When the war broke out in 1939, Warnie, who had remained in the Army Reserve, was called into active duty and posted to the Base Supply Depot at Le Havre. He was now forty-three, had enjoyed seven years of retirement, and the ‘romance’ of Army life which he had felt as a young man had palled. Even the Enemy, which had been somewhat amorphous during the First World War, had become grim and dreadful in the person of Hitler – the one modern man so bad that Lewis (in ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’) put him in Hell. At the same time, Lewis had no sympathy with the modern view that killing or being killed is the greatest possible of all evils and he did not believe in pacifism. Expecting a Leftist and a Rightist pseudo-theology to emerge in England, he would not accept the tempting belief that his country was without fault. Thus it was that when the vicar of his parish church, the Reverend Thomas Bleiben,* prayed on the morning of 10 September 1939 that God might prosper ‘our righteous cause’, Lewis protested to Warnie against the ‘audacity of informing God that our cause was righteous’.1
During the First World War Lewis had not only his brother’s life to worry about but his own. Now that he was left behind, in the relative security of his college, he worried about Warnie and whether he would come out of the war alive. Maureen Moore later told Walter Hooper of the elaborate means he went to in order to hide his deepening sorrow from the family. Once when Mrs Moore sent her into his study to call him for tea, she found Lewis reading. This she knew to be a ruse when she noticed that the book he was holding was upside down. Some idea of his mental anguish comes through the pages of one of his notebooks where he tried to put his prayers for his brother into a poem. Scribbled throughout the notebook are various versions of the lines
How can I ask thee Father to defend
In peril of war my brother’s head to-day?
Later – perhaps for the purpose of disguising his feelings from others – he amends ‘brother’ to ‘dearest friend’, and takes the poem a bit further:
How can I ask thee, Father, to defend
In peril of war my dearest friend to-day,
As though I knew, better than Thou, the way,
Or with more love than thine desired the end?
When I, for the length of one poor prayer, suspend
So hardly for his sake my thoughts, that stray
And wanton, thrusting twenty times a day,
Clean out of mind the man I call my friend;
Who, if he had from thee, no better care
Than mine, were every moment dead. But prayer
Thou givest to man, not man to thee: thy laws
Suffering our mortal wish that way to share
The eternal will; at taste of whose large air
Man’s word becomes, by miracle, a cause.
The war advertised itself everywhere. Three schoolgirls were evacuated to The Kilns, and Mrs Moore set Lewis to hanging up blackout curtains. So great was the shortage of space near London that the Government appropriated many college buildings for the billeting of soldiers. Lewis, fearing the worst, was delighted that New Buildings, which contained his set of rooms, was not used and that there were enough undergraduates to begin Michaelmas Term.
Meanwhile, the loss of Warnie was somewhat compensated for by the appearance in Oxford of Charles Williams. Though Williams was given something of a hero’s welcome by Lewis he was, as we have seen, not universally admired by the Inklings: Tolkien told Walter Hooper some years later that ‘Lewis has always been taken in by someone. First, it was Mrs Moore, then Charles Williams, and then Joy Davidman.’ As it has become fashionable to speak of the ‘influence’ of Charles Williams on Lewis and to draw parallels between the two men’s books, it is not, perhaps, amiss to record a conversation Hooper once had with Lewis on the subject. After a meeting of the Inklings some years after Williams’s death, Dr ‘Humphrey’ Havard drove Lewis and Hooper out to The Trout inn at Godstow. Over lunch Hooper asked Lewis what he thought of the current vogue for tracing the ‘influence’ of Williams in his work. ‘I have never’, replied Lewis, ‘been consciously influenced by Williams, never believed that I was in any way imitating him. On the other hand, there may have been a great deal of unconscious influence going on.’ Then, bursting into laughter, he said, ‘By the by, I notice that every time I have a pork pie you have one too – is that “influence”?’
It may have been partly the great unconscious influence or the mental stimulation of Williams that made the war years some of Lewis’s most productive. Some months before the Oxford University Press moved to Oxford, Lewis received two unusual requests for a layman. One came from the Reverend T.R. Milford asking if he would preach before the University in the Church of St Mary the Virgin, and the other from the publisher Ashley Sampson* requesting him to write a book on pain.
Lewis often said that if anyone had told him in his atheist days that he would someday step into a pulpit and preach he would have considered that man raving mad. Nevertheless, he accepted the invitation, conscious while doing so of both his duty to take on whatever tasks of this kind he was given and the curious ‘about-face’ actions which God sometimes requires of a once cheeky atheist. He was at this time writing his essay on ‘Christianity and Culture’ and the sermon is quite obviously an outgrowth of it. The vicar of St Mary’s was pleased with the script Lewis sent him and he mimeographed copies to pass out after the sermon. So, on Sunday evening, 22 October 1939, Lewis climbed into the pulpit to preach to a very large congregation of dons and undergraduates, one of whom was Roger Lancelyn Green. The sermon was entitled ‘None Other Gods: Culture in War Time’,2 and Lewis chose as a text the verse ‘A Syrian ready to perish was my father’ from Deuteronomy 26:5. The sermon appeared, under the title ‘Learning in War-Time’, in Transposition and Other Addresses (1949), and was reprinted in Fernseed and Elephants (1975).
Knowing that many of the undergraduates might go to war – as he had – before they completed their studies in Oxford, he set himself to answer the peculiarly relevant question, ‘What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing?’3 Lewis, typically, went straight to the heart of the matter – pointing out that, since we are all going to die sometime, as we live perpetually on the edge of a precipice, war creates no absolutely new situation but only ‘aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it’.4 That being so, and as neither conversion nor war obliterates our intellectual and aesthetic activities, we would be foolish to allow fear to cause us to substitute a worse cultural life for a better. (It is interesting to compare Lewis’s idea of culture with that which Hitler was busy inaugurating in Germany.)
Lewis went on to say that, whereas a man might have to die for his country, no man should, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. Religion, on the other hand, though it cannot occupy the whole of life in the sense of excluding all our natural activities, must, in another sense, occupy the whole of life – the solution to this paradox being that whatever we do must be done to the glory of God. ‘The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman’, Lewis insisted, ‘become spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly “as to the Lord”.’5
Ashley Sampson was, during the 1920s, the owner of a small London publishing firm, the Centenary Press. Shortly before the war, another publisher, Geoffrey Bles,* who had opened a firm in 1923 and who achieved success through his publication of a translation of Vicki Baum’s novel Grand Hotel in 1930, bought up the Centenary Press and its owner. Though he was working for Bles now, Sampson – who can truly be called the ‘discoverer’ of C.S. Lewis – was keenly interested in theology and, having been greatly impressed by The Pilgrim’s Regress, invited Lewis to contribute a book on pain to his ‘Christian Challenge’ series. This series of popular theological books, which came out during the war under the imprint of both the Centenary Press and Geoffrey Bles Ltd, contained many valuable titles: Canon Roger Lloyd’s The Mastery of Evil (1941), Father Gerald Vann’s The Heart of Man (1944), Charles Williams’s The Forgiveness of Sins (1942), and The Resurrection of Christ (1945) by Professor A.M. Ramsey (later Archbishop of Canterbury).
Lewis began writing The Problem of Pain during the summer of 1939, and when the Inklings met on 8 November 1939 at the Eastgate Hotel to dine, the fare consisted of a section from Tolkien’s ‘new Hobbit’, a nativity play by Charles Williams, and a chapter from Lewis’s Problem. The latter was still being written and read aloud when Lewis and Tolkien (the only two Inklings on this occasion) met in Tolkien’s rooms in Pembroke College on Thursday, 30 November. In a letter to his brother written a few days afterwards (3 December) Lewis described his observations on the supposedly close connection between theories about pain and actual pain: ‘If you are writing a book about pain and then get some actual pain, as I did in my ribs, it does not either, as the cynic would expect, blow the doctrine to bits, or, as a Christian would hope, turn it into practice, but remains quite unconnected and irrelevant, just as any other bit of actual life does when you are reading or writing.’6
After The Problem of Pain had obtained the nihil obstat of the Inklings – to whom it is dedicated – the manuscript went off to Ashley Sampson in the spring of 1940 and it was published on 18 October of the same year. Though it has often been listed in catalogues as a medical handbook (much to Lewis’s amusement), its success was immediate and continuing; it has never gone out of print.
Except for hints dropped in The Pilgrim’s Regress, the public had no idea what Lewis’s religious ‘stance’ would be. In the Church of England there is a jingle about the three kinds of Anglican churchmanship: ‘Broad and hazy, low and lazy, high and crazy.’ Which would fit Lewis? He surprised everyone. Like the Pilgrim in The Pilgrim’s Regress, he bypassed all kinds of churchmanship and made straight for the Main Road of Classical Christianity; or, as he called it elsewhere, that ‘great level viaduct which crosses the ages’.7 In a letter to Sister Penelope of 8 November 1939 he said, ‘To me the real distinction is not between high and low but between religion with real supernaturalism and salvationism on the one hand and all watered-down and modernist versions on the other.’8 A few years later he made his position clearer still. ‘I am’, he said, ‘a dogmatic Christian untinged with Modernist reservations and committed to supernaturalism in its full rigour.’9
The ‘problem’ of pain is roughly this: ‘If God is good, why does he allow so much suffering in the world?’ Lewis knew that most readers had never read a serious discussion of theology before and might never read another, so he used a technique not totally unlike that of Billy Graham in taking full advantage of his one opportunity to get everything in. He spends the first half of his book discussing the nature of God, free will, human wickedness and the Fall of man, with such freshness, clarity and dispelling of petty, traditional prejudices that, had only those chapters been printed, many readers might have been able to attempt an answer to the ‘problem’ for themselves. In Chapter 6 on ‘Human Pain’ Lewis points out the benevolence of God in giving men the ‘enormous permission to torture their fellows’.10 Lewis’s purpose is not only to justify free will but to show the good and remedial effects of pain: ‘God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.’11 (Interestingly, the Dutch translation of the book is entitled Gods Megafoon.)
It was probably to be expected that there would be those who ridicule Lewis for his treatment of pain. Who are you to talk about pain? etc. We should remember what was said in Chapter 4 about the distinction Lewis found in Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity between ‘enjoyment’ and ‘contemplation’: you ‘enjoy’ the act of thinking and ‘contemplate’ whatever it is you are thinking about. The two activities, as Lewis said, are distinct and incompatible. ‘I am not arguing,’ he said, ‘that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made “perfect through suffering” is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design.’12
By the time he got to the chapter on ‘Hell’, Lewis had placed God’s goodness beyond attack and, then, having pictured a really bad man, he asked: ‘Can you really desire that such a man, remaining what he is (and he must be able to do that if he has free will), should be confirmed forever in his present happiness – should continue, for all eternity, to be perfectly convinced that the laugh is on his side? … Even mercy can hardly wish to such a man his eternal, contented continuance in such ghastly illusion.’13 ‘In the long run,’ he concluded, ‘the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: “What are you asking God to do?” To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But he has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what he does.’14
In the chapter on ‘Animal Pain’, which Lewis admitted is pure speculation (‘God has given us data which enable us, in some degree, to understand our own suffering: He has given us no such data about beasts’),15 he traced the sufferings of animals to the Fall of man and suggested that as man is to be understood only in his relation to God, the beasts are to be understood only in their relation to man and, through man, to God. ‘The tame animal’, he said, ‘is therefore … the only “natural” animal – the only one we can see occupying the place it was made to occupy, and it is on the tame animal that we must base all our doctrine of beasts.’16
Finally, in his last chapter on ‘Heaven’, Lewis brought in the dearest theme of all his writings, the romantic yearning after a transcendent joy which lifts the thesis of his book once and for all to a level at which everything is seen in its full significance.
While it would be difficult to find liberal Christians who would accept those beliefs Lewis held in a literal Satan, a literal Fall of man, and the traditional doctrine of original sin, they are all accepted by the Catholic Church and most Protestant evangelicals. However, the chapter which has attracted most attention is that on ‘Animal Pain’.17 Some of the most pointed criticism of this chapter came from Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), who was also Mrs Stuart Moore. This Anglican mystic complained in a letter to Lewis of 13 January 1941 that she found the belief that the tame animal is the only natural animal ‘an intolerable doctrine of a frightful exaggeration of what is involved in the primacy of man’. She went on to ask:
Is the cow which we have turned into a milk machine or the hen we have turned into an egg machine really nearer the mind of God than its wild ancestors? … You surely can’t mean that, or think that the robin redbreast in a cage doesn’t put heaven in a rage but is regarded as an excellent arrangement … If we ever get a sideways glimpse of the animal-in-itself, the animal existing for God’s glory and pleasure and lit by His light (and what a lovely experience that is!) we don’t owe it to the Pekinese, the Persian cat or the Canary, but to some wild free creature living in completeness of adjustment to nature a life that is utterly independent of man. And this, thank heaven, is the situation of all but the handful of creatures we have enslaved. Of course I agree that animals too are involved in the Fall and await redemption and transfiguration … And man is no doubt offered the chance of being the mediator of that redemption. But not by taming, surely? Rather by loving and reverencing the creatures enough to leave them free. When my cat goes off on her own occasions I’m sure she goes with God – but I don’t feel so sure of her theological position when she is sitting on the best chair before the drawing-room fire. Perhaps what it all comes to is this, that I feel your concept of God would be improved by just a touch of wildness.18
Lewis replied on 16 January 1941:
The robin in a cage and the over-fed Peke are both, to me, instances of the abuse of man’s authority, tho’ in different ways. I never denied that the abuse was common: that is why we have to make laws (and ought to make a good many more) for the protection of animals. I do know what you mean by the sudden ravishing glimpse of animal life in itself, its wildness – to meet a squirrel in a wood or even a hedgehog in the garden makes me happy. But that is because it is, being partly exempt from the Fall, a symbol and reminder of the unfallen world we long for. That wildness would not be lost by the kind of dominion Adam had. It would be nicer, not less nice, if that squirrel would come and make friends with me at my whistle – still more if he would obey me when I told him not to kill the red squirrel in the next tree. I don’t envisage the taming of all beasts as involving domestication of all – only perhaps the dog and a few others. In a Paradisal state if you wanted a horse to ride you would walk up to the newest herd and ask for volunteers – and the one you chose would be regarded as the lucky one.19
Miss Underhill would probably have delighted in the wildness of the animals in Lewis’s Narnian stories, which are far more like the real thing than anything in Walt Disney’s films. When one of the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe asks if Aslan, the lion-king of Narnia, is ‘safe’ she is answered, ‘Safe? Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.’20 And, lest one get the impression from The Problem of Pain that Lewis himself treated his own pets – which did not include Pekinese, Persian cats, or canaries – with exaggerated and cloying affection, Walter Hooper noticed during the months he lived in The Kilns what a pleasant relationship the people and the animals enjoyed. Lewis and the others did for the cats (Tom and Snip) and dog (Ricky, a boxer pup) what was expected of them. Otherwise they left them to a very carefree, live-and-let-live existence. Hooper was particularly touched by Lewis’s intervention on behalf of ‘Old Tom’, a much-loved cat who had been a great mouser in his day, but had now lost all his teeth. Lewis’s housekeeper, Mrs Maude Miller, suggested that the time had come for Tom to be ‘put down’. Lewis would not hear of it. ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘Tom has worked hard. He’s a pensioner now.’ Thereafter he had Mrs Miller cook fish several times a week for Tom. It was deboned and prepared specially for this much-loved old cat. Once when Hooper and Lewis were walking down the private lane of The Kilns they met Tom. As they passed, Lewis lifted his hat. ‘He’s a pensioner,’ he reminded Walter.
Years before, Lewis would have stopped to savour the success of a new book, but, once delivered of the manuscript of The Problem of Pain, his attention switched to new enthusiasms and ideas. Since Charles Williams’s arrival in Oxford Lewis had been trying to persuade the University to invite him to lecture on English Literature. On 29 January 1940 Williams began a term of weekly lectures on ‘Milton’ in the fabulously vaulted Divinity School of the Bodleian. Lewis was there of course and immensely pleased with his friend’s success. He was even more pleased with Williams’s second lecture, on 5 February 1940. This was probably the most celebrated lecture Williams gave in Oxford, and Lewis wrote to Warnie about it on 11 February:
On Monday C.W. lectured nominally on Comus but really on Chastity. Simply as criticism it was superb – because here was a man who really started from the same point of view as Milton and really cared with every fibre of his being about ‘the sage and serious doctrine of virginity’ which it would never occur to the ordinary modern critic to take seriously. But it was more important still as a sermon. It was a beautiful sight to see a whole roomful of modern young men and women sitting in that absolute silence which can not be faked, very puzzled, but spell-bound: perhaps with something of the same feeling which a lecture on unchastity might have evoked in their grandparents – the forbidden subject broached at last. He forced them to lap it up and I think many, by the end, liked the taste more than they expected to. It was ‘borne in upon me’ that that beautiful carved room had probably not witnessed anything so important since some of the great medieval or Reformation lectures. I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded to do: teaching Wisdom. And what a wonderful power there is in the direct appeal which disregards the temporary climate of opinion – I wonder is it the case that the man who has the audacity to get up in any corrupt society and squarely preach justice or valour or the like always wins?21
Writing to Warnie on 3 March 1940 about the next meeting of the Inklings, Lewis said: ‘Dyson … was in his usual form and, on being told of Williams’s Milton lectures on “the sage and serious doctrine of virginity”, replied “The fellow’s becoming a common chastitute.”’22
Charles Williams’s Milton lectures have not survived, but the essence of them is found in the preface Williams wrote for the World’s Classics edition of Milton’s poems.23 As mentioned in Chapter 7, in December 1941 Lewis gave a series of lectures at the University College of North Wales which was later published as A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1942). It is impossible to imagine what that book would have been like without Williams’s lectures and his preface. Lewis said in dedicating A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ to Williams:
To think of my own lecture is to think of those other lectures at Oxford in which you partly anticipated, partly confirmed, and most of all clarified and matured, what I had been thinking about Milton … It gives me a sense of security to remember that, far from loving your work because you are my friend, I first sought your friendship because I loved your books. But for that, I should find it difficult to believe that your short Preface to Milton is what it seems to be – the recovery of a true critical tradition after more than a hundred years of laborious misunderstanding. The ease with which the thing was done would have seemed inconsistent with the weight that had to be lifted. As things are, I feel entitled to trust my own eyes. Apparently, the door of the prison was really unlocked all the time; but it was only you who thought of trying the handle. Now we can all come out.24
During the period that Williams was lecturing on Milton, Warnie Lewis, who was given the rank of major on 27 January, was lying ill in a French hospital. He had been there for several months, and the world was erupting around him. On 7 April British forces set out to mine Norwegian territorial waters in an effort to protect the country from Germany. In the last days of April 1940, while British and foreign troops prepared to withdraw from their footholds in Norway, Hitler ordered the German army to be ready to launch an offensive against France and Britain.
At daybreak on 10 May the German forces began their advance into Belgium and Holland. As the British and French troops advanced towards them, 2,500 German aircraft destroyed most of their planes. Immediately after this 16,000 German airborne troops parachuted into Rotterdam, Leiden, and The Hague.
That afternoon Winston Churchill became both Minister of Defence and the new Prime Minister. On 13 May, as the German forces conquered the Low Countries, and moved towards France, Churchill told the House of Commons, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, promising to ‘wage war … with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us … against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime’.25
German forces continued to advance across France, while the British Army waited for a planned French counter-attack from the south. On the evening of 24 May General Halder sent General Rundstedt permission to attack Dunkirk. Rundstedt, however, turned down the opportunity, preferring to allow his army to halt to regather strength and await reinforcements. Contrary to expectations, and while stating his intention to ‘annihilate the French, English and Belgian forces which are surrounded in Flanders’, Hitler did not overrule him.26 The British Government began planning the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk. On 26 May Hitler realized the grievous error he had made in approving the ‘halt’ order of 24 May. That afternoon he ordered a thrust by armoured groups and infantry divisions in the direction of Dunkirk.
Meanwhile, the British Government gave permission for ‘Operation Dynamo’ – the code name for the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk – to begin, and by 27 May it was under way. During the next nine days while the evacuation proceeded, the German air force struck with all its might. However, the pilots of the British Fighter Command, with Canadians and Poles among them, fought equally hard to keep the skies clear enough to make the evacuation possible. In one of the bravest acts of the war, and with the aid of numerous naval vessels, civilian craft, tug boats, lifeboats, cruisers and steamers, 400,000 British and French troops were rescued from Dunkirk. One of them was Warnie Lewis.
Back on English soil, Warnie went with the rest of his unit to Wenvoe Camp in Wales. Though it was some months before he recovered his strength, his brother was relieved that he was at least safe and close to home.
As Lewis spent his weekends at The Kilns, it had long been his and Warnie’s practice to go to Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry on Sunday mornings. The Rev. Thomas Bleiben, the parish priest, was an able man, but low-church and, thus, unrepresentative of the parish with its long tradition of Anglo-Catholicism. Because of his intense dislike of organ music Lewis usually shunned the 10.30 Sung Eucharist or Matins and went instead to the Communion service at 8 a.m. Writing to Warnie (who was still at Wenvoe Camp) on Saturday evening, 20 July, Lewis told him that the night before ‘Humphrey’ Havard had come by and they had listened to Hitler over the radio. ‘I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people,’ he said, ‘but it is a positive revelation to me how while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little. I should be useless as a schoolmaster or a policeman. Statements which I know to be untrue all but convince me, at any rate for the moment, if only the man says them unflinchingly.’27
The next day, Sunday, 21 July, Lewis was possibly still thinking of Hitler’s persuasiveness when he went to the eight o’clock Communion service at Holy Trinity Church, and it was during the service that he was struck by the idea for what was to become one of his most famous books. Continuing the letter to Warnie begun the evening before, he said:
Before the service was over – one could wish these things came more seasonably – I was struck by an idea for a book which I think might be both useful and entertaining. It would be called As one Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first ‘patient’. 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 [God] 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 a proof that prayer is a kind of self-hypnosis. Or if it is answered by some external event, then since that event 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. Or again, ‘In attacking faith, I should be chary of argument.’ Arguments only provoke answers. What you want to work away at is the mere unreasoning feeling that ‘that sort of thing can’t really be true.’28
The book is of course The Screwtape Letters, and the passage quoted above is almost exactly as it appears in the first Letter. We do not know how long he spent writing it except for what he tells us: he never wrote with more ease – but, as it turned out, with less enjoyment. If it flowed as freely as most of his books, he had probably finished it by Christmas 1940.
The plot of Screwtape is quite simple. It consists of a series of admonitory epistles from Screwtape, an experienced devil high in the Administration of the Infernal Civil Service, to his nephew, Wormwood, a junior colleague engaged on one of his earliest assignments on earth – which is to secure the damnation of a young man who has just become a Christian. It was prescient of Lewis to have the patient confronted at the beginning of his Christian life with a problem that confronts all young people – the difference between appearance and reality. When the young man goes to church, Screwtape advises Wormwood on how to deal with this:
Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous … His mind is full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real – though of course an unconscious – difficulty for him. Never let it come to the surface, never let him ask what he expected them to look like.29
The young man, or ‘patient’, lives with a very trying mother and, much to Screwtape’s delight, falls under the influence of ‘rich, smart, superficially intellectual and brightly sceptical people’.30 Later he does a number of things which, though innocent enough by normal standards, are considered suspect by the Lowerarchy of Hell: he reads a book he likes, takes an agreeable solitary walk, has tea at an old mill, and falls in love with a delightful girl in whose home he encounters ‘Christian life of a quality he never before imagined’.31 Finally – and this is how Wormwood loses him – he is most inopportunely killed in the war while working in Civil Defence.
If this is a dull, simple ‘human’ story from the novelist’s usual point of view, it is anything but dull to God – and, presumably, to Satan. Even those who do not hold, as Lewis did, that men are immortal and that each of us is progressing moment by moment either to Heaven or to Hell, will benefit from Lewis’s angle of vision.
It was an angle he found difficult to maintain, for in every letter he had to twist his mind into a diabolical attitude – to imagine how every temptation, pleasure, joy and sorrow looks to the devils. He was often asked to write more Screwtape letters, but felt no inclination to do so until 1959 when he produced ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’. In 1961 Lewis wrote a new preface for a combined volume, The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, in which he revealed some of his difficulties in writing the Letters. The strain of doing so, he said, ‘produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The world into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done.’32
What interests a great many people is not so much that Screwtape is an imaginary correspondence between devils, but that Lewis believed in their existence. However, as he explained in his 1961 preface, what he does not believe in is the existence of a power opposite to God – that is, in dualism. As there is no uncreated being except God, he cannot have an opposite.
The proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. That is to say, I believe in angels and I believe that some of them, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God and, as a corollary, to us. These we may call devils. They do not differ in nature from good angels, but their nature is depraved. Devil is the opposite of angel only as Bad Man is the opposite of Good Man. Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite not of God but of Michael.33
He goes on to say that though the belief in devils is not part of his creed, it is one of his opinions: ‘It seems to me to explain a good many facts. It agrees with the plain sense of Scripture, the tradition of Christendom, and the beliefs of most men at most times. And it conflicts with nothing that any of the sciences has shown to be true.’34
Though there has always been a certain amount of interest in devils, it is not perhaps unfair to say that the publication of The Screwtape Letters stirred up even greater curiosity. It also cleared up a mass of nonsense about their nature. In his original preface of 1942 Lewis wrote: ‘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.’35 When Wormwood asks Screwtape whether the ‘patient’ ought to know of his existence or not, he is told, ‘I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that “devils” are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arrive in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that … he therefore cannot believe in you.’36
At the same time that he was writing Screwtape, Lewis was busy with two other books in which he wanted to demonstrate why Christians are committed to believing that ‘the Devil is an ass’. In the first book, A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, he suggests in his chapter on ‘Satan’ that those who consider him the ‘hero’ of Milton’s poem have confused a ‘magnificent poetical treatment’37 with what a real being like Satan would be like if we actually met him. Of the progressive degradation of Satan, who ‘thought himself impaired’ by being inferior to his Creator, Lewis says: ‘In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, he could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige. And his own prestige, it must be noted, had and could have no other grounds than those which he refused to admit for the superior prestige of Messiah … It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.’38
At the end of Milton’s ‘temptation scene’, which lasts only two hundred lines, Eve falls. Lewis in Perelandra takes up the same biblical story from Genesis 3, albeit on a different planet with a different Eve, and devotes a hundred pages to it. His Eve is far more intelligent than Milton’s; but then so is his Satan. Though Lewis’s hero, Ransom, feels defenceless in the face of Satan’s dizzying barrage of logic, illogic and half-truths, he eventually sees that the fallen archangel, by choosing to make Evil his ‘Good’, has come to regard intelligence ‘simply and solely as a weapon, which it had no more wish to employ in its off-duty hours than a soldier has to do bayonet practice when he is on leave. Thought was for it a device necessary to certain ends, but thought in itself did not interest it.’39
Lewis complained that Screwtape gave a lopsided view of life because, ideally, Screwtape’s advice to Wormwood ought to have been balanced by archangelical advice to the ‘patient’ from his guardian angel. This cannot, however, be seen as a serious defect in the book because Screwtape himself, despite his malign ingenuity, throws out numerous back-handed compliments about the ‘Enemy’ (i.e. God):
Whenever there is prayer, there is danger of His own immediate action. He is cynically indifferent to the dignity of His position … and … pours out self-knowledge in a quite shameless fashion.40
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 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.41
I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one.42
When the creation of man was first mooted and when, even at that stage, the Enemy freely confessed that he foresaw a certain episode about a cross, Our Father very naturally sought an interview and asked for an explanation. The Enemy gave no reply except to produce the cock-and-bull story about disinterested love which He has been circulating ever since. This Our Father naturally could not accept. He implored the Enemy to lay His cards on the table, and gave Him every opportunity. He admitted that he felt a real anxiety to know the secret; the Enemy replied ‘I wish with all my heart that you did’. It was, I imagine, at this stage in the interview that Our Father’s disgust at such an unprovoked lack of confidence caused him to remove himself an infinite distance from the Presence with a suddenness which has given rise to the ridiculous enemy story that he was forcibly thrown out of Heaven … If we could only find out what He is really up to!43
Not a few critics have complained that, considering the world’s woes – wars, famines and the like – Lewis has Screwtape aim at very small targets in his attempt to secure the ‘patient’s’ damnation. But Lewis has supplied us with the answer to this charge. In Letter 12 Screwtape pulls Wormwood up sharply:
Like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one, the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.44
Once when Walter Hooper asked if there were any book which had given him the idea for The Screwtape Letters, Lewis took off his bookshelves Stephen McKenna’s Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman (1922) and gave it to him to read. McKenna’s once-popular book had been, he said, his only ‘model’ and had suggested how he might go about writing an ‘infernal correspondence’. It consists of twelve letters from Lady Ann Spenworth to an unnamed ‘friend of proved discretion’. Lady Ann is the daughter of an earl and her husband the younger of two sons of another peer – the rub being that their son Will is unable to inherit either family title unless various uncles and cousins come to grief in some way or another. Though Lady Ann does not confess to having anything so crude as this in mind, her letters betray her as being an unscrupulous and catty hypocrite, bent (though she says just the opposite) on destroying their lives. Her grief, other than the fact that her relatives remain in blooming health, comes in the form of a poor, but pretty, Yorkshire girl whom her son marries – the daughter, wails Lady Ann, of ‘one of these rugged, north-of-England clergymen who always have the air of intimidating you into a state of grace’.45 ‘The connection may not be obvious’, Lewis wrote in the 1961 preface, ‘but you will find there the same moral inversion – the blacks all white and the whites all black – and the humour which comes of speaking through a totally humourless persona.’46
The fact remains that, bad as Lady Ann Spenworth is, she does not understand evil as well as Lewis who, pressed for information about how he knew so much about temptation, replied in the 1961 preface: ‘Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years’ study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works. “My heart” – I need no other’s – “sheweth me the wickedness of the ungodly.”’47
No one will ever know just how much personal experience went into Screwtape, but members of an Oxford Senior Common Room do not usually find their so-called ‘ivory tower’ existence, however plush the surroundings, free of thorns. Lewis did nothing to hide the fact that he found his colleagues at Magdalen, though no worse, certainly no better than men of other professions. Then there was Mrs Moore whose faults, rarely, if ever, spoken of by Lewis, did not escape the notice of his friends. Though her father was a clergyman, and her brother, the Reverend William James Askins (1879–1955), was the dean of Kilmore Cathedral in Ireland, Mrs Moore was an atheist in later life (blaming it on Paddy’s death). Owen Barfield told Walter Hooper that he had heard her chide Jack and Warnie Lewis for participating in ‘blood feasts’ at the local parish church. In his diary entry for 21 December 1933, Warnie said: ‘She nags Jack about having become a believer.’48
Lewis doubtless encountered many instances where mothers resented their children becoming Christians, but if Mrs Moore was as bitter about his conversion and subsequent fame as a Christian apologist as she is said to have been, it is hard to reject the idea that Lewis consciously or unconsciously had her in mind when Screwtape asks how the patient’s mother accepted his conversion: ‘Is she at all jealous of the new factor in her son’s life? – at all piqued that he should have learned from others, and so late, what she considers she gave him such good opportunity of learning in childhood? Does she feel he is making a great deal of “fuss” about it – or that he’s getting in on very easy terms? Remember the elder brother in the Enemy’s story.’49
But what is probably much closer to the pain and jealousy Mrs Moore suffered over Lewis’s conversion is found in Lewis’s comment about the jealousy of the character Orual in Till We Have Faces (1956). As Lewis wrote to Clyde S. Kilby on 10 February 1957:
Orual … is a ‘case’ of human affection in its natural condition: true, tender, suffering, but in the long run, tyrannically possessive and ready to turn to hatred when the beloved ceases to be its possession. What such love particularly cannot stand is to see the beloved passing into a sphere where it cannot follow … Someone becomes a Christian, or, in a family nominally Christian already, does something like becoming a missionary or entering a religious Order. The others suffer a sense of outrage … Now I, as a Christian, have a good deal of sympathy with these jealous, puzzled, suffering people (for they do suffer, and out of their suffering much of the bitterness against religion arises).50
Lewis’s ability to ferret out those sins which lie hidden, like tiny cancers, so close to a man’s heart probably owes a great deal to a decision made near the time he thought of writing The Screwtape Letters. Though Lewis’s theology was ‘high’ from the standpoint of being completely and utterly orthodox, he had not been brought up to make auricular confessions to a priest – except, that is, for the ‘general confessions’ contained in the services of Matins, Evensong and Holy Communion. The difficulty he found with these Prayer Book confessions is that one could be as specific or (as is usually the case) as ‘general’ as one liked. It was shortly after Lewis conceived the idea of Screwtape that he was attracted by the Exhortation in the service of Holy Communion which states that if any man ‘cannot quiet his own conscience’ he may go to a priest and ‘open his grief’ in order that he ‘may receive the benefit of absolution together with ghostly counsel and advice’.
As Lewis was considering what he should do about ‘ghostly counsel’ he had a war-duty forced upon him. He was only forty-one, and it was expected that he would join the Home Guard. On 10 August 1940 he was issued with a rifle and uniform and began his weekly three-hour patrol on the outskirts of Oxford. Every Saturday he joined two other men at 1.30 a.m. and patrolled the area round the college sports grounds and pavilions till 4.30 a.m. – an experience he came to treasure as he was able to walk home in what he called the ‘empty, silent, dewy, cobwebby hours’51 of the morning.
Meanwhile, Warnie’s health remained unsatisfactory and on 16 August 1940 he was transferred to the Reserve List and sent home. Lewis and his brother had been wrenched apart so many times that, with the war growing worse every day, they hardly dared hope that this time they were permanently united. But they were, for the rest of Lewis’s life. It was a help to have Warnie back at The Kilns because Maureen Moore, who had been living there while teaching music at Oxford High School, married on 27 August 1940. Her husband, Leonard Blake, was Director of Music at Worksop College in Nottinghamshire.
Lewis’s mind was now made up about confession, and on 24 October 1940 he wrote to his friend, Sister Penelope of the Community of St Mary the Virgin, ‘I am going to make my first confession next week … The decision to do so was one of the hardest I have ever made … I begin to be afraid that I am merely indulging in an orgy of egoism.’52 Some years later he told Walter Hooper that a moment after he had dropped the letter into the pillar-box he got cold feet and tried to fish it out. As this turned out to be impossible he felt he had no course but to go through with the confession.
Shortly before this Lewis had come to know the Anglican priests of the Society of St John the Evangelist in Cowley – popularly known as the ‘Cowley Fathers’ – where he was given a directeur, Father Walter Adams (1871–1952). Until Fr Adams died, he was thereafter Lewis’s regular confessor. Shortly after his first confession, Lewis reported back to Sister Penelope on 4 November 1940:
Well – we have come through the wall of fire and find ourselves (somewhat to our surprise) still alive and even well. The suggestion about an orgy of egoism turns out, like all the enemy propaganda, to have just a grain of truth in it, but I have no doubt that the proper method of dealing with that is to continue the practice, as I intend to do. For after all, everything – even virtue, even prayer – has its dangers and if one heeds the grain of truth in the enemy propaganda one can never do anything at all.53
Lewis had long given up what he considered a pernicious and time-wasting habit – that of following the news. The one paper, or weekly news-magazine, he did read, however, was The Guardian. It had been founded in 1846 to uphold Tractarian principles and ‘to show their relevance to the best secular thought of the day’ and ceased publication in 1951 when it was taken over by the Church Quarterly. Following his conversion, Lewis decided that any monies made from specifically religious writings should go to charities, for, as he told Walter Hooper, ‘I felt that God had been so gracious in having me that the least I could do was give back all the money made in His service.’ So, even before he was paid for his first contribution to The Guardian, an essay entitled ‘Dangers of National Repentance’ (15 March 1940),54 he arranged with the editor to have all monies owing to him to be sent to any charity he might name.
The thirty-one Screwtape Letters were sent as a single manuscript to the editor of The Guardian who published them in weekly instalments from 2 May to 28 November 1941. Lewis was paid £2 per letter. He had already made a ‘preferential option’ for the ‘orphans and widows’ mentioned by St James (1:27) and he directed The Guardian to send all £62 into a fund for ‘Clergy Widows’.
Lewis’s ‘discoverer’, Ashley Sampson, read the letters as they came out in The Guardian and, with his usual acumen for ‘spotting a winner’, had no trouble in persuading Geoffrey Bles to snap them up before Lewis had any other offers. Lewis sent Bles a fair copy of the manuscript in his own hand (he could not afford a typist) and, as there was yet no complete printed copy of all the letters, he sent the original manuscript to Sister Penelope on 9 October 1941 with the request that, ‘If it is not a trouble I should like you to keep it safe until the book is printed (in case the one the publisher has got blitzed) – after that it can be made into spills or used to stuff dolls or anything.’55
Lewis was showered with praise even before all the letters had appeared in the columns of The Guardian. On 3 October 1941 a letter was published from one subscriber who, delighted with Lewis’s ironic mockery of the Lowerarchy, had written to suggest that, as Screwtape had no degree higher than a B.S., some ‘grateful university now welcome him in gradum Doctoris in Satanitate dishonoris causa’. There were, however, dissenting voices as well; one, that of a country clergyman who, Lewis learned with glee, wrote to the editor cancelling his subscription on the ground that ‘much of the advice given in these letters seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical’.56 Lewis was beginning to feel that he had hit his target.
He had indeed. The first 2,000 copies of Screwtape were published by Bles on 9 February 1942 and disappeared almost at once. The book was reprinted twice in March and, then, so great was the clamour for copies, six more times before the year was out. Lewis’s New York publishers, Macmillan & Co., brought out an American edition in 1943 which immediately became a best-seller. The Screwtape Letters has been translated into some twenty languages, and the paperback sales in England and America have long passed the million mark.
Not a few of the hundreds who have reviewed Screwtape have adopted in their reviews Lewis’s idea of an ‘infernal correspondence’. One of the cleverest is that of Charles Williams who, in Time and Tide (21 March 1942), has one devil, ‘Snigsozzle’, write a letter to another, ‘Scorpuscle’, in which the former suggests that the best counter-irritant to the publication of Screwtape’s ‘cursedly clever’ letters is ‘to make the infernal text a primer in our own Training College’. As a postscript he adds, ‘You will send someone to see after Lewis? some very clever fiend?’
One of the book’s most trenchant reviewers, Professor C.E.M. Joad, put his finger on what may be Lewis’s greatest gift. Writing in the New Statesman and Nation, 23 (16 May 1942), Professor Joad said: ‘Mr Lewis possesses the rare gift of being able to make righteousness readable.’
Almost overnight, it seemed, Lewis was internationally famous. Money began to roll in and he, not understanding the difference between gross and net profit, celebrated his good fortune by a lavish scattering of cheques to societies and individual lame dogs. Before the situation got completely out of hand, Owen Barfield, who ran his own legal firm in London, intervened and helped him set up a charitable trust – generally referred to as the ‘Agape Fund’ – into which Lewis was thereafter to pay two-thirds of his royalties for the purpose of helping the poor.
* The Rev. Thomas Eric Bleiben (1903–47) was vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, 1935–47.
* Ashley Sampson (1900–47) began his own publishing firm, the Centenary Press, in the 1920s. He was always of a delicate constitution and in 1930 he sold it to Geoffrey Bles, who retained Sampson to run it. He gave talks on the radio, lectured to the Forces during the war, taught English to the naval cadets at Dartmouth, and was devoted to St Paul’s Cathedral. His books include a biography, Wolsey (1935), an anthology, Famous English Sermons (1940), a novel, The Ghost of Mrs Brown (1941) and From the Ashes: Poems (1942). He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Literature in 1941. An obituary by Walter de la Mare is found in The Report of the Royal Society of Literature (1947).
* Geoffrey Bles (1886–1957) read Greats at Merton College, Oxford, and took his BA in 1906. He joined the Indian Civil Service in 1910 and was with the 7th Calvary in the Indian Army during the First World War. In 1923 he created his publishing firm in London, and in 1930 he began publishing religious books. Subsequently he bought Ashley Sampson’s Centenary Press; thus it was that he became Lewis’s publisher. He retired in 1954 and the controlling shares in his firm were bought by William Collins & Sons.
1 Letters, letter of 10 September 1939, pp. 324–5.
2 ‘Thou shalt have none other gods before me’, Deuteronomy 5:7.
3 ‘Learning in War-Time’, Fern-seed and Elephants, p. 14.
4 Ibid., p. 15.
5 Ibid., p. 20.
6 Letters, p. 331.
7 ‘On the Reading of Old Books’, C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley Walmsley (2000), p. 441.
8 Letters, p. 327.
9 ‘On Ethics’, Christian Reflections, p. 55.
10 The Problem of Pain (1940; Fount, 1998), ch. 6, p. 70.
11 Ibid., p. 74.
12 Ibid., p. 85.
13 Ibid., ch. 8, p. 99.
14 Ibid., p. 105.
15 Ibid., ch. 9, p. 106.
16 Ibid., pp. 114–15.
17 Lewis’s controversy with Professor C.E.M. Joad over this issue is found in Timeless at Heart: Essays on Theology, ed. Walter Hooper (1987).
18 The Letters of Evelyn Underhill, ed. Charles Williams (1943), pp. 301–2.
19 Magdalen College Archives.
20 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), ch. 8.
21 Letters, pp. 338–9.
22 Ibid., p. 341.
23 The English Poems of John Milton, ed. H.C. Beeching (Oxford University Press, 1940).
24 A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1942), pp. v–vi.
25 Martin Gilbert, The Second World War (1989; new edn, 2000), p. 64.
26 Ibid., p. 73.
27 Letters, p. 355.
28 Ibid., pp. 355–6.
29 The Screwtape Letters (1942; Fount, 1998), Letter 2, p. 6.
30 Ibid., Letter 10, p. 37.
31 Ibid., Letter 24, p. 94.
32 The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, with a new Preface (1961), p. 12.
33 Ibid., p. 6.
34 Ibid., p. 7.
35 The Screwtape Letters, p. ix.
36 Ibid., Letter 7, p. 26.
37 A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, ch. 13, p. 92.
38 Ibid., p. 94.
39 Perelandra, ch. 10, p. 129.
40 The Screwtape Letters, Letter 4, pp. 14–15.
41 Ibid., Letter 8, p. 30.
42 Ibid., Letter 9, p. 34.
43 Ibid., Letter 19, p. 74.
44 Ibid., Letter 12, pp. 47–8.
45 Stephen McKenna, Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman (1922), p. 158.
46 The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, p. 11.
47 Ibid., p. 12. He is quoting Psalm 36:1.
48 BF, p. 128.
49 The Screwtape Letters, Letter 3, p. 11.
50 Letters, pp. 462–3.
51 From a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne of 30 September 1958 in Letters to an American Lady, ed. Clyde S. Kilby (1967).
52 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/1, fol. 5.
53 Ibid., fol. 14.
54 Reprinted in Christian Reunion and Other Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Fount, 1990).
55 Letters, p. 360.
56 The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, Preface, p. 5.