The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis

You can make him do nothing for long periods.  You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.  All the healthy and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at least he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, 'I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.'  The Christians describe the Enemy as one 'without whom Nothing is strong.'  And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters takes the form of a series of messages sent by Screwtape, a mid-level functionary in the hierarchy of demons, to his nephew Wormwood, a neophyte who is tasked with working on a "patient" to corrupt his soul and bring him to hell.  Lewis' depiction of hell as a kind of immense bureaucracy is fairly inspired--unlike God, it's the demons who stand for hierarchies of all kinds, and who treasure the kind of affectless banality that bureaucracies promote.  As Screwtape notes in the above letter, directing the patient's attention to nothing at all is as good as directing it toward lust, avarice, or wrath.  Pleasures of all kinds, Screwtape advises, always run the risk of directing the patient toward "the Enemy," that is, God, who "has filled His world full of pleasures."

The Screwtape Letters is at its most interesting when it is counterintuitive.  In one letter, Screwtape advises Wormwood not to get too excited over the threat of war that is consuming the European continent.  (The letters were written in the early years of World War II.)  Yes, war induces both "tortured fear and stupid confidence," which are "desirable states of mind."  It also makes a man "hag-ridden by the Future," and terrified to live in the present as the Enemy desires.  But war, too, awakes people from "moral stupor."  "In peace," Screwtape writes, "we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely."  Counterintuitive, too, is Screwtape's delight that Wormwood's patient has become a Christian, because the church is where hypocrisy and self-satisfaction flourish best.

It's interesting, reading The Screwtape Letters at this point in my life.  Like The Inferno it offers a highly stylized version of the world of Satan; it makes no claims to be Biblically or theologically accurate, but it seeks to offer certain metaphorical truths through imagination.  As a teenager, I would have accepted wholeheartedly some unquestioned assumptions about the operation of God and His enemies present in The Screwtape Letters: for instance, that there is a real, metaphysical battle over individual souls.  I would have accepted that the state of the individual soul is of utmost importance, and that it must always be guarded for some quality that is constantly tipping toward God or toward Satan, that it is important that a Christian get his or her heart right.  But I'm no longer happy with those assumptions.  I wonder if The Screwtape Letters is easier to read as a committed atheist than a progressive Christian.

Of course, none of that is really important.  It doesn't really matter much to Lewis' project whether demons exist at all.  Rather, The Screwtape Letters is interested in advancing a certain perspective on the human world and its virtues and vices.  It wants us not to be distracted by the humdrum realities of everyday life, or to be "knit to the world" by our prosperity.  It wants us to reject "materialism"--the idea that only the material world exists--and set our attention to the spiritual world.  In classic Protestant fashion, our attention is of the utmost importance.

It's also fun, and funny.  I particularly liked the suggestion that Screwtape, once Wormwood loses control over his patient, is going to eat his nephew as punishment.  The last letter is signed, "Your increasingly and ravenously affectionate uncle, SCREWTAPE."