I just read C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters for the first time, having heard much of it for years (I believe DocCathode was the first to introduce me to the book with his concept of “Screwtape poisoning”). I have an entirely new respect and admiration for Lewis. The religious content doesn’t do much for me as an atheist, but did this guy have human nature down, or what? I’ve seldom read something so perceptive. My neck hurts from excessive nodding.
My two favourite passages:
Echoes of hours used up doing pretty much nothing, watching sitcom episodes or refreshing the SDMB waiting for someone to post something interesting. We’ve all been there.
The poison of relationships. God, I’ve done this and had it done to me a zillion times. When I read that paragraph I swore it would never happen again.
There have been half a dozen or so “continuations” written by other people of The Screwtape Letters. (They mostly don’t use the names from The Screwtape Letters, but they are all some sort of reverse advice from a devil.) In general, they stink. They tend to be people spouting off about their favorite political issue which they’re convinced is a necessary matter for any Christian. Lewis did very little of that in The Screwtape Letters. Most of his book is ordinary advice and comments about human relationships.
I find the book amazing. It’s anti-glurge. You’re aware you’re being preached to and taught a lesson, but the feel of the letters is so entertaining you don’t care.
I confess to having started a Screwtape lecture for a class of devils. I also started The Screwtape Letters To Penthouse years ago.
My favorite bits from memory
‘The Enemy freely confesses that if we could understand this love, the war would end and we could re-enter Heaven.’
‘My dear, my very dear, nephew, my poppet, my pigsnie’
Lewis vision of Hell as a bureaucracy grows more frightening and convincing every time I have to deal with government paperwork.
There was an episode of Milennium composed of four devils telling how they gained souls. With the large exception that they seemed to have genuine comradery and care for each other, they could be Screwtape’s co-workers.
I like the faculty address at the end where Screwtape complains about how the quality of sinners they get nowadays is so bland compared to the old days when sinners sinned boldly. Quite a zinger at mid-20th-Century Christendom.
Wow I should re-read that book. Thanks for bringing it up! I used to have tapes of John Cleese reading it and it was just as good as you’d imagine it would be.
> I like the faculty address at the end where Screwtape complains about how the
> quality of sinners they get nowadays is so bland compared to the old days
> when sinners sinned boldly. Quite a zinger at mid-20th-Century Christendom.
This is the essay “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” which was written quite a while after the book The Screwtape Letters. The essay is, I guess, added as a postscript to some editions of the book. I just wanted to note that in case some of you don’t understand why it wasn’t in your copy of the book.
Hmm… Arguably Deconstructionism is an approach toward criticism which does allow its subjects to be treated as sources of wisdom. (Debatable of course. But Deconstructionist readings very often have a philosophical tint to them.)
The approach described in the quote from Screwtape describes historical criticism generally, not particularly Deconstructionism.
It has been years and years since I have read it. I enjoyed it at the time. I tried to pass it on to a Christian woman I knew and she wrinkled her nose and said: It doesn’t sound like the type of book a Christian should read!
Screwtape is superb. If you’ve not already seen it, you may also enjoy The Great Divorce, in which various “ghosts” basically argue themselves out of going to Heaven when the opportunity lies plain before them. (But not all. There’s also a lovely scene showing a young man with, almost literally, a monkey on his back… some kind of unstated sexual peccadillo which it seems he will do anything rather than give up. That incident ends very happily with a rather cheering lesson.)
In my experience, those who would benefit the most from reading Lewis (mostly fundamentalists and non-denominational mega-church “evangelicals”) are also the ones that really hate Lewis.
I think her bigger problem is that she wasn’t too complex and didn’t think too deeply. I’m sure never read Christian literature and only read the parts of the bible that were taught in her church. She was a very sweet woman though and had a good heart.
And that passage, my dear friends, is why I don’t have any postgraduate degrees in literature. We disagree about many things, C.S., but at least we both despise Theory!
As I understand it, what Lewis meant in the quotation in Lumpy’s post was not that he completely distrusted any historical analysis or any theory of literature. What he disliked was taking it as the end-all and be-all of the consideration of any statement of fact. I think that he was willing to place things in their historical and theoretical context, but beyond that he wanted to know if those things were true. He may not have liked Theory (although most of what’s meant by that in literary studies today arose after his death), but I don’t think he would have objected to all theories.
