The Screwtape Letters is one of C.S. Lewis’s most enduring and prophetic works.
Adopting the voice of the demon Screwtape, Lewis predicts everything from virtue signalling, to porn addiction.
He also shows us the folly of political utopianism, and, as is typical of Lewis’s oeuvre, exposes how the modern world has dispensed with truth and reason in favour of fashionable ideas and materialism.
At the personal level, we are implicitly warned (by taking the opposite view to the evil Screwtape) of how an obsessive focus on the future causes anxiety, and how the pleasures, though divine in origin, can be corrupted and perverted.
Lewis also makes it clear that our thirst for novelty and concerns about social status are further avenues for evil to exploit.
Watch my new video breakdown of this surprising classic below.