NORFOLK,VA. (Catholic Online) - I was  a teenager when I first read "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis. Lost in the fog of "hippiedom" and searching for deeper meaning in my life, I decided to hitchhike across the country in an ongoing quest for truth. 

The summer before I embarked on that life changing pilgrimage, I moved into a rental house on Newburyport, Plum Island, Massachusetts. The house was owned by a friend's father who was a College Professor. When he decided to take a summer sabbatical in Europe, he allowed his son to rent the home for the summer and choose two friends to occupy it with him. I was one of those friends.

We drew straws to determine who got which of the three bedrooms. I ended up with the College professor's room, complete with a library filled with books by C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and George McDonald. Decades later, I look back and believe that those straws were not accidentally arranged. That became my summer of C.S. Lewis. It also laid the groundwork for my later return home to the faith and the Church of my childhood.

First, I read his novel, "Till We Have Faces". Then I read, "The Chronicles of Narnia" followed by the "science fiction" trilogy - "Out of the Silent Planet", "Peralandra" and "That Hideous Strength". Next, I read his classic apologetic books, "Mere Christianity" and "The Great Divorce". Finally, I read "The Screwtape Letters". I found that last little book of letters between a demon/instructor and his nephew/student both amusing and challenging. Its depiction of evil as personal, strategic and adversarial had been my own experience, even in my youth.

The book was first published in 1942. I remember being drawn to it because it was dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien, whose works of fantasy had already captured my fertile imagination. I was intrigued by Lewis' insight in the Preface, "There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight".

Four decades later, I am once again captured by the brilliance of this series of letters between two demons. Only the "me" reading the book is closing in on 60 years old. The letters have been revealed as a masterful work on the moral life. As a PhD student in Moral theology currently writing my dissertation, I now see this treasure with older eyes, deeply set in the wrinkles earned by the vicissitudes of life. I have also acquired reading lenses which help me see more clearly in so many ways. Age is the best tutor. 

The book peels back the layers of life, revealing the reality of the unseen or spiritual world. It exposes a morally upside down universe where the Evil One, the "Father Below",  and his minions, strategically seek out the fissures in our fractured freedom in order to lead us into the slavery of Hell. That Hell, which is separation from the God who is Love, is aptly called in the book, the "kingdom of noise". It is devoid of all that is beautiful and good and true.

The road to separation from Love follows along the path of our wrongful exercise of human freedom. The correspondence between these two demons exposes both the meaning and the means of the Moral life. Our choices not only change the world around us, they change us. We become what we choose. Because our capacity to choose the good has been fractured by sin, our choices have become a field of battle.

On that field, temptations raise their weapons against us, seeking out our most vulnerable areas. It is there where demons find their open door, piggybacking on our pride and self love in its myriad of disguises, riding high on our disordered appetites. It is also there where lies lure us into the darkness where the "father below" works his evil and corrupting ways. 

The letters between Screwtape, the older demon, contain allegedly "affectionate" instructions to his nephew/student "Wormwood". They are intended, or so it seems, to assist the student in tempting an unnamed man, a sort of "everyperson", who is  called the "patient", away from the path of faith, love and virtue. However, there is no true affection in these letters, in spite of their ending salutations. That is because there is no love in Hell.

The letters reveal the nature of all counterfeit "affection" as the relationship between student and teacher devolves into denigration, manipulation and abuse. The affection of Screwtape is in reality the cover for a relationship of use with the ultimate aim of consuming Wormwood in its hungry malice.  

The book can be read on many levels, unfolding its teaching like layers of an onion. Forty years after I first read it in Newburyport, Massachusetts, it is ...