The Screwtape Letters, originally published in The Guardian in 1941, is an epistolary novel in the form of Letters from the demon Screwtape to his nephew, the apprentice demon Wormwood. Each Letter is a beautifully crafted description of how the forces of evil seek to subvert good men and turn them away from Christianity. Take the following example:

My dear Wormwood, So you “have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away,” have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians–half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

This means that while their spirits can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation–the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

If you had watched your patient carefully, you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life–his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth, periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite…. in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.

The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense.

But the obedience the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing…. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself–creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His.

We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in…. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo….

Now obviously I like that because it jibes with my view of the Human Dilemma. Even better is this, from Lewis’s Introduction:

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

This metaphor, of course, proved to be more prescient than even Lewis could have forseen. For as the Letters were being published, bureaucrats in Berlin and Moscow were exterminating humans by the millions and the Depression and the War would give rise to increasing huge and intrusive Welfare State bureaucracies, bent on destroying Religion, Family, Community, any institution which could rival the power of the State. All the while, and ever so gradually, citizens were willingly ceding more and more of their autonomy (their hard won Free Will), as we slid into the modern Liberal godless Hell.

To read Lewis now is to realize that things could have been different; that a few voices, crying in the wilderness, warned of the authoritarian netherworld that Western man exiled himself to for much of this Century as he abandoned God and Christianity in favor of the State and statism. We are now in the midst of a twilight struggle that will decide whether we retain sufficient confidence in our ultimate godliness to reclaim our freedom from the grasp of the State, or whether Western man’s crisis of confidence will lead us back to the Garden of Eden, with our needs taken care of and our souls extinguished.

There is no better way to gird yourself for the battle than to read this book.