![]() He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. To us a human is primarily food our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. Screwtape writes: “Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. God really does love us, and uses our pain and suffering to bring us closer to Himself: Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.” 2. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Screwtape writes: “Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal…As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. In fact, through the wiles of Screwtape, and bearing in mind that the goal of the Lowerarchy (even in hell, there’s a hierarchy!) is the “anguish and bewilderment of a human soul”, we can learn several essential truths about ourselves – and God. Indeed, there’s a reason the Letters remain so poplar: it underscores with a clever wit and astute wisdom the temptations and weaknesses we all experience as human beings. ![]() Knowing this – that it was a work produced devoid of joy – seems fitting for a book that makes the devil – the ultimate joy sapper – its main character.īut, it also makes its brilliance, and humor, even more impressive. “…ut though it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long.” “The ease came, no doubt, from the fact that the device of diabolical letters, once you have thought of it, exploits itself spontaneously,” Lewis explains. While it has entertained and enlightened readers for over 70 years – it’s Lewis’ most popular non-Narnia novel – playing the devil, it turns out, was not particularly enjoyable. Lewis (1898-1963) said of The Screwtape Letters (1942), his satirical novel featuring Screwtape, a senior demon of the “Lowerarchy”, who writes 31 letters to his novice nephew with advice on how to win the soul of a young man and keep him from “the Enemy” (i.e. “Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment,” beloved author C.S.
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