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The Screwtape Letters

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The Bible says in James 2:19, “Thou believest there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.” Clive Staples Lewis, the author of The Screwtape Letters, “viewed human beings as being on the road of life progressing toward a state of heaven or hell” (Christensen 27). “Each moral choice [an individual makes] furthers [the individual] along the road and slowly changes [the individual] into a more heavenly of hellish creature” (qtd. in Christensen 27). The Screwtape Letters delves into a conversation between Screwtape, a high-ranking demon, and his nephew, Wormwood via letter. In those letters, Screwtape instructs Wormwood on how to keep his client, a young Englishman, from seeing the light of Salvation. The demons in hell …show more content…

C.S. Lewis was born November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Ireland, to Albert James Lewis and Florence Augusta Lewis (Green 19). “As a child and teenager, Lewis was fascinated by fantasy writing” (Florman 1). Lewis received education through tutors until he was sent to Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire. “He excelled at Latin and Greek in school… Lewis ultimately graduated Oxford with a ‘triple-first’ in English, Classics, and Philosophy…” (Florman 1). As a young man, “Lewis fought in World War I… [an] experience that made him an atheist throughout his twenties” (Florman 1) Lewis then joined the Anglican Church in his early thirties under the influence of a . C.S. Lewis developed his reputation by writing allegorical novels having to do with God, the Christian life, and the Devil. Over the course of his career, C.S. Lewis wrote seventy-four novels including Mere Christianity, The Chronicles of Narnia series, The Four Loves, and numerous essays concerning the life of a Christian and was ranked “eleventh out of fifty for being among the top British authors since 1945” (Shearer 1). In this particular book, C.S. Lewis warns believers and potential converts of the ways that the devil would attempt to bring the individual to the real enemy. Some of those tactics include the promotion of shallow prayers, oblivion, misdirection of intentions, uncertainty, and temptation. In The Screwtape Letters, “the perils of temptation and the joys of salvation are both dramatized and analyzed, providing the reader with a double vision in which the imagination and the intellect are simultaneously illumined” (McDonald 24).
The Screwtape Letters takes place in England during the 1940’s in the midst of World War II. The world was in shambles over a universal dispute between the Axis and Allied

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C.S. Lewis, a Christian writer from England, penned a manuscript in 1942 called The Screwtape Letters that examined the temptations presented to man by Satan. “Lewis's Screwtape Letters was certainly one of his most popular works, and by his own admission it was a work that he found easy to write” (Harwood 24). By being a Christian himself, Lewis could sympathize and identify with fellow Christians undergoing the onslaught of spiritual attacks. Christians struggle daily with the temptations of Satan similar to those that Screwtape directs his nephew, Wormwood, to employ towards the Patient. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis uses the character, Patient, to symbolize everyman and his struggles with overcoming temptations by showing how Screwtape attempts to conjure a plan for Wormwood to lure the Patient to the Devil’s camp with Satan’s insipid temptations of vanity,

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Authored by C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters is a collection of writings addressed from Screwtape, the high-ranking assistant to Lucifer, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter. The letters contain examples of previous successful cases, and the advice of Screwtape to Wormwood about the soul of the “patient” to whom he was assigned. The patient, whom Wormwood was to corrupt, lived in England during World War II, and was converted to the Church of England as an adult. Consequently, he is constantly tormented by Wormwood through the directives of Screwtape, both of whom try to fill his life with immoralities in the midst of his newfound Christianity. In giving his advice to Wormwood, Screwtape shows clever subtlety in tempting patients to self-centeredness

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