Nowhere is this clearer than when Wormwood is excited by the outbreak of the Second World War, and Screwtape advises caution: wars bring souls as easily to God, “the Enemy,” as to the Devil, “Our Father Below.” In another letter addressing prayer, Screwtape writes, “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.” These demons aren’t digging pits of fire or offering bargains of absolute power, they are embedding themselves in the daily lives of their patients.
Work on that.” Adultery seems excessive when furrowed eyebrows and dismissive tones can do the work of ruining relationships slowly: “Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which grow up ten years later into domestic hatred.” “When two humans have lived together for many years,” he tells his nephew, “it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Screwtape is more than just a masterful theologian-he is a careful anthropologist.
He wants nothing but the best for his nephew, an erring neophyte unversed in the finer methods of temptation. “My dear Wormwood,” the letters begin, and we meet the first-person voice of the spine-tinglingly charming Screwtape, who signs off, “Your affectionate uncle.” Screwtape likes philosophy, admires history, and disdains science he is so cultured that in one letter he talks about reading in the British Museum, so hip that in another he says how helpful it will be to make use of “the ‘Life Force,’ the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis.”
“The patient” is an unremarkable man who fights with his mother, falls in love, and then dies in an air raid during the Second World War. An epistolary novel, “The Screwtape Letters” features a senior demon called Screwtape writing thirty-one letters of advice and encouragement to his inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, who is trying to win the soul of a nameless young man. Unlike Dante and Milton, he eschewed a grand theology of the cosmos, focussing instead on quotidian temptations of the common man. Its appeal, I think, comes from Lewis’s success in writing a theodicy of the everyday.
I remember wondering then, as I have been again since Justice Scalia’s interview, why the novel is still so popular. Three years ago, I saw one of the stage adaptations in New York, where it was shockingly difficult to get a ticket. Fox owns the film rights, and Ralph Winter, best known for blockbusters like “X-Men” and “Fantastic Four,” has said he will produce it. Continuously in print since Lewis published it in 1942, the novel has been adapted into plays, made into a comic book, and recorded as an audio drama by John Cleese. “The Screwtape Letters,” though, remains one of his most popular works.
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