Every now and then it gets punctured, and the scalding lava of their hatred spurts out. Over all this their good manners, their expressions of grave respect, their “tributes” to one another’s invaluable services form a thin crust. Everyone wishes everyone else’s discrediting, demotion, and ruin everyone is an expert in the confidential report, the pretended alliance, the stab in the back. For of course “Dog eat dog” is the principle of the whole organization. Rudeness to one’s superiors would obviously be suicidal rudeness to one’s equals might put them on their guard before you were ready to spring your mine. On the surface, manners are normally suave. It enabled me, by earthly parallels, to picture an official society held together entirely by fear and greed. Here again my symbol seemed to me useful. A being which can still love is not yet a devil. Milton has told us that “devil with devil damned Firm concord holds.” But how? Certainly not by friendship. 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.

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. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. 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. I like bats much better than bureaucrats. For the rest, my own choice of symbols depended, I suppose, on temperament and on the age.

We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment. After addressing the most common question - whether he really believed in the Devil - Lewis observed that “(i)t should be (but it is not) unnecessary to add that a belief in angels, whether good or evil, does not mean a belief in either as they are represented in art and literature.” 1 Lewis offered a brief discussion of some of the ways angels and devils have been symbolized over the centuries and then explained his own choices for Screwtape: First published in 1942, Lewis wrote a new preface for the 1961 paperback edition in which he addressed some of the questions which had been raised by readers. Lewis’s best-known books is the fictional The Screwtape Letters, a series of letters, from a senior devil to his nephew on how to tempt an ordinary human.

Cs lewis letters from the devil