Devils

The Devils are the tempters behind the letters that narrate the patient’s spiritual struggle, and their defining principle is possession: they seek to absorb other wills, while the Enemy’s opposing purpose is to unite distinct beings without erasing them. Their account of this conflict is deliberately untrustworthy. The preface cautions that the Devil lies and that Screwtape’s judgments should not be taken as true simply because they are presented with confidence; the letters’ most revealing evidence often comes from the gap between what the Devils profess and what their own defeats disclose.

Identity and Order

The Devils are not simply objects of superstition in the book’s account. The preface warns against both disbelief in their existence and an excessive, unhealthy fascination with them, explaining that Devils welcome either error. The script of their correspondence, the preface adds, could be acquired by someone who knew the knack, but it is withheld from people who might misuse it. This framing presents infernal knowledge as something that can tempt its human audience as well as illuminate the tempters’ methods.

Their ranks and discipline emerge through Screwtape’s position as Wormwood’s uncle and superior. He expects a junior tempter to accept correction, pay for mistakes, and obey policy set by the High Command. In one letter he rebukes Wormwood for shifting responsibility after a failed attempt to influence the patient’s prayers; elsewhere he threatens consequences for incompetence. The affectionate family language of the correspondence therefore sits beside a hierarchy in which a subordinate is judged by results, not good intentions.

The Devils’ policy is strategic rather than consistent in any simple sense. For the present phase of the struggle, the High Command orders concealment: open belief in Devils can produce fear, but it can also prevent humans from becoming materialists and sceptics. Screwtape imagines a future in which people deny spirits while worshipping vaguely defined forces, but the immediate instruction is to keep the patient unaware of his tempters. Their campaign depends on adapting its methods to the beliefs and vulnerabilities of the period.

Methods of Temptation

The Devils seek influence less by supplying a persuasive argument than by redirecting thought and action. Screwtape tells Wormwood that contemporary people sort doctrines by labels such as practical or outworn rather than by whether they are true, so jargon and social prestige may serve temptation better than reasoning. The aim is not necessarily to convince the patient that materialism is true, but to make it seem strong, courageous, or modern. The method exploits a gap between intellectual judgment and a willingness to change one’s conduct.

Prayer is another point of attack. Screwtape advises Wormwood to turn a beginner away from deliberate, regular prayer toward a vaguely devotional mood that demands little concentration of will or intelligence. If that fails, the tempter should redirect attention from the Enemy to the patient’s own feelings, so that a request for charity or courage becomes an effort to manufacture the sensation of being charitable or brave. The patient may then judge prayer by whether it produces the desired emotional result, overlooking how much such feelings depend on bodily condition and tiredness.

Screwtape also describes the Devils’ work as keeping things out of the mind, not simply putting ideas into it. A human being’s imagined object of prayer can combine religious images, bodily sensations, and personal reverence; the tempter’s goal is to keep attention fixed on that constructed image instead of the real, external presence the patient cannot fully comprehend. This account is the Devil’s own tactical instruction, not an impartial description of prayer, but it shows how closely infernal strategy depends on confusion between the object imagined and the reality toward which a person intends to reach.

The Devils exploit emotional states and social affiliations as well as private thought. Screwtape urges Wormwood to encourage political or religious extremes when the age is prone to faction, because a small, disliked group can foster inward admiration and outward pride and hatred. A conscientious objector, for example, might be drawn into an organised and unpopular society; whether this helps Hell depends on the patient’s motives and character. Likewise, during wartime fear and fatigue can be channelled into hatred, particularly by encouraging a person to regard the enemy as someone else’s enemy and so to evade the demand to forgive.

What the Devils Want

Screwtape states the infernal principle starkly: one self is not another, one being’s gain is another’s loss, and to exist is to compete. In this scheme, possession is the measure of success. A stronger will absorbs a weaker one, just as an animal consumes food; the Devils seek to increase their own sphere of selfhood at the expense of the person they tempt. The patient is therefore not primarily a person to be understood but a prospective resource.

Screwtape contrasts this with the Enemy’s purpose. The Enemy, he says, wants beings who remain distinct while becoming united through freely conformed wills; the Devils want to draw all beings into their own existence. The antithesis is expressed through two opposed images: Devils want cattle that become food, while the Enemy wants servants who become sons. The Enemy’s giving, in Screwtape’s unwilling formulation, arises from fullness; Hell’s appetite arises from emptiness. The theological argument is conveyed through an adversary who regards love as impossible, but who repeatedly supplies evidence for the contrast his doctrine cannot explain.

That opposition also clarifies why the Devils cannot simply make a person virtuous or compel a spiritual outcome. Screwtape admits that Hell’s research has not discovered how to produce virtue. It can only use qualities it cannot provide, as it might turn courage or self-denial toward wicked ends. The limitation is strategically costly: even a person Hell has made vulnerable retains qualities Screwtape attributes to the Enemy, leaving a foothold for resistance.

Limits and Contradictions

The Devils’ strongest philosophical claim is also their blind spot. Screwtape insists that separate selves cannot genuinely will one another’s good, yet confesses that the Enemy appears to love humans and desire their freedom and continued existence. He tries to recast that love as a disguise for an unknown motive, because admitting it would unsettle the infernal account of existence as competition. The question of what the Enemy gains remains unsolved, and Screwtape treats this failure of understanding as a problem of intelligence rather than evidence against his premises.

His letters disclose further cracks. He fears that Wormwood might show his correspondence to others, anxiously qualifies earlier remarks about his own superiors, and insists that apparently threatening statements were not serious. His posture of absolute confidence thus coexists with suspicion and self-protection. The preface’s warning about wishful thinking in Hell gives these evasions particular weight: Screwtape may be perceptive about tactics while remaining unreliable about the moral reality those tactics oppose.

The most consequential limit is the Devils’ inability to master the patient’s spiritual life. Screwtape’s account of spiritual dryness explains that changes in bodily and emotional vitality are natural human fluctuations, not necessarily the work of a tempter. More damaging still, he recognises that the Enemy may use such low periods to cultivate obedience: a person who keeps intending to do what is right after the feeling of support has withdrawn becomes, in Screwtape’s terms, more dangerous to Hell than someone carried by an easy emotional high. The tempter can exploit a trough, but he cannot guarantee what it will mean.

Defeat and Narrative Significance

The patient’s repentance and renewal are a major defeat for Wormwood, whom Screwtape accuses of letting his charge slip away. Later, after the patient has behaved as duty required during the first air raid despite being frightened, Screwtape’s report reduces the tempter’s gains to irritability, smoking, and a forgotten prayer. The contrast matters: the patient’s fear does not amount to cowardice in action, and Hell’s accounting of isolated failures cannot cancel the larger fact of his conduct.

The final loss exposes the Devils’ doctrine in its most literal form. Screwtape describes the patient as having been taken from Wormwood and turns at once to the possibility of consuming his nephew instead. The affection he had expressed is revealed as appetite shaped by superior power: he says that his desire for Wormwood resembles Wormwood’s desire for him, except that Screwtape is stronger. Infernal fellowship therefore reproduces the same competitive relation that the Devils claim governs all existence.

At the patient’s death, Screwtape imagines him recognising the spiritual beings who had accompanied moments he once thought solitary, and seeing the Enemy in a form the Devil cannot bear. What is suffocating to Screwtape is, for the patient, clarity; the patient’s awareness of his sins does not keep him from the presence he encounters. The Devils are left outside, with the soul they sought to possess beyond their reach. Their defeat gives the book’s central contrast its narrative proof: their language of food and ownership cannot account for a love that preserves distinct persons, while their own practice repeatedly reduces every relationship to appetite and power.