Status, grievance and resentment: C.S. Lewis on the surprisingly modern business model of hell

60 years after its author’s death, The Screwtape Letters image of hell as an unscrupulous business is still relevant. Simon Horobin tells how C.S. Lewis came to author the influential bestseller.

Simon Horobin

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University.

A comic book style cartoon of a small squat devil looking quizzed in hell.

A scene from Marvel Comic's version of The Screwtape Letters.

November 22nd is the sixtieth anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis, an event that was overshadowed by the assassination of JFK on the same day. Although he is best known today as the author of the Narnia stories, the obituary that appeared in The Times newspaper a few days later noted that it was in fact The Screwtape Letters which sparked his success as a writer.

Initially published as a series of letters in the church newspaper The Guardian, The Screwtape Letters appeared in book form in 1942. The idea came to Lewis during an uninspiring sermon at Lewis’s local parish church in the Oxford suburb of Headington, in July 1940. Provisionally titled ‘As one Devil to Another’, the book would form a series of letters addressed to a novice devil, called Wormwood, beginning work on tempting his first patient, by an older, retired devil, called Screwtape. In finding Screwtape’s voice, Lewis was influenced by a speech given by Adolf Hitler at the Reichstag and broadcast by the BBC. What struck Lewis about the oration was how easy it was, while listening to the Führer speaking, to find oneself wavering just a little.

Lewis dedicated the volume to his friend and fellow Oxford academic, J.R.R. Tolkien. After Lewis’s death, having read an obituary in the Daily Telegraph claiming that Lewis was never fond of the book, Tolkien noted drily:

‘He dedicated it to me. I wondered why. Now I know.’

Despite Tolkien’s misgivings, the public devoured the work and it quickly became a bestseller. Although, as Lewis pointed out, numbers of sales can be misleading. A probationer nurse who had read the book told Lewis that she had chosen it from a list of set texts of which she had been told to read one in order to mention it at an interview. ‘And you chose Screwtape?’, said Lewis with some pride. ‘Well, of course’, she replied, ‘it was the shortest’.

Not all readers approved of its sentiments. A country clergyman wrote to the editor of The Guardian withdrawing his subscription on the grounds that much of the advice the letters offered seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical. The confusion no doubt arose from the lack of any explanation surrounding their circumstances; in a later preface Lewis gave more context, though refused to explain how this devilish correspondence had come into his hands.

Its publication by Macmillan in 1943 brought Lewis to the attention of readers in the United States; when Time magazine featured an interview with him in September 1947, it carried the title ‘Don v. Devil’. A picture of Lewis featured on the magazine’s cover, with a comic image of Satan, complete with horns, elongated nose and chin, and clutching a pitchfork, standing on his shoulder.

For Lewis, the war did not present a radically different situation, but rather aggravated and clarified the human condition so that it could no longer be ignored.

The Screwtape Letters are the product of the war years, during which Lewis wrote many of his most popular works. It was in 1941 that he delivered the first of his broadcasts for the BBC Home Service, which launched his career as a public apologist for the Christian faith. In 1942 Lewis published Perelandra, the sequel to his first space travel novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938), in which his hero, Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist – another nod to Tolkien – is summoned to Venus to prevent a second fall. Although it was published in 1950, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe begins with four children being evacuated to the countryside to escape the London blitz. In setting his stories in outer-space or the fantastical world of Narnia, Lewis could be accused of writing escapist fiction that avoided the realities of a world in conflict. Lewis, however, believed that the war had not created a new crisis, but rather brought into clearer focus an ever-present struggle between good and evil.

For Lewis, the war did not present a radically different situation, but rather aggravated and clarified the human condition so that it could no longer be ignored. As he remarked in the second of his Broadcast Talks:

‘Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage’.

The key point, writes Screwtape, is to fix the patient’s attention on ‘real life’ – but don’t let him question what he means by ‘real’.

Lewis’s message to a country living in fear of occupation by German troops was that the invasion had already happened. They had been summoned not to their country’s defence, but to its liberation. When the Pevensie children stumble into a snow-covered Narnia under the control of the tyrannical White Witch, they are told in hushed whispers of the rumours of Aslan’s return: ‘“They say Aslan is on the move—perhaps has already landed.”’ It is a reminder that Aslan enters Narnia as a rebel, intent on overthrowing the Witch and installing the rightful kings and queens on the thrones of Cair Paravel.

The Screwtape Letters do not ignore the war during which they were written; Wormwood’s patient is killed in the London bombing. But, for Screwtape, a war is of no value unless it results in winning souls for his Father Below. His advice to his nephew is concerned with diverting the patient from engaging with universal questions by distracting him with everyday preoccupations and sense experiences. While these might involve the immediate conflict, they could also be the excitement of a new romance, a falling out with a friend, the prospect of promotion, or an obsession with food. If the patient should begin to speculate about spiritual matters, Screwtape advises Wormwood to deflect him with academic theories and philosophies that avoid confronting the question of whether the Christian faith might actually be true. The key point, writes Screwtape, is to fix the patient’s attention on ‘real life’ – but don’t let him question what he means by ‘real’. It is ironic, Screwtape observes, that, while mortals typically picture devils putting ideas into their minds, their best work is done by keeping things out.

Despite numerous requests for sequels, Lewis was reluctant to twist his mind back into the ‘diabolical attitude’ and revisit the spiritual cramp it produced. Numerous spin-offs have appeared to fill the void, with Screwtape emails, audio and stage performances and even a Marvel comic book adaptation. Despite this, readers continue to turn to the original work. After all, Lewis’s depiction of hell as an unscrupulous business concern, whose employees are perpetually concerned about their own status, nursing grievances and resentment, speaks to our modern age just as much as it did to Lewis’s own.

Review

Culture

Economics

Politics

5 July 2024

10 min read

The book Keir Starmer says you must read

Will Hutton’s This Time No Mistakes surveys the thinking that could solve Britain’s ills.

John Milbank

John Milbank is a theologian, philosopher and poet. A co-founder of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, he is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Nottingham.

Kier Starmer sits on a sofa, leaning forward and holding papers he is reading. Rachel Reaves sits and looks on.

Starmer and Reeves.

Labour Party

In the aftermath of a historic election, one could do worse than read Will Hutton’s second big ‘state of the nation book’, recently published. This Time No Mistakes is worth reading just for the succinctness and clarity of its politic-economic history of the United Kingdom since the industrial revolution, which it provides in its central chapters. Indeed, Keir Starmer says it is a ‘brilliant book... read it if you haven't already ’ It may well take a sophisticated journalist to be able to do this so well: too often, even the best of academics cannot see the public wood for their private-obsessional trees.

But it is doubly and mainly worth reading for Hutton’s prognosis of our ills and his recommendations for solving them. The new Labour government could do far worse than try to carry through Hutton’s proposals, which almost anyone of common sense and goodwill (including all Tories) ought readily to endorse. Indeed, if the next government managed to initiate even a half of what he suggests, this country could be placed back upon the right tracks.

As to the history, which is crucial to the ultimate diagnosis: Hutton contends quite simply that Britain has been self-deceived by the peculiar nature of its industrial revolution, which was the first in history. It was largely a matter of private enterprise, partly enabled and later cushioned by empire, whose possession encouraged us to support an unqualified doctrine of free trade.

However, all other nations, including the United States, both when they sought to catch up with the steam and rail revolution, and when they later co-pioneered the ones based on gas and electricity, and ultimately on nuclear and digital, from the outset depended much more upon state intervention to promote needed expertise, education and investment. The United Kingdom, by contrast, remained captivated by the mythical glory of its initial take-off.

As a result, not just Conservative governments, but also Labour ones, right up to the New Labour one, and including the catastrophically misguided work of Margaret Thatcher (Hutton is admirably unqualified here) remained far too captivated by the norms of economic laissez-faire, ‘balancing the books’, a primacy of finance over production and obsessive Treasury concern with money, rather than productive wealth.

The exceptions to this were the pre-World War one Liberal government and the post World War Two Labour one. Yet all the strong ideas implemented by the latter came from ‘New Liberal’ thinkers and not Labour ones: notably from Keynes and Beveridge. Labour on its own, by comparison, has tragically and disastrously oscillated between a desire to replace capitalism with some sort of command economy on the one hand, and simply leaving capitalism as it is, with a bit of welfare tinkering, on the other. More recently this has been seen in the contrast between Corbyn and Blair.

It is at this juncture that Hutton proceeds to complement his political-economic diagnosis with a more purely political one. The split on the ‘progressive left’ is a catastrophe that has kept the Tories unfairly in power for much of a century. This split is both caused by and has prevented any reform of the first past the post voting system, which urgently needs to go.

For this reason then, political economy and constitutional reform go together.

As to the latter, we need proportional representation which would allow more reasoned debate instead of the inter-party squabble, alongside legally guaranteed local government and a different kind of informed, rather than overweening executive.

As to the former, we need flexible planning, public-private partnership in investment, a national wealth fund, sectional trade union bargaining, the breaking up of cartels and monopolies and required social purpose and stakeholding, for every business and financial enterprise.

One is tempted just to say hurray! But there are some historical and theoretical questions to be posed that may have hidden practical consequences.

Better than trying to ‘balance’ the private and the collective, as if the self and society were in rivalry, is to take the more Continental (and early Blairite!) course of stressing that we are always ‘persons in relation’.

Hutton now backs Tawney besides Keynes. But do they say the same thing? For the latter, capitalism is a wild, amoral and dynamic beast that can nonetheless be politically tamed. In certain phases of the capitalist cycle only (as Hutton rightly sees) this will be about boosting demand, but in others it can mean lessening it and temporarily hurting workers.

But Tawney, and Hutton clearly agrees with him, wanted a market economy permitting only useful and not merely acquisitive wealth. Given this ethical purpose it was for him possible for the market, aa a socialist market, to reach equilibrium, beyond extrinsic and always precarious state ‘management’.

Just how precarious was seen in the 1970s. For Hutton, the lapse of Keynesianism in this decade was simply a matter of the triumph of the wrong ideas. To a large degree this is surely right, and yet it is not the whole story. Were it the latter, then neoliberalism might not have spread beyond Anglo-Saxon lands to Europe and South America.

The other aspect is surely the reality that capitalism of its nature, as driven by the amoral search for profit, resists any prospect of a stable, social market. Achieving that and extending the corporatist order of negotiation between state, business and unions would have been the alternative way, instead of Hayekianism, to deal with ‘stagflation’. Rather than a competition between capital, labour and consumer for money that wasn’t there at the time, a fair division of spoils could have been consistently instituted by legally and culturally re-framing the firm and the market, something that would have immediately favoured a renewed degree of growth.

Really, almost everything that Hutton writes indicates agreement with this sort of thing, including the recognition that of itself, capitalism is not actually dynamic (that comes from technology and culture) but tends to build up sterile finance in the interests of the few, rather than productive growth in the interests of the many. But in that case ‘ethical socialism’ is not just a set of ideals, as he tends to imply, but a mode of achievable practice.

Similarly, a general mutualist national insurance approach to welfare, which he rightly favours, was not just a New Liberal advocacy as he claims, but deeply rooted in co-operative socialism and in Christian (especially Anglican) social thinking whose influence -- except silently in the case of Tawney -- goes unmentioned. Yet the very phrase ‘welfare state’ is Archbishop William Temple’s and Tawney’s social analysis, intended for the general public, concluded with an unabashed High Church ecclesiology!

It is relevant here that Hutton speaks of the need to combine the ‘I’ with the ‘We’ and yet he clearly does not endorse just any old exercise of ‘individual agency’, even if he sometimes appears to do so, when defining the operation of the price mechanism as necessarily ‘wild’, after Adam Smith’s exclusion of commercial transactions from the immediate operation of social sympathy. Better than trying to ‘balance’ the private and the collective, as if the self and society were in rivalry, is to take the more Continental (and early Blairite!) course of stressing that we are always ‘persons in relation’ – at once within and outside each other, in a constant creative weave.

Nothing could be further from Keynes’ despising of the proletariat and favouring of learned leisure, that John Ruskin’s revolutionary mystique of the artisanal.

There are two deeper questions about Hutton’s approach. First, his excessive ‘idealism’, as with his analysis of the Seventies switch, may still underrate the difficulty of overcoming the power of entrenched interests – the need indeed not so much for class, as for popular warfare against plutocracy.

Secondly, he tends to underplay a theoretical tension between secular and materialist thinkers, including New Liberals, on the one hand, and religious and Idealist thinkers like the first ‘New Liberal’, T.H Green on the other.

The latter was much more like Alasdair Macintyre or Michael Sandel than like John Rawls, as Hutton claims: for by human ‘self-realisation’ he meant the ‘positive liberty’ of pursuing the objectively true ends of human flourishing: religious contemplation, artistic creation of genuine beauty, active citizen participation.

By contrast, the secular New Liberals, including Keynes, tended to reduce the ethical good to the negative liberty of rights, private friendship and utility – often leading them to favour eugenics and to indulge in racism. Nothing could be further from Keynes’ despising of the proletariat and favouring of learned leisure, that John Ruskin’s revolutionary mystique of the artisanal.

Hutton tends to express surprise that a Tory like Ruskin, or a reactionary like Carlyle, should have favoured the cause of the worker – and indeed in Ruskin’s case also espoused ‘communism’, as Hutton elides from the picture. But this is to fail to see how Tory Radicalism and even paternalism is actually a third strand in the kind of transformative thinking that we continue to need, was always a crucial influence on Labour and was a crucial element of the postwar settlement.

If these thinkers indeed favoured ‘hierarchy’, then that was in part because they wanted more interpersonal and mediated chains of command, rather than brutally centralised and mechanical ones. Surely Hutton wants that also, as his excellent reservations about the use of Artificial Intelligence would indicate?

There is a recognition that economic individualism usually ‘on the right’ is actually matched and encouraged by a cultural individualism usually ‘on the left’.

This is perhaps the limit of talking in terms of ‘progressive’ versus ‘conservative’. Hutton harks back to the norms of the Enlightenment. Yet, as Richard Whatmore has shown, all the great British enlightenment thinkers came to think that pure enlightenment was failing.

They saw its anti-religious fanaticism stance as challenged by the rise of new secular, nationalist and direct democratic fanaticisms, as supremely with the French Revolution. By ‘populism’, as we might now say!

But they also already recognised that the breakdown of a rational peace had been encouraged by excessive consumer greed and by the over-implication of commerce in state borrowing (whose pre-enabling of industry in Britain, Hutton does not mention) and so also in war and empire.

It was exactly in this context that the enlightenment thinker Edmund Burke began to consider the virtues of the longer-term embedding of enlightenment in Christianity and the importance of the medieval ‘gothic’ legacy of a corporate order binding social body to social body, rather than individual to individual via contract, mediated by the market and backed up by the state.

In Burke’s wake, for example with the radical William Cobbett, much of the Nineteenth Century critique of economism, to which Hutton is the heir, was of a ‘Romantic’ and often ‘neo-medieval’ rather than purely enlightenment cast. (Hutton at times wrongly reads medieval ‘feudalism’ as ‘absolutist’ – a specifically early modern phenomenon.) This matters, because this tradition contains a stronger recognition that the centralising state (which the Enlightenment favoured as a substitute for the Church) can be just as alienating and anti-social as the uprooting market – even if, as Karl Polanyi later saw, one needs the power of the state today in order to restore the primacy of the social and of inter-human fellowship.

Within the same current, there is a recognition that economic individualism usually ‘on the right’ is actually matched and encouraged by a cultural individualism usually ‘on the left’. And here Hutton is perhaps inconsistent – he definitely sees this, mentioning the dubious overriding of the universal by identitarian concerns, and yet also recognises it somewhat uneasily, as it challenges certain ‘progressivist’ assumptions.

As a result, he rather disallows the validity of some populist concerns – ironically rather like the incomprehension of the older enlightenment in the face of the new revolutionary era. For example, concerns with the normative primacy of the heterosexual family and the enabling of family and children, with regional and national identity, with the academic ‘woke’ trashing of the entire Western legacy, with the exploitation and cultural disruption of excessive immigration, with ecological policies that simply override current human needs while doing little to assist the future of nature.

The danger of these partial blind spots could be a continued failure of the roughly ‘communitarian’ Left, or the sensible Right, to win over the mass of the people to their cause. For they must be won over if not just the United Kingdom, but humanity as a whole, is to have a decent future.

Towards building that future, no one has contributed more, or more valiantly, than Will Hutton.