The Screwtape Letters

Rating:
Summary: Five Stars either way.
Review: If I were a demon (and for all you know, I may very well be), I would give the Screwtape Letters five stars because it certainly is an excellent little guide to working on human "patients." We demons should have a good working knowledge of our patients weaknesses if we are to have our way with them and get to devour them in the end. Yes, if I were a demon, I would say "Thank you Screwtape for enlightening, er, I mean endarkening us all." BUT I am not a demon-- yet I still give it five stars. As a Christian, I can see some of my own weaknesses in wormwood's patient. Also, I see how I have been manipulated myself at times. By understanding a little more about the operation of the enemy, I know better how to fight against his attacks. Not only that, I enjoyed "The Screwtape Letters" because Lewis wrote them with much wit and humor. If you like the Screwtape letters be sure to read "Castle of Wisdom" which I highly (and I do mean HIGHLY) recommend.

Rating:
Summary: Words to live by
Review: I decided to read "The Screwtape Letters" for a Latin class in order to understand the context in which C.S. Lewis's letters to Don Giovanni Calabria in the Latin language were written. Little did I know that its main character, a conniving little demon named "Screwtape" would show me how human obsession can obstruct one's enjoyment of every day life. Did you know that obsessive dieting and meaningless dietary fussiness can be just as much of a vice as gluttony? Or that 'Unselfishness' can be one of the most selfish acts of all? Or that the future is the least like eternity of all the time-frames and that to obsess about it is the least productive activity in which a human being can participate? In "The Screwtape Letters", C.S. Lewis sketches the geography of the human soul and hands the reader a guidebook that suggests how to negotiate its tricky highways and byways. This books is fuel for hours of productive introspection and should not be missed.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, insightful
Review: While not enjoying this book as much as Mere Christianity, I found the Screwtape Letters to be a good read and very insightful on many levels. The Screwtape Letters is an effort by Lewis to address many concerns and issues within the context of a morality play. Whether it's suffering, casual religion, interpersonal relationship issues, war, or cynicism, Lewis provides compelling insights into the origins and effects of these issues. In describing in a fictional way why demons encourage or discourage certain things, the reader begins to see how they are being tempted in their own life and the kinds of effects certain actions and thoughts have. Within this context, Lewis cleverly provides fitting commentaries on people's attitudes and the current state of human affairs relative to their relationship with God. Assuming that the morality play presented here is valid and that demons are indeed trying to encourage or discourage things in people, I found the overriding theme of this book to be that absent a deep relationship with God and continual reinforcement of Godly values and living in a person's life, a drift away from God and toward harmful attitudes and actions is inevitable. Lewis clearly tries to demonstrate that there is an absolute good and an absolute evil in this book, and that while good and evil are not always easily discernible, it is in our interests to keep our guard up and not be fooled by the notion that good and evil are defined by our own feelings (which lead to many of the negative consequences described in this book) instead of a transcendent and universal standard upon which terms like "good" and "evil" can be uniformly defined. This is a message that is more applicable today than it was even when Lewis wrote this book, in my view. It is therefore highly relevant and applicable to the human condition in the new millenium.

Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Work: Not just for Christians
Review: I am not christian or even sure i believe in god, but this book is immeasureablely deep and insightful none the less. Its not about being religious, pious, or faithful, its about BEING A GOOD PERSON.

After reading this book i caught myself thinking exactly the things that this book warns agaist. C. S. Lewis's insight into human nature is uncanny. I can honestly say that i am a better person for having read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Sorry, it just didn't make it.
Review: Written by C.S.Lewis, read by John Cleese? This is going to be great! There were a few chuckles I'll admit, but I kept waiting for some revelation, some new understanding, a new light on the matter. Alas, it was not to be. I found this book mostly boring and old hat, very old hat. I feel I wasted my time.

Rating:
Summary: gird yourself for the battle
Review: "the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." -Screwtape

The Screwtape Letters, originally published in The Guardian in 1941, is an epistolary novel in the form of Letters from the demon Screwtape to his nephew, the apprentice demon Wormwood. Each Letter is a beautifully crafted description of how the forces of evil seek to subvert good men and turn them away from Christianity. Take the following example:

My dear Wormwood, So you "have great hopes that the patient's religious phase is dying away," have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians--half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy's determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

This means that while their spirits can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

If you had watched your patient carefully, you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life--his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth, periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite.... in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.

The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense.

But the obedience the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing.... 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 want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. 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.

And that is where the troughs come in.... Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo....

Now obviously I like that because it jibes with my view of the Human Dilemma. Even better is this, from Lewis's Introduction:

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

This metaphor, of course, proved to be more prescient than even Lewis could have forseen. For as the Letters were being published, bureaucrats in Berlin and Moscow were exterminating humans by the millions and the Depression and the War would give rise to increasing huge and intrusive Welfare State bureaucracies, bent on destroying Religion, Family, Community, any institution which could rival the power of the State. All the while, and ever so gradually, citizens were willingly ceding more and more of their autonomy (their hard won Free Will), as we slid into the modern Liberal godless Hell.

To read Lewis now is to realize that things could have been different; that a few voices, crying in the wilderness, warned of the authoritarian netherworld that Western man exiled himself to for much of this Century as he abandoned God and Christianity in favor of the State and statism. We are now in the midst of a twilight struggle that will decide whether we retain sufficient confidence in our ultimate godliness to reclaim our freedom from the grasp of the State, or whether Western man's crisis of confidence will lead us back to the Garden of Eden, with our needs taken care of and our souls extinguished.

There is no better way to gird yourself for the battle than to read this book.

Grade: A+

Rating:
Summary: Letters from the Depths
Review: Because of the ingenuity required to merely have the idea for this book, C.S. Lewis showed what a brilliant and creative mind he had. This is one of the few books that insightfully delves into answering the question "What does Satan want our lives to be like?" Lewis answers this question by writing from the point of view of a demon--so the language we are used to seeing in Christian books is reversed. God is the Enemy, people are encouraged to end up in Hell, and virtues are turned to vice. It is fun, convicting, poignant, and delightful all at once. While reading through it, I found several times that subtle lies Screwtape (the guide to a younger demon, Wormwood) was encouraging Wormwood to feed into his human's consciousness, are lies that have subtly made their way into my mind as well. So this book definitely has the capability of convicting of sin, and of revealing incorrect paradigms that we hold about what our lives are about. What I enjoyed most about this book was that it was almost entirely focused on heart condition as opposed to action. As an experienced demon, Screwtape knew that to really turn a human to the dark side you need to focus on his view of the world and his internal motives. This book is short, and it's well-worth at least one read through.

As one additional bit of info: if you sometimes have difficulty understanding C.S. Lewis' writings, or just worry that you might be missing something, there is an older version of this book with a study guide by Walter Hooper in the back that is very helpful.

Rating:
Summary: Very Good
Review: Having been serialized, The Screwtape Letters is conveniently chopped up into manageable, commute-sized chunks, each of which is self contained and written with exemplary prose.

The style - described by too many of the other reviews - is novel and effective, and is probably why ex-girlfriends continue to confiscate my old copies.

I recently bought this edition, and was quite happy to find it includes "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," which is just as clever as the letters, themselves.

[Incidentally, I just read "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" to my girlfriend. She previously did not like C.S. Lewis because of the way Christians have tried to introduce him to her. She said that it scared her at parts and it was much more thought provoking than /Mere Christianity/. Why anyone would try to introduce a scientist to Lewis' work with that book instead of something like /The Screwtape Letters/ or /The Abolition of Man/, I don't know.
--JR Dec 29th, 2002]

It is an excellent read, and if you haven't picked up a copy, yet, you should really consider doing so.

Rating:
Summary: Timeless and Invaluable
Review: C.S. Lewis, a favorite author of mine, explores the life of a man through the point of view of one of Satan's minions. An amusing and intelligent book, it can help bolster some of your views and bring light to your eyes regarding sin, society, and Christianity. Non-Christians or anti-Christians may find the book to be lacking, but the book is a definite must for any concerned Christian's library. I highly reccommend the book, and suggest that readers who enjoy it consider reading "The Great Divorce," another book by the inestimable C.S. Lewis.

Rating:
Summary: Temptation and Evil
Review: When i read the screwtape letters i found that it was my life i couldnt get over how so like me it was it was really neat