With tragic naïveté, people once said that World War I—“The Great War,” as it was then called—would end all wars. But as long as mankind has both weapons and disagreements, as long as ambition, cruelty, greed, and righteous anger endure, wars will continue to be fought.
Many great writers have reflected on the tragic mystery of war, which is intertwined with the human experience and story. One of these was C.S. Lewis, who lived through two world wars. In his writing, he sought to remind his readers of the gleam of hope on the fringes of war’s dark shadow.
Cheshire Regiment occupied this German trench at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, years into the fighting of WWI. Lewis’s and Tolkien’s experiences with trench warfare profoundly influenced the rest of their lives. (Public Domain)A Metaphor in Novel Form
His short epistolary novel “The Screwtape Letters” contains an instance of this device. The novel purports to be a collection of letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, to an apprentice devil, Wormwood, about Wormwood’s efforts to ruin the human soul he was assigned to tempt. This ingenious literary device allowed Lewis to explore human psychology and spirituality from a unique point of view, inserting dark humor alongside preternaturally penetrating insights. The novel acts like a photo-negative of Lewis’s actual spiritual views. Everything Screwtape loves, Lewis deplores, and what Screwtape hates or discourages, Lewis admires and advises.
In Chapter V, readers learn that a war has broken out. The book was written in 1941, and this is almost certainly a reference to World War II. Lewis takes the opportunity to indirectly offer words of encouragement about wartime to his readers—by means of Screwtape’s words of discouragement to Wormwood. Lewis’s commentary on the psychological and spiritual effects of war offer wisdom that can be applied to any time of military strife.
In Screwtape’s letter on the occasion of the outbreak of war, he chides the inexperienced Wormwood for getting too excited. He explains:
“It is a little bit disappointing to expect a detailed report on your work and to receive instead such a vague rhapsody as your last letter. You say you are ‘delirious with joy’ because the European humans have started another of their wars. I see very well what has happened to you. You are not delirious; you are only drunk.”
Screwtape goes on to explain that Wormwood got carried away on the tides of his human charge’s fear and bewilderment—because human despair is like the finest liquor to a demon.
“For the first time in your career you have tasted that wine which is the reward of all our labours—the anguish and bewilderment of a human soul—and it has gone to your head,” Screwtape admonishes. Then he mocks Wormwood as he envisions the scene when Wormwood’s human learned about the war:
“Did the patient respond to some of your terror-pictures of the future? Did you work in some good self-pitying glances at the happy past?—some fine thrills in the pit of his stomach, were there? You played your violin prettily, did you?”
Children wait outside the wreckage of what was once their home, in East London, 1940. (Sue Wallace/CC BY-SA 2.0)Human Endurance Amid Disaster
Why does Screwtape chastise Wormwood for his enthusiasm over the war? Because, as the more experienced demon knows, war isn’t necessarily the undoing of humanity that Wormwood thinks it is. “I must warn you not to hope too much from a war,” Screwtape cautions. Of course, what Lewis is really saying to his human readers is, “Do not despair over the prospect of war. Do not fear it too much.”
Screwtape goes on to elaborate why war isn’t always to the benefit of the infernal powers:
“We may hope for a good deal of cruelty and unchastity. But, if we are not careful, we shall see thousands turning in this tribulation to the Enemy, while tens of thousands who do not go so far as that will nevertheless have their attention diverted from themselves to values and causes which they believe to be higher than the self.”
Here, Lewis—through the sneering voice of Screwtape—lights upon a great and important truth: War brings out the worst in humanity, but it also brings out the best. It draws people out of themselves, wakes them from the slumber of selfish comforts, and turns their attention to the most important subjects: life, death, courage, sacrifice, patriotism, good and evil, and what is worth dying for. As Screwtape laments, “how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of our death which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contended worldliness, is rendered useless.”
Times of hardship—whether war or any other disaster—force us to reckon with hard truths, but we are often the better for it. As Socrates says, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Nothing forces us to examine our lives and what it means to both live and die well as war does. Under the pressure of dire circumstances, the truth of who we are emerges. It is then that the possibility of genuine courage and heroism arises.
When the world darkens, what lights there are burn brighter. When unknown futures threaten, we realize what really matters, and how dear are the people and values that we hold close, the things we are willing to fight for. That realization is, in itself, a gift.
A 1940s-era colorized photo of Tolkien. (TuckerFTW/CC BY-SA 4.0)One of Lewis’s close friends understood this well. J.R.R. Tolkien, another survivor of war and combat, created a beautiful reflection on hard times. He wrote in “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
There is little I can add to these words that ring so purely with all the anguish and hope of embattled humanity. Lewis and Tolkien, no strangers to war, knew how to find light and hope in even the darkest days.
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