About the Edition

The bookstore stocks the edition with both prefaces (1941, 1960) as well as “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” It’s important that you use that one. For several years, the publisher was leaving out the 1960 preface, and your well-thumbed favorite copy might be deficient like that.

Recommended material online

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Reading Group Guide. 12 thoughtful topics. Strongly recommended.

Analysis of the Screwtape Letters. Blog series that’s a good model of connecting a work of fiction to scripture and modern application. (Unknown author)

CONTEXT: C. S. Lewis

CSL Wikipedia article, a fine brief biography and list of critical studies. Good starting point if you’ve not studied CSL’s life.

“Screwtape” Wikipedia article. Concise and accurate. See the sections on audio, stage, and film versions for anecdotes for your class. The article mentions a film version due for release in 2012, but it’s evidently on hold (http://www.waldenfans.com/?s=screwtape).

Into the Wardrobe—a C. S. Lewis web site. Comprehensive, long-established (1994), dependable. The “biography” tab has enough detail for quick reference in class. The “papers” tab has academic papers, most not pertinent to Screwtape. “Multimedia” has a handy collection of CSL photos.

The C. S. Lewis Review. Dr. Bruce Edwards ran the best CSL site on the web for years, and this is its digitally-savvy successor (podcasts, etc.). (We interviewed Edwards for an ACU job years ago, but he made his career at Bowling Green. He’s done five books on Lewis including a four-volume biography and critical study.)

MEDIA RESOURCES

Screwtape Letters reading, audio performance by John Cleese, in convenient segments.

The Screwtape Letters play, 3-minute clip from New York stage production, 2007-2008 with Max McLean as Screwtape. Official site for the touring production. Coming back to Dallas in November.

Sales site for the audio drama version of Screwtape produced for Focus on the Family and starring Andy Serkis (Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films). The free samples on the site are excellent.

http://www.ovguide.com/the-screwtape-letters-9202a8c04000641f800000000dead930#, Scroll past the ads (it’s a nasty page) and click the images for clips. The TV interview with actor Max McLean, 4 minutes, is lively. The 7-minute film, a contemporary treatment with cell phones and coffee shop, is stiff but might interest some students.

Teaching Screwtape – Dr. Chris Willerton

Why use The Screwtape Letters in a course on Ways of Knowing (or perspectives on knowing)? How can a satire relate to the Syllabus questions “How do we know? How do we and our culture come to understand the world?”

The answer is that “knowing” is the basis of all conversion and refusal to convert. Lewis shows that people get to Heaven or Hell because of HOW they know, not just what they know. If a human “knows” that the world of the senses is the “real” one, “knows” that science has made religion obsolete, or “knows” that the churches are full of ruffians, he’s a candidate for Screwtape and Wormwood to lure to Hell. They don’t have to persuade him, just keep him muddled. “Do remember,” writes Screwtape, “you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!” (21). The devils’ “patient” can damn himself with his spiritual pride or self-delusion. Logic and doctrine and submission to Christ are brushed away because he “knows” better.

“Knowing” can be your umbrella theme, then, in reading and teaching the book. Under your umbrella, I suggest these three baskets:

• Knowing or Misknowing Yourself
• Knowing or Misknowing God and the Church
• Knowing or Misknowing Society

1. Knowing or Misknowing Yourself

Self-delusion means opportunity for the devils. Letter 1 describes “a sound atheist” whose thoughts drifted toward God as he sat reading in the British Museum. Screwtape’s countermove was to remind this thinker of lunch. Stepping into the “reality” of a busy street, he regained his atheism—“all ‘that sort of thing’ just couldn’t be true” (20). His self-delusion consisted in thinking that he was unprejudiced and rational. In fact he was just swayed by physical experience. He thought he was thinking. Screwtape reports smugly that, “He is now safe in Our Father’s house,” Hell.

The patient’s mother (Letter 17) deludes herself that she is selfless. Her “All I want is . . .” routine with food is actually a kind of bullying. She is finicky. And when her son prays for her soul (Letter 3), his prayer is so lofty that he is really “praying for an imaginary person” rather than “the real mother—the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table” (26).

Another way to misknow yourself is to believe in your own consistency. The law of Undulation (Letter 8) is one of the most popular discoveries in the book for my students. I like it, too. It explains a lot about our up-and-down experience as believers. “Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal,” says Screwtape, and can’t be constant. Peaks of liveliness and joy alternate with troughs of weariness. Devils can use the troughs for sexual temptation and loss of religious enthusiasm in a recent convert (Letter 9). So don’t let the patient know himself, says Screwtape. Not knowing the law of Undulation, the patient will assume that his first enthusiasm is gone for good, a phase he has passed through. Keep the patient “out of the way of experienced Christians,” says Screwtape, who could reassure him that the troughs will pass (44).

2. Knowing or Misknowing God and the Church

Misknowing God is sometimes evident in the way we pray. We may pray to a hazy figure we’ve invented, and that makes us pray in a hazy way. Screwtape hopes that when the patient prays, he will “aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised,” thinking he ought to achieve “a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part” (Letter 4, p. 28). What sort of God would rather not be bothered with “will and intelligence” in prayers? The kind of God we might make up. “Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills,” says Screwtape. Humans try to generate their own feelings because they pray to “a composite object containing many quite ridiculous elements” including images from Sunday school pictures (29).

Misknowing God can also take the form of rejecting God as a kill-joy. Screwtape and other devils, who have no joy but cruelty, know better. One reason they can’t beat “the Enemy” is that God creates joy. See letters 2, 8, 13, 22. All pleasures are created by God. The kingdom of Hell cannot invent pleasures, only corrupt them. Screwtape tells his nephew to keep the patient sold on the “vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium” that “the World” believes are pleasure. Real pleasures have “a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness” that draw people to love others and to love God (56, 57).

A third way humans misknow God is to claim He hates human freedom. The fact is, God wants humans to be themselves by choosing to be His. Here are Screwtape’s grouchy descriptions of God’s method:

The Enemy . . . has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His “free” lovers and servants—“sons” is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals. Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to “do it on their own.” (23)

Remember, always, that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them. When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever. (56)

Misknowing the Church is another issue important to The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape himself says, “One of our great allies at present is the Church himself.” He doesn’t mean the eternal Church, “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners,” but the human, visible part of the Church, with shabby songs and your most irritating neighbors sitting in the pews with you (23). Screwtape’s nephew Wormwood is told to keep the irritation going until the patient becomes “a taster or connoisseur of churches,” looking for “the church that ‘suits’ him” (Letter 16, p. 64). The two nearest churches for him to visit are eaten up with party spirit, one dominated by a vicar who waters down the faith and the other by a combative minister who preaches to shock. Either one could help undermine the patient’s faith, thinks Screwtape. And if Wormwood can’t keep the patient out of the Church, he should at least get him attached to some faction. Naturally, Screwtape picks the examples that would please a demon, but ACU readers can add their own. People misknow the Church when they think its purpose it to “suit” them or be a boxing ring for factions or an extension of a minister’s personality.

Screwtape does give one example of a wholehearted Christian and her family, and his rage at her goodness accidentally turns him into a centipede.

The little brute! She makes me vomit. . . . We’d have had her to the arena in the old days. That’s what her sort is made for. Not that she’d do much good there, either. A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood, and then dies with a smile. . . . Looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and yet has a satirical wit. The sort of creature who’d find ME funny!” (Letter 22, p. 82)

The patient has fallen in love with this young woman. Her whole family and circle of friends carry an atmosphere of selfless love—to Screwtape, “that deadly odour.” The house is “full of the impenetrable mystery”—a selfless love that a devil can’t comprehend. (82. Also see Letter 19, p. 74.) This family, in short, knows God, and the scoffers misknow Him.

3. Knowing or Misknowing Society

As Lewis wrote in the 1961 preface, he chose to symbolize Hell as “something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” “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 the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” Why imagine it as a bureaucracy? Because Lewis lives in “the Managerial Age, in a world of ‘Admin.’” (7). Hell was imagined differently by Dante in the 1400s and Milton in the 1600s because their eras gave them different materials.

To know society accurately is to know that selfish ambition has eternal consequences. The patient’s mother—the finicky eater—is selfish on a very small scale. But just outside the pages of The Screwtape Letters stand Hitler and his engineer for the death camps, Adolph Eichmann, who was discussed in the Spotlight materials for Week 1. Their selfish ambition cost the lives of millions. They aren’t mentioned in the letters since Screwtape is not impressed by wars. Victims are easier prey for devils when they have years of peace to grow complacent.

Expand on this theme of selfishness with your classmates. Ask them what is the essence of a personality fit for Hell. Lack of compassion? (Stalin had 11 million people executed in the Great Purge and on other occasions.) Delight in cruelty? (Saddam Hussein’s son Uday made torture his hobby.) Infinite craving for power? Determination to create a Master Race? Willingness to torture people for religious reasons (Inquisitions, witch trials)? Remind the class about Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil,” and you’ll be close to Lewis’s conception. He writes that the greatest modern evil is carried out not in concentration camps but “by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.” That could describe Adolf Eichmann, who claimed to be “following orders” but who actually gave them. Now think of Screwtape, the bureaucrat who looks forward to devouring his nephew. “The mark of Hell,” Lewis writes, is “the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self” that marked Goethe’s character Faust.

Another misknowing of society is to miss an eternal perspective on war. God has decreed free will, so wars happen. But He works with His people in war as well as peace, wooing them to choose His ways. As bombing increases over England, Screwtape urges Wormwood to push his patient toward cowardice. But it could backfire—“The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients . . . is that we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility. And in fact, in the last war, thousands of humans, by discovering their own cowardice discovered the whole moral world for the first time.” When a war or revolution happens, “the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor. This indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world—a world in which moral issues really come to the point.” (104).

Of the three themes, this one is most dependent on knowing the 1930s and 1940s. Lewis’s references (through Screwtape) to Bergson, Shaw, Creative Evolution, and the Life Force will be blanks to many readers today, and eugenics, psychoanalysis, Marxism and so forth (see Letters 7, 15, 23, etc.) will have altered connotations. To Lewis, these philosophers and conceptions were misunderstandings of society, history, and even eternity (see letter 25 on intellectual fashions, worship of “progess,” etc.). His little sequel “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” added in 1962, is still current since it deals with American-style public education. Through Screwtape, Lewis criticizes an exaggerated “democracy” that kills excellence by making social equality an entitlement. But I have had trouble teaching it even to advanced students. The term democracy becomes a red flag too easily, and reading an Englishman’s critique of American schools through the mouthpiece of a devil is complicated anyway.

 

Teaching Screwtape – Prof. Karen Cukrowski

I plan to use The Screwtape Letters for my two Cornerstone classes, and, while I haven’t worked it all out yet, I have thought through a bit of the Ways of Thinking issue (not much, mind you!), as I’ve begun re-reading the book. First, I don’t think it will be productive to focus on every single letter. Sure, assign it all–but only concentrate on certain letters, such as IX, in which Screwtape takes some time walking Wormwood through his Christians’ dry “Trough” periods, which yield excellent opportunities to tempt them into sexual sins. It is in this chapter that he categorizes people in general: wishful-thinking types (p. 42 in my version of the text): those who can be assured that all is well; desponding types: those who can be tempted to despair. Earlier he mentioned those who think the ardours of their conversion ought to have lasted forever and those who think their present dryness is forever, etc. Anyhow, you get the idea…. In other words, I was thinking one could a different way than the Science route or the Missional route with this approach here in this particular discussion.

For each letter, I’m not sure how this next exactly is addressing Ways of Thinking, but I know how I would want each student to preach each text in a nutshell:

• What’s the problem it’s addressing?
• What’s it look like now?
• Bonus: What’s a solution? What can you do to guard against it?
• What about addressing a different Way of Thinking about Prayer and about “How I Feel” about my faith?

Letter 2 “The Church itself” can be an ally to the diabolical cause. How? Read Mt. 16:18; 1 Cor 12:12-27; Eph 1:3-14; 4:1-6; Rev 7:9ff. . What do these texts have to say? When can specific forms and styles of worship become barriers to worship and service to God, or can/do they?

“Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anti-climax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman.” Letter 2

Why is there an anticlimax? Did this happen to you? Discuss.

In Letter 4, “teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.” After all, don’t our students so often judge their relationship with God by how they feel?

Ways of Thinking about Good and Evil, Letters 5-7

 I definitely do want to do an epistolary exercise of some sort; to me, that just makes sense with this book. I’d like to have them write how to catch college freshmen, but I realize it’s pretty transparent. I could return them at the end of the semester (or even have peer leader return them next semester?)