The Pilgrim's Regress, by C. S. Lewis: Only the Best Bits! Part 1: The Preface

This series was first posted on Data Secret Lox-I’ll be posting one entry per week here.

Introduction: An Apologetic Preface

The Pilgrims Regress was C. S. Lewis’s first published prose book, and the first work he published after becoming a Christian. Written one year after his 1931 conversion the book is an allegory in the style of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and follows the journey of John, a Lewis analogue, from Christianity into atheism and the intellectual environment of the early 1900s, through Freudianism, Nihilism, Pantheism, and Theism, and back to Christianity.

It’s probably his worst book.

Not to say that it’s terrible. Whatever you think of C. S. Lewis' metaphysics the man was a talented writer and even at his worst his prose is enjoyable. The problems with the book are not bad writing but lack of experience and restraint. It is too heavy handed in some places, and far too subtle in others. It is also clearly an early work, and Lewis's later books benefit from the lessons he learned writing this one. Lewis himself wrote a long introduction to the third edition where he admitted candidly that the book has significant issues, which he tries to mitigate in the preface.

One of the primary flaws, perhaps unfixable, is how particular the story is to Lewis. Not only was his path back to Christianity not a typical one but the book spends a great deal of time on intellectual trends that, while extremely relevant in the 1910s and 20s, died pretty quickly and have been mostly forgotten. Lewis addresses this directly in the book’s preface:

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. I still think this a very natural road, but I now know that it is a road very rarely trodden. In the early thirties I did not know this. If I had had any notion of my own isolation, I should either have kept silent about my journey or else endeavoured to describe it with more consideration for the reader’s difficulties. As things were, I committed the same sort of blunder as one who should narrate his travels through the Gobi Desert on the assumption that this route was as familiar to the British public as the line from Euston to Crewe. And this original blunder was soon aggravated by a profound change in the philosophical thought of our age. Idealism itself went out of fashion. The dynasty of Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet fell, and the world inhabited by philosophical students of my own generation became as alien to our successors as if not years but centuries had intervened.

The other issue of obscurity is even more central to the book, and more difficult to explain.

A Joyful Desire

Lewis was deeply impacted throughout his life by a recurrent emotion, or sensation, of deep longing. He called this feeling by several names over the years: in The Pilgrim’s Regress he calls it Romanticism, but in the third edition preface he admits “I would not now use this word to describe the experience which is central in this book. I would not, indeed, use it to describe anything, for I now believe it to be a word of such varying senses that it has become useless and should be banished from our vocabulary.” Near the end of his life he referred to the sensation as Joy, as seen in his autobiography Surprised by Joy. In the preface to the third edition, he calls it Desire.

Whatever you call it the experience is one that haunted Lewis throughout his life and was a significant driver on the journey back to Christianity. Desire is central to the book: the main character John sets out on his pilgrimage in search of the Island, a mysterious place he periodically has visions of and that he seeks desperately to find. The Island is Lewis’s Joy, the desire that drives him in search of satisfaction.

But what is this feeling? Lewis does his best to describe it:

The experience is one of intense longing. It is distinguished from other longings by two things. In the first place, though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight. Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is expected in the near future: hunger is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to eat. But this desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it. This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth. And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire, though the subject may not at once recognise the fact and thus cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is being rejuvenated. This sounds complicated, but it is simple when we live it. ‘Oh to feel as I did then!’ we cry; not noticing that even while we say the words the very feeling whose loss we lament is rising again in all its old bitter-sweetness. For this sweet Desire cuts across our ordinary distinctions between wanting and having. To have it is, by definition, a want: to want it, we find, is to have it.

In the second place, there is a peculiar mystery about the object of this Desire. Inexperienced people (and inattention leaves some inexperienced all their lives) suppose, when they feel it, that they know what they are desiring. Thus if it comes to a child while he is looking at a far off hillside he at once thinks ‘if only I were there’; if it comes when he is remembering some event in the past, he thinks ‘if only I could go back to those days’. If it comes (a little later) while he is reading a ‘romantic’ tale or poem of ‘perilous seas and faerie lands forlorn’, he thinks he is wishing that such places really existed and that he could reach them. If it comes (later still) in a context with erotic suggestions he believes he is desiring the perfect beloved. If he falls upon literature (like Maeterlinck or the early Yeats) which treats of spirits and the like with some show of serious belief, he may think that he is hankering for real magic and occultism. When it darts out upon him from his studies in history or science, he may confuse it with the intellectual craving for knowledge.

But every one of these impressions is wrong. The sole merit I claim for this book is that it is written by one who has proved them all to be wrong. 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-centred than it was. For I have myself been deluded by every one of these false answers in turn, and have contemplated each of them earnestly enough to discover the cheat. To have embraced so many false Florimels is no matter for boasting: it is fools, they say, who learn by experience. But since they do at last learn, let a fool bring his experience into the common stock that wiser men may profit by it.

Every one of these supposed objects for the Desire is inadequate to it. An easy experiment will show that by going to the far hillside you will get either nothing, or else a recurrence of the same desire which sent you thither. A rather more difficult, but still possible, study of your own memories, will prove that by returning to the past you could not find, as a possession, that ecstasy which some sudden reminder of the past now moves you to desire. Those remembered moments were either quite commonplace at the time (and owe all their enchantment to memory) or else were themselves moments of desiring. The same is true of the things described in the poets and marvelous romancers. The moment we endeavour to think out seriously what it would be like if they were actual, we discover this. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claimed to have photographed a fairy, I did not, in fact, believe it: but the mere making of the claim—the approach of the fairy to within even that hailing distance of actuality—revealed to me at once that if the claim had succeeded it would have chilled rather than satisfied the desire which fairy literature had hitherto aroused. Once grant your fairy, your enchanted forest, your satyr, faun, wood-nymph and well of immortality real, and amidst all the scientific, social and practical interest which the discovery would awake, the Sweet Desire would have disappeared, would have shifted its ground, like the cuckoo’s voice or the rainbow’s end, and be now calling us from beyond a further hill. With Magic in the darker sense (as it has been and is actually practised) we should fare even worse. How if one had gone that way—had actually called for something and it had come? What would one feel? Terror, pride, guilt, tingling excitement. . . but what would all that have to do with our Sweet Desire? It is not at Black Mass or seance that the Blue Flower grows. As for the sexual answer, that I suppose to be the most obviously false Florimel of all. On whatever plane you take it, it is not what we were looking for. Lust can be gratified. Another personality can become to us ‘our America, our New-found-land’. A happy marriage can be achieved. But what has any of the three, or any mixture of the three, to do with that unnamable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves?

It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience. This Desire was, in the soul, as the Siege Perilous in Arthur’s castle—the chair in which only one could sit. And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit in this chair must exist. I knew only too well how easily the longing accepts false objects and through what dark ways the pursuit of them leads us: but I also saw that the Desire itself contains the corrective of all these errors. The only fatal error was to pretend that you had passed from desire to fruition, when, in reality, you had found either nothing, or desire itself, or the satisfaction of some different desire. The dialectic of Desire, faithfully followed, would retrieve all mistakes, head you off from all false paths, and force you not to propound, but to live through, a sort of ontological proof.

As for myself, I understood exactly what Lewis was describing within the first sentence of his explanation. have felt it myself many times: the painful longing on seeing a far off mountain, or a field of wildflowers, or when reading certain lines of Tolkien, is as familiar to me as my mother’s face. I’ve felt it periodically since I was a child. Reading Lewis has helped me greatly in two respects. One, he taught me that I’m not alone in feeling this way and that the sensation is common to many or perhaps most people. Two, I should not despair that I have never found a satisfaction for it. That is common to the experience as well.

Only the Best Bits

The Pilgrim’s Regress is a messy book, with significant flaws. However, being Lewis, there are some real gems to be found among the muck. Though it is a favorite book of mine I understand how the obscurity, heavy handedness, and occasional bad poetry would turn away many. With that in mind I plan on posting specific sections of the book from week to week here: just the best bits! Each section will also include commentary and context from Lewis’s other works, particularly his autobiography. There is plenty here to stimulate the mind and serve as fodder for interesting discussion.

I plan on posting sections of the book each Thursday until we've worked through all the good bits. I will post the first proper section of the book, in which young John learns about “The Rules” in far off Puritania, this coming Thursday.