Finding the Landlord but not Lewis

  • 513ddyahgtl_aa240_.jpgI tried to make my way through “The Pilgrim’s Regress” again, armed with “Find­ing the Land­lord: A Guide­book to C. S. Lewis’ Pilgrim’s Regress.” I thought it would help me unravel all the eso­teric alle­gories. I’d love to report that it did, but … nope. I still only partly under­stand who Mr. Sen­si­ble and the city of Eschro­po­lis are sup­posed to represent.

    Too bad, because that alle­gory is a unique nar­ra­tive about how one extra­or­di­nary per­son nav­i­gated the trendy philoso­phies at work in the world and made it to mere Chris­tian­ity. The fact that Lewis wrote the entire book in a short period of time almost imme­di­ately after his con­ver­sion shows both a great mind and a gen­er­ous nature at work. Unfor­tu­nately, that haste is also one of the rea­sons that “Pilgrim’s Regress” is impos­si­ble for many to make out. Lewis remarked later that the book was need­lessly obscure and subjective.


    For those that haven’t picked it up in a while, or ever, “Pilgrim’s Regress” is in the form of a dream and fol­lows the nar­ra­tive of a sort of every­man indi­vid­ual named John as his spir­i­tual life unfolds. Sub­ti­tled “An Alle­gor­i­cal Apol­ogy for Chris­tian­ity Rea­son and Roman­ti­cism,” the book fol­lows John from the first Sunday-School-calibre infor­ma­tion about God to his Chris­t­ian con­ver­sion and beyond. After his bap­tism, John has to face all of the schools of thought that had con­tributed wrong­fully to his spir­i­tual state — this is the ‘regress’ in the title — to even­tu­ally com­bat the demons that lay at the heart of them.

    It could be a pow­er­ful weapon in under­stand­ing how the world’s cul­ture entrapped so many in the last cen­tury and give us one great thinker’s pre­scrip­tion for how Chris­t­ian vic­tory is possible.

    The prob­lem with the book, as Lewis acknowl­edged later, is that he wasn’t clear enough about what those trends of thought were. When Lewis has John encounter a bohemian char­ac­ter named Mr. Halfways, his san­guine daugh­ter Media Halfways and his angry son Gus Halfways, Lewis assumes:

    1. that we will be able to fig­ure out that Mr. Halfways is the sort of ide­al­is­tic spirit of the early 1900′s that Lewis called Roman­ti­cism, that Media Halfways is that spirit expressed in art, music and poetry, and that Gus is the angry off-shoot of beat­nik poetry and abstract art.
    2. that we will know what Roman­ti­cism, Roman­ti­cist cul­ture and the beat­nik sub­cul­ture were all about.

    The lat­ter issue is just a mat­ter of edu­ca­tion, and we could all feel worse that we’re not up to snuff on this until we remem­ber that C. S. Lewis had degrees in lit­er­a­ture and phi­los­o­phy from Oxford and knew more than we could be expected to. The for­mer issue stems from a mis­take that Lewis made. In an after­word writ­ten ten years after “Regress” came out, Lewis said:

    There were two causes, I now real­ize, for the obscu­rity. 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. …

    The sec­ond cause of obscu­rity was the (unin­ten­tion­ally) ‘pri­vate’ mean­ing I then gave to the word ‘Romanticism’.

    So enough about Lewis’ mis­takes, what about this “Guide­book”? Well, all I can say is that a per­son would need a guide­book to make it through the guidebook.

    It’s just down­right weird to me that when the “Guide­book” author under­takes to inter­pret the dif­fi­cult char­ac­ter of Mr. Sen­si­ble, for exam­ple, she trans­lates all of the clas­si­cal Greek quo­ta­tions, restates obvi­ous parts of the chap­ter and then says, “Lewis wrote to his Amer­i­can cor­re­spon­dent that Mr. Sen­si­ble is the type of per­son of which Mon­taigne was the best lit­er­ary spec­i­men.” Who? I hope I’m not a com­plete dunce, but replac­ing one eso­teric name with another is like a dic­tio­nary that offers to explain the word ‘Brob­dig­na­gian” by telling me to see “antidisestablishmentarianism.”

    So what can you do? I’ve already taken more words than I meant to with this. It just seems like a bit of a shame to me, that’s all. And I think there’s still room for the book that this “Guide­book” should have been. Because there’s still a great need for the book that “Pilgrim’s Regress” is, if only some­one could trans­late it for the rest of us.


    Related posts:

    1. C. S. Lewis on the prob­lem with Big Government
    2. C. S. Lewis on the love of God
    3. Spir­i­tual Coun­sels by Fr. John of Kronstadt
    4. “My Life in Christ” by St. John of Kronstadt
    5. Harry Pot­ter thoughts — w/o spoilers

    February 18th, 2008 | Grace | No Comments |

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