C.S. Lewis on Evil, Faith, and Materialism: Three Works Compared
This essay compares and contrasts C.S. Lewis's three works — The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Problem of Pain — examining how Lewis constructs a unified theology of evil across different literary forms. The paper argues that Lewis consistently portrays evil not as an active, malevolent force but as an absence of good: the reduction of reality to pure materialism, the denial of Christ's divinity, and the arrogant over-reliance on human intellect. Drawing on key passages from all three texts, the essay traces Lewis's vision of salvation as a matter of grace and genuine spiritual striving, in contrast to rationalistic bargaining or historical reductionism.
- Introduction: Lewis's Shared Theological Vision: Overview of Lewis's three interconnected works
- The Screwtape Letters: Evil as Intellectual Materialism: Demon Screwtape's letters reveal evil as materialism and false intellect
- The Great Divorce: Hell, Heaven, and the Materialist Mindset: Hell portrayed as the endpoint of materialist thinking
- The Problem of Pain: Free Will, the Fall, and the Absence of Good: Lewis addresses evil directly through free will and the Fall
- Conclusion: Evil as Absence Across Three Works: Evil unified across all three texts as spiritual absence
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper maintains a clear, consistent interpretive thesis — that Lewis defines evil as an absence of good rather than a positive force — and applies it coherently across all three texts.
- Direct quotations from primary sources are used purposefully, anchoring each analytical claim in textual evidence rather than paraphrase alone.
- The comparative structure moves logically from the most literary and satirical work to the most explicitly philosophical, building argumentative momentum toward the final synthesis.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative literary analysis applied to a theological framework. Rather than treating each text in isolation, the student identifies a unifying concept — evil as spiritual absence and materialist reduction — and tests it across three works with different genres (epistolary satire, allegorical fantasy, and philosophical prose). This is a strong model for multi-text thematic synthesis.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with close reading of The Screwtape Letters, establishing Lewis's core idea of evil as intellectual materialism. It then moves to The Great Divorce, showing how that idea operates in an allegorical afterlife setting. Finally, it turns to The Problem of Pain, where Lewis addresses the problem directly without allegory. A brief conclusion ties the three together. The structure is source-by-source rather than theme-by-theme, which suits a shorter comparative essay.
Introduction: Lewis's Shared Theological Vision
The three works examined here — The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Problem of Pain — represent C.S. Lewis's most sustained engagements with the nature of evil, faith, and the human condition. Across all three, Lewis advances a consistent theological argument: evil is not a positive, active force, but an absence — a turning away from God and from the higher spiritual purpose for which human beings were created.
The Screwtape Letters: Evil as Intellectual Materialism
The Screwtape Letters details the correspondence of a demon named Screwtape with a younger, apprentice demon named Wormwood, who is attempting to lead a man away from the path of righteousness. The temptations Wormwood employs 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 movement toward dissipation and licentiousness, but also toward intellectual arrogance and an obsession with the material world. Screwtape counsels 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, since it does move human beings to consider matters of higher-order philosophy. What is evil is the absence of seeking something higher than purely earthly life: "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 holds a rather broad view of belief in Christ, implying that both higher-order science and religious philosophy seek the same transcendent aim. However, later in the book he takes 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 also tries to interest the man in a prostitute, and is disappointed when the man instead falls in love with a Christian woman. Yet 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 inherently bad, but because a union with a prostitute has no spiritual component, unlike the true meeting of minds between 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 destroyed by the end of the book, while the "patient," though he dies, is elevated to heaven. As Lewis writes, materialists believe that "'real' means the bare physical facts, separated from the other elements in the experience they actually had," but true Christians understand that apprehending reality can be accomplished only with the heart (Lewis 168).
The Great Divorce: Hell, Heaven, and the Materialist Mindset
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 — a reality with no transcendent significance, no heaven — is the place to which all human beings who reject belief are ultimately confined. As in The Screwtape Letters, a failure of religious intensity is shown as being linked to a failure of imagination. When confronted by heaven, the souls of human beings are awestruck not at the surreal nature of heaven, but at 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 in which salvation does not come through God's infinite grace, but through a kind of bargaining. One damned man demands justice, claiming that because murderers are saved, he too should be saved. Another figure, known as the Episcopal Ghost, is a skeptic who denies heaven and hell despite their evident materiality in the book. He states that Jesus should never have died but should instead have saved himself and allowed his philosophy to mature — once again reflecting a narrow conception of life as something that can be redeemed by the mind alone, not by faith. He claims that his denial of the Resurrection is an "honest belief" borne of his God-given critical faculties (Lewis 36). It is precisely this type of mindset that "the patient" resists when he becomes a Christian.
Conclusion: Evil as Absence Across Three Works
In The Problem of Pain, Lewis states directly what his allegories in his other works suggest — if there is evil, it is not a positive force in the world. Rather, evil is a hollow, an absence in which we turn from our God-given potential to find something higher than the here and now. The arrogant belief that intellectualism alone can set us free is similar to the sin that first took place in Eden, ripping humanity away from its rightful place near God and rewarding it instead with only cold learning that provides no true insight into reality at all.
Works Cited
Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. Harper One, 2001.
Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. Harper One, 2001.
Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. Harper One, 2001.
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