He warned us: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. Lewis did not intend The Screwtape Letters to replace Scripture, but to reinforce and reveal the teaching of Scriptures on the reality of temptation. Lewis skillfully used his fictional letters to take Christians behind enemy lines and glimpse the devil’s tactics and strategies. Eventually, all 31 letters were published in February 1942. The Screwtape Letters first appeared in May 1941 as a serial publication in The Guardian, a weekly Anglican newspaper. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters features a series of fictional letters written from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood. “The idea,” Lewis told his brother, Warren, “would be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view.” Ĭ.S. He had an inkling of an idea for a book eventually titled The Screwtape Letters.

Lewis began cracking a very different kind of enemy code: temptation from the tempter’s perspective. In July 1940, with war raging in the skies above Great Britain, C.S. Armed with this vital information and their own cipher device, named Ultra, the British began the war with the ability to decipher German military movements, tactics and strategy. In July 1939, with war on the horizon, the Polish Cipher Bureau gave British Military Intelligence years worth of cryptanalysis and deciphering techniques used to crack the legendary German Enigma cipher machine.

Lewis the screwtape letters