The Screwtape Letters

“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 […]. There is wishful thinking in hell as well as on earth.”

Screwtape, an experienced senior devil, sees humanity through the distorted lens of his mission: to tempt souls to sin and damnation. He always sees the shadow side and mostly ignores the human potential for virtue, meaning he has a limited understanding of Love, Self-Love, and the Conflict Between Good and Evil. Screwtape’s unreliability as a narrator is key to the work’s satire, as readers must look beyond the superficial meaning of his words.

“By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result […] you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real.’”

Screwtape contrasts human reasoning with the everyday stream of sensory experiences that keep a person tied to the body, introducing the theme of Humans as Both Physical and Spiritual Beings. Lewis suggests that evil is much more likely to gain a foothold in someone who is preoccupied with their material reality than with the kind of intellectual exploration that might lead them to a belief in God; however, this dichotomy is not absolute, as there are times when bodily pleasure can also be a route to spiritual experience.