The Screwtape Letters: Annotated Edition

Dedication

TO J.R.R. TOLKIEN*

Contents

Dedication

Introduction to the Annotated Edition

Works Cited

Preface to the 1961 Edition

Epigraph

Preface to the Original Edition

The Screwtape Letters

Letter 1

Letter 2

Letter 3

Letter 4

Letter 5

Letter 6

Letter 7

Letter 8

Letter 9

Letter 10

Letter 11

Letter 12

Letter 13

Letter 14

Letter 15

Letter 16

Letter 17

Letter 18

Letter 19

Letter 20

Letter 21

Letter 22

Letter 23

Letter 24

Letter 25

Letter 26

Letter 27

Letter 28

Letter 29

Letter 30

Letter 31

Screwtape Proposes a Toast

Acknowledgments

C. S. Lewis’s Ten Favorite Books

Further Reading

About the Authors

Books by C. S. Lewis

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction to the Annotated Edition

While working on a dramatization of The Screwtape Letters for Focus on the Family’s Radio Theatre, I became aware of two things. First, The Screwtape Letters is as relevant to the twenty-first century as it was to the twentieth. Second, though Screwtape is timeless in its perspectives, the writing is fixed in time and many of the references, words, and phrases have been lost to the generations since it was written. So I put it to Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson, that someone ought to do an annotated version to help modern readers along.

He hated the idea. For him, the authors of annotated books too often try to interpret the material for the audience—and often get it wrong. I assured him that it was possible for an annotated edition to illuminate the material without attempting to interpret it. I believed that for readers to understand the classic works of literature or philosophical concepts Lewis referenced, as well as how Lewis explored ideas in his other works, they would have a richer experience with The Screwtape Letters.

To that, he agreed. And he gave me the honor of taking on the effort, though I am not, nor have I ever pretended to be, an academic. That wasn’t important to him. He wanted The Screwtape Letters to be accessible to as broad an audience as possible.

With that said, I should be clear that this book is not an interpretation of The Screwtape Letters nor of C. S. Lewis. Apart from the mandate from Doug Gresham himself, I wouldn’t attempt such a thing. Greater minds than mine have debated this work and its meanings since the book’s release. I have no interest in adding my opinions to the debate.

And I’m sensitive that Lewis himself loathed the practice of poring over an author’s life to discern some deep, inner meaning to a written work. In a letter dated January 19, 1948, Lewis wrote to the Reverend Roy W. Harrington in answer to a request for some background material about his life. Lewis stated, The only thing of any importance (if that is) about me is what I have to say. He went on to explain one of his favorite peeves:

I can’t abide the idea that a man’s books should be set in their biographical context and if I had some rare information about the private life of Shakespeare or Dante I’d throw it in the fire, tell no one, and re-read their works. All this biographical interest is only a device for indulging in gossip as an excuse for not reading what the chaps say, [which] is their only real claim on our attention. (I here resist a wild impulse to invent some really exciting background—that I am an illegitimate son of Edward VII, married to a chimpanzee, was rescued from the practice of magic by a Russian monk, and always eat eggs with the shells on.)¹

Yet Lewis himself, as a teacher of English literature, understood the importance of putting a work and its author into its historical context. His English Literature in the Sixteenth Century and The Discarded Image are only two of many examples where he does that very thing.

It was a tribute to his audience that Lewis never spoke down to them. He seemed to assume that his readers were as well read as he was. Perhaps they were then. Now, however, annotations are needed to help contemporary readers who haven’t been educated to the high standards of Oxford or Cambridge in 1941, or who know little or nothing about the world in which Lewis wrote.

Also buried in The Screwtape Letters are themes and ideas that Lewis had touched on in earlier works or would develop more fully later. For example, the phrase merely Christian is used by Screwtape in Letter 25 to describe Christians who embrace a mere Christianity—as opposed to Screwtape’s preferred "Christianity and . . . The concept of mere Christianity was actually explored long before Lewis adopted the phrase, as you’ll see in the annotation. And Lewis would later develop mere Christianity in a series of broadcast talks" he did for the BBC.² Those talks became his classic book Mere Christianity. That’s one example of how I hope these annotations will help.

Finally, in some cases, Lewis uses words and phrases that have fallen out of use or have changed meaning over the years, or over the Atlantic. Where possible, I give a simple explanation of what those words or phrases mean.

With all that said, my greatest hope is that the reader will find in this edition even more reasons to love and appreciate Lewis’s brilliant classic.

The Context for Screwtape

By the time C. S. Lewis had the spark of an idea for The Screwtape Letters in 1940, the world around him was changing dramatically.

In July, Germany’s war against Britain had taken to the skies as the German Luftwaffe hoped to decimate the Royal Air Force over the English Channel. Then, in September, the Germans changed their strategy and began bombing England’s cities. London was the main target. By the end of that month alone, over seven thousand people had been killed and nine thousand injured. The Blitz, as it was known, would last until May 1941 and would pervade Lewis’s consciousness while writing The Screwtape Letters.

That period would also prove to be a remarkable time for Lewis’s career. He was commissioned by publisher Ashley Sampson to contribute a book to the Christian Challenge series. The subject was pain. And from that commission came The Problem of Pain, published in the autumn of 1940.

The Problem of Pain was critically acclaimed, and Lewis was acclaimed for tackling such a difficult subject with honesty and clarity of thought. The book came to the attention of James Welch, the director of the BBC’s Religious Broadcasting department. On February 7, 1941, Welch wrote to Lewis with a couple of suggestions about a series of radio broadcasts they might produce together. An exchange of letters followed, leading to four broadcast talks given by Lewis called Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe. The following year he would write two more series and in 1944 yet another. Not long after that, all four efforts would wind up as the published Mere Christianity.

Between his published and broadcasting work, Lewis was becoming well known far beyond the walls of Oxford. Letters poured in from both an admiring and annoyed audience. More opportunities came his way. In June 1941, he delivered a sermon entitled The Weight of Glory. It would become one his most famous essays when published later.

Another duty Lewis performed was to serve as a Royal Air Force lecturer. Beginning in April 1941, he spent weekends traveling to RAF bases around the country speaking to young soldiers as well as their chaplains. This heightened his awareness of the topics—and spiritual battles—the average person dealt with.

All of these activities occurred while Lewis was still tutoring and lecturing full-time at Magdalen College in Oxford.

The Creation of Screwtape

The seed of the idea that would become The Screwtape Letters presented itself to C. S. Lewis in the summer of 1940. Lewis had been ill for several weeks, and as soon as he felt able, he returned to his local Anglican church—Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry—for the midday service. Rev. Arthur William Blanchett, the young curate, preached. But not very favorably, Lewis reported in a letter to his brother, Warnie,³ in July.

Before the service had ended, Lewis was struck by an idea for a book, an idea that he told Warnie might be both useful and entertaining. He initially wanted to call it As One Devil to Another as it would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first ‘patient.’ He continued:

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 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 proof that prayer is a kind of self-hypnosis. Or if it is answered by some external event, then since that even 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."⁴

Readers of The Screwtape Letters will recognize how Lewis used this idea in Letter 27. The letter to his brother also serves as a good example of how Lewis’s mind was already working through the foundational aspects of what the collection of letters would be.

Lewis was a subscriber to The Guardian, a weekly Anglican newspaper (not to be confused with the current British newspaper). In fact, it was the only periodical he received. After completing all thirty-one letters, he offered them to the editor, who had already agreed to publish Lewis’s essay The Dangers of National Repentance.⁵ A deal was struck, with The Guardian offering to pay him two pounds for each letter. (Lewis refused to accept the money, opting instead to have the total dispersed to various widows and orphans, a practice he would continue throughout the rest of his life.)⁶ The first letter appeared on May 2, 1941.

The letters were hugely successful, causing even nonsubscribers to seek out The Guardian just to read the weekly installments. Watching the success of the letters, publisher Ashley Sampson saw a bestseller in the making. By this time, Centenary Press had been bought by Geoffrey Bles Publishing, and Sampson suggested to the editors that they grab up The Screwtape Letters before another publisher beat them to it. They agreed and the book was released in England in February 1942. It appeared in the United States several months later.

Like all his other books, Lewis wrote Screwtape in longhand⁷ and Warnie typed it into a final draft. Normally Lewis would then burn the original longhand version. But because of the German Blitz on London, Lewis was afraid the original typed manuscript might be destroyed in an air raid. He sent the longhand manuscript for safekeeping to his friend, Sister Penelope, an Anglican nun at the convent of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin at Wantage.⁸ After the war, Sister Penelope offered to return the manuscript. Lewis suggested that she sell it, if possible, and put the money to good use. Eventually she sold it to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library and used the funds to restore the convent’s chapel.

Writing Screwtape, as Lewis readily admitted, was an unpleasant experience as it forced him to take on the deeply cynical view of a demon who tempts and perverts. It distressed him to write so much, and so easily, from that perspective. Biographer and friend George Sayer surmises in his Jack:⁹ C. S. Lewis and His Times that it may not have been coincidence that around this time Lewis turned to the Cowley Fathers—the Church of England priests of the Society of St. John the Evangelist—for spiritual direction, confession, and advice. This was a practice he continued for many years after Screwtape was but a memory.

The Screwtape Letters also utilizes a particular literary approach, uncommon for Lewis at that time, which presents a negative point of view to lift up the positive—an approach Lewis suggested would give a fresh, even comical perspective on the subject and attract readers who might not normally think about such things. In 1947, Lewis refused permission for a scholar to create an index for The Screwtape Letters because "part of the success of that book depends on luring the ordinary reader into a serious self-knowledge under pretense of being a kind of joke. Lewis stated that a subject index would turn the joke into something to be taken seriously. Of course, this would not deter readers like you, he wrote. But it is the worldly reader I specially want to catch."¹⁰

Catching readers—both worldly and otherwise—was something at which C. S. Lewis excelled, as you’ll see in these pages.

—Paul McCusker

Colorado Springs

April 2012

Works Cited

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publishers and copyright holders for permission to reproduce the following material. Because there are so many editions of these titles, I do not provide page numbers but defer to chapters, dates of letters, or other means to source the quotes used.

Allegory of Love.

C. S. Lewis. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960.

Arthurian Torso.

Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis. Arthurian Torso, Containing the Posthumous Fragment of the Figure of Arthur by Charles Williams and a Commentary on the Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams by C. S. Lewis. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948.

At Breakfast.

C. S. Lewis. C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences. Edited by James T. Como. New York: Macmillan, 1979.

Brothers and Friends.

W. H. Lewis. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. Edited by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1982.

Christian Reflections.

C. S. Lewis. Christian Reflections. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967; Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1967.

Collected Letters II.

C. S. Lewis. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949. Edited by Walter Hooper. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2004.

Collected Letters III.

C. S. Lewis. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950–1963. Edited by Walter Hooper. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007.

Discarded Image.

C. S. Lewis. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964.

English Literature.

C. S. Lewis. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954.

Experiment in Criticism.

C. S. Lewis. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1961.

Four Loves.

C. S. Lewis. The Four Loves. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960; New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1960.

God in the Dock.

C. S. Lewis. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1970.

Last Battle.

C. S. Lewis. The Last Battle. London: Bodley Head, 1956.

Letters to an American Lady.

C. S. Lewis. Letters to an American Lady. Edited by Clyde S. Kilby. Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1967; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969.

Letters to Malcolm.

C. S. Lewis. Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964; New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1964.

Lewis: A Complete Guide.

C. S. Lewis. C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life and Works. Edited by Walter Hooper. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996.

MacDonald: An Anthology.

George MacDonald. George MacDonald: An Anthology. Edited by C. S. Lewis. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946; New York: Macmillan, 1947.

Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

C. S. Lewis. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Edited by Walter Hooper. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966.

Mere Christianity.

C. S. Lewis. Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952; New York: Macmillan, 1952.

Narrative Poems.

C. S. Lewis. Narrative Poems. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1969; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Preface to Paradise Lost.

C. S. Lewis. A Preface to Paradise Lost. Oxford Univ. Press, 1942.

Problem of Pain.

C. S. Lewis. The Problem of Pain. London: Centenary Press, 1940; New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Reflections on the Psalms.

C. S. Lewis. Reflections on the Psalms. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1958; New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1958.

Screwtape Letters.

C. S. Lewis. The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast. New York: Macmillan, 1961.

Surprised By Joy.

C. S. Lewis. Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955; New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1956.

Surprised By Laughter.

Terry Lindvall. Surprised By Laughter: The Comic World of C. S. Lewis. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996.

Weight of Glory.

C. S. Lewis. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Revised and Expanded Edition. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: Macmillan, 1980. Five of these essays originally appeared in Transposition and Other Addresses by C. S. Lewis (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949) and The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Macmillan, 1949).

World’s Last Night.

C. S. Lewis. The World’s Last Night and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960.

Preface to the 1961 Edition

*

It was during the second German War¹ that the letters of Screwtape appeared in the (now extinct) Guardian.² I hope they did not hasten its death, but they certainly lost it one reader. A country clergyman wrote to the editor, withdrawing his subscription on the ground that "much of the advice given in these letters seemed to him not only erroneous but