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."

Hinds' Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard; The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

I seem to be founding a pattern of reading companion books. First it was Blink and The Invisible Gorilla, now I'm on an allegory kick. We shall see what happens next...

When I first picked up this book, I was a little bit leery of it. After eight months of reading somewhat dry, intellectual approaches to spirituality, an allegory with a (literally) lame, ugly main character with the uninspiring name of Much-Afraid seemed like it was headed into soft and undesirable territory.

And I will say that yes, to a certain extent, that impression was correct. There were times when I got a little sick of the less-than-intrepid heroine crying in the face of some new disaster or failing yet again to fend off her not-so-dear cousins, Pride, Bitterness, Self-Pity, &c. But at the same time, I connected too well with too many parts of the story to discard it as mere fluff.

Literarily, it's something of a modern Pilgrim's Progress, though Hurnard tends to avoid Bunyan's rather more obvious sermonizing. It makes no pretenses about being anything but an allegory, so all of the characters have names that aptly describe who they are: no mystery there. Lots of symbolism, a motif or two, and a neat little twist to tie it off at the end, those are really the bulk of the fine points there.

In brief summary: Much-Afraid, a cowering shepherdess whose only rebellion is to break away from her family (the Fearings) to work for the Good Shepherd, discovers that there is a way for her to leave the Valley of the Fearings and to be healed of her physical (and emotional/spiritual) deformities. The path, however, is difficult and will require her to climb up into the mountains, facing unnamed trials and tribulations.

In short, a good book so long as you do not like to pursue interpretation.

The Great Divorce was a fun read, in part because searching for it gave me an excuse to plunder a few used bookstores in my area (resulting in a biography of Charles Fox, the previously reviewed Dark Lord of Derkholm, and several other works), and in part because it was all of the intellectual delight that Hinds' Feet lacked while also being incredibly readable. I think it took me about two, maybe two and a half hours to actually read it, plus another hour when accounting for all of the quotes that I wrote down.

The premise of the story is captured in the preface when Lewis says, "I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself."


The story itself concerns an unnamed narrator who finds himself dazedly wandering through silent, gray streets until he comes to a queue of people. Seeing aught else to do, he joins the line without questioning what its purpose is and eventually comes to understand that it is for a bus. The people are a more or less unpleasant lot, but some seem decent enough. None of the other characters stick around for very long. When they have taken their long bus ride, they arrive in a land that is somehow more real than they are, a land in which they are ghosts who can barely walk on the unbending grass for the pain of it. The bulk of the story that follows is taken up in the encounters of the various ghosts with the spirits who come to greet them and offer to guide them to the mountains and a greater reality.

Lewis delivers all of the usual profundities in what I found to be an easy to follow format. Perhaps if it suffered at any point, it was in the repetition of structure. Spirit meets Ghost, offers to lead Ghost, Ghost shows recalcitrance, stalks back to bus. But each situation was sufficiently fresh and different to make this a non-obstacle for me. Highlight would have to be the cameo appearance of George MacDonald, whose works I have not read (save for a copy of The Princess and the Goblin through which I am painstakingly making my way), but whose professorial Scottishness and character make him perfect for his role.

Downside: The part of me that has been subconsciously avoiding fiction has been complemented by an increased desire to read non-fiction. Curses!

Perelandra by C. S. Lewis

It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile... It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence.

Perelandra is the second book in C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. The trilogy begins with Out of the Silent Planet, which both Carlton and I read, and ends with That Hideous Strength.

Peralandra is ostensibly a direct sequel to Out of the Silent Planet, but, although there are several references to the first book, it could easily stand alone. It follows Ransom, the protagonist of Planet on his voyage to Peralandra--or, in English, Venus. He is drawn there by Maledil, the trilogy's version of God, although he isn't so much a version as a perception--that is, Maledil and the Christian God are one and the same. Anyway, he arrives on the planet, which is mostly made up of water and floating islands, and meets a woman, the only one who lives there. She is in search of the King, who, Ransom eventually divines, is her male counterpart. She is without any sort of avarice or rebellion at all. She has so little conception of sin or wrongdoing that when Weston, Ransom's enemy in Planet, arrives--possessed by an evil spirit and ready to do psychological battle--Ransom cannot even communicate to her the danger. As she starts spending time with Weston, the main plot kicks in, and Lewis plays out his version of the Garden on Eden.

Initially, I wasn't sure what I thought of the book. It started off very slowly, especially for Lewis, but around the 1/3 mark (which, honestly, this book is not too long anyway) it really picked up. Once Weston arrives, the book turns into a philosophical thriller of sorts--there are fistfights and chases nestled alongside long arguments on the nature of good, what it means to be wise or obedient, and lots of other religious topics that some people might find dull but I loved.

The strangest part of Perelandra to me was how intense parts of it were. In the final third of the book, Ransom finds himself trapped in a pitch dark cave, unable to see or keep his mind from imagining that the veritable zombie Weston may be coming for him. It's nail-bitingly good, although my description doesn't do it any sort of justice:

Slowly, shakily, with unnatural and inhuman movements a human form, scarlet in the firelight, crawled out on to the floor of the cave. It was the Un-man, of course: dragging its broken leg and with its lower jaw sagging open like that of a corpse, it raised itself to a standing position. And then, close behind it, something else came up out of the hole. First came what looked like branches of trees, and then seven or eight spots of light, irregularly grouped like a constellation. Then a tubular mass which reflected the red glow as if it were polished. His heart gave a great leap as the branches suddenly resolved themselves into long wiry feelers and the dotted lights became the many eyes of a shell-helmeted head and the mass that followed it was revealed as a large roughly cylindrical body. Horrible things followed - angular, many jointed legs, and presently, when he thought the whole body was in sight, a second body came following it and after that a third.

It hard to know just what to say about Perelandra from a recommendation standpoint. Even for as big a Lewis fan as I am, I found it rough going at first. However, it was ultimately as rewarding as anything of his I've read. I'd recommend it with the asterisks that maybe it should be the first book of his you pick up. And that'll do it for this review.

Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis

I had never heard of this book or the trilogy that it is a part of (often referred to as the Ransom Trilogy) before I saw this at Joseph-Beth. Lewis is a little hit-or-miss for me, but I thought I would give this a try.

The main character of Out of the Silent Planet is Dr. Ransom. He is kidnapped by two rouge scientists, one of which he knew nominally when at Cambridge, and taken by spaceship to a planet called Malacandra. Ransom is unsure of their purposes, completely in the dark about what they plan to do with him. Shortly after landing on Malacandra, Ransom is able to elude his captors and escape into the wilds of the unknown planet. It is not long, however, before he befriends Hyoi. Hyoi is a hrossa, one of the many sentient species that inhabit Malacandra. The hrossa are very in tune with the natural world that surrounds them. Unlike Ransom's captors, Westin and Devine, who are driven by their desire for a valuable mineral that they found on Malacandra. Ransom lives with the hrossa for quite a long time, learning their language and much about the Malacandrian world, and visiting with Oyarsa, the diety that looks over the Malacandria. A chance encounter with Westin and Devine results in utter chaos, and in their hasty return to Earth. With the passage of time, Ransom begins to doubt his experience, chalking it up to some delusion or vivid fever dream. Then he receives a letter from a colleague (who we find out is the narrator of the book) that inadvertently restores his faith in his Malacandrian adventure.

This was not at all what I expected from this book. I can't imagine that it was received well by Christians in 1943, when it was first published. There is more than a tinge of animism in the book and while Oyarsa is like Christ for another world-- the protector god who steps in when the people of his world need him. The intriguing storyline of Out of the Silent Planet was full of big-picture ideas. I highly recommend this book.

The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis

"'Lord, is it then true... that thou and Tash are one?' The Lion growled so that the earth shook and said, 'It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites.

For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child?' I said, 'Lord, thou knowest how much I understand.'

But I said also, 'Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days.' 'Beloved,' said the Glorious One, 'unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.'"--Emeth, the Calormene, describing his encounter with Aslan"

I had such a difficult time with this concept when I was a child that I let it overshadow the entire story. However, I missed a really great story with a lot of truth in it. I am really glad I reread it. I don't have too much to say, except that it was good. I still don't agree with the quote, but i don't have too.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

I read The Chronicles of Narnia when I was about ten, and felt that they really were very grown up books. It was surprising to go back and see how simple this book is. It was also great to see that while the reading level hasn't advanced with me, the story is still charming and the allegory still stirring.

The story of Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy is pretty straightforward, but I think that is as it should be with children's tales. Children don't catch twists the same way adults do, and an interesting story doesn't mean complicated.

Well, the book is still most excellent. Lewis is a great writer. He does a good job going from his in depth writings for adults to his beautiful stories for children without losing any truth. He still gives you the same sense of wonder at the power and awesomeness of God whether you are a child or all grown up.

The Language of God by Fancis S. Collins

Francis Collins is the head of the Human Genome Project, which successfully mapped the human genome in 2000. I remember seeing this press conference live when it happened, and remember hearing what I assumed was religious rhetoric coming from those speaking. No scientists at this high of a level could believe in God, could they? It is this line of thinking that Collins looks to correct with his book, The Language of God.

Collins was not raised in a religious family. His parents sent him to church as a kid, but only so he could learn to sing in a choir. At some point he decided that he was an atheist, a view which he espoused through his college years. There came a time, however, when he felt that he needed to give God another look. He points to the writer, C. S. Lewis as an important influence on his thought processes during this time. And it is clear to see Lewis’ imprint on Collins’ way of thinking and even his writing style. He quotes heavily from Lewis and other religious writers through his book. Collins acknowledges this toward the end of the book, saying, “Few if any original theological concepts are portrayed within these pages.”

Collins basic argument: a strong belief in science does not preclude a belief in God, or vice versa. He makes no claim that science can prove there is a God, but neither can it prove that God does not exist. He argues that there are certain questions that science simply cannot answer, such as, ‘Why are we here?’, ‘How did we get here?’, and ‘What is the meaning of life?’.

By far the most interesting section of the book was the discussion of evolution, and description of BioLogos, which Collins jokingly refers to as “crevolution”. BioLogos is the belief that evolution is the process the God devised to create life on earth. It is interesting and worth thinking about, and Collins does a good job addressing questions that might arise from such a belief.

The appendix, “The Moral Practice of Science and Medicine: Bioethics”, is worth reading. Collins tackles issues, such as stem cell research, cloning, and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). In this section, and the rest of the book, Collins does a great job of explaining complex scientific theories and experiments. He is by no means a great writer, but neither is he a bad one. Regardless, it is the subject matter that makes The Language of God what it is, not Collins’ writing.

My review of Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis

The contents of this book were originally presented as a multiple-part radio series. C. S. Lewis, who served in World War I and was an air raid warden during World War II, was asked to give a series of broadcasts on Christian faith. These broadcasts came during the blitzkreig, when Great Britain was attacked on almost a nightly basis by German bombers. Incidentally, the blitz played a pivotal part in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

In the preface to Mere Christianity, Lewis states, “The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian denominations.” This sentence tells the reader a lot about the book. It also describes why I liked Mere Christianity as much as I did.

Having grown up in a thoroughly conservative Christian environment, I am painfully aware of the misplaced importance that many Christians put on issues that have almost no bearing on what it means to be a Christian. Lewis is not concerned with the differences between denominations. His topic is much larger in scope. His goal is to answer questions, such as “What is Christianity?”, and “What are the major tenets of the religion?”. In other words, “What must one believe to be a Christian?”. I find this infinitely more interesting than squabbles over the importance of prayer or the debate over works and faith. Many of the questions that Lewis poses are questions that I have asked at some point.

Lewis approaches his topic logically, employing illuminating, and often witty, illustrations. He begins with the universe, arguing that Christianity provides answers to the many questions posed by the universe. Each successive chapter flows logically from the previous one. Of course, Lewis ends up concluding that Christianity is the salve to the aches and pains of the world. But he does not do so by being flippantly dismissive of other religious beliefs. In fact he says, “If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through.”

Lewis tells his reader that he is writing from the perspective of a layman, emphasizing that Mere Christianity is a collection of what he has come to know about Christianity. But he does not place undue importance on what he has to say. At one point he tells his readers, “If this chapter has not meant anything to you, or you have not found it helpful, drop it. Do not give it another thought.” I find this kind of candor refreshing.