Let’s just skip the part about atheists since that’s embarrassingly false, what with Lewis having been an atheist and all. What I really don’t get is why you give a shit about salvation. If you sincerely believe that there is only one way to be saved, and being saved is important to you, then you know how to go about getting what you want. If, on the other hand, you think it’s just nonsense, there is no logical reason why it should concern you one way or the other, especially to the degree that you react with such charged emotions. I mean, I think rap music is nonsense, but I don’t go into threads about rap music and summon up every charged adjective I can think of to hurl at rap musicians. I just shrug my shoulders and let them be.
Some of the worst anti-smoking nazis are ex-smokers. Sometimes the most insufferable religionists are converts from atheism (and yes, some of the most obnoxious atheists are former believers).
There is a letter in Screwtape where the title charater describes his attempt to keep an atheist from examining his beliefs on a train. The “enemy” is whispering in the atheists ear and starting to sway him. Screwtape manges to distract the atheist away from these thoughts merely by suggesting that he get something to eat. This letter exemplifies for me both what is good and bad about the book. The observation that people can be so easily distracted from self-examination and deep thinking by such trivial cognitive digressions as wanting lunch is genuinely insightful. But for me, the inisght is ruined by the smug assumption that atheists are automatically hellbound (Screwtape mentions that the atheist in his story is now “with our father below”) and I think it’s insulting and false (and self-comforting) for him to imply that atheists would all be christians if they only thought things through.
I don’t think I reacted with charged emotions. I gave my opinion of a book. essentially, my opinion of Screwtape is that Lewis sabotages his own insights by constantly inserting (what are to me) bigoted moral assumptions. That’s just my opinion of a particular author and a book. It’s not an opinion of Christians.
I appreciate that, but I do think that things like “dogmatic religious moralism”, “insulting, childish, wishful, sanctimonous and fallacious”, “insufferably self-satisfied”, and the like are emotionally charged. If to you they are not, then I dread the day that I find you upset. 
Does the book say, or even imply, that all atheists are automatically hellbound? The book is about the fate of one particular character, and whether he ends up saved or damned; that is its premise, the device that drives what little plot it has.
This sounds like you’re faulting Lewis for being a Christian rather than an atheist. Lewis reasoned his own way from atheism to Christianity. His sincerely-held belief was that Christianity was more reasonable than atheism. And again, I’m not sure how appropriate your use of the word “all” is.
It is debatable (a) what makes a sincerely-held belief (and/or a premise assumed for the sake of a work of fiction) a “smug assumption” (aside from the fact that you don’t share said belief), and (b) how many of these things Lewis actually did believe (I believe more evidence could be found against than for many of them in the body of Lewis’s work).
It’s a great book. I first read it in college, and then again last year with my book club. It was selected for us by an evangelical member who knew about Lewis’s life story and personal habits, but was not troubled by them in the last. I always remember Screwtape’s last letter to his nephew, strongly implying that he’s going to gobble up the hapless junior tempter the next time he sees him. Chilling.
A little factoid: Lewis died on Nov. 22, 1963, the same day JFK was assassinated. Definitely pushed Lewis off the front pages.
But did Lewis really believe in a literal hell where unbelievers are literally tortured for all time? Having read The Great Divorce I came to believe he held different views on the nature of the afterlife, specifically hell, than such a simplistic view. That book would also lead me to believe that Lewis neither thought that Christians were “better than everyone else”, nor did he believe that only Christians could be “saved”. Though it is a work of fiction, and I’ve never studied his strictly apologetic writings such as Mere Christianity. You might be projecting a fundie stereotype onto a thinker with considerably different ideas about some of these matters.
The late writer and blogger Cathy Seipp (who was Jewish) related her reasons for liking Lewis’ writings.
“To call the [Narnia] stories allegory also gives no hint of why readers return to them many times (as I have over the years, even past childhood), long after the page-turning adventures hold no more surprises. Lewis was a master stylist, and his children’s series are marked by the same dryly witty prose, comic characters, and shrewd insight into the human condition that distinguish The Screwtape Letters and his other books for adults.”
The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce are both, as far as I could tell, allegories. You should not by any means assume that Lewis is trying to describe what he thinks Hell is in TGD – he’s just trying to talk about why we (especially believers) fall. DtC, you don’t seem to understand that The Screwtape Letters are not about salvation in the sense of going to Heaven or Hell (though Screwtape and Wormwood are certainly preoccupied with that concern.) On the contrary, they are about how Christians can be induced so easily to be far from God; they’re about how we fall.
Also, one should make a distinction–which Lewis himself did–between what he (Lewis) believed versus what a character in one of his novels (Screwtape) believes. Screwtape is a devil: inconsistent, manipulative, and a liar. He has considerable and in my opinion extremely cogent insights into human nature, but he is also drawn deliberately by Lewis as self-contradictory and confused about some things. It’s one of the big reasons I enjoy this book so much. I, for one, would not be comfortable drawing any of Diogenes’s conclusions about Lewis’s theology from this book alone. The protagonist is simply far too (again, deliberately) untrustworthy.
I have no trouble accepting the book’s premise (devils are real, the path to salvation is through Jesus Christ, etc.), anymore than I do in accepting the premise to, let’s say, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (orcs are evil, Sauron imbued his essence into a ring which will corrupt anyone who tries to use it, etc.) I don’t believe in the premise, though I confess I once did profess to be a Christian, but I certainly don’t feel defensive about it and it doesn’t hinder my enjoyment of the novel.
As for accusations that Lewis was a bigot, well that’s just unworthy. The man’s actual beliefs (as opposed to Screwtape’s) were far more nuanced than Diogenes is managing to acknowledge. Frankly, Diogenes’s astonishing defensiveness comes across as rather peculiar.
Anyway, count me in as an non-believer Lewis fan.
That’s pretty much exactly my feeling on the matter. I read fiction based on premises I don’t believe in all the time.
I appreciate the info about a Cleese-read version available on Audible (and it’s only $7) - I feel like I ought to read this to be culturally literate, and I’m genuinely curious. Plus I love Cleese, so cool.
On the one hand, I have to say that I find the observation that people are passive-aggressive about where to go to eat to be utterly banal. Hopefully there will be greater insights than that.
On the other hand, as **Priceguy **put it so well, I don’t anticipate having a problem with accepting the premises of the story. That Lewis may have truly believed them while I treat them as I do any suspension of disbelief for fiction doesn’t matter much.
I’m not sure that they are allegories; they certainly wouldn’t be allegories according to Lewis’s definition of the term, which would require a one-to-one relationship of each of the story’s elements to some other physical or intellectual element. I’d classify them as fantasy, or as Christian fantasy. And again, I’ve not read much of Lewis’s strictly religious writings, but to me someone who is capable and willing to craft stories, though they be fantasy, that show heaven, hell, and salvation as quite different than the traditional Calvinist view shows that there is some measure of depth in his views of these matters that differs from what Diogenes’s stereotype might suggest. I can’t imagine for instance a Jerry Falwell type crafting a work, even of fiction, that describes hell in the manner that it appears in The Great Divorce.
Possibly Lewis’s only true allegory is The Pilgrim’s Regress, which I still enjoy but Diogenes should probably stay very far away from. 
I’d like to put in a plug for my favorite Lewis novel, Till We Have Faces. Not at all allegorical, not obviously religious in any way–although supernatural powers are real in the novel, they’re simply not allegorically Christian. It’s a very interesting retelling of the myth of Psyche and Cupid.
I love it.
Thank you for this thread. I haven’t read Screwtape in at least a decade, and it’s sitting right there on my bookshelf, so I’m going to promote it to my bedside table right now.
*Till We Have Faces * is Lewis’s greatest fiction work in my opinion - great insight into the human “psyche”.
And I’d like to add that I agree with Diogenes in some measure. I don’t think it is wrong to criticize a book because you disagree with its premise. I don’t like Hemingway, in part, because I find the idea of macho being the ultimate expression of manliness to be insulting and dangerous. I don’t have to accept such a premise in order to give a valid reading and justifiable criticism to any of Hemingway’s works.
This has always been acceptable in general literary criticism. Speaking of accepting the premises of LOTR, for instance, many critics did not accept its premises when it was released, not because they didn’t literally believe in goblins, but because they thought that hero and monster stories lacked subtlety and relevance compared to realism and naturalism. Lewis defended LOTR against these charge in his essays about the books that can be found in the collection On Stories. One could even see Tolkien’s masterpiece on Beowulf criticism The Monsters and the Critics as a sort of prescient roundabout defence of criticisms of Tolkien’s own work which he knew were bound to come forward.
Bob Jones was not an evangelical. He was a fundamentalist, and there’s a difference.
I also never met an evangelical who had a serious problem with Lewis.
Lewis himself said Till We Have Faces was his best fiction; he was right.
Oh, I know Jones was a fund’ist. And one who recognized Lewis as a brother in the Faith, as painful as it must have been for Jones. G
“I also never met an evangelical who had a serious problem with Lewis.”
Transposing a word, I also never met a serious evangelical who had a problem with Lewis.
Aldoux Huxley also. Evangelical-turned-Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft wrote a very uneven “novel” Between Heaven & Hell about their meeting in the Great In-Between before going off to their respective destinations. Lewis may have approved of the idea, but not the execution.
Peter Kreeft teaches at Boston College, where I’m currently a senior. He has played off a lot of Lewis’ works, the one applicable for this discussion being “The Snakebite Letters.” I remember liking it but must confess that the content escapes me.
As for Lewis, I think he’s great, one of if not the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. Diogenes has a valid point, but does it not all boil down to the problem of evil? Lewis tried to address this if I’m not mistaken in The Problem of Pain. It’s been a while.
Oh, and dont forget about Lewis’ science fiction trilogy! They drag a bit at times, but are overall fantastic!
So have you had a class with Peter Kreeft? I’ve read other books by him which I’ve enjoyed- especially Making Sense Out of Suffering. BH&H wasn’t altogether bad, but I have a low opinion of it as it could have been so much better.
Re Lewis- I’ve never made it through OOTSP, but I’ve read Perelandra & especially That Hideous Strength several times. A few years ago, OOTSP was optioned for a movie & I even exchanged e-mails with Douglas Gresham about it, but I think it’s fallen by the wayside.
As good as The Problem of Pain is, it has to be followed by A Grief Observed. In fact, they really should be bound together IMO.