The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Annotated Version

THE

Pilgrim's regress

An Allegorical Apology for Christianity Reason and Romanticism

by C.S. Lewis

As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country. - Proverbs

An Annotated Version by Paulo Ribeiro and Mike Vanden Bosch

THE CHARACTERS OF THE ALLEGORY AND WHAT THEY STAND FOR. (in the order of their first appearance)

John: any person whose spiritual development parallels that of CSL

John's parents, family, retainers, etc...: those close to that person

The Steward: any ordinary, undistinguished Anglican vicar

The Voice from the star: the first yearning for Heaven

the brown girls: explicit temptations to sexual acts outside of marriage

The Voice from the Coach: the yearning for Heaven again

Mr. Enlightenment: Nineteenth century Rationalism

Vertue: the conscience, or moral imperative, of John

Media Halfways: esthetic experience

Mr. Halfways: Romantic poetry

Gus Halfways: the "modern" literary movement

the Clevers: ephemeral artistic fads of the 1920's

Victoriana: silliness of the 1920's

man in crocodile-skin codpiece: pornography masquerading as literature

Glugly: gibberish masquerading as literature

Mr. Mammon: economic realities on which the Clevers are parasitical

Sigismund Enlightenment: Freudianism

the Giant: intellectual climate of the day

the Jailor: the cliches of the intellectual climate

Reason: rational thought and argument

Mother Kirk: traditional Christianity, Catholic and Protestant

Mr. Sensible: cultured worldliness

Drudge: poverty in servitude

Neo-Angular: rarefied intellectual Catholicism debunking Romanticism

Neo-Classical: self-conscious classicism debunking Romanticism

Mr. Humanist: cultured worldliness behind a veil of illusion

Savage: heroic nihilism

Mr. Broad: liberal, secularized Christianity

Wisdom: philosophy, specifically Absolute Idealism

Wisdom's children: various philosophical halfway houses and compromises

The Man: Christ

History: the development of human thought

Contemplation: itself

The Appalling Face: the realization of death

The Voice in the Caverns: Divine revelation

Slikisteinsauga: a guardian angel

Superbia: pride

Luxuria: lust

young man with Luxuria: a man slave to lust

Northern Dragon: tension, hardness, possessiveness, coldness, anemia, rigorism, cruelty

Southern Dragon: uncontrolled passion, a craving for intoxication of any kind

LEWIS'S OWN RUNNING HEADLINES PRINTED CONSECUTIVELY

(Arranged and reprinted in this form by kind permission of the American publisher, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan)

BOOK ONE. Knowledge of broken law precedes all other religious experience. John receives his first religious experience. John receives his first religious instruction. Did the instructors really mean it? He is more serious than they: and discovers the other Law in his members. He awakes to Sweet Desire, and almost at once mixes his own fantasies with it. He hears of Death and what his elders pretend to believe about it. An uncomfortable funeral, lacking both pagan fortitude and Christian hope. Everyone except John cheers up on the way home. Greed to recover Desire hides the real offer of its return. He tries to force himself to feel it, but finds (and accepts) Lust instead. The deception does not last, but leaves a habit of sin behind it. Sin and the Law torment him each aggravating the other. Sweet Desire returns, and he resolves to make it the object of his life.

BOOK TWO. He begins to think for himself, and meets Nineteenth century Rationalism, which can explain any religion by any number of methods: "evolution" and "comparative religion", and all the guess-work which masquerades as "Science". He abandons his religion with profound relief, and forthwith has his first explicitly moral experience. The Moral Imperative does no fully understand itself. John decides that Aesthetic Experience is the thing to pursue. "Romantic" poetry professes to give what hitherto he has only desired. For a moment it seems to have kept its promise. The rapture does not last, but dwindles into technical appreciation, and sentiment, and would finally turn into Lust, but that in the nick of time the "modern" literary movement offers to debunk it. The poetry of the Machine Age is so very pure.

BOOK THREE. The poetry of the Silly Twenties, the "courage" and mutual loyalty of Artists, the swamp-literature of the Dirty Twenties--it was a low-brow blunder to mention the most obvious thing about it. The gibberish-literature of the Lunatic Twenties. He abandons the "Movement", though a little damaged by it. What did the Revolutionary Intellectuals live on? He is hindered from pursuing his quest by the intellectual climate of the Age, especially Freudianism. All is only Wish-Fulfillment: a doctrine which leads to the giant's prison. He sees all humanity as bundles of complexes, until at last his common sense revolts. The spell begins to break; once rational argument is allowed a hearing the giant is lost.

BOOK FOUR. But those who have been Freudianised too long are incurable. A question-begging argument exposed: the sciences bring to "the facts" the philosophy they claim to derive from them. The Reason's duty: not (even for life's sake) to decide without evidence. Why all the accounts of the Unconscious are misleading, though they also have their use. If Religion is a Wish-Fulfillment dream, whose wishes does it fulfill? Certainly not John's! He decides to stop reasoning at this point.

BOOK FIVE. He decides to live virtuously but at once meets an obstacle. Conscience tells him he can and must pass it by his own efforts; traditional Christianity says he cannot. The sin of Adam: because of it all his posterity find a chasm across their road. Fear is too suspicious, and the natural conscience too proud, to accept help. Rejecting Christianity, John turns to cultured worldliness, its pretentiousness and cold frivolity. Far from attacking the spiritual life, the cultured World patronises it: "the philosophy of all sensible men". Its hatred of systematic reasoning, its ignorant and dilettante scepticism, its unacknowledged dependences: "the religion of all sensible men". These "sensible" men are parasitic, their culture is precarious. Take away its power of commanding labor, and the whole thing collapses.

BOOK SIX. Accompanied by poverty and virtue John travels into sterner regions of the mind. Counter-romanticism makes strange bedfellows. Modern thought begets Freudianism on baser, negativism on finer, souls. These men are interested in everything not for what it is but for what it is not, and talk as if they had "seen through" things they have not even see; and boast of rejecting what was never in fact within their reach. This region has no strength to resist philosophies more inhuman than its own: the revolutionary sub-men, whether of the Left or the Right, who are all alike vassals of cruelty. Heroic nihilism laughs at the less thorough-going forms of tough-mindedness, and they have no answer to it.

BOOK SEVEN. In the presence of these thoughts traditional morality falters. Without Desire it finds no motive; with Desire, no morality. Hence conscience can guide John no longer. "Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, he yields up moral questions in despair". He looks longingly toward less comfortless modes of thought, and meets Broad Church, modernising, "religion". It is friends with the World and goes on no pilgrimage; it is fond of wildflowers. John takes up the study of metaphysics. His imagination re-awakes. Idealist philosophy rejects the literal truth of religion, but also rejects materialism. The chasm is still not crossed. But this philosophy, while denying the hope, yet spares the Desire, to cross it. Whence come logical categories? Whence come moral values? Philosophy says that the existence of God would not answer the question. Philosophy will not explain away John's glimpse of the Transcendent. The desired is real just because it is never an experience. John finds that the real strength in the lives of the philosophers comes from sources better, or worse, than any of their philosophies acknowledge: Marx really a dwarf; Spinosa a Jew; Kant a Puritan. John is taught that the finite self cannot enter the noumenal world. The doctrine of the Absolute, or Mind-as-such, covers more of the facts than any doctrine John has yet encountered.

BOOK EIGHT. But supposing one tries to live by pantheistic philosophy? Does it lead to a complacent Hegelian optimism? Or to oriental pessimism and self-torture? Adjustment between the two views seems impossible. John would turn back: Christ forces him on. As soon as he attempts seriously to live by philosophy, it turn into religion. From pantheism to theism. The transcendental I becomes Thou. John must accept God's grace or die. Having accepted His grace, he must acknowledge His existence. The terror of the Lord. Where now is Sweet Desire? John begins to learn something of the history of human thought. History has seen people like the counter-thought. History has seen people like the counter-Romantics in many ages. There was really a divine element in John's Romanticism, for morality is by no means God's only witness in the sub-Christian world--even pagan mythology contained a Divine call. But the Jews, instead of a mythology, had a Law. Conscience and Sweet Desire must come together to make a whole man. It is dangerous to welcome Sweet Desire, but fatal to reject it, whether it comes as courtly love in the Middle Ages, or nature-worship in the Nineteenth century: every form has its proper corruption, but "debunking" is not the cure. We know that the object of this desire is not subjective--nay, even the desire ceases to be our desire. No matter, for it is God's love, not ours, that moves us and all things.

BOOK NINE. John realises that he is in imminent danger of becoming a Christian. He struggles to withdraw, but reason will not let him. He sees the face of death and learns that dying is the only escape from it. He returns to the Church of Christ, though all the states of mind through which he has ever passed rise up to dissuade him. He comes where philosophy said no man could come. The goal is, and is not, what he had always desired. And the Christian life still to begin.

BOOK TEN. John now first sees the real shape of the world we live in: how we walk on a knife-edge between Heaven and Hell. The "world of all sensible men" becomes invisible. God's mercy on philosophical despair. The Divine justice. Hell as a tourniquet. Human choice. Tough-mindedness revealed as a form of pride: as virtue increases so does the temptation to pride. The vision of God is the fountain of humility. The change from classical to scientific education strengthens our ignorance, though the Machine Age, for good or ill, will do less than is expected of it. Lechery means not simply forbidden pleasure, but loss of the man's unity; its supreme mode of temptation is to make all else insipid. The Northern and Southern diseases of the soul: the Northern tension, hardness, possessiveness, coldness, anemia; John overcomes it--and wins from it some of the needful hardness he lacked. Meanwhile his moral self must meet the Southern evil and take into him its heat, which will make virtue itself henceforth a passion. Death is at hand. Morality still seeks no reward and desires no resurrection. But faith, being humbler, asks more. The Angel sings.

Preface to the Third Edition

C.S. Lewis