My desire for both Crowley and Uncle Screwtape to exist in the same literary universe wars greatly with how weird I’d feel about Crowley eating souls.

latimes.com

John Cleese Is Devilishly Good as 'Screwtape'

John Cleese is a man of improbable versatility, one in an apparently endless line of latter-day university wits who come down from Cambridge and Oxford with their reputations already formed and careers awaiting them.

CHARLES CHAMPLIN

The letters are from Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to Satan (referred to, however, simply as Our Father Below). They are addressed to Screwtape’s young nephew, Wormwood, a minor tempter who is trying to lure an otherwise unidentified man from the Enemy (God, that would be, in Lewis’ wonderfully inverted scheme) to Our Side.

What Cleese does is not a reading but a dramatic monologue of infinite and startling variety. He chides, he cajoles, he sneers; he is exasperated, then annoyed, then furious, then so apoplectic with rage that he turns briefly into a large white worm, as a kind of sotto voce footnote explains.

Calm restored, Screwtape is a whispery voice of patience, careful explanation, sweet reason. It can’t last, of course, because Wormwood (who presumably works on the client’s subconscious) is letting his man slip away into the comforting arms of Christianity. This, despite Wormwood’s subliminal appeals to both pride and despair, indifference, worldly pleasures and the fiery satisfactions of the flesh.

The John Cleese version apparently can only be purchased on cassette. I am not Crowley and cannot make cassette players appear, so for now, I’ll settle for this.

[parabola-magazine]

“You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

—C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942). Wisdom from our spring issue on the subject of sin.

Photography Credit: Pierre Yves Petit, 1886-1969, Gargoyle atop Notre Dame.