The Screwtape Letter Analysis

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Benny Hinn, an Israeli clergyman, once asked, “Do you know that every unbeliever is filled with an evil spirit?” Demons are Satan’s malicious henchmen, fighting wholeheartedly against God’s plan by tempting his potential human sons. In The Screwtape Letters, which C. S. Lewis originally published in 1942, a fictitious demon named Screwtape wrote a series of letters to his “nephew,” Wormwood, as he tried to convince a British man to sin and, ultimately, to disown his faith in God. Although The Screwtape Letters aids readers in recognizing many of the temptations which plagued both British culture and, in differing degrees, all of humanity, Lewis’ writing style also makes readers sympathetic to the plight of Screwtape and Wormwood because …show more content…
S. Lewis’ style of writing in The Screwtape Letters makes readers sympathetic to Screwtape and Wormwood because these demons truly believed in horribly misleading lies. Screwtape stated, “We know that He cannot really love: nobody can; it doesn’t make sense” (Lewis, 87). They are thus neither willing to believe in nor accept either God’s free and perfect love and mercy or his infinite creative power that makes his love to his creation possible. Screwtape reasons, “The whole philosophy of hell rests on the recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self… When one gains another loses… “To be” means “to be in competition” (Lewis, 81). Here Screwtape brought natural selection to its extreme conclusion: everybody is in competition with everybody else, and the stronger should destroy those who are weaker. Screwtape proclaimed, “Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united with Him and still distinct” (Lewis, 38). Although Satan would gladly engulf both Screwtape and Wormwood while the Lord would gladly forgive them, Screwtape called Satan “Our Father Below” and God “the Enemy.” Because Screwtape and Wormwood are unwilling to accept God, instead embracing their true enemy, Satan, one cannot help feeling sorry for their disbelief and the hardship which resulted from
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