Screwtape Letters
Knowing one's Enemy
My dear Wormwood,
So you "have great hopes that the patient's religious phase is dying away", have you? I always thought the Tempters' Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
The Screwtape Letters consists of a series of letters from a senior demon to a junior tempter, advising him in his pursuit of a human soul. The Letters had originally been published weekly in a Church paper called The Guardian (not the same as the British national newspaper), before being collected as a book.
The humour in Screwtape stems from its reversal of values: for example, the bureaucracy of Hell is called the Lowerarchy, and the persons referred to as "Our Father" and "the Adversary" are not who a Christian would normally expect. Lewis returns to themes he discussed in Surprised by Joy and Mere Christianity, this time from the opposite point of view; and although writing entertainingly, he lays into weighty spiritual problems. Screwtape advises his nephew on "the routine technique of sexual temptation" and "the painful subject of prayer", and Lewis's own views are plainly visible beneath the satire.
Lewis found The Screwtape Letters unpleasant to write. He felt that placing himself in the mind of a demon had been dangerous for his own character.