Given that Lewis’s rightful claim to fame came from his ability to explain complex ideas in a way understandable by all, The Pilgrim’s Regress is a failure, though a heady one. Some allegorical elements are obvious to the reader, while others are frustratingly obscure. The Pilgrim’s Regress also possesses all the strengths and weaknesses of an allegory. “There is no room for vanity in the claim: I know them to be wrong not by intelligence but by experience, such experience as would not have come my way if my youth had been wiser, more virtuous, and less self-centered than it was.” Lewis believed, in the interwar period, that while all of the various schools of thought hated one another, they set aside their personal dislikes for their general hatred of anything that seemed, however slight, romantic, dismissing romanticism as mere “nostalgia.” “The sole merit I claim for this book is that it is written by one who has proved them all to be wrong,” he explained in 1943. Eliot.” At times, the book is gentle, and, at times, brutal, especially in its descriptions of immorality and its attacks upon ideas and persons Lewis disliked. Upon writing it originally, he claimed to be mocking “Anglo Catholicism, Materialism, Sitwellism, Psychoanalysis, and T.S. Though drastically uneven in its ability to convey Lewis’s successes (and failures), The Pilgrim’s Regress possesses not a dull moment, though, in parts, it is viciously scathing toward opponents of Christianity and those whom Lewis disliked. Its original title was The Pilgrim’s Regress, or Pseudo-Bunyan’s Periplus: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism. “On the intellectual side my own progress had been from ‘popular realism’ to Philosophical Idealism from Idealism to Pantheism from Pantheism to Theism and from Theism to Christianity.” Stunningly, he wrote the entire work in two weeks while staying with Arthur Greeves in August 1932. In it, Lewis fictionally traces his own intellectual and faith journey. Lewis” who would soon become so famous as the world’s foremost Christian apologist. One may find the second version of Lewis’s conversion in his fascinating but somewhat erratic allegory, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), the book that really began Lewis’s career as recognizably “the C.S. The first, the fulfillment of his paganism-and paganism in general. ![]() Critically, too, the three stories overlapped and played off one another. Lewis practiced Christianity, he offered three stories-or variations on a single story, depending on the angle one wishes to take-regarding the reason for his conversion. As Lewis wrote ten years after the book’s first publication, “All good allegory exists not to hide but to reveal: to make the inner world more palpable by giving it an (imagined) concrete embodiment.”ĭuring the thirty-one years that C.S. Lewis fictionally traces his own intellectual and faith journey.
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