Summary Of Lewis The Pilgrim's Regress

Clive Staples Lewis is a writer who has been psychoanalyzed to death. More specifically, his works have been drained of all their literary lifeblood by critical vampires – modern and classical alike – down to epithelial husk and osseous substructure, where rigid philosophy replaces, or has not suffered the same fate as, style. There is one work, though, which seems to have escaped the scourge of Christian love-smothering or non-Christian indictment of Lewis as a theological anachronism: The Pilgrim’s Regress. The reason it remains philosophically untouched is, oddly, perhaps its blatancy of purpose; subtitled “An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism,” it needs no foreword with that rather forward mission statement.
As with all allegories, The Pilgrim’s Regress has characters whose every word, movement, association, is meant to colnvey an idea about a certain idea. As the protagonist makes his or her way through the gauntlet of ideas, rejecting or accepting them, there is a certain path they take, a certain order and a certain reason to the timing and the reason for any meeting or departure. In life, on the other hand, there is no pre-set course laid out for a mind to follow. So, as much as Lewis tries to make a series of events and people for John to ‘stumble upon,’ ‘revelations’ for him to come to, they are predestined by the ending. The hand of God, or the writer, is present in the path of the allegory because of the role of guiding the character. Nowhere does this phenomenon do more to tell about an author’s psyche than in The Pilgrim’s Regress. In the afterword, Lewis admits to “obscurities” of the text, or philosophical knowledge the reader does not have, as well as the uniqueness of the structure. To some, the path did not flow. He writes: “on the intellectual side my own progress had been from ‘popular realism’ to Philosophical Idealism…to Pantheism to Theism…to Christianity…I now know that this is a road very rarely trodden.” John takes this path, though, and as the reader meets charcters like “Mr. Enlightenment,” “Vertue,” the “Spirit of the Age,” “Mr. Sensible,” the “Pale Men,” “Mr. Wisdom,” “History,” and “Mother Kirk,” the reader meets in order those philosophies which C.S. Lewis met. There is very little analysis that need be done here, except for analysis of each individual character and theway in which Lewis, or John, or both treat that character. Merely recognize that, by virtue of Lewis’ own words, the pathway of the book was the pathway of his