Why C.S. Lewis Wrote The Screwtape Letters as Fiction

C.S. Lewis was a master of blending theological depth into stories. While he wrote nonfiction—apologetics, essays, and sermons—his enduring influence lies in his fiction. Among his most powerful works is The Screwtape Letters, a fictional series of letters from a senior demon to his novice nephew, offering advice on how best to tempt a soul to Hell. Why would Lewis choose the satire and inverted perspective of fictional letters rather than a straightforward theological to address the topic of spiritual warfare?

Lewis’ understood that fiction has the unique power to communicate truth in a way that bypasses the reader’s defenses. In Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said, Lewis wrote that, “what they want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.” Overt moral correction generally fails to reach readers. By clothing truth in the garments of story, he could “smuggle” theological insights into the reader’s mind “past watchful dragons”—those intellectual and emotional barriers that resist instruction.

But this isn’t actually quite right. Because Lewis himself explains that a story can’t actually be simply a thief leaving morals instead of taking them. Storytelling doesn’t work that way. In a letter, he wrote that, “The first business of a story is to be a good story.” He is running into the problem he is talking about in the essay in which he is talking about it. His small story of a thief stealing past watchful dragons is itself stealing past the watchful dragons of those that believe story is only good if it delivers lessons. In order to tell a story effectively you have to leave morality tales to the nursemaids.

A story must exist to tell what really happens. What really happens with these characters in this situation. What really happens when these characters face the pressures of this story? That is why The Screwtape Letters works.

Writing from the perspective of a demon allows Lewis to highlight human sin, folly, and spiritual apathy indirectly so that it is neither overbearing nor accusatory. Through Screwtape’s voice, Lewis unmasks the logic of temptation, revealing its subtlety, its appeal, and ultimately its danger. By narrative inversion Lewis requires us to stay alert, awake, and engaged. The reader must continually reverse Screwtape’s perspective to uncover the truly good, noble, and divine perspective. In that imaginative labor we find our own perspective righted. Irony does what seriousness can.t: it reveals by reversal. What might have felt like a lecture becomes a self-directed diagnosis.

In addition to engaging the reader’s reason, Lewis believed fiction uniquely engages the imagination—what he called “the organ of meaning.” In his essay Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare, he explains, “Reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.” Fiction provides a stage upon which abstract theological ideas—temptation, grace, the will, divine providence—can be dramatized and embodied. The Screwtape Letters does not just tell us what temptation is; it shows us how it feels. It immerses the reader in the battlefield of the soul. Because the form is fictional and personal, the lessons stick. Truths discovered (rather than declared) are more likely to be owned.

Finally, Lewis’s choice of fiction allows for a spiritual realism lost in systematic theology. Demonic bureaucracy reveals the mechanisms of modern life—media, education, politics, leisure—that distract and decay when de-divinized. The demonic thrives, not in overt evil, but in comfort, complacency, and respectable worldliness. Lewis’s fictional mode makes the spiritual realm vivid and urgent. As Screwtape reminds us, “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts”

The Screwtape Letters is fiction, not to obscure truth, but to reveal both the truth and the reader simultaneously. Imagination, irony, and inverted narration, invite readers into the spiritual reality. Fiction, for Lewis, was not an escape from theology but a doorway for the the whole person to enter in. Screwtape is, in the end, both a brilliant work of literature and one of the most enduring explorations of temptation, spiritual warfare, and the patient grace of God penned in the modern era.