S4E3 – TSL – “Preface”

Today we discuss the Preface to The Screwtape Letters or, more accurately, the Prefaces! Not only did Lewis write one Preface in 1942 and 1961, but the handwritten version of the 1942 Preface has a difference from the published version which is of “cosmic” significance…

S3E3: “Preface” (Download)

Show Notes

Opening

We chatted about what books we’ve been reading recently

• Matt: Navarre Bible
• David: Bible-in-a-year, Fahrenheit 451, CS Lewis: A Very short introduction, Atheist Delusions
• Andrew: All the books!

Quote-of-the-week

Matt shared the Quote-of-the-week:

“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. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942 Preface)

Drink-of-the-week

For the drink-of-the-week we tried the Balvenie 12:

• Nose: Sweet fruit and Oloroso sherry notes, layered with honey and vanilla.
• Taste: Smooth and mellow with beautifully combined flavours ~ nutty sweetness, cinnamon spiciness and a delicately proportioned layer of sherry.
• Finish: Long and Warming

I talked about presents sent to me by Matt and Andrew, an American first edition of Till We Have Faces, a prayer card from Lewis’ installation at Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, as well as some rocks from the Kilns and Addison’s Walk:

Summary

There are multiple prefaces to The Screwtape Letters, but the most commonly-found is from 1941. In this short Preface, Lewis declares that he’s not going to tell us how he obtained these letters from Screwtape. He then identifies two mistakes people often make when it comes to the devils, complete disbelief and excessive fascination, both in which the devils delight. As well as explaining there are some disconnects in chronology of the letters, Lewis reminds the reader that the devil is a liar and that we can’t trust anything Screwtape says, even from his own hellish point-of-view.

One hundred word summary of the 1942 Preface of The Screwtape Letters

Discussion

Opening Pages

We spoke about the dedication of The Screwtape letters:

To J.R.R. Tolkien

The Screwtape Letters dedication

We also discussed the quotations at the beginning of the book:

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” — Luther

The devill… the prowde spirite…. cannot endure to be mocked.” — Thomas More

Opening quotations to The Screwtape Letters

When Matt expressed his trepidation at Satan’s power, David quoted the first epistle of St. John:

Little children, you are of God, and have overcome them; for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.

1 John 4:4

There are two main prefaces to The Screwtape Letters: the original preface from 1942, and another he wrote in 1961. Lewis explains the difference between the two in a letter he wrote to his publisher, Jocelyn Gibb:

“The 1960 Preface is me speaking in my own person and giving literal autobiographical facts. The 1941 one is part of the fantasy or convention which the Letters employ – spoken by the imaginary C.S.L. who has somehow tapped a diabolical correspondence”

Letter to Jocelyn Gibb

The 1942 Preface

We began working through the 1942 Preface:

I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Much like Narnia, the demonic chronology seems to be a little different from our own:

I ought to add that no effort has been made to clear up the chronology of the letters… in general the diabolical method of dating seems to bear no relation to terrestrial time

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Lewis gives us two warnings in this first short Preface. The first is this…

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. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1942)

The second warning is this…

Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle… There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1942)

The Handwritten 1942 Preface

David explained the background to the handwritten version of the 1942 Preface. As is often noted, Lewis wrote his books like Screwtape by hand with a dip pen. Then someone, in this case Warnie, typed it out on his typewriter. Lewis would typically burn his handwritten manuscript, using the paper to light his pipe or fires during winter. However, because the Blitz was going on, he was worried that air rights might destroy his Screwtape manuscript. He therefore sent it to Sister Penelope, an Anglican nun at the Community of St. Mary the Virgin in Wantage (about half an hour away from where David grew up).

As an aside, Lewis later dedicated Perelandra to Sister Penelope’s convent. If you look on the inside cover of Perelandra, you’ll see “To Some Ladies at Wantage,”. What’s funny is that when Perelandra was translated into Portuguese, the translator misunderstood it and instead rendered the dedication “To some wanton women” (which they all found rather hilarious)…

Anyway, so Sister Penelope received the handwritten manuscript. After the war, she asked Lewis what he wanted her to do with it. He told her to sell it, which she did and the money was used to restore the convent’s chapel:

If you can persuade any “sucker” (as the Americans say) to buy the MS of Screwtape, pray do, and use the money for any pious or charitable object you like. …Did it ever occur to you that the replacement of scrawled old manuscript by the clear, printed book in mint condition is a pretty symbol of resurrection?

Letter from C.S. Lewis to Sister Penelope

The buyer was the New York Public Library, where the manuscript remained in relative obscurity. However, as Brenton Dickieson, a former guest on this show, likes to say, it would have “cosmic significance”. The reason for the hand-written version’s importance is that it differs from both the version you have in your book today. It has an extra paragraph, but also another important difference – it connects The Screwtape Letters to Lewis’ Sci-Fi trilogy:

 I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands…

Nothing will induce me to reveal how my friend Dr. Ransom got hold of the script which is translated in the following pages

C.S. Lewis, Published Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1942)

In this version of the Preface, it is Lewis’ protagonist from his Science Fiction trilogy, Professor Ransom, who discovers the letters, with Lewis acting as the publisher, which is what he does in the first book of the series, Out of the Silent Planet. In that book Professor Ransom discovers an interplanetary demonic conspiracy. From this handwritten Screwtape Preface, it seems that Lewis wants us to think that these letters are part of that conspiracy.

You can find out more about this hand-written Preface on Brenton Dickie’s blog, A Pilgrim In Narnia. I also chat with Dr. Dickieson about this in more detail on this Skype Session:

The 1961 Preface

Lewis begins this discussion with a rather amusing story about someone who wrote to The Guardian after reading some of The Screwtape Letters:

A country clergyman wrote to the editor, withdrawing his subscription on the ground that “much of the advice given in these letters seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical.”

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961)

Lewis says that you can’t trust the high sales of Screwtape to mean that it was widely-read:

…sales do not always mean what authors hope. If you gauged the amount of Bible reading in England by the number of Bibles sold, you would go far astray. Sales of The Screwtape Letters, in their own little way, suffer from a similar ambiguity. It is the sort of book that gets given to godchildren, the sort that gets read aloud at retreats.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961)

Lewis continues the self-deprecating humour by recounting the story of a student nurse who discovered that one of the staff members had read Screwtape because she was told at her interview that she would need to have something to talk about with the patients. They gave her a list of ten books. She chose Screwtape because it was the shortest!

He then sets about answering questions which people ask him related to this book… He begins by answering whether he actually believes in the devil. Lewis makes some distinctions:

Now, if by “the Devil” you mean a power opposite to God and, like God, self-existent from all eternity, the answer is certainly No. There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. No being could attain a “perfect badness” opposite to the perfect goodness of God; for when you have taken away every kind of good thing (intelligence, will, memory, energy, and existence itself) there would be none of him left.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961)

He then explains that the opposite of the Devil is not God. Satan’s oppose is Michael, the Archangel from Daniel 10 and Revelation 12:

I believe in angels, and I believe that some of these, 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.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961)

He says he believes in angels and demons since it accords with the plain sense of Scripture, Christian tradition, human tradition and doesn’t conflict with science… but notes that it wouldn’t undermine his faith if shown to be false. He makes a similar statement in God in the Dock.

Lewis then starts to speak about the depictions of angels. Lewis goes on to explain that belief in angels and demons doesn’t mean an endorsement of their representations in art and literature and he begins to unpack why we depict angels in the way we do, our human preferences and the symbolism involved:

It is only the ignorant, said Dionysius in the fifth century, who dream that spirits are really winged men.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961) referring to Pseudo-Dionysius (5th/6th Century writer)

He then talks about how their depiction has changed over time, through Fra Angelico, Raphael, and into 19th Century:

In the plastic arts these symbols have steadily degenerated. Fra Angelico’s angels carry in their face and gesture the peace and authority of Heaven. Later come the chubby infantile nudes of Raphael; finally the soft, slim, girlish, and consolatory angels of nineteenth century art, shapes so feminine that they avoid being voluptuous only by their total insipidity… In Scripture the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying “Fear not.” The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say, “There, there.”

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961)

Lewis then goes on to talk about angelic and demonic representation in literature, saying that it’s more dangerous since they’re not so easily recognized as symbolic.  He talks about Dante, Milton, and Goethe. He criticises Goethe for making the devils humorous, saying that humour involves a sense of proportion and a power of seeing yourself from the outside. There’s none of that in Hell.

Lewis says he takes this vision and then explains how he styled it to his own temperament and era:

I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961)

He speaks about a Hellish society held together, not by love (for something which can still love isn’t yet a devil), but one held together entirely by fear and greed.

On the surface, manners are normally suave. Rudeness to one’s superiors would obviously be suicidal; rudeness to one’s equals might put them on their guard before you were ready to spring your mine. For of course “Dog eat dog” is the principle of the whole organisation. Everyone wishes everyone else’s discrediting, demotion, and ruin; everyone is an expert in the confidential report, the pretended alliance, the stab in the back. Over all this their good manners, their expressions of grave respect, their “tributes” to one another’s invaluable services form a thin crust. Every now and then it gets punctured, and the scalding lava of their hatred spurts out.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961)

Matt shared a quotation which he thought was from G.K. Chesterton:

A man knocking on the door of a brothel is knocking for God.

Bruce Marshall

He also explains their motivation isn’t “Evil”, but fear of punishment and a kind of hunger. We’ll probably come back to this section in a later chapter. Lewis says that those who believe in demons will view them as concrete realities, but those who do not will view the book allegorically.

For of course [the book’s] purpose was not to speculate about diabolical life but to throw light from a new angel on the life of men.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961)

Lewis points out that he’s not the first person to try to write a book like this, and goes on to explain the origin of the devil names:

The names of my devils have excited a good deal of curiosity, and there have been many explanations, all wrong. The truth is that I aimed merely at making them nasty—and here too I am perhaps indebted to Lindsay—by the sound. Once a name was invented, I might speculate like anyone else (and with no more authority than anyone else) as to the phonetic associations which caused the unpleasant effect. I fancy that Scrooge, screw, thumbscrew, tapeworm, and red tape all do some work in my hero’s name, and that slob, slobber, slubber, and gob have all gone into slubgob.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961)

Lewis explains that there were a few ways to write this and he chose the interior route and quotes Psalm 36:1:

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—“showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly.”

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961)

Lewis tells us that he was often asked for a sequel, but he didn’t because he didn’t enjoy it

Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment… It would run away with you for a thousand pages if you gave it its head. But though it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The work 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. It would have smothered my readers if I had prolonged it.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961)

Friend and Biographer, George Sayer, said that this was about the time Lewis began receiving direction from the Cowley Fathers.

He then explains that he also had a bit of a grudge against the book because it didn’t come out as he had wished. He had wanted to write from the angelic point-of-view as well, but found it too difficult:

Even if a man—and he would have to be a far better man than I—could scale the spiritual heights required, what “answerable style” could he use? For the style would really be part of the content. Mere advice would be no good; every sentence would have to smell of Heaven.

C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1961)

…but he explains that as the memory of writing the book faded, he wrote Screwtape Proposes A Toast when he was sent an invitation from the American magazine, Saturday Evening Post. We’ll be talking with Charlie Starr about the Archangel Fragment on a subsequent recording…

Unscrewing Screwtape

1. Develop prudence with regards to your interest in the devils.
2. Don’t trust anything he says
3. Do remember that the devil has already lost

Providence eLearning