Racial/Ethnic Group Comparison and Contrast:

Racial/Ethnic Group

Comparison and contrast: C.S. Lewis'

The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce and The Problem of Pain

Lewis' The Screwtape Letters details the letters of a demon named Screwtape to a younger, apprentice demon named Wormwood who is attempting to convince a man to stray from the path of righteousness. The temptations used by the demon are not simply sensual pleasures. Rather, they are the pleasures of false intellectualism and rationalization. The man's falling away from Christ is not only a falling away from goodness to a path of dissipation and licentiousness, but also intellectual arrogance and an obsession with the material world. Screwtape councils Wormwood: "make him [the man] think it [materialism] is strong, or stark, or courageous -- that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about." Science is not viewed as antithetical to Christianity by Lewis, however, given that it does move man to consider matters of higher-order philosophy. What is evil is the absence of seeking something higher than life on the purely earthly level: "The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result... If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology." (Lewis 4).

These words suggest that Lewis has a rather broad-based view of a belief in Christ, as it seems to imply that both higher-order science and religious philosophy seek the same, transcendent aim. However, later in the book he will take aim at historical materialists who view Jesus merely as a character in history, rather than as the saving figure of Christian dogma: "The advantages of these constructions [for Satan], which we intend to change every thirty years or so, are manifold. In the first place they all tend to direct men's devotion to something which does not exist, for each 'historical Jesus' is unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to; each new 'historical Jesus' therefore has to be got out of them by suppression at one point and exaggeration at another" (Lewis 124).

As well as attempting to get the soul, known as 'the patient' interested in material subjects, to deny the divinity of Jesus, and to be distracted during prayer, Wormwood does also attempt to get the man interested in a prostitute (and is disappointed when he falls in love with a Christian), but the overall emphasis on the nature of evil in The Screwtape Letters is that evil is a kind of absence of good. Evil is materialism, or the absence of belief that God created the world with a higher spiritual purpose. Evil is the reduction of Christ to mere, human form without appreciating the fact that He died for our sins. Evil is not licentiousness because sex is bad, but because a union with a prostitute has no spiritual component, unlike the true meeting of the minds of people who acknowledge they are God's creation. Evil is finitude, just like human bodily life and materialism itself. Wormwood, because of his failure, is done away with by the end of the book, while the 'patient' although he dies, and is elevated to heaven. "Real' means the bare physical facts, separated from the other elements in the experience they actually had" according to materialists, but to those who are true Christians, they understand that apprehending reality can be accomplished only with the heart (Lewis 168)

Lewis uses a similarly fantastic scenario in The Great Divorce, which is set in hell. Hell is portrayed as a bleak, dreary place. This suggests that the reality conceptualized by materialists, namely a reality with no transcendent significance in heaven, is the place to which all human beings who are believers are damned. As in the Screwtape Letters, a failure of religious intensity is shown as being linked to a kind of failure of imagination. When confronted by heaven, the souls of human beings are awestruck, not at the surreal nature of heaven, but how real it seems, compared to their own, past existences. It is the spirits who are ghostly, not the actual substance of heaven.

In hell, those who are damned are not necessarily those who committed the worst crimes -- in heaven, there are even murderers. Instead, the damned are those who adopt the type of materialistic mindset that Wormwood attempted to coax 'the patient' into adopting -- a mindset that salvation does not come because of God's infinite grace, but as a kind of bargaining. One damned man asks for justice, claiming that because murderers are saved, he should be saved as well. Another figure, a man called the Episcopal ghost, who is a skeptic and denies heaven and hell, despite their evident materiality in the book, states that Jesus should never have died but instead tried to have saved himself and matured his philosophy -- once again reflecting a narrow conception of life as something that can merely be redeemed by the mind, not belief. He says that his denial of the Resurrection is an "honest belief" borne of his God-given critical faculties (Lewis 36). 'It is this type of mindset that the 'patient' resists when he becomes a Christian.