The Screwtape Letters

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Screwtape Letters runs backwards, and missing that inverts the entire book. It is thirty-one letters from Screwtape, a senior devil in what Lewis stages as an infernal civil service, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter assigned to one ordinary young man in England under the Blitz. Screwtape calls God “the Enemy” and Satan “Our Father Below.” Every recommendation in it is therefore bad advice on purpose. Lewis’s own word for the method, in the preface he wrote for the 1961 reissue, was “moral inversion—the blacks all white and the whites all black.” The original preface adds a second warning: people go wrong about devils in two opposite directions, disbelieving in them entirely, or taking “an excessive and unhealthy interest” in them.

Mere Christianity

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Everything in Mere Christianity rests on an argument Lewis makes before God is mentioned at all. Listen to how people quarrel: nobody in a row announces that fairness is no concern of theirs, and both sides try to show that the other broke a rule they already share — he promised, she went first. Lewis calls it the Law of Human Nature, and on his account it behaves like nothing else we study: it reports not how people do behave but how they ought to, and everyone who appeals to it also breaks it. Follow that oddity honestly, he argues, and you end up somewhere you had not planned to go.

C. S. Lewis on SummaryShelf

The Screwtape Letters

Mere Christianity