“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.“
This edition of The Screwtape Letters also includes the companion and sequel short story Screwtape Proposes a Toast. A brief read, manageable in a day if you’ve the time, it is fiction only in the loosest sense. The novel is epistolary, taking the form of a demon, Screwtape, writing to an apprentice demon about how to corrupt a man’s soul. The short story is a speech Screwtape gives to a bunch of new apprentice tempters. The letters and the speech address, at heart, the moral and spiritual foundations of Christanity, and the temptations of sin and loss of faith in the modern world.
Lewis is a great writer: he has a brilliant ability to capture the strengths and weaknesses of human nature, and he writes satire brilliantly. By arguing from the point of view of Hell, he is able to deploy the most tempting and convincing arguments against Christianity and mock them, thereby making his own case strongly. The characters he comes up with are strong archetypes for different kinds of people with their flaws and strengths, each tested by the temptations against man both universal and particular to our age. Nearly 100 years on, the insights Lewis has on modern English society are still spot on, and his writing both fun and engaging.
But most importantly, the book is a powerful argument for the importance of faith in God, and how natural it is to do God’s will, yet how easy it can be to fall away from it. Lewis’s central insight into Christian faith and the corruptions thereof is that it is rarely a desire to be evil that turns one from God, but rather a lack of moral, intellectual and spiritual courage that leads us to do what feels easy but not what is good. The fact that we often prefer arguments that make us feel smart, that we behave towards people to feel superior, and how we take something good, like food or sex or perspective, and make idols of them. To say all this, and to make it easily digestible by the public, is great art and powerful reading.
Wet Broken Things 