C.S. Lewis – The Screwtape letters
https://thoughtsonthingsandstuff.com/cs-lewis-a-modern-view-of-evil/
cs lewisIn 1941 Christian author C.S. Lewis began publishing a series of letters in the English periodical, The Guardian.
The
letters were a fictional correspondence between a senior level
administrator type devil named Screwtape and his nephew, a low level
tempter type devil named Wormwood.
The letters include
advice from Screwtape on the means whereby Wormwood should go about
guiding his human target away from God and towards Satan.
New letters were published weekly and a total of 31 letters were
published in all. In 1961 the letters were compiled into a book and CS
Lewis provided a preface which explained some of his motivation in
writing the letters as well as some of his views on Hell, Angels,
Devils, and Evil itself.
Modern Evil
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Most
impressing upon my mind is his description of how modern forms of evil
are brought into existence and what drives the agents behind it. At
this point I will simply let his description speak for itself:
“… 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.”