C.S. Lewis was a brilliant and creative mind, penning great apologetic works (Mere Christianity) as well as captivating tales (The Chronicles of Narnia). He has pointed people to the profound truths of who God is through various mediums.
In 1942, Lewis wrote an incredibly insightful book, combining his skills of apologetics and creative writing. Screwtape Letters imagines conversations happening in the spiritual world of “devils”. The book is a collection of letters written between Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood as he mentors him in the fine art of temptation and deception.
Screwtape Letters sheds light on the complexities and personalities behind the lies we believe, the accusations we face, the distractions that entangle us, and the temptations we battle.
I have been amazed by the insight in how we can be drawn away from God’s possibilities by deceptive counterfeits, giving our lives to good, worldly values instead of embracing what God offers.
Here are a few quotes from the book. Notice how Satan’s tactics can fly under the radar and unknowingly impact our experience of a loving God (or Enemy in the eyes of Screwtape).
Which one stands out to you? What do you learn about your own vulnerabilities? How can you bring God and others into that reality?
It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.
All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged.
Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.
You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books.
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden.
You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours . . . The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels…
If you can once get him to the point of thinking that ‘religion is all very well up to a point,’ you can feel quite happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all- and more amusing.
There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.
You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about, on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.
We have done this through the poets and novelists by persuading the humans that a curious, and usually shortlived, experience which they call ‘being in love’ is the only respectable ground for marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding. This idea is our parody of an idea that came from the Enemy.
… if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.
Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once.
