Revised Preface to the 1962 Edition

 

IT WAS DURING THE second German War that the letters of Screwtape

appeared in (now extinct) The Guardian. I hope they did not hasten its death, but they certainly lost it one reader. 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.”

In general, however, they had a reception I had never dreamed of. Reviews were either laudatory or filled with that sort of anger which tells an author that he has hit his target; sales were at first (by my standards) prodigious, and have continued steady.

Of course, 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.

It is even, as I have noticed with a chastened smile, the sort that gravitates towards

spare bedrooms, there to live a life of undisturbed tranquillity in company with The

Road Mender, John Inglesant, and The Life of the Bee. Sometimes it is bought for even

more humiliating reasons. A lady whom I knew discovered that the pretty little

probationer who filled her hot-water bottle in the hospital had read Screwtape. She also

discovered why.

“You see,” said the girl, “we were warned that at interviews, after the real, technical

questions are over, matrons and people sometimes ask about your general interests. The

best thing is to say you’ve read something. So they gave us a list of about ten books that

usually go down pretty well and said we ought to read at least one of them.”

“And you chose Screwtape?”

“‘Well, of course; it was the shortest.”

Still, when all allowances have been made, the book has had readers of the genuine sort

sufficiently numerous to make it worthwhile answering some of the questions it has

raised in their minds. The commonest question is whether I really “believe in the Devil.”

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.

The proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. That is to say, 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.

I believe this not in the sense that it is part of my creed, but in the sense that it is one of

my opinions. My religion would not be in ruins if this opinion were shown to be false.

Till that happens—and proofs of a negative are hard to come by—I shall retain it. It

seems to me to explain a good many facts. It agrees with the plain sense of Scripture, the

tradition of Christendom, and the beliefs of most men at most times. And it conflicts

with nothing that any of the sciences has shown to be true.

It should be (but it is not) unnecessary to add that a belief in angels, whether good or

evil, does not mean a belief in either as they are represented in art and literature. Devils

are depicted with bats’ wings and good angels with birds’ wings, not because anyone

holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but

because most men like birds better than bats. They are given wings at all in order to

suggest the swiftness of unimpeded intellectual energy. They are given human form be

cause man is the only rational creature we know. Creatures higher in the natural order

than ourselves, either incorporeal or animating bodies of a sort we cannot experience,

must be represented symbolically if they are to be represented at all.

These forms are not only symbolical but were always known to be symbolical by

reflective people. The Greeks did not believe that the gods were really like the beautiful

human shapes their sculptors gave them. In their poetry a god who wishes to “appear” to

a mortal temporarily assumes the likeness of a man. Christian theology has nearly

always explained the “appearance” of an angel in the same way. It is only the ignorant,

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

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— the frigid houris of a testable paradise. They are a pernicious symbol.

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.”

The literary symbols are more dangerous because they are not so easily recognised as

symbolical. Those of Dante are the best. Before his angels we sink in awe. His devils, as

Ruskin rightly remarked, in their rage, spite, and obscenity, are far more like what the

reality must be than anything in Milton. Milton’s devils, by their grandeur and high

poetry, have done great harm, and his angels owe too much to Homer and Raphael. But

the really pernicious image is Goethe’s Mephistopheles. It is Faust, not he, who really

exhibits the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self which is the mark of

Hell. The humorous, civilised, sensible, adaptable Mephistopheles has helped to

strengthen the illusion that evil in liberating.

A little man may sometimes avoid some single error made by a great one, and I was

determined that my own symbolism should at least not err in Goethe’s way. For humor

involves a sense of proportion and a power of seeing yourself from the outside. What

ever else we attribute to beings who sinned through pride, we must not attribute this.

Satan, said Chesterton, fell through force of gravity. We must picture Hell as a state

where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where

everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy,

self-importance, and resentment. This, to begin with. For the rest, my own choice of

symbols depended, I suppose, on temperament and on the age.

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.

Milton has told us that “devil with devil damned Firm concord holds.” But how?

Certainly not by friendship. A being which can still love is not yet a devil. Here again my

symbol seemed to me useful. It enabled me, by earthly parallels, to picture an official

society 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.

This symbol also enabled me to get rid of the absurd fancy that devils are engaged in the

disinterested pursuit of something called Evil (the capital is essential). Mine have no use

for any such turnip ghost. Bad angels, like bad men, are entirely practical. They have two

motives. The first is fear of punishment: for as totalitarian countries have their camps

for torture, so my Hell contains deeper Hells, its “houses of correction.” Their second

motive is a kind of hunger. I feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another;

and us. Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one’s

fellow; to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one’s

own—to hate one’s hatreds and resent one’s grievances and indulge one’s egoism

through him as well as through oneself. His own little store of passion must of course be

suppressed to make room for ours. If he resists this suppression he is being very selfish.

On Earth this desire is often called “love.” In Hell I feign that they recognise it as

hunger. But there the hunger is more ravenous, and a fuller satisfaction is possible.

There, I suggest, the stronger spirit—there are perhaps no bodies to impede the

operation—can really and irrevocably suck the weaker into itself and permanently gorge

its own being on the weaker’s outraged individuality. It is (I feign) for this that devils

desire human souls and the souls of one another. It is for this that Satan desires all his

own followers and all the sons of Eve and all the host of Heaven. His dream is of the day

when all shall be inside him and all that says “I” can say it only through him. This, I

surmise, is the bloated-spider parody, the only imitation he can understand, of that

unfathomed bounty whereby God turns tools into servants and servants into sons, so

that they may be at last reunited to Him in the perfect freedom of a love offered from the

height of the utter individualities which he has liberated them to be.

But, as in Grimm’s story, des träumte mit nut, this is all only myth and symbol. That is

why the question of my own opinion about devils, though proper to be answered when

once it was raised, is really of very minor importance for a reader of Screw-tape. To

those who share that opinion, my devils will be symbol & of a concrete reality: to others,

they will be personifications of abstractions, and the book will be an allegory. But it

makes little difference which way you read it. For of course its purpose was not to

speculate about diabolical life but to throw light from a new angle on the life of men.

I am told that I was not first in the field and that someone in the seventeenth century

wrote letters from a devil. I have not seen that book. I believe its slant was mainly

political. But I gladly acknowledge a debt to Stephen McKenna’s The Confessions of a

Well-Meaning Woman. The connection may not be obvious, but you will find there the

same moral inversion—the blacks all white and the whites all black —and the humour

which comes of speaking through a totally humourless personna. I think my idea of

spiritual cannibalism probably owes something to the horrible scenes of “absorbing” in

David Lindsay’s neglected Voyage to Arcturus.

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.

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.”

I was often asked or advised to add to the original Letters, but for many years I felt not

the least inclination to do it. Though I had never written anything more easily, I never

wrote with less enjoyment. The ease came, no doubt, from the fact that the device of

diabolical letters, once you have thought of it, exploits itself spontaneously, like Swift’s

big and little men, or the medical and ethical philosophy of Erewhon, or Anstey’s Garuda

Stone. 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.

I had, moreover, a sort of grudge against my book for not being a different book which

no one could write. Ideally, Screwtape’s advice to Wormwood should have been

balanced by archangelical advice to the patient’s guardian angel. Without this the

picture of human life is lopsided. But who could supply the deficiency? 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.

And nowadays even if you could write a prose like Traherne’s, you wouldn’t be allowed

to, for the canon of “functionalism” has disabled literature for half its functions. (At

bottom, every ideal of style dictates not only how we should say things but what sort of

things we may say.)

Then, as years went on and the stifling experience of writing the Letters became a

weaker memory, reflections on this and that which seemed somehow to demand

Screwtapian treatment began to occur to me. I was resolved never to write

another Letter. The idea of something like a lecture or “address” hovered vaguely in my

mind, now forgotten, now recalled, never written. Then came an invitation from

the Saturday Evening Post, and that pressed the trigger.