Magnificent Malevolence ~ Review

Magnificent Malevolence
By Derek Wilson

Memoirs of a Career in Hell in the tradition of The Screwtape Letters

Magnificent Malevolence follows the devilish career of Crumblewit a prominent devil in the Sons of Darkness (SOD) from 1942 until the present day.  Unlike The Screwtape Letters this is not the collection of letters written by a mentoring devil to a subordinate but rather the thoughts of a single devil concerning his feelings and views on thwarting the unmentionable enemy - God.

Chapters are broken into periods of time and strategies of attack.  In everything subterfuge is key - to distract the target and the enemy's agent from the true agenda.  Division within and without the body of believers while working towards unity is a favorite tactic.  Focusing rather on the differences that were keeping the various Christian factions apart kept the people from focusing on sharing the Enemy's message.

Convince the people that by suppressing (by personal choice) desires is actually a harmful repression.  Convince them that they need to act on their feelings or suffer the consequences for years to come (after all what's wrong with do this one little thing when it will gratify that need).

Crumblewit's memoirs were found after his disappearance which some feel was orchestrated by his rivals within the SOD.  With these notes one can advance into the lower levels of the Lower Command.

Having read The Screwtape Letters I can easily say that this book is a worthy companion to C.S. Lewis's work.  This is an enlightening look at our modern world and what can be used to keep us busy and unable to do the work God has given us by listening to another voice instead - the voice of the Deceiver.

I was provided with a copy of this book by Kregel Publications in exchange for my honest review.

Magnificent Malevolence: Memoirs of a Career in Hell, by Derek Wilson

In the tradition of C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters

C. S. Lewis, who introduced Screwtape, a senior devil, to the world in 1942, knew that evil is powerful and personal. He understood that its main thrust was against God and the people of God. There can be no doubt that Lewis would agree that Screwtape and his diabolical colleagues have not ceased their operations in the last seventy years. As the human decades have passed, the same war has been fought, with new weapons and different battle tactics.

How fortunate, then, that the following account, rescued from the archives of the Low Command's Ministry of Misinformation, has fallen into our hands. This remarkable manuscript outlines the career of the prominent devil, Crumblewit SOD (Order of the Sons of Darkness, 1st Class). It was in a much mutilated state and has only, with difficulty, been cut and pasted together to make a reasonably coherent narrative of the activities of a post-Screwtape generation of devils. It is not, of course, "true" in the sense of being an objective appraisal of the struggles between good and evil which dominated human affairs in the period from 1950 to 2000. The account is distorted by Crumblewit's truly diabolical conceit and also his ability for self-delusion. However, it does shed fresh light on the ups and down experienced by the church throughout this period.

 

Crumblewit's energies were entirely deployed in the religious arena. He was employed exclusively in undermining the attempts of Christians to bring to bear upon world events the prerogatives of love, peace, and justice and to carry out the mission entrusted to them by Jesus . . .