The Devil and Mr. Lewis

by Bruce L. Edwards
The September 8, 1947 cover of Time Magazine improbably depicts the demure C. S. Lewis accompanied by a fiercely impish devil poised on his left shoulder, a caricature of his infamous fictional protagonist, Screwtape, AKA, Senior Tempter of Hell.

You can search Time’s cover stories 35 weeks forward and backwards and never see another religious figure or spiritual topic featured. Such was the notoriety and impact of Lewis, even 61 years ago.

Few people in 1947 were writing about demons and their ilk, and still fewer believed in them enough to bother speculating on this question: What if we could see what the temptation of our souls looks like through the eyes of the other side? In other words, what if we could interview a demon?

That was Lewis’s premise for one of his most durably popular works, perhaps his single most popular work among non-Christian readers; in an ingenious preface, Lewis purports to be beneficiary of the intercepted correspondence of diabolical counsel from a senior devil to an apprentice devil.

Screwtape had actually been published five years earlier, as part of a quartet of scintillating war-time works (including The Problem of Pain; Mere Christianity; The Great Divorce) that challenged battle-weary Britons and others around the globe not to give up hope or yield to unbelief in this world, specifically by turning their lively focus on the world to come. In so doing, Lewis established that those only those so heavenly-minded have a chance to be any earthly good.

The story unfolds as a chronological series of letters that captures the downs and ups of Wormwood, Screwtape’s nephew, who is trying to use what weapons he has, lies, deceptions, doubts, to undermine the faith of his “patient,” a young man whom we first meet as one struggling to believe, and then who is on and under trial as a new Christian.

As an apologist for Christianity, Lewis’s used his imagination to seek fresh ways to communicate orthodox Christian faith. The idea for Screwtape actually occurred to him while he sat in church during a lackluster sermon (an experience with which many men and women might identify).

It is a classic reversal story—that is, it turns upside down our expectations and affiliations; for example, Satan is reverenced and referenced as “Our Father Below,” while Jesus is termed, simply, “the Enemy.” By turns comic, sobering, satirical, enlightening, and challenging, Screwtape prepares us to bolster and extend our faith in the face of opposition and deliberate sabotage.

Its winsomeness trades on the fact that most of us fail to grasp the moment-by-moment momentousness of temptation, the behind the scenes activity that accounts for how we respond to challenges to our faith and character, and the consequences of each decision we make. Put in theological prose, Lewis’s main intention is to illuminate the psychology of temptation for believers—but also to illustrate the severe limitations and outright ignorance that pervades the underworld as it seeks to undermine God’s purposes.

Screwtape never understands why the Enemy loves the patient, even to the point of giving up His life for another. This is not even ponderable for Hell-bent or Hell-bound dwellers, who are the ultimate egotists and self-aggrandizers.

Lewis also wished to debunk the “romance” attributed to rebellion, proving that those who align themselves with hell choose not only the losing side, but the most banal, boring, bloated, uninteresting creatures as eternal companions. Along the way, he uses Screwtape to point out the foibles and stupidities of human life—identifying the pressure points of pride and vanity undergirding so much of our day to day living.

Screwtape’s timeless brilliance lies in depicting the everyday and showing how from a demonic point of view, the devotion and care Christians show to their fellow men and women, mirrors of the love God has shown to them, is unfathomable to the desperately lost and unreflectively wicked.

From Screwtape we learn that God has no equal: Satan is a created being, and is a quite fallen, finite entity; God is eternal, everlasting, omnipotent, omniscience, and omnipresent. Satan is none of these. He is a deceiver whose first deception was self-deception. Over time Satan has fallen deeper in delusion, a victim of his own lies and deceptions, and seeks only to devour those who would similarly choose to believe his lies and the lies about themselves that he plants and nurtures.

God is Love—and God is light. There is no one like him. There is no other God but He who is reveal in the revelation of the Scriptures, his mighty acts in history, and in the incarnation of His Son and the coming of the Holy Spirit. As Lewis puts it, Satan is not God’s nemesis, but that of fellow angel, Michael the archangel.

It’s clear that the “patient” has a will, and by Heaven’s help he can resist the stumbling-blocks put in front of him by choosing the good, the true, and the beautiful. It is also clear that “the Enemy” is not abandoning him and leaving him to stand alone. Screwtape and Wormwood are both befuddled not only by the patient’s perseverance in face of war and calamity, but equally so by the Enemy’s personal dedication to preserving his faith.

War, like all grand human tragedies—hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, plagues—is indiscriminate in how it touches every aspect of life, the mind, the heart, the spirit, affecting how we see ourselves and others in relation to the present and to eternity. It can be a weapon to divert our eyes from heaven.

In Screwtape, war is the backdrop that could make the patient overthrow his faith in the face of greater peril, making him cynical, weary, hopeless, to question God’s goodness. Screwtape hopes to prolong the patient’s life, to convince him that his purpose is to live forever on this earth, and thus to give him more time to wear him down, to turn him into a selfish and prideful wretch of a man. God instead grants him release—and therefore peace and everlasting rest.

From Screwtape we learn that temptation is essentially a campaign of distortion, exaggeration, manipulation, lies that tempt the individual one way or another to focus on the self, to become selfish, self-important, preoccupied with one’s own appearance, one’s own standing, a constant appeal to vanity—the beginnings of hell on earth.

Lewis cleverly demonstrates that “big sins” start as small ones, but are predicated on the one, essential step to exalting the self, promoting pride as essentially the deepest, longest, widest abyss between God and His creatures. “Why use adultery when golf will do?”

As Lewis was composing Screwtape, he was also writing a book about John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which retells the fall of humankind in the Garden of Eden. In many ways, this passage from Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost, profiles Screwtape:

To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography. Yet the choice is possible. Hardly a day passes without some slight movement towards it in each one of us. (Oxford UP, 1942, 102)

There is nothing appealing about hell in Screwtape—it is not the promised realm of infinite freedom and profound achievement, but rather an ugly bureaucracy, overcome by utter grayness, since there is nothing more uninteresting than a smug sea of fallen humanity sinking deeper into themselves forever and ever, lacking the transformative glory and uniqueness that redemption and the company of heaven provide.

Perhaps the most enduring lesson to be learned from The Screwtape Letters is that diabolical lies can be resisted and refuted by steadfastly holding on to the truth of Who God is, and who we are in Him, and by being knowledgeable and vigilant to oppose the devil’s schemes, through prayer, Scripture, worship, and, most of all, the company we keep.

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Bruce L. Edwards is Professor of English and Africana Studies, and Associate Vice Provost for Academic Technology at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, where has he been a faculty member and administrator since 1981. He has served as a C. S. Lewis Foundation Fellow at the Kilns in Oxford, England; a Fulbright Fellow in Nairobi, Kenya (1999-2000); a Bradley Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC (1989-90); and as the S. W. Brooks Memorial Professor of Literature at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (1988). Bruce and his wife, Joan, live in the mighty metropolis of Bowling Green, Ohio, and have four grown children, ranging in age from 24 to 34.

His C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy (4 volume encyclopedia) was published by Praeger Press in 2007. Bruce’s other books on Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia include: Not a Tame Lion (2005) and Further Up and Further In: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), A Rhetoric of Reading: C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy (1988) and The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer (1988). He has since 1995 maintained a popular web site on the life and works of C. S. Lewis at www.cslewisblog.com.

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New Starts: Looking at the World Rightly

by Devin Brown
Near the end of chapter seven of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the narrator steps in to tell us about the change that has occurred in the formerly obnoxious Eustace.

It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that “from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.” To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.

The fiction of C. S. Lewis is replete with characters who make a 180-degree change in the direction they have been on and make a new start, but in no case does Lewis over-simplify or misrepresent the difficulty of the process. No where does Lewis suggest that change is easy or painless, or can take place without acquiring a radically new perspective.

In The Great Divorce, Lewis’s weird and wonderful ghost story, he tells the tale of a busload of departed souls who get one last chance to change the way they have been thinking and set out on a new path. In the book’s Preface, Lewis writes, “I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working afresh from that point, never by simply going on.”

Lewis draws on this same idea of correcting a wrong sum as a metaphor for repentance in Mere Christianity, where he points out “If you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road…. When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start again, the faster I shall get on.”

Not all of Lewis’s characters who are given the chance to start afresh do so. For every Eustace who undergoes a successful, albeit painful, transformation, we can find one who refuses to change. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Gumpas, who is serving as the Governor of the Lone Islands, is told by Caspian that he must stop the slave trade. Gumpas objects stating, “That would be putting the clock back.” In The Great Divorce nearly all of the ghosts on the bus reject the opportunity they are given to make a new start. As the George MacDonald character explains, “There is always something they prefer to joy.” This something always involves holding on to a false perception.

If making a new start begins with seeing the world rightly, Lewis would hold that seeing the world rightly begins with seeing ourselves rightly, something that Gumpas and most of the ghosts in The Great Divorce are either unable or unwilling to do. As Lewis notes in Mere Christianity, “A moderately bad man knows he is not very good; a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right.”

If it is so difficult to see ourselves as we truly are, what can be done? In The Problem of Pain, Lewis argues that God “whispers” to us in our pleasures, “speaks” through our conscience, and, if these voices are not heeded, “shouts” to us in our pains. In the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis gives us a number of characters who are transformed when Aslan comes looking for them—sometimes coming with a whisper, sometimes with a spoken word, but other times with a shout when needed.

Eustace, as Paul Ford notes in Companion to Narnia, is an “arrogant” and “obnoxious” boy who, like all those in his condition, has a “complete misperception of himself.” Eustace, who has not once shown any consideration for anyone else on board The Dawn Treader writes in his diary, “I always try to consider others whether they are nice to me or not.” After his experience on the Lone Islands as a slave no one will buy fails to open his eyes, Eustace is turned into a dragon, a transformation that enables him to finally see himself as he is. As Lewis points out in The Problem of Pain, “While what we call ‘our own life’ remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests, but make ‘our own life’ less agreeable to us?” Eustace’s external alteration mirrors his dragonish inner condition, and—to use Lewis’s metaphor from The Problem of Pain—becomes Aslan’s “megaphone” to rouse the selfish boy’s deaf soul.

For Lewis personally, the idea of marking a new start by seeing the world rightly was both something that happened in a big way at one specific moment of his conversion—where he gave in and admitted that God was God—as well as something that happened in smaller ways again and again. In The Problem of Pain Lewis recounts his own pattern of becoming inordinately focused on “a merry meeting with friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today” and needing to be once again see that “all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ.”

Eustace, while providing Lewis’s most dramatic example of a new start, is by no means his only illustration of a character who undergoes a transformation and comes to see the world rightly. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Edmund reverses the path he is on, as does Elwin Ransom, the protagonist in Lewis’s Space Trilogy. In fact, it could be argued that all of Lewis’s characters, in ways big and small, are continually called to journey “further up and further in” their ways of seeing.

In Prince Caspian, the first comment Lucy makes when she finally meets Aslan is to declare that he seems to have grown bigger. However, as Aslan points out, he has not altered since their last encounter—it is Lucy’s perception that has changed. Aslan explains, “Every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

And the same can be said for us as well. Each time we grow in awareness—each time we come to see the world and our place in it more accurately—can be viewed as a new start, or, as Lewis writes at the close of The Last Battle, as a new chapter of that Great Story “in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

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Devin Brown is a Lilly Scholar and Professor of English at Asbury College, where, among other duties, he teaches a class on Lewis. He is the author of Inside Narnia: A Guide to Exploring The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Baker 2005) and Inside Prince Caspian: A Guide to Exploring the Return to Narnia (Baker 2008). He is currently working on Inside the Voyage to the Dawn Treader to be released in fall 2010 in advance of the third film.

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