And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends.

I was in high school when I first read C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. It had been recommended by a Sunday School teacher. The story of two devils consulting on a human’s damnation set off something like a series of small explosions in my brain. I’d never run across Christian thought anything like this before (pleasures weren’t necessarily sinful? Who knew?), and it dispensed a guilty thrill of possible heresy. It was for me the beginning of a lifelong grappling match with both Lewis himself and with orthodox Christian theology.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve read it in my life. The depressing part of revisiting it again is observing how little progress I’ve made in resisting my own personal Wormwood. To make it more uncomfortable, I understand the nature of sin and temptation better now than I did when I was in high school. The knives, therefore, are sharper.

I was also impressed, in reading the sequel essay, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” to note how prescient it is. Writing in the 1950s, Lewis observed trends in society and in education that have since metastasized in a way no one could have conceived of at the time.

The Screwtape Letters is a clever, masterfully written, insightful book about temptation that is actually extremely uncomfortable for anyone with any moral insight. And it gets more uncomfortable as you get older.

So I recommend it.