I mentioned several things last night about the bearing Jack’s childhood spiritual feelings might have had on The Screwtape Letters and after my drive in to work this morning, one needs amending and another can be taken a step further:
- I was wrong when I remembered Lewis’ comment on where he got his inspiration for Screwtape coming from. I listened to the Prologue of the book today (read by John Cleese) on the way to work and it wasn’t in there. I’ll most a further amendment when I remember where I read that!
- There is a definite parallel between Jack’s experience with willfully forcing a spiritual, mystical experience in his prayers at Cherbourg and Screwtape. In Letter 4*, Screwtape discusses the process, and in Letter 9** he says further that,
You have only got to keep him out of the way of experienced Christians (an easy task now-adays), to direct his attention to the appropriate passages in scripture, and then to set him to work on the desperate design of recovering his old feelings by sheer will-power, and the game is ours.
Apparently, I need to break out my copy of Screwtape too. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to look there for insight on Jack’s personal experience of temptation away from the faith. Some of us are, perhaps, thicker than others!
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*In the Cleese narrated audio version–it’s abridged and I don’t have a copy of the book here at work to check to make sure it is the same in the original.
**This one I found, in detail here: C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (originally 1942; this edition: Harper Collins, 1996) 43, 45-46
Mere Lewis 
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