The Book Club: The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis with Seth Dillon | The Book Club

Welcome to the book club. This month we will be probing how best to destroy the human soul. We will be probing the advice of demons in C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters. But first, you know, in our fast-paced world, it is very difficult to make reading a priority. At least it used to be. At thinker.org, they summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy non-fiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form. You can read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to recent bestsellers like Jordan Peterson's Twelve Rules for Life. If you want to challenge your preconceptions, if you want to expand your horizons, if you want, most importantly, to sound intelligent at cocktail parties, you should go to thinker.org. T-H-I-N-K-E-R.org. No E. No time for that. Head on over there right now. Set your mind in motion. We will now set our minds and our souls in motion by discussing the Screwtape Letters with the CEO of the Babylon Bee and, according to the New York Times, a far-right trafficker of misinformation, Seth Dillon. Scary stuff. It's very scary, Seth. Thank you for being here to misinform us. Yeah, thank you for having me. I guess this whole book is a book of misinformation because this book is a series of letters from one demon, Screwtape, to his demon nephew, Wormwood, about all the things that Wormwood should do to human souls that will be really good, but it'll be good for the demons. It'll be terrible for the human beings. At the same time, it's like a playbook because for Christians or just laypersons, encountering this from the outside, it's like you've stolen the other team's playbook and you're looking at it to get ideas for what their strategy is and how you can counter it. So, yeah, both of those things. So could you take us through, before we get into, I mean, this is the first time we're doing C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis, an incredibly significant author for me, one of the few men who helped to save my soul. If my soul has any chance of being saved, C.S. Lewis was really a pivotal figure there, a wonderful writer of the 20th century, wonderful Christian writer. So before we get into that, can you just give a little plot summary of what happens here? Yeah, I mean, you gave like the super brief version. I'll give you the thinker version. How about that? Perfect. So, you know, Lewis in the preface talks about how he's had these letters fall into his lap, this correspondence, and it's one-way correspondence. It's coming from Screwtape, this demon, who is training up his underling, Wormwood, and instructing him on how to tempt his man, who he's referred to as a patient in the book, tempt him and find ways to keep turning him little bits at a time, little tiny tweaks in his character and in his activity, his will and his behavior, so that he turns more and more away from God and eventually becomes theirs and they can claim his soul, right? That's the goal. And what Screwtape is doing throughout the book is he's writing one letter in succession after another, responding to Wormwood's letters, because Wormwood is providing updates on how the temptation is going and how far along he's getting with his patient and issues that he's running into along the way where his patient meets somebody that has a positive influence on him and he's got to find a way to counterbalance that. And so Screwtape is giving advice, demon advice, throughout the story and ultimately trying to, you know, claim his soul. And the book is trying to bring to light what's happening behind the scenes and I think give us some insight into how we can be aware of some of these things that are happening. That's the overall theme is it's a war. You have the physical war that's happening in the physical world, the real war, but then you have the realer war, the spiritual war that's happening as the backdrop behind that in this physical world and that's the tug of war between, you know, the forces of good and evil battling each other for the souls of men. And that's, you know, that's really kind of the stage for the whole thing. And it's not a Manichean war to use an ancient term. It's not that, you know, good and evil are basically on equal footing here. The good guys are going to win. It's not like the devil is actually going to defeat God, but there can be a lot of casualties along the way. Right. That the stakes are quite real, if not for the world, because the devils and the demons are inferior. They're less agile, they're evil. Right, right. It's not that they're going to overwhelm God, but they can win over a lot of souls. Yes. And what good is it if God wins in the end, but you were on the wrong side? Right. That's right. You will be lamenting that for a very long time. Back when I was still an atheist, I was an atheist practically speaking for about 10 years. And some guy, some evangelical guy on my college campus had a bunch of books laid out on a table. And I was well in the practice of worldliness at the time. Let's put it that way. So everyone's walking by these books. I say, oh, free books. I don't know. It was sort of a vice of mine. I said, it's only free. I'll take a look at it. And I said, okay, that book doesn't look good. That book doesn't. Oh, what's that? C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. I've heard C.S. Lewis is good. Okay. And I try and it really, you know, there may be four or five things that kind of set me back on a path of reversion. And C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity was certainly one of them. And this book may be more famous than Mere Christianity. It might be. But it's interesting you bring that up because he's had that impact on a lot of people. I've read a lot of books by prominent like scientists and philosophers and thinkers who credit C.S. Lewis with providing with an intellectual basis for their faith because of the arguments that he employs in Mere Christianity and others. And I think it's worth pointing out when just to even understand what he's saying and C.S. Lewis, it was an Anglican, high church Anglican, Anglo-Catholic, maybe you would say. But he was a sort of traditional minded Protestant. And he didn't really care for all these labels. He preferred the term Mere Christianity. Yes. For a very specific reason. Yeah. If you wouldn't mind explaining. Yeah. I mean, he's narrowing it down to those fundamental things that all Christians should hold to and trying to cut out all the noise, the things that divide us, the different labels, you know, Calvinist versus Arminian, Catholic versus Protestant, the disagreements over the sacraments and whether they're, you know, all of those things. Those are considered out on the periphery of the spider web and the core at the center of it, the heart of it. Mere Christianity is the life, death, resurrection of Jesus Christ. You believe in that, you know, you live by that. So that's what he's doing there is focusing on that. And I appreciate that. I think that's useful because some of the other stuff can be distracting and can get us at each other's throats. Right. The idea which Lewis really popularized that when you take out all the other questions that every Christian who believes the creed, the Nicene Creed, and you know, that that is what we're talking about here. So that that's the place that he's beginning with in Screwtape. To get into Screwtape, I'd like to begin with his idea of love, because it's one of my favorite lines in the book. He says, and I'm paraphrasing here, but to demons, human beings are primarily food. So they, the demons are desiring human beings, not to go get a cup of coffee with them, not to go help them out. Have a relationship. Not to have a relationship, but to consume them. And this is the polar opposite of the Christian understanding of love, which as St. Thomas Aquinas describes is willing the good of another, willing their good. This is what the enemy, as the demons call God, the enemy wills the good of these human beings. Yeah. The demons just want to devour them. Right, right. And he's in Screwtape, who's advising Wormwood here, is bristling at this idea that God has given humanity freedom. And he kind of keeps them at arm's length a little bit. And that he can't, you know, he uses the line, he says that God can't tempt to virtue the way we do to vice. You know, he doesn't, he can't make you be good. He can't influence you in those same ways to develop a love relationship with these creatures. And Screwtape finds that, you know, detestable. It's disgusting to him that that's what God wants for his creatures. But ultimately, you know, freedom is a huge theme, and this freedom and love and how they work together. When you start talking about, you know, these issues of the necessity of freedom for love to be possible. You know, my wife had the option to say no to me, but she didn't. She said yes to me. She chose me back. Yeah. And that kind of union, that special human relationship that we have is meant to mirror, you know, the relationship that God wants for us as well. And, you know, they're trying to mess that up. They are trying to interfere with this in ways that are, I think, unexpected. I mean, this is the thing with great writers, is that when you read them, you think, oh my gosh, how are you reading into my mind? How do you know what I'm doing? Yeah. And so he'll say, one way for us demons to win over the souls, to win our patience for our father, the devil, is to make them extreme pacifists. Because in the background here is a war. The war is going on in the back. So he says, one way is to, if they're extreme pacifists, they'll be easier to capture. Or if they're extreme patriots. Right. If they're so focused on these worldly things, they're not thinking about the eternal. Right. Either way, we can sort of win them over. But the war plays an interesting role here. Because you would think that demons love war, right? And carnage and death. But Screwtape here says, be very careful. War can work for God, our enemy. The reason he says that is because war reminds humans that they're mortal, for one thing. We see death all of a sudden becomes not some distant thing that we're going to see on our deathbed when we're 70 or 80 or 90 years old. There are no atheists in the foxholes. Exactly. It becomes this immediate, clear and present danger. You may die. There's a battle going on. Bombs are falling all around you. And that brings people into the present. It snaps them into the present, which is a big theme in this. The relationship of time, future, past, and how you can distract people. The demons are trying to distract people from the present moment where real things actually happen and things actually matter. War does that. It jarringly pulls you back into reality. It makes you care about big things. And it also draws out virtues like courage. I think the word is lovely that he uses. It has a loveliness to it and a value to it that everybody immediately sees when it's needed and men are being courageous. For all those reasons, war is actually dangerous to the cause of demons. Whereas they enjoy the carnage and people dying and suffering and they're in pain and everything. They relish that. But what they don't relish is how it actually can draw people closer to God. The time aspect is so telling here because it occurs to me when I'm reading them saying, don't keep them focused in the future, don't keep them focused now. I say, when someone dies, especially unexpectedly, but really just when they die at all, I have found that one of the big gut punches of that is that you had planned a future with that person in it. You had been thinking, oh, this is what it'll be like in 10 years and this is what it'll be like in 20 years. But that's not real. The past is somewhat real because it happened already and it's grounded in reality. You can refer back to it, accurately describe it. Yes. And the present is certainly real. That's what's happening now. But the future is an illusion. And Lewis makes the point in here twice, at least two times, of having screw tape say, keep their mind on the future. It's okay to keep it on the past, but not really. We always want it on the future. And yet it seems to me that's all we ever do in society. We are a progressive society. All we're ever doing is looking toward the future. Right. And when you're looking out towards the future, you experience things like anxiety and fear. And you're wondering what will happen to me rather than how am I behaving? And that was the key thing that he's trying to do. He's trying to take your focus. This is why this book is so powerful, right? Because you can read the other side of this is books like Mere Christianity. They're giving you instruction. They're giving you advice, one Christian to another. Giving you advice on reasons to believe in God and reasons why Christianity is true, but also how you should behave and what should matter in terms of virtues like chastity and charity and things like that. And that's all nice. But when it's presented in that way, it's not as interesting as when you take it. This is a work of religious satire and this is an imagined scenario and it's exaggerated and there's humor and there's irony. And so it's very, you know, in my experience with satire, personally. I suppose you know a thing or two about satire. Yeah. That's what makes satire so effective. You're looking at things from this new perspective that you never would have thought to look at them from before and it makes it stick with you. I read this book for the first time when I was a teenager and I still, incredibly when I went back to read it again recently, I still remembered some of these lines. They were still in my mind. I had them memorized, but I'd only read them one time. And the reason I think for that is because it was just so interesting and impactful that I was looking at these things from a perspective like, wow, that's, you know, that's not a way I would have ever looked at it before. It's so funny you say that because this is, I even had a little trepidation about discussing Screwtape on the show because it's not an ordinary book. It's not an ordinary narrative. It's these sort of bizarre satirical letters from demons. It's talking about all the virtues, which we can get to in a second, but it's hard to tell all of that as a coherent narrative. And so I found with this book more than, more than most others, it's a random line that sticks out to me. It's a, like one line in it that is, it's not the most important line of the book, but it really stuck out to me is, all mortals tend to become what they pretend to be. That you, when you fake it till you make it, you really do make it. I mean, people really do become that thing. Your habits become you. Yes. Yeah. What is one of these lines for you? Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. And that's Screwtape explaining that you don't need big scandalous sins. You don't need somebody to be a tyrant who wipes people out and massacres people. You don't need somebody to be a rapist. You merely need somebody to be irritated with everybody around them and treating them with disrespect and doing selfless things, but with selfish motives. You know, like those subtle things that can even take a good person, good. You know, they seem good. They have a good job. They have a wife. They have kids. They're going about their life in a very normal, positive way. They're churchgoers, but they're resenting the person up here next to them. Or, you know, they do things, they take little jabs or they say things in just the right tone to purposefully irritate their loved ones, you know? And it's that kind of stuff that he's focused on in this book. And that's what's so, I think, shocking to people who read it. It's so convicting. It's because it's like, now, wait a minute. I do that kind of stuff all the time. You can check off the list all these sins that you're not committing actively, but you are doing all these things. We all do. We're all human. We all do these things. And to get your focus on them and to see them as being actually, these are the big problems. Because it's what I said earlier, you know, the whole point is to make little adjustments in the person's behavior and will so that they're no longer turning towards God. They're turning away from him slowly as the key is, like, notched. The turning is key here. He makes this point. He says, look, it's not about, you know, it's just that you do this one thing or you do that one thing or you have them start to exalt this one virtue or this or the other thing. He said the movement is the whole thing, right? Because you see this interplay broadly between will and grace, that God's grace comes down the mountain and then we are free. We have our free will to turn and embrace that or to turn away and to turn toward these guys and have them lure you away. So it's all about which way you're moving. I love there's a line here that I think it rings so true for our very emotion-focused culture, which is when Screwtape is talking about prayer, something as subtle as prayer, when he's praying, make him be like Coleridge, the romantic poet Coleridge. Make him say it's wrong to recite formal prayers or it's wrong to get on your knees. Then he quotes a line from Coleridge. He says, I don't need to do any of that. I just sort of think in my own mind. You know, I'm in the right mood. I'm in the right mind frame. And right after he quotes Coleridge, he says, we want more of that. Do much more of that, which, especially in our culture, even talking to a lot of Christians, there is a focus away from ritual, away from liturgy, a way to just basically intellectualize everything. I find myself guilty of it sometimes. And what Lewis says here through Screwtape is the virtues only matter when they, as you say, become habits, when you do something with them, when they interact with the will, not when it's just some intellectual thing in your head. It's got to translate into behavior and behavior done with the right motive. You have to have both of those working together, which is really interesting. But even you mentioned prayer, to see that the demon's thinking about how they can modify a prayer. So this is a good example of how, I don't think he said it in this book. I think he said, maybe it was in Mere Christianity. Tell me if this is right. But he said, badness is merely spoiled goodness. This principle of how you can take good things and just tweak them a little bit, tweak the person's perspective on them a little bit, or tweak the way that they're doing it, make them a little uncomfortable, modify the way they pray or who they're praying to, have them fixate on the cross that they're praying towards as if that's what they're praying at, and keep their focus on the object rather than what's behind the object, rather than what it represents. And so even the act of prayer can be something that is drawing your attention away from God. That's a profound thought. I guess it would be the distinction between an icon and an idol. And you don't want to make idols out of anything. But that's subconscious stuff. We don't do those things consciously, and so this book draws attention to those things. It unearths them. Those are all riding under the surface somewhere, and we're not even aware of that. No one thinks about how, oh, I'm making that object the focus of my prayer rather than what it represents. But this draws that to the surface, and that's why I think it's so effective. It's interesting that he then goes after this kind of puritanical view. So this idea, especially it's kind of common in America, going back to our great forefathers on the Mayflower, you know, that sex is kind of bad, and food, no, and drink, and that. And the demon here says, no, sex, and food, and drink, these are good things. God made these things good. He calls God a hedonist. He's essentially a hedonist, he says. And the trick is to pervert those things such that those goods can lead men into perdition. You spoil the goodness, and you take the sexual pleasure, for example, which was designed by God, and you focus the man on all the perversions of that rather than the correct and context for it. And he's even, he's so sophisticated about this, where it's, you know, if a guy overindulges in drink, or sex, or food, or something, that's always a bad deal. But there are two different ways you can do it, and one is more dangerous than the other. You can either, you go out to the party, and you're having a really great time, and maybe you have a few too many drinks. Maybe you get a little too frisky with whoever the cute gal is there. But you're having a lively, fun enough time. Well, that's one way to lead the man down to perdition, and it'll work. But the more effective way, says Screwtape, is when the man is feeling low, when he's drinking, not to augment the excitement, but as an anodyne for his pain when he's drinking alone, when he's engaging in sexual perversions out of a pain, out of a loneliness, that's the much better place to grab him. Then you can exploit just the position that he's in, and the weakness that comes with that. The role here, too, of humility, that, you know, humility is a very important virtue, and there's a distinction here between humility and false modesty. That false modesty, really, is, and we all do it, you see it all the time in our modern culture, but false modesty is just another form of pride. It's just, it's all focused on the self. I think the wording is, your patient has become humble. Have you brought his attention to that? You know, because the minute he starts to think about, oh, you know what, I'm being pretty humble. Then you can get him to take pride in his humility. And you don't even want him to become aware that he's done that, because then he'll realize that's absurd. You can't be proud of your humility, and he would shake it off. So he's like, you just want him to notice that he's humble. Just notice it. And it's the same thing with unselfishness, or, you know, a charitable behavior. You know, thinking, doing something for charity, for a good motivation, is great, and you may do that. But then if you start to think, oh man, you know, I'm a pretty charitable person. Well, then you're taking pride in how charitable you are. What is left out of this book is the other perspective. It's this, you know, the angels giving advice to their underlings on how to guide this patient to turn him back toward God. That whole picture is omitted from the story. You see a little bit of it if you actually pick up one of Lewis's other books, like Mere Christianity, where he's giving you positive Christian advice. I think maybe those would be some of the things he would say if he wrote that. But he did write somewhere that he felt inadequate to give that picture, and it was actually easier for him to put himself in the devil's mindset than to try to reach into the heavens and speak on behalf of angels and God. There's a line in here that I know is going to irk right-wingers, and I love it. It doesn't irk me, but it does irk some kinds of Christians. I'm interested to know what that one is. The line is that ownership is at all times to be encouraged among the patients. Specifically, ownership of one's body. This idea that, look, this is my body and liberty means I can do whatever I want. This is, I guess, more prominent on the libertarian right. Though some self-described conservatives would hold that view too. Autonomy is seen as elevated as this, you know, this great thing. Where the simple fact is, from the Christian perspective, and Lewis makes this quite clear, we do not own our bodies. We did not create our bodies. We did not choose when to come into this world. We're probably not going to choose how to get out of this world, and we're not going to get to keep our bodies, at least for some period of time. Afterward, that we are stewards of ourselves and of this creation, but that ultimately, we cannot escape the moral universe, that we have obligations to God. There is a spiritual war raging all around us, and we are going to move toward one side or we're going to move toward the other, whether we want to admit it or not. And we focus so much on our bodies and controlling our bodies and controlling the material things in our lives and accumulating things, whereas the focus really should be on the behavior itself. What am I doing with my body? That's what matters a lot more than whether or not it's mine. Am I being a good steward of my body? Am I being responsible with it? Those are very valuable questions to get people to ask. I don't want to have a spoiler here, but frankly, if you're watching this book club, I hope you've read the book already. If not, I don't think this will really spoil it for you. What happens to poor Wormwood? He fails miserably. Part of it has to do with the war. You've got this war raging on that we were talking about, the European war. Lewis is writing in his time, and he's talking about this conflict and how the Germans are bombing. The war has come to the patient's hometown. Bombs are falling from the sky, and his patient is anxious. It culminates with this fear from the demons that maybe he'll die before they've claimed him. In fact, that does end up happening. Screwtape rips into him for his failures. Quite literally rips into him for his failures. Yes. Now, Screwtape does bear some responsibility because he was offering all this advice and wasn't able to guide Wormwood to claim this guy's soul. Ultimately, Wormwood fails, and Screwtape devours him, quite literally. Quite a literal, physical representation of what's going on. It's interesting on this point where they're hoping, don't die, don't die during the war, that the demons are sometimes rooting for you to live. Yes. Because a man who's got his affairs in order at age 40, oh, you want that guy to live to be 90. Hopefully, 100 years old, hopefully by then he'll start to weaken. When you get somebody who's prosperous, the world has its grip on them, and they get attached to it, and it works its way into their heart. It's very difficult for that person to then focus on beyond the world. Another place, I think, Lewis said this somewhere else. He didn't say this in this book, but he said, aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in, aim at earth and you get neither. It's that kind of mentality. Someone is not going to have that mentality unless the world doesn't matter to them that much. They're willing to point beyond it, look beyond it to something else. That's the only future, really, that humans should be looking to, because the earthly future, what's going to happen in our lives the next few years, is unknown to us. It's unknown to us, well, except for one certainty. We will eventually die, whether it's from a war or whether it's from something else, and we will go somewhere. We do have a final destination, and it's not going to be swimming in the riches of this world. As long as people's attention is just focused on this world. Now, you know, another important point on that, to piggyback on that, we skipped past this, I think, but one of the early things that jumped out at me when I first started reading this, the whole premise is that your fate is not fixed. There is not this, like, you were predestined to heaven, you were predestined to hell. There's this idea that God created a world in which there are free creatures that can be either tempted to turn away from him or yield to his wooing and unite with him. And that all plays out in this open arena where anything can happen. And it's not that God's not in control and that there's no divine providence, but he is giving a very strong view of human freedom in the response that you either have to God to yield to him or to reject him. And I think that's a very strong theme that he's landing on. And that's a big topic. I mean, that's a subject of debate among Christians. A lot of Christians believe in, you know, predestination. Some are the elect, predestined for heaven. Sort of a fatalism. Exactly. Yeah, it's all decided. It was decided from eternity past. God decreed who would be saved, who wouldn't. This book rejects that and looks at it from a perspective of anybody can turn to God or turn away from God. And there's constantly a spiritual war. This spiritual war would be meaningless. It wouldn't really be happening. There would be no point to it if everything was fixed. What are the demons doing? The book was written quite some years ago. I guess it's dealing with eternal things. So this should not surprise us. But it does feel urgently relevant today. I mean, he talks about social justice. He's talking about how causes, he uses the word causes, you know, causes can become the focus. And then we use them like they are the end in the church, the Christian life, Christian behavior, religious rights, and the things that we do for supposedly for God end up serving that cause rather than God. And he brings up social justice in those terms, in that context, which I think is highly relevant today. And then there's other angles where, you know, you look at, he's talking about the need to keep your focus on loving your neighbor. And when he's saying that, he's talking about your immediate neighbors and not people who are far away who are easy to love, but the people who are hard to love, who live in your home, who irritate you. Yeah, somewhat related to this point. Lewis keeps coming back to this, that it's very important that the demons cultivate the historical sense that when we deal with ancient thinkers, ancient figures, we never take them seriously. We just say, well, that was in the historical context of Plato. What he was sort of, the reason he said what he said was because at his time, people did this and it meant this for that time, but it has no relevance to what we're doing today. Rather than taking these people seriously, rather than ever suggesting, hmm, maybe these brilliant, great men who came before me, maybe they actually understood something about reality. Maybe there's some truth to what they're saying. Yeah. And maybe change and progress, just for the sake of change and progress, isn't a good thing. You know, we hear that word progress all the time. And, you know, we have a progressive movement going on and we're constantly changing. Change the world. Yeah. And the demon in this book encourages that, actively encourages that, because it keeps you constantly searching for something else, always never being satisfied with the way things are, always looking towards perfection that you'll never achieve. And he's like, we can, you can, they give you everything and we give them nothing back in return for that. That's really a hopeless endeavor. I think that's highly relevant to today. I think we could keep talking about this book much more. What you've reminded me is we need to do about seven million other C.S. Lewis books. Yes. There's so much. We should do all of them. All of them. And we will stumble in the meantime, hopefully orienting our will with the right direction. Yes. With who, the being that the screw tape and wormwood would call the enemy. Yes. Who is our ultimate hope. Yes. Seth Dillon, thank you for being here. Thank you. We'll have to have you back when we do the next 20,000 C.S. Lewis books. I'd love to. Yeah. This has been The Book Club. I am Michael Knowles. Enjoy your stumbling as we will. We will catch you next month. Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Book Club on PragerU. PragerU is a 501c3 non-profit organization, so we rely on donations from viewers like you to keep this content on the air. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution today to help keep this content coming. Thank you very much.