The Screwtape Letters by {author}: summary and why it matters

What it argues

The book is a series of letters from Screwtape, an experienced official in the hierarchy of hell, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter assigned to a young man in wartime England. The advice is reversed in moral terms: the enemy is God, and the devils want the man to fall.

Rather than dramatic sins, Screwtape recommends small ones. Distract the man from prayer, encourage vague spiritual feelings over practice, nurture irritation at a mother's ways, persuade him that his ideas are only the product of the age and keep his attention on the future and the past and away from the present. Screwtape wants a man comfortably lukewarm.

The letters mock modern habits, such as treating the latest fashion as the proof of truth, and expose the self-deceptions of ordinary life.

Why it matters

The book has endured because the temptations it shows are common ones, and because it makes a sermon enjoyable. The theme that moral drift comes in small steps is relevant well beyond religion.

About the author

The letters first ran weekly in an Anglican newspaper, The Guardian, in 1941, and were published as a book in 1942. Lewis dedicated it to J. R. R. Tolkien, and in a later preface he said that he found it unpleasant to write. He added a new piece, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, in 1959. It was the book that made him a household name.

Who should read it

Any reader, believer or not, who likes satire.