The Screwtape Letters by Lewis - Book Report/Review Example

5 November The Screwtape Letters by C. S Lewis I Screwtape advises Wormwood to misdirect the Patient from the object of worship (God) itself to prevent the Enemy from victory. He talks about the patient’s mother by saying that he should imagine the form of an ideal mother because only she will be able to make him understand the need for healing himself from the sins of temptation that he had committed. He advocates Wormwood’s use of the patient’s mother to be a source of distraction and asks him to focus on the flaws small annoyances that his mother caused to him in his youth rather than let his newfound love for religion include his mother in the same. 2. Screwtape helps Wormwood understand that as long as people are interested and absolved in worldly things in life, they will find it easier to stray away from God. Thus, this is how a man tends to lead a double life because of the various worldly temptations that distract him. “Build up…a good settled habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks” (131) 3. Screwtape talks about the young woman and mentions that her minor fault lies in the fact that when she is testing out life’s temptations she forgets about prayers for those moments and commits sins for which it is not easy to absolve off one’s self in reality. The Devil distances a woman easily from her aims in life and makes her forget her faith which leads to problems in her life. 4. Screwtape tells Wormwood that it is from pleasure that human beings derive happiness and this joy keeps them from being in a state of sorrow. However, the Devil works in a different way as he keeps humans from thinking or carrying out actions that would be pleasurable for God to see and this distances a man from Him. Thus the real pleasures would actually be doing things that would make God happy and not just a man happy because those are worldly pleasures that are transient in nature and not of much value, even though they may be more exciting. 5. Wormwood distracts the man from the worship in the Church by allowing or guiding him to be distracted by the others in the church. Rather than thinking of God, the man thinks of all the reasons that before had kept him from worshiping God. He seeks to confuse the patient by making him focus on churchgoers and their desires rather than on the Church itself. 6. “Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours..” (140) Screwtape wishes that Wormwood distracts the patient during prayers so that he will not be able to make any sort of spiritual connection with God. Thus, he believes that a person will not be able to gain access to thoughts of God because his emotions will be preoccupied with other thoughts and beliefs. He wants him to pray for the sake of praying and forget about his real motives of praying or forming a spiritual bond with God. 7. Screwtape talks about how he wants to make sure that every man is only told a part of the truth. Keeping in mind the theme of truth, he wants to lead the patient into so much confusion that it is hard to understand what the actual truth is. In the first chapter, he says, “Make him think [materialism] is strong, or stark or courageous—that is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.” All these things will help to lead the patient away from the actual truth. 8. Gluttony is one of the seven sins of the world and Screwtape suggests that the gluttony of delicacy puts man in a different trip altogether. Food makes him think that he is only born to feed his stomach and sends him to a different level. However, a man should understand that his purpose in life is to form a spiritual bond with God and that should be enough to feed his appetite. Screwtape suggests the introduction of delicacies to distract the patient from attaining the actual food of God and thought that he should. 9. In the fifth chapter Screwtape and Wormwood discuss the events of war and state that war only puts a man into a lot of agony and trauma. It sends him into a deeper level of anger and it should not persist in hell because that would make humans think of God and want to be with him. It is intriguing to think about this because war has a very anti effect on people and Wormwood is happy because it might make people astray from religion as they might feel that if God is causing war then he is not doing enough to ensure the happiness of the people. 10. Humility is the modesty that God asks every person to attain and stay consistent with in life however when pride gets caught in humility, the aspect of the humble emotion does not persist anymore. Screwtape urges Wormwood to make the patient forget about humility by inserting pride and greed so that he forgets to worship God and in this way he distances him from Him. 11. "We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique." (34) People should learn to keep a guard against the enemy and not let it access their hearts. A great man of God and revivalist Leonard Ravenhill said, “If we do not trust and obey, we will rust and decay…” A man needs to take care of his past, present, future and eternity by having utmost faith in his spiritual well being and constantly obey and seek the Lord. 12. Screwtape makes Wormwood tell the patient that unselfishness means pride and anger or resentment. He teaches him the wrong things so that he may grow up and believe that God has taught him the incorrect way of life by which he would move to the Devil and worship him instead. II.1. The first conversion holds both a matter of pride and fear in the heart and mind of the patient because he wants to believe in God so much that his entire life is devoted to it however he does not how it will turn out to be – whether or not he will be accepted on account of his conversion. 2. Backsliding involves the patient from regretting his views on conversion and wishing that he had never carried out the same because his fear eats up the inner confines of his mind and leaves him thinking otherwise. 3. Second conversion is fairly an easy process as compared to the first one because Wormwood is able to divert the attention of the patient easily from the God and be turned off from Church whereas the patient might be thinking that he is praying to and in the thoughts of God. 4. The Church may be a good influence in the patient’s life however Wormwood distracts the patient from thinking so and directs his thoughts as far away from the Church as possible but at the same time grounds them in the ‘familiar’ because the unfamiliarity would be harder to believe. Even after Wormwood’s patient has converted to Christianity, Screwtape says that it is possible to bring him back; because the entirety of the patient’s old habits or weaknesses are still intact. 5. In the given letters of Screwtape, it has been written that death or eternal salvation is dependent on the recurrence of particular actions or thoughts and for those that tempt others, the objections seem to be direct towards the Enemy or the Devil and towards the immediate self and the world. Thus as soon as the patient begins to practice virtues and good deeds instead of focusing on the lusts and greed in life, it becomes very dangerous for those that are involved in tempting others to join the dark side. III.1. Lewis writes that faith is a means to achieving an end which in this context is the World itself. Every man has the capability of achieving something or the other and every individual makes it a point to run behind the pursuit of something during the course of his lifetime thus in the end it does not matter what a man desires, but how he uses faith to attain the same. Faith has always been the main motivating and driving force behind the achievement of any desire and is thus a justified means to achieving the world as a whole. 3. The Christians define the enemy in the manner that they do because their faith helps them estimate the worth of every individual even if he might be the devil. The enemy is ‘one without whom nothing is strong’ because the enemy teaches a man to understand the negative aspect of life and acts as a stepping stone through which man may repent on the mistakes that he is bound to carry out throughout the course of his life time. Therefore, an enemy always shows the path to righteousness and helps a man understand that it is important to make mistakes. It is only through these mistakes that a man grows and becomes mature. 4. The philosophy of Hell reads as ‘to be’ is ‘to be in competition’ because every man is competing with each other because the world is full of scarcity. In the face of this reality, every man is scared and thus commits sins in order to get to his desires faster. Hell is thus a place where people go when they need to absolve themselves of their sins and in Hell people are again in competition with one another to get out clean faster than the others. Thus, this competition may be termed as a vicious cycle which the Devil enjoys bequeathing upon every man. 5. It is quite common for a man to put up ownership on his property, clothes, and other assets. However, Lewis writes that it is funny when man tries to put ownership in Hell and Heaven because these are aspects that rest in a person’s mind or imagination and cannot be owned by any one person. The aspect of committing sins or cleaning oneself of sins is not unique to a person and thus cannot be owned. Putting up claims sounds funny because humans can never attain Hell or Heaven as these are merely objects of forgiveness and understanding which help them grow; they are thus transient in nature and the author has not necessarily meant them to be a destination after death. One may visit these places during their lifetime as well and thus cannot own them. 6. Every man has to encounter a number of pains during the course of his lifetime but he has a way of embracing all those pains because unless a man is able to take in his stride every ounce of trauma that is being caused to him, he will not be able to succeed. As a Christian, every man is taught that God has the good will of every individual in mind and the reason that a person is caused pain is to learn from it and grow from the same. People need to find the higher purpose in life which they can only do by embracing pain and thus it is God’s will to cause pain so that people learn to accept it as a daily part of life. For example, the pain of war has been described in order to show how one deserves comfort only after undergoing hardships and struggles in wars among humanity. IV.1. In his eleventh letter, Screwtape has devised the four causes of laughter as Joy, which is found when friends and lovers reunite and rekindle their flames, Fun, which involves emotional froth from instincts, Joke Proper, which refers to sudden absurdity and Flippancy. Joy and Fun are both advantages for the devils because they are extremely easy for a man to experience and mostly fun is experienced in the more tabooed aspects of life which go against the Church, for example carrying on the practice of sexual intercourse. Hell or the devils use sex as a means for abandoning any sort of shame and thus the devils take pride in the aspect of flippancy as well because flippant people view sex as an everyday aspect of life. However, joke proper could be the devil’s disadvantage because absurdity might come natural to some beings but may not be understood by others. 2. Music and silence are often termed as very pristine aspects of life which are given importance and help in healing and spiritual uplifting of the people. Thus, these two aspects are characterised with Heaven because Heaven is sought to be a place where people go when they have lived a lifetime of peace and prosperity in a very healthy and clean manner. Those that carry out good deeds and follow and obey the Lord’s orders and demands, are sent to Heaven after their death where they may enjoy an afterlife of peace amidst music, harmony and silence. On the other hand, Hell is characterised by noise because it is a dark place where a man goes to absolve himself of his sins. The devils do not believe in living quietly and try to relieve themselves of the trauma that they have been made with. Every man tries to vent out his frustration and cleanse himself off all anger in Hell, making it thus a noisy place. Works Cited Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. New York: Macmillan Company, Inc., 1976. Print. Read More