The Screwtape Letters was published by Geoffrey Bles on February 9, 1942, having been serialized in The Guardian (an Anglican weekly newspaper, not the modern daily) from May to November 1941, and was Lewis’s first popular success — the book that made him famous beyond Oxford. It consists of thirty-one letters from Screwtape, a senior demon in the “lowerarchy” of Hell, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter assigned to damn a young Englishman (referred to only as “the patient”). The conceit is perfectly sustained: everything is inverted. God is “the Enemy.” Pleasure, love, and truth are threats. Hell is a bureaucracy.
The Book
Lewis’s genius was to recognize that the psychology of temptation is most clearly visible when viewed from the tempter’s perspective. Screwtape’s advice to Wormwood is a negative image of Lewis’s own moral theology: every tactic Screwtape recommends reveals, by inversion, what Lewis considers spiritually healthy.
Screwtape counsels Wormwood on how to keep the patient from genuine prayer (make it vague and self-regarding), how to undermine his faith (encourage abstract argument rather than lived experience), how to corrupt his relationships (promote irritability with his mother, sexual fixation with women, spiritual pride with his Christian friends), and how to exploit the war (encourage either reckless bravery or paralyzing cowardice — both are spiritually dangerous).
The patient survives Wormwood’s temptations and is killed in a bombing raid, dying in a state of grace. Wormwood fails. Screwtape is furious. The final letter is terrifying: Screwtape, having used up his patience, intends to eat Wormwood.
Themes
Self-deception — Screwtape’s most effective weapons are not dramatic sins but subtle distortions: the patient’s tendency to mistake feelings for thoughts, to confuse self-image with reality, to treat Christianity as an intellectual position rather than a way of life.
Bureaucratic evil — Hell, in Lewis’s vision, is not a dramatic inferno but a gray bureaucracy of petty officials, filed reports, and interdepartmental rivalries. Evil is banal. This insight, published the same year Hannah Arendt began thinking about the banality of evil, is Lewis’s most modern contribution.
Spiritual warfare — Lewis takes the existence of demons literally (or at least literarily). The book’s power, however, does not depend on believing in literal demons; the psychological insights work regardless of their metaphysical framework.
Collecting The Screwtape Letters
First edition (Geoffrey Bles, London, 1942): Red cloth with gilt lettering. Dust jacket by Papas.
Market values (with dust jacket):
- Fine in dust jacket: $8,000–$20,000
- Very good in dust jacket: $3,000–$8,000
- Without dust jacket: $500–$1,500
First American edition (Macmillan, New York, 1943): $2,000–$5,000 in dust jacket.
Wartime paper restrictions mean that first printings were small, and many copies were destroyed in the Blitz and its aftermath. Copies in the fragile dust jacket are particularly scarce.