Professor of english literature

[Pages:82]The

Screwtape

Letters

L e tt e r s f r o m a s e n i o r t o a j u n i o r d e v i l .

BY

C. S. Lewis

Prof essor of English Liter ature Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford Oxford University, 1925?1954. Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University

(Magdalene College), 1954?1963 Member of the "Inklings"

Diabolus superbus spiritus, quod ferre non possunt, ad illudendum

The year of our Lord MMXVI

Samizdat

University Press

T he Screwtape Letters was initially published, chapter/letter, by chapter, in T he Guardian

on May 2nd, 1941. Based on the public domain etext provided by Gutenberg Canada Ebooks. The text was produced by Marcia Brooks, Mark Akrigg, Stephen Hutcheson & the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team.

Samizdat, May 2016 (public domain under Canadian copyright law) This file may not be sold or packaged with any product or application for sale.

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TO J. R. R. TO L K I E N

"The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." -- Luther

"The devill... the prowde spirite.... cannot endure to be mocked." -- Thomas More

P r e fa c e

I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.

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. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight. The sort of script which is used in this book can be very easily obtained by anyone who has once learned the knack; but illdisposed or excitable people who might make a bad use of it shall not learn it from me.

Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle. I have made no attempt to identify any of the human beings mentioned in the letters; but I think it very unlikely that the portraits, say, of Fr. Spike or the patient's mother, are wholly just. There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.

In conclusion, I ought to add that no effort has been made to clear up the chronology of the letters. Number XVII appears to have been composed before rationing became serious; but in general the diabolical method of dating seems to bear no relation to terrestrial time and I have not attempted to reproduce it. The history of the European War, except in so far as it happens now and then to impinge upon the spiritual condition of one human being, was obviously of no interest to Screwtape.

C. S. Lewis, Magdalen College July 5, 1941

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