Book Reviews and More: Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces - C.S. Lewis

The Screwtape Letters

and Other Pieces

The Ransom Cycle Book 4

C.S. Lewis

Harper Collins

ISBN 9780008192532

eISBN 9780008228545

ASIN B01MA511VT

This book hit very differently reading it this time. I believe that is for a few reasons. Some of which are: One I now believe this is part of the Ransom cycle, more on that below. Two looking back on my life from my mid 50’s I can see thinks, I hope, a little better. As a father of three teenagers, and a child in her late 20’s growing up in this day and age I am even more concerned about the trials and temptations they face. I know I read this volume a number of times in University, but that was before I started keeping a list of everything I have read, which I started in October of 1995. At the time of writing this review according to Goodreads there are over 800 editions of The Screwtape Letters available. Interestingly enough some editions contain this work at the end; there are some notes on that in this edition:

“C. S. Lewis had finished putting this book together shortly before his death on 22nd November 1963. It is devoted almost entirely to religion and the pieces are derived from various sources. Some of them have appeared in They Asked for a Paper (Geoffrey Bles, London 1962, 21s.), a collection whose subjects included literature, ethics and theology. ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’ was initially published in Great Britain as part of a hard-covered book called The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast (Geoffrey Bles, London 1961, 12s. 6d.). This consisted of the original ‘The Screwtape Letters’, together with the ‘Toast’, and also a new preface by Lewis. Meantime, ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’ had already appeared in the United States, first as an article in The Saturday Evening Post and then during 1960 in a hard-covered collection, The World’s Last Night (Harcourt Brace and World, New York)”

The preface ends with:

“At the end of his preface to They Asked for a Paper, Lewis wrote: ‘Since these papers were composed at various times during the last twenty years, passages in them which some readers may find reminiscent of my later work are in fact anticipatory or embryonic. I have allowed myself to be persuaded that such overlaps were not a fatal objection to their republication.’ We are delighted that he allowed himself to be persuaded in the same way over this paperback collection of pieces on religious themes.”

Lewis himself in the new preface included in this volume states:

“I was often asked or advised to add to the original “Screwtape 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”, as 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 world 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.”

And over the years there have been numerous attempts to update or modernize Screwtape including:

Flambeau@Darkcorp.com - Don Hawkings

The Snakebite Letters - Peter J. Kreeft

The Gargoyle Code - Dwight Longenecker

Lord Foulgrin's Letters - Randy Alcorn

As One Devil to Another - Richard Platt

The Gravedigger File - Os Guinness

(Now published as The Last Christian on Earth)

And those are just the ones that come to mind and that I have encountered. I have read half of that list but before I started writing reviews. And from what I recall those I have read paled in comparison to this volume. As can be seen from this list and even Lewis’s own preface Screwtape has often been imitated but never replicated. Even Lewis did not attempt that. The work sin this volume are:

Preface and Acknowledgements

Screwtape Proposes a Toast: An Address

The Inner Ring: An Oration

Is Theology Poetry?: A Paper

On Obstinacy in Belief: A Paper

Transposition: A Sermon

The Weight of Glory: A Sermon

Good Work and Good Works: A Paper

A Slip of the Tongue: A Sermon

Footnotes

About the Author

Other Books By C.S. Lewis

A note before I continue:

Recent scholarship published found a handwritten preface to manuscript edition of The Screwtape Letters in the C.S. Lewis Archive in Wheaton, IL. This note indicates the letters were found and translated by Dr. Ransom. And that they were written in Old Solar. Thus linking the 3 Ransom novels, the 2 Screwtape pieces and the partial fourth Ransom novel into one series. As such this reading of this volume is in the order of it being volume 3 of 6 in that reading order.

I could have read the edition of this piece that was at the end of the letters, but historically I have always read an edition that is separate and I decided to do so again. It is also fitting that the remaining pieces in this collection are derived from sermons, talks, or articles by Leis on the topic of religion, faith and life.

This volume is powerful. But in a very different way the the letters. The first piece is of course my primary concern when reading it as part of the Ransom cycle, but the other pieces fit in well especially as I am now well into That Hideous Strength, as I write this review. I cannot help but feel the other pieces in this serve so well as a counter to N.I.C.E. and what they are trying to achieve. The description of this edition of this work states:

“The only official sequel, penned by Lewis himself, to the ever-popular ‘Screwtape Letters’ – published alongside other short essays.

One of the most popular books ever to come from the pen of C.S. Lewis was written in the name of Screwtape, a senior devil, experienced in the art of luring his ‘patients’ on earth to their own damnation in service of ‘our father below’ – and training others to do the same.

Screwtape’s correspondence with his nephew, an apprentice devil, came into Lewis’s hands, he said, by a route he would not disclose, and many a reader has finished the collection longing for more of the insights they gained from its wisdom.

Much to Lewis’s resistance, this after-dinner speech, given by Screwtape to a graduating class of demons at a college in hell, came to light a few years after the publication of the original letters. Now 75 years later, the speech is reproduced in full once more, along with a short collection of Lewis’s other lesser-known, but perennial works.

Many people will have forgotten about the only official ‘sequel’ that exists to Screwtape; the 75th anniversary of Screwtape’s publication is the perfect opportunity to bring this back.”

I highlighted a few passages while reading this work, some of them are:

“The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The world 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.”

“The sort of souls on whose despair and ruin we have—well, I won’t say feasted, but at any rate subsisted—to-night are increasing in numbers and will continue to increase. Our advices from Lower Command assure us that this is so; our directives warn us to orient all our tactics in view of this situation.”

“As for the poor who benefited by this, they were behaving in a most disappointing fashion. Instead of using their new liberties—as we reasonably hoped and expected—for massacre, rape, and looting, or even for perpetual intoxication, they were perversely engaged in becoming cleaner, more orderly, more thrifty, better educated, and even more virtuous. Believe me, gentledevils, the threat of something like a really healthy state of society seemed then perfectly serious.”

“The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid resounding lie.”

“Now this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to the humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices.”

“Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level.”

“All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: “Oh God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!” Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly, “Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.””

“The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic”.”

“For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, morally flaccid from lack of discipline in youth, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and soft from lifelong pampering.”

“The ultimate value, for us, of any revolution, war, or famine lies in the individual anguish, treachery, hatred, rage, and despair which it may produce. I’m as good as you is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies. But it has a far deeper value as an end in itself, as a state of mind, which necessarily excluding humility, charity, contentment, and all the pleasures of gratitude or admiration, turns a human being away from almost every road which might finally lead him to Heaven.”

All of those quotes come from the preface of the Toast. This is one of those volumes that people today will often scoff at or deride, both the toast and most of the other pieces as well. Even in many Christian circles. Those who do take its warnings could face opposition from friends, family and other Christians. But it is an important work, both as part of the Ransom cycle and just on its own. It is a work I am going to encourage my youngest two read.

I have struggled with the works of C.S. Lewis, when I was in university 35ish years ago he was immensely popular in Campus ministry, with evangelicals, and even mainline protestants. I also know many Catholic scholars, teachers and priests who love his works and use them extensively today. There have been debates of weather he would have converted to Catholicism or if he lived a sort of Catholicism. All I know is that I have hardly read any of his books in decades and that was my loss. And after my recent readings I can greatly appreciate why he is loved by both Catholics and evangelicals.

So my recommendation is if you are Catholic, or evangelical or nondenominational that you give this volume a read with an open heart. And see if you are not changed and challenged by the end of the work. And consider reading the Ransom cycle in the order outlined above. By the end of this volume you will see how they all fit so well together and how we are in need of this great wisdom.

Other Reviews of Lewis's Books.
A Grief Observed
The Four Loves

...

The Ransom Cycle:

Out of the Silent Planet

Perelandra

The Screwtape Letters

Screwtape Proposes a Toast

That Hideous Strength

The Dark Tower and Other Stories

...

Original Space Trilogy:
Out of the Silent Planet
Perelandra
That Hideous Strength

...
The Dark Tower and Other Stories