Status, grievance and resentment: C.S. Lewis on the surprisingly modern business model of hell

60 years after its author’s death, The Screwtape Letters image of hell as an unscrupulous business is still relevant. Simon Horobin tells how C.S. Lewis came to author the influential bestseller.

Simon Horobin

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University.

A comic book style cartoon of a small squat devil looking quizzed in hell.

A scene from Marvel Comic's version of The Screwtape Letters.

November 22nd is the sixtieth anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis, an event that was overshadowed by the assassination of JFK on the same day. Although he is best known today as the author of the Narnia stories, the obituary that appeared in The Times newspaper a few days later noted that it was in fact The Screwtape Letters which sparked his success as a writer.

Initially published as a series of letters in the church newspaper The Guardian, The Screwtape Letters appeared in book form in 1942. The idea came to Lewis during an uninspiring sermon at Lewis’s local parish church in the Oxford suburb of Headington, in July 1940. Provisionally titled ‘As one Devil to Another’, the book would form a series of letters addressed to a novice devil, called Wormwood, beginning work on tempting his first patient, by an older, retired devil, called Screwtape. In finding Screwtape’s voice, Lewis was influenced by a speech given by Adolf Hitler at the Reichstag and broadcast by the BBC. What struck Lewis about the oration was how easy it was, while listening to the Führer speaking, to find oneself wavering just a little.

Lewis dedicated the volume to his friend and fellow Oxford academic, J.R.R. Tolkien. After Lewis’s death, having read an obituary in the Daily Telegraph claiming that Lewis was never fond of the book, Tolkien noted drily:

‘He dedicated it to me. I wondered why. Now I know.’

Despite Tolkien’s misgivings, the public devoured the work and it quickly became a bestseller. Although, as Lewis pointed out, numbers of sales can be misleading. A probationer nurse who had read the book told Lewis that she had chosen it from a list of set texts of which she had been told to read one in order to mention it at an interview. ‘And you chose Screwtape?’, said Lewis with some pride. ‘Well, of course’, she replied, ‘it was the shortest’.

Not all readers approved of its sentiments. A country clergyman wrote to the editor of The Guardian withdrawing his subscription on the grounds that much of the advice the letters offered seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical. The confusion no doubt arose from the lack of any explanation surrounding their circumstances; in a later preface Lewis gave more context, though refused to explain how this devilish correspondence had come into his hands.

Its publication by Macmillan in 1943 brought Lewis to the attention of readers in the United States; when Time magazine featured an interview with him in September 1947, it carried the title ‘Don v. Devil’. A picture of Lewis featured on the magazine’s cover, with a comic image of Satan, complete with horns, elongated nose and chin, and clutching a pitchfork, standing on his shoulder.

For Lewis, the war did not present a radically different situation, but rather aggravated and clarified the human condition so that it could no longer be ignored.

The Screwtape Letters are the product of the war years, during which Lewis wrote many of his most popular works. It was in 1941 that he delivered the first of his broadcasts for the BBC Home Service, which launched his career as a public apologist for the Christian faith. In 1942 Lewis published Perelandra, the sequel to his first space travel novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938), in which his hero, Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist – another nod to Tolkien – is summoned to Venus to prevent a second fall. Although it was published in 1950, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe begins with four children being evacuated to the countryside to escape the London blitz. In setting his stories in outer-space or the fantastical world of Narnia, Lewis could be accused of writing escapist fiction that avoided the realities of a world in conflict. Lewis, however, believed that the war had not created a new crisis, but rather brought into clearer focus an ever-present struggle between good and evil.

For Lewis, the war did not present a radically different situation, but rather aggravated and clarified the human condition so that it could no longer be ignored. As he remarked in the second of his Broadcast Talks:

‘Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage’.

The key point, writes Screwtape, is to fix the patient’s attention on ‘real life’ – but don’t let him question what he means by ‘real’.

Lewis’s message to a country living in fear of occupation by German troops was that the invasion had already happened. They had been summoned not to their country’s defence, but to its liberation. When the Pevensie children stumble into a snow-covered Narnia under the control of the tyrannical White Witch, they are told in hushed whispers of the rumours of Aslan’s return: ‘“They say Aslan is on the move—perhaps has already landed.”’ It is a reminder that Aslan enters Narnia as a rebel, intent on overthrowing the Witch and installing the rightful kings and queens on the thrones of Cair Paravel.

The Screwtape Letters do not ignore the war during which they were written; Wormwood’s patient is killed in the London bombing. But, for Screwtape, a war is of no value unless it results in winning souls for his Father Below. His advice to his nephew is concerned with diverting the patient from engaging with universal questions by distracting him with everyday preoccupations and sense experiences. While these might involve the immediate conflict, they could also be the excitement of a new romance, a falling out with a friend, the prospect of promotion, or an obsession with food. If the patient should begin to speculate about spiritual matters, Screwtape advises Wormwood to deflect him with academic theories and philosophies that avoid confronting the question of whether the Christian faith might actually be true. The key point, writes Screwtape, is to fix the patient’s attention on ‘real life’ – but don’t let him question what he means by ‘real’. It is ironic, Screwtape observes, that, while mortals typically picture devils putting ideas into their minds, their best work is done by keeping things out.

Despite numerous requests for sequels, Lewis was reluctant to twist his mind back into the ‘diabolical attitude’ and revisit the spiritual cramp it produced. Numerous spin-offs have appeared to fill the void, with Screwtape emails, audio and stage performances and even a Marvel comic book adaptation. Despite this, readers continue to turn to the original work. After all, Lewis’s depiction of hell as an unscrupulous business concern, whose employees are perpetually concerned about their own status, nursing grievances and resentment, speaks to our modern age just as much as it did to Lewis’s own.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Psychology

4 September 2024

5 min read

Who’s missing from Inside Out’s internal family?

Where Riley’s writers could go next.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Cartoon characters of emotions at a control desk.

Inside Riley's head.

Disney.

Once upon a time a man got angry. Then he got angry at himself for the fact that he got angry, which of course didn’t help. As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh would say, “If we become angry at our anger, then we will have two angers at the same time.” Similarly, there was an occasion when he got really nervous that he might make a mess of giving a speech, and his nerves became so overwhelming that he delivered the speech badly. A self-fulfilling prophecy, one might say.

These are not my examples; they are examples given by psychologist Richard Schwartz in his introduction to Internal Family Systems (IFS). This therapy (sometimes also called “parts therapy”) is a form of self-analysis in which participants learn to resist supressing or controlling their difficult thoughts or emotions, the different “parts” of their inner world, and instead adopt a posture of curiosity towards each of them. This posture allows people to be in a beneficial relationship to their emotional lives, rather than being ruled by them.

Fundamentally, the relationship that emerges is one of compassion, understanding that our thoughts and emotions have a job to do, even the uncomfortable or shameful ones. So, anxiety, for example, guards us from committing social faux pas, whilst joy helps us to keep hold of a sense that life is ultimately worth the living, no matter how hard things get. Even sadness and grief, as much as we fear being overtaken by such emotions, have an important role to play, for example by helping us to define what things and people are most valuable and important to us.

For those who haven’t seen the Inside Out films, the writers cleverly take this idea of the “internal family” of emotions and create five relatable characters that embody them – Joy, Fear, Sadness, Anger and Disgust. In the first film, we see how these characters interact inside the head of a little girl called Riley. They are helping her to hang on to her sense of self despite the upheaval she experiences in her outside world, when her family relocate to a new city, and she must settle in to a new home and school. In the sequel, we rejoin Riley as she enters the turmoil of puberty, and the five initial characters are abruptly forced to work alongside some new arrivals – the “teenage” crew of emotions: Anxiety, Ennui, Envy, and… the biggie… Embarrassment.

This Self is transpersonal – it exceeds the boundaries of who we each are as an individual person and connects us to something large.

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When he first developed IFS in the 1980s, Richard Schwartz was, by his own confession, a committed atheist, with what he describes as “a distain for religion”. Schwartz writes of the frustration he felt at that time when several Christians got excited about IFS in its early stages of development. His peer, Robert Harris, even went so far as to publish a book that set out a Christian version of the therapy. Initially, Schwartz felt the biggie – embarrassment – that his therapy was being taken up by Christians. However, as time went on, and as much as Schwartz tried to push aside the spiritual dimension of IFS, he increasingly found that spirituality could not be eliminated from the picture:

“As I used the model with clients through the eighties and nineties, increasingly they began having what can only be described as spiritual experiences. These vicarious encounters with the mystical profoundly affected my own spirituality and I became interested in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, shamanism, Kabala – everything but Christianity.”

Over time, Schwartz’s antipathy to the relationship between IFS and Christianity began to wane. He saw how much he had been working on the basis of prejudice, limiting his own exploration of Christian ideas in response to some unhelpful encounters he’d had with a few heavy-handed fundamentalists. He made deliberate moves to engage with Christian dialogue partners across the breadth of the tradition and began to see how congruent IFS was with the teaching of Jesus. The posture of curious compassion towards oppressive and uncomfortable emotions that Schwartz was encouraging his clients to adopt was mirrored perfectly in the attitude that Jesus advocated towards “enemies” in the outside world: do not judge, instead seek to engage them with kindness, and work towards their healing.

In recent decades, Schwartz has come to rethink IFS as an integration of psychology and spirituality, rather than as a form of psychotherapy. He speaks of “spirituality” as an innate essence at the core of each person, which he calls the “Self”, and acknowledges that many of his more religious students prefer to think of this essence as “the soul” or “Atman” (the eternal self within Hinduism). And, whilst he still describes himself as fundamentally agnostic and is wary of making his own definitive religious commitments, he has come to agree that this Self is transpersonal – it exceeds the boundaries of who we each are as an individual person and connects us to something larger.

Screenwriting for a popular audience of all-faiths-and-none, it is perhaps unsurprising that the makers of Inside Out have thus far eschewed the deep and fascinating spirituality of IFS. Riley’s “sense of self” is at the centre of both films, but the way it is depicted implies that it is something that only comes into being at birth and exists entirely to regulate Riley’s engagement with the outside world. So far, there has been no exploration of more existential questions such as faith and eternity. However, the concept of the film is so brilliant, and for a complex idea it is so well executed, that I am sure we can look forward to many more Inside Out films to come. If that is the case, then just as Schwartz found himself going on an unexpected journey of spiritual exploration, the writers of Riley’s may well find themselves doing the same. I, for one, look forward to finding out what Riley discovers.