable insights and advice for the first-time reader in his prefaces: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist and a magician with the same delight.” “Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle.” (By “magician,” he means someone who dabbles in the occult, not a sleight-of-hand performer.)

His purpose is “not to speculate about diabolical life but to throw light from a new angle on the life of men.” Lewis’ hell (as we talk about “Milton’s Paradise” and “Dante’s Inferno”) is divided into different departments, like a large corporation. “We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” “Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”  “. . . an official society held together entirely by fear and greed”.

So, why do people love this book, and why should you read it? As suggested above, it’s wildly imaginative. And it’s wickedly funny, but also, theologically profound.

One source of reading pleasure is Lewis’ masterful handling of irony, that powerful tool in the hand of the satirist. Satire makes fun of something that’s wrong in order to bring it to the reader’s attention and spur reform—exactly what Lewis is doing here, belittling Satan and spurring the reader to reform his life in the light of certain spiritual realities that fallen angels see more clearly than we do. Paradoxically, the best fantasy takes us closer to reality in a roundabout way. 

Before the opening line of chapter one, Lewis quotes two great Christian thinkers: 

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” –Martin Luther

“The devil . . . the proud spirite . . . cannot endure to be mocked.” –Thomas More

To enjoy the ironic humor of the book, make a little effort, early on, to grasp—to hear—Uncle Screwtape’s tone. If you’ve ever gotten in trouble for your “tone of voice,” you already know how important tone is. “Tone” in fiction and poetry refers to the mood or attitude of the narrator. Keep in mind what you already know about Screwtape: he “lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” It will also help you “hear” him if you keep his audience in mind, his far less experienced nephew whom he sees as naïve, ignorant, and vastly inferior to himself. 

With an ear for tone, you will more quickly catch the insights Lewis offers on a variety of important subjects: prayer, marriage, church, sacraments, emotions, faith, time, death, and more.

I have space for just one example, but it’s a timely one, as some Christians today are struggling with their relationships to the visible church. In Screwtape, as he does in Mere Christianity, Lewis projects a vision of the church that’s grand, beautiful, even cosmic in nature. Thus, the view of it from below is strangely heartening:

“One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle  which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans.”  

spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners  Meditate on that description of the Church occasionally!

Finally, The Screwtape Letters is treasured for its power to instruct and convict, much like Lewis’ imaginative vision of heaven in The Great Divorce. Do not be surprised to find passages that hit a little too close to home. In my copy, “Ouch!” is scrawled many times in the margins.  

Dr. Larry E. Fink is a retired professor of English at Hardin-Simmons University