Meanwhile, the British Government gave permission for ‘Operation Dynamo’ – the code name for the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk – to begin, and by 27 May it was under way. During the next nine days while the evacuation proceeded, the German air force struck with all its might. However, the pilots of the British Fighter Command, with Canadians and Poles among them, fought equally hard to keep the skies clear enough to make the evacuation possible. In one of the bravest acts of the war, and with the aid of numerous naval vessels, civilian craft, tug boats, lifeboats, cruisers and steamers, 400,000 British and French troops were rescued from Dunkirk. One of them was Warnie Lewis.
Back on English soil, Warnie went with the rest of his unit to Wenvoe Camp in Wales. Though it was some months before he recovered his strength, his brother was relieved that he was at least safe and close to home.
As Lewis spent his weekends at The Kilns, it had long been his and Warnie’s practice to go to Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry on Sunday mornings. The Rev. Thomas Bleiben, the parish priest, was an able man, but low-church and, thus, unrepresentative of the parish with its long tradition of Anglo-Catholicism. Because of his intense dislike of organ music Lewis usually shunned the 10.30 Sung Eucharist or Matins and went instead to the Communion service at 8 a.m. Writing to Warnie (who was still at Wenvoe Camp) on Saturday evening, 20 July, Lewis told him that the night before ‘Humphrey’ Havard had come by and they had listened to Hitler over the radio. ‘I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people,’ he said, ‘but it is a positive revelation to me how while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little. I should be useless as a schoolmaster or a policeman. Statements which I know to be untrue all but convince me, at any rate for the moment, if only the man says them unflinchingly.’27
The next day, Sunday, 21 July, Lewis was possibly still thinking of Hitler’s persuasiveness when he went to the eight o’clock Communion service at Holy Trinity Church, and it was during the service that he was struck by the idea for what was to become one of his most famous books. Continuing the letter to Warnie begun the evening before, he said:
Before the service was over – one could wish these things came more seasonably – I was struck by an idea for a book which I think might be both useful and entertaining. It would be called As one Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first ‘patient’. The idea would be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view.
E.g. ‘About undermining his faith in prayer’, I don’t think you need have any difficulty with his intellect, provided you never say the wrong thing at the wrong moment. After all the Enemy [God] will either answer his prayers or not. If He does not, then that’s simple – it shows prayers are no good. If he does – I’ve always found that, oddly enough, this can be just as easily utilised. It needs only a word from you to make him believe that the very fact of feeling more patient after he’s prayed for patience will be taken as a proof that prayer is a kind of self-hypnosis. Or if it is answered by some external event, then since that event will have causes which you can point to, he can be persuaded that it would have happened anyway. You see the idea? Prayer can always be discredited either because it works or because it doesn’t. Or again, ‘In attacking faith, I should be chary of argument.’ Arguments only provoke answers. What you want to work away at is the mere unreasoning feeling that ‘that sort of thing can’t really be true.’28
The book is of course The Screwtape Letters, and the passage quoted above is almost exactly as it appears in the first Letter. We do not know how long he spent writing it except for what he tells us: he never wrote with more ease – but, as it turned out, with less enjoyment. If it flowed as freely as most of his books, he had probably finished it by Christmas 1940.
The plot of Screwtape is quite simple. It consists of a series of admonitory epistles from Screwtape, an experienced devil high in the Administration of the Infernal Civil Service, to his nephew, Wormwood, a junior colleague engaged on one of his earliest assignments on earth – which is to secure the damnation of a young man who has just become a Christian. It was prescient of Lewis to have the patient confronted at the beginning of his Christian life with a problem that confronts all young people – the difference between appearance and reality. When the young man goes to church, Screwtape advises Wormwood on how to deal with this:
Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous … His mind is full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real – though of course an unconscious – difficulty for him. Never let it come to the surface, never let him ask what he expected them to look like.29
The young man, or ‘patient’, lives with a very trying mother and, much to Screwtape’s delight, falls under the influence of ‘rich, smart, superficially intellectual and brightly sceptical people’.30 Later he does a number of things which, though innocent enough by normal standards, are considered suspect by the Lowerarchy of Hell: he reads a book he likes, takes an agreeable solitary walk, has tea at an old mill, and falls in love with a delightful girl in whose home he encounters ‘Christian life of a quality he never before imagined’.31 Finally – and this is how Wormwood loses him – he is most inopportunely killed in the war while working in Civil Defence.
If this is a dull, simple ‘human’ story from the novelist’s usual point of view, it is anything but dull to God – and, presumably, to Satan. Even those who do not hold, as Lewis did, that men are immortal and that each of us is progressing moment by moment either to Heaven or to Hell, will benefit from Lewis’s angle of vision.
It was an angle he found difficult to maintain, for in every letter he had to twist his mind into a diabolical attitude – to imagine how every temptation, pleasure, joy and sorrow looks to the devils. He was often asked to write more Screwtape letters, but felt no inclination to do so until 1959 when he produced ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’. In 1961 Lewis wrote a new preface for a combined volume, The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, in which he revealed some of his difficulties in writing the Letters. The strain of doing so, he said, ‘produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The world into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done.’32
What interests a great many people is not so much that Screwtape is an imaginary correspondence between devils, but that Lewis believed in their existence. However, as he explained in his 1961 preface, what he does not believe in is the existence of a power opposite to God – that is, in dualism. As there is no uncreated being except God, he cannot have an opposite.
The proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. That is to say, I believe in angels and I believe that some of them, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God and, as a corollary, to us. These we may call devils. They do not differ in nature from good angels, but their nature is depraved. Devil is the opposite of angel only as Bad Man is the opposite of Good Man. Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite not of God but of Michael.33
He goes on to say that though the belief in devils is not part of his creed, it is one of his opinions: ‘It seems to me to explain a good many facts. It agrees with the plain sense of Scripture, the tradition of Christendom, and the beliefs of most men at most times. And it conflicts with nothing that any o
f the sciences has shown to be true.’34
Though there has always been a certain amount of interest in devils, it is not perhaps unfair to say that the publication of The Screwtape Letters stirred up even greater curiosity. It also cleared up a mass of nonsense about their nature. In his original preface of 1942 Lewis wrote: ‘There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.’35 When Wormwood asks Screwtape whether the ‘patient’ ought to know of his existence or not, he is told, ‘I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that “devils” are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arrive in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that … he therefore cannot believe in you.’36
At the same time that he was writing Screwtape, Lewis was busy with two other books in which he wanted to demonstrate why Christians are committed to believing that ‘the Devil is an ass’. In the first book, A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, he suggests in his chapter on ‘Satan’ that those who consider him the ‘hero’ of Milton’s poem have confused a ‘magnificent poetical treatment’37 with what a real being like Satan would be like if we actually met him. Of the progressive degradation of Satan, who ‘thought himself impaired’ by being inferior to his Creator, Lewis says: ‘In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, he could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige. And his own prestige, it must be noted, had and could have no other grounds than those which he refused to admit for the superior prestige of Messiah … It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.’38
At the end of Milton’s ‘temptation scene’, which lasts only two hundred lines, Eve falls. Lewis in Perelandra takes up the same biblical story from Genesis 3, albeit on a different planet with a different Eve, and devotes a hundred pages to it. His Eve is far more intelligent than Milton’s; but then so is his Satan. Though Lewis’s hero, Ransom, feels defenceless in the face of Satan’s dizzying barrage of logic, illogic and half-truths, he eventually sees that the fallen archangel, by choosing to make Evil his ‘Good’, has come to regard intelligence ‘simply and solely as a weapon, which it had no more wish to employ in its off-duty hours than a soldier has to do bayonet practice when he is on leave. Thought was for it a device necessary to certain ends, but thought in itself did not interest it.’39
Lewis complained that Screwtape gave a lopsided view of life because, ideally, Screwtape’s advice to Wormwood ought to have been balanced by archangelical advice to the ‘patient’ from his guardian angel. This cannot, however, be seen as a serious defect in the book because Screwtape himself, despite his malign ingenuity, throws out numerous back-handed compliments about the ‘Enemy’ (i.e. God):
Whenever there is prayer, there is danger of His own immediate action. He is cynically indifferent to the dignity of His position … and … pours out self-knowledge in a quite shameless fashion.40
He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His … We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.41
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.42
When the creation of man was first mooted and when, even at that stage, the Enemy freely confessed that he foresaw a certain episode about a cross, Our Father very naturally sought an interview and asked for an explanation. The Enemy gave no reply except to produce the cock-and-bull story about disinterested love which He has been circulating ever since. This Our Father naturally could not accept. He implored the Enemy to lay His cards on the table, and gave Him every opportunity. He admitted that he felt a real anxiety to know the secret; the Enemy replied ‘I wish with all my heart that you did’. It was, I imagine, at this stage in the interview that Our Father’s disgust at such an unprovoked lack of confidence caused him to remove himself an infinite distance from the Presence with a suddenness which has given rise to the ridiculous enemy story that he was forcibly thrown out of Heaven … If we could only find out what He is really up to!43
Not a few critics have complained that, considering the world’s woes – wars, famines and the like – Lewis has Screwtape aim at very small targets in his attempt to secure the ‘patient’s’ damnation. But Lewis has supplied us with the answer to this charge. In Letter 12 Screwtape pulls Wormwood up sharply:
Like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one, the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.44
Once when Walter Hooper asked if there were any book which had given him the idea for The Screwtape Letters, Lewis took off his bookshelves Stephen McKenna’s Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman (1922) and gave it to him to read. McKenna’s once-popular book had been, he said, his only ‘model’ and had suggested how he might go about writing an ‘infernal correspondence’. It consists of twelve letters from Lady Ann Spenworth to an unnamed ‘friend of proved discretion’. Lady Ann is the daughter of an earl and her husband the younger of two sons of another peer – the rub being that their son Will is unable to inherit either family title unless various uncles and cousins come to grief in some way or another. Though Lady Ann does not confess to having anything so crude as this in mind, her letters betray her as being an unscrupulous and catty hypocrite, bent (though she says just the opposite) on destroying their lives. Her grief, other than the fact that her relatives remain in blooming health, comes in the form of a poor, but pretty, Yorkshire girl whom her son marries – the daughter, wails Lady Ann, of ‘one of these rugged, north-of-England clergymen who always have the air of intimidating you into a state of grace’.45 ‘The connection may not be obvious’, Lewis wrote in the 1961 preface, ‘but you will find there the same moral inversion – the blacks all white and the whites all black – and the humour which comes of speaking through a totally humourless persona.’46
The fact remains that, bad as Lady Ann Spenworth is, she does not understand evil as well as Lewis who, pressed for information about how he knew so much about temptation, replied in the 1961 preface: ‘Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years’ study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works. “My heart” – I need no other’s – “sheweth me the wickedness of the ungodly.”’47
No one will ever know just how much personal experience went into Screwtape, but members of an Oxford Senior Common Room do not usually find their so-called ‘ivory tower’ existence, however plush the surroundings, free of thorns. Lewis did nothing to hide the fact that he found his colleagues at Magdalen, though no worse, certainly no better than men of other professions. Then there was Mrs Moore whose faults, rarely, if ever, spoken of by Lewis, did not escape the notice of his friends. Though her father was a clergyman, and her brother, the Reverend William James Askins (1879–1955), was the dean of Kilmore Cathedral in Ireland, Mrs Moore was an atheist in later life (blaming it on Paddy’s death). Owen Barf
ield told Walter Hooper that he had heard her chide Jack and Warnie Lewis for participating in ‘blood feasts’ at the local parish church. In his diary entry for 21 December 1933, Warnie said: ‘She nags Jack about having become a believer.’48
Lewis doubtless encountered many instances where mothers resented their children becoming Christians, but if Mrs Moore was as bitter about his conversion and subsequent fame as a Christian apologist as she is said to have been, it is hard to reject the idea that Lewis consciously or unconsciously had her in mind when Screwtape asks how the patient’s mother accepted his conversion: ‘Is she at all jealous of the new factor in her son’s life? – at all piqued that he should have learned from others, and so late, what she considers she gave him such good opportunity of learning in childhood? Does she feel he is making a great deal of “fuss” about it – or that he’s getting in on very easy terms? Remember the elder brother in the Enemy’s story.’49
But what is probably much closer to the pain and jealousy Mrs Moore suffered over Lewis’s conversion is found in Lewis’s comment about the jealousy of the character Orual in Till We Have Faces (1956). As Lewis wrote to Clyde S. Kilby on 10 February 1957:
Orual … is a ‘case’ of human affection in its natural condition: true, tender, suffering, but in the long run, tyrannically possessive and ready to turn to hatred when the beloved ceases to be its possession. What such love particularly cannot stand is to see the beloved passing into a sphere where it cannot follow … Someone becomes a Christian, or, in a family nominally Christian already, does something like becoming a missionary or entering a religious Order. The others suffer a sense of outrage … Now I, as a Christian, have a good deal of sympathy with these jealous, puzzled, suffering people (for they do suffer, and out of their suffering much of the bitterness against religion arises).50
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