As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country. Proverbs
As cold waters: Proverbs 25:25. For Lewis, the good news from a far country is Sweet Desire, that yearning for some lost paradise which hints at a splendid reality beyond the realm of the senses.
C. S. L E W I S
The Pilgrim’s Regress Wade Annotated Edition
Edited and introduced by David C. Downing Illustrated by Michael Hague
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.
Lewis’s original full title was The Pilgrim’s Regress, or Pseudo-Bunyan’s Periplus: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism. Though his publishers convinced him to shorten it, that long original title, with its arcane vocabulary, suggests that Lewis was writing less for a popular audience than for the intellectual elite of his generation. Pseudo-Bunyan indicates that he intends to update Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress for modern readers. Periplus means “sailing around,” taking the long way to get to one’s destination.
The Pilgrim’s Regress © 1933, 1943 C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd. All other material by C. S. Lewis © 2014 C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd. Annotations, Preface, Introduction, and Notes © 2014 David C. Downing Illustrations © 1981 Michael Hague All rights reserved Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546 Hardcover edition 2014 Paperback edition 2020 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963. The Pilgrim’s Regress: an Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism / C. S. Lewis; illustrated by Michael Hague. — Annotated edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8028-7899-1 (pbk: alk. paper) 1. Pilgrims and pilgrimages — Fiction. 2. Christian fiction. 3. Allegories. I. Hague, Michael, illustrator. II. Title. PR6023.E926P5 2014 823´.912 — dc23 2014031192
www.eerdmans.com
To Arthur Greeves
To Arthur Greeves: Joseph Arthur Greeves (1895-1966) lived just down the road from the Lewis family in an affluent suburb of Belfast. Lewis and Greeves had known each other since childhood, but their true friendship began in their teens when they discovered their shared passion for “Northernness,” Norse myths and legends, as well as many other common literary interests. The two friends exchanged letters and visits for nearly half a century, until Lewis’s death in 1963.
Contents
Note on the Wade Center Copy of The Pilgrim’s Regress, by Marjorie Lamp Mead Editor’s Preface
xiii xv
Editor’s Introduction
xvi Book One
The Data
I. The Rules
7
II. The Island
10
III. The Eastern Mountains
13
IV. Leah for Rachel
16
18
V. Ichabod
VI. Quem Quaeritis in Sepulchro? Non est Hic
19
B o o k Tw o
Thrill
I. Dixit Insipiens
23
II. The Hill
28 vii
Contents III. A Little Southward
30
IV. Soft Going
31
32
V. Leah for Rachel
VI. Ichabod
36
VII. Non est Hic
36
VIII. Great Promises
37 Book Three
Through Darkest Zeitgeistheim
I. Eschropolis
41
II. A South Wind
42
III. Freedom of Thought
44
IV. The Man Behind the Gun
46
48
V. Under Arrest
VI. Poisoning the Wells
49
VII. Facing the Facts
51
VIII. Parrot Disease
52
IX. The Giant Slayer
54 Book Four
Back to the Road
I. Let Grill Be Grill
59
II. Archtype and Ectype
59
III. Esse Is Percipi
62
IV. Escape
64
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Contents Book Five
The Grand Canyon
I. The Grand Canyon
71
II. Mother Kirk’s Story
73
III. The Self-Sufficiency of Vertue
76
IV. Mr. Sensible
77
83
V. Table Talk
VI. Drudge
85
VII. The Gaucherie of Vertue
87 Book Six
Northward along the Canyon
I. First Steps to the North
93
II. Three Pale Men
94
III. Neo-Angular
98
IV. Humanist
100
101
V. Food from the North
VI. Furthest North
101
VII. Fools’ Paradise
107 Book Seven
Southward along the Canyon
I. Vertue Is Sick
111
II. John Leading
113
III. The Main Road Again
114 ix
Contents IV. Going South
115
V. Tea on the Lawn
116
VI. The House of Wisdom
119
VII. Across the Canyon by Moonlight
120
VIII. This Side by Sunlight
122
IX. Wisdom — Exoteric
126
130
X. Wisdom — Esoteric
XI. Mum’s the Word
132
XII. More Wisdom
133 Book Eight
At Bay
I. Two Kinds of Monist
139
II. John Led
142
III. John Forgets Himself
144
IV. John Finds His Voice
145
146
V. Food at a Cost
VI. Caught
148
VII. The Hermit
150
VIII. History’s Words
152
IX. Matter of Fact
157
161
X. Archtype and Ectype Book Nine
Across the Canyon
I. Across the Canyon by the Inner Light II. This Side by Lightning
167 168
x
Contents III. This Side by the Darkness
169
IV. Securus Te Projice
172
174
V. Across the Canyon
VI. Nella Sua Voluntade
176 Book Ten
The Regress
I. The Same Yet Different
181
II. The Synthetic Man
182
III. Limbo
184
IV. The Black Hole
185
187
V. Superbia
VI. Ignorantia
191
VII. Luxuria
193
VIII. The Northern Dragon
197
IX. The Southern Dragon
201
202
X. The Brook
Afterword to Third Edition
207
Bibliography
220
Notes
225
General Index
235
Scripture Index
238
xi
List of Illustrations
Mappa Mundi
3
John’s Island
11
John and Mr. Enlightenment
27
John and Media
35
Reason and the Giant
55
Vertue and Savage
103
John and Contemplation
120
Mother Kirk
171
John and the Dragon
199
Mappa Mundi (Lewis’s original)
218
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Note on the Wade Center Copy of The Pilgrim’s Regress
On 18 June 1937, C. S. Lewis inscribed his name and the date in a copy of The Pilgrim’s Regress that he had carefully annotated for one of his students, Richard Thornton Hewitt, who was reading English at Magdalen College at the time. Whether the book was a gift from Lewis to Hewitt or Lewis simply agreed to annotate it for his pupil is not apparent, but from comments in various letters it is evident that Lewis held Hewitt in high regard, indicating to one correspondent that “I think I have as great a respect and affection for him as for any I taught . . . I wish I had more like him.” Accordingly, Lewis was glad to offer his conscientious student whatever help he could to clarify the meaning he had intended to convey in this work. Richard Hewitt enlisted in the British military during World War II, serving in the Cheshire Regiment and Special Forces, eventually being promoted to lieutenant-colonel. After the war, he became assistant to the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford; in 1952, he was named Executive Director of the Royal Society of Medicine. Lewis’s good opinion of him continued; in a letter to Katharine Farrer in October 1957 Lewis wrote: “. . . you probably mean Dick Hewitt . . . he is one of the straightest, most rigidly conscientious men I know. . . . I’d bet on his integrity and kindness as soon as on anybody’s.” It is fitting that Lewis’s kindness to a pupil that he so clearly valued has left us with a legacy that continues to be helpful to the readers of today. Richard Thornton Hewitt’s copy of the 1935 Sheed and xiii
Note on the Wade Center Copy of The Pilgrim’s Regress Ward edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress was sold to the Marion E. Wade Center in August 1987 by an Oxford bookseller on behalf of a private owner. The purchase was funded by Stephen Board of Harold Shaw Publishers, who worked with Lyle W. Dorsett, then Director of the Wade Center, with a view toward publishing an annotated edition of Lewis’s earliest work on his Christian faith. Unfortunately, this initial publishing venture was never achieved, and Steve Board generously released the Wade Center to pursue other publishing opportunities at a later date. Fortunately, that time is now, and we are grateful to the C. S. Lewis Company, Jon Pott of Eerdmans, and Lewis scholar David C. Downing for the realization of The Pilgrim’s Regress: Wade Annotated Edition. Marjorie Lamp Mead Associate Director The Marion E. Wade Center
xiv
Editor’s Preface
This edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, produced in collaboration with the Marion E. Wade Center of Wheaton College, contains nearly five hundred page notes, including definitions of unusual terms, translations from a half-dozen foreign languages, identifications of key characters, and cross-references to other works by C. S. Lewis. Lewis’s own handwritten notes in an early edition of Pilgrim’s Regress are set in boldface in this edition. Bible references are taken from the King James Version. I wish to express my gratitude to Jon Pott, the editor-in-chief of Eerdmans Publishing Company, and Marjorie Lamp Mead, the associate director of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton, for their ongoing encouragement and support for this edition. I am especially thankful to Jenny Hoffman and other members of the production team at Eerdmans for their intelligent and diligent work in completing such a demanding and multifaceted project on schedule. I am also indebted to Arend Smilde for his thorough and painstaking detective work in tracking down so many little-known quotations and references in Regress (see bibliography) and to Colin Duriez for reviewing the typescript and offering many helpful comments. Thank you as well to three student assistants for their careful and conscientious work: Brandon Wold at Wheaton College, Michelle Laraia at Elizabethtown College, and Alison Williams at Messiah College. David C. Downing xv
Editor’s Introduction
The year 2013 marked a half century since the death of C. S. Lewis in 1963. Lewis assumed that his books would go out of print soon after his passing,1 but he is now widely viewed as one of the most influential Christian writers of the twentieth century — and someone whose influence continues undiminished fifty years after his death. Lewis is probably best known as the creator of the Narnia Chronicles, which continue to sell millions of copies a year. These were hailed in The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature as “the most sustained achievement in fantasy for children by a 20th-century author.”2 But even before he achieved renown as the creator of classic children’s stories, Lewis had already put together one of the most distinguished writing careers of the twentieth century. He is still acknowledged as one of the leading literary scholars of his generation, composing a volume for the prestigious Oxford History of English Literature and writing books on medieval literature, Milton, and Spenser, all of which continue to be required reading for graduate students in English. Lewis has also gained worldwide recognition for his books on Christian faith and practice. His Screwtape Letters (1942) became an international sensation and landed his face on the cover 1. Collected Letters 3:1457. 2. Humphrey Carpenter and Marie Prichard, The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 370.
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Editor’s Introduction of TIME magazine (September 8, 1947). This book continues to be a perennial best-seller, along with other Lewis titles such as Miracles (1947) and Mere Christianity (1952). As Alister McGrath has observed, Lewis’s career is remarkable not only in that he became so famous as a Christian thinker and writer in his own lifetime, but also because he continues to be so famous a half century after his death.3 The year 2013 marked another Lewis milestone, the eightieth anniversary of The Pilgrim’s Regress, first published in 1933. Lewis spent most of his twenties striving mightily to become a celebrated writer; but he simply didn’t have much to write about. Yet once he became a Christian in his early thirties and accepted a humbler role, one whose writing gifts should be used in the service of the Kingdom, he embarked on what is assuredly one of the most notable writing careers of the twentieth century. The Pilgrim’s Regress represents a number of firsts for C. S. Lewis: it was his first Christian book; it was his first book of fiction; it was the first book he published under his own name.4 (It may also be the first book composed in two weeks that is still in print eight decades later!) Yet this book of many firsts for Lewis may also be counted as last. The Pilgrim’s Regress is one of Lewis’s least read and least understood books, mainly due to its obscurity. Regress includes untranslated quotations in Greek, Latin, German, French, and medieval Italian. It also assumes the reader has a working knowledge of Aristotle, Kant, Spinoza, and Hegel, philosophers who were known mainly to specialists in Lewis’s time and are even less widely recognized in our own era. The book also portrays cultural figures and literary trends of the early twentieth century that are no longer familiar to contemporary readers. Lewis seemed almost to be writing for an audience of one — himself — in his first edition of Pilgrim’s Regress, trying to sort out his own spiritual journey up to that point. He wrote the book in only two weeks, August 15-29, 1932, while staying in Belfast with his child3. McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life, xi. 4. These many firsts were originally noted by Dunckel, “C. S. Lewis as Allegorist,” 38.
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Editor’s Introduction hood friend, Arthur Greeves. Composing in what must have been a white heat of creativity, Lewis recounted the details of his pilgrimage — from a fear-haunted childhood faith; to the liberation of “enlightened” unbelief; through the mazes of occultism, Freudianism, Modernism, Idealism/pantheism; and finally back to his starting point: Christianity, the spiritual home from which he had begun.5 (Though Lewis warned that the book was not intended to be strictly autobiographical, the parallels between his protagonist’s journey and his own are much more striking than the differences.) Feeling a great surge of spiritual zeal, Lewis probably composed the book too quickly. He later apologized for its “needless obscurity” (p. 207 in this edition), and he had good reason to do so. The book contains nearly three hundred references and allusions in half a dozen languages — from classical poets to contemporary philosophers, as well as frequent literary echoes from Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, not to mention short-lived catch-phrases from his own generation. Lewis later explained the erudition of Pilgrim’s Regress in terms of his original sense of audience. After he had become a best-selling writer, Lewis offered these comments to an admiring reader who said she was struggling to understand Lewis’s first Christian book: “I don’t wonder that you got fogged in Pilgrim’s Regress. It was my first religious book and I didn’t then know how to make things easy. I was not even trying to very much, because in those days I never dreamed I would become a ‘popular’ author and hoped for no readers outside a small ‘highbrow’ circle.”6 Once Lewis realized there was a wider audience for Pilgrim’s Regress than he had expected, he began adding explanatory notes. The first edition was released by J. M. Dent in 1933 with no interpretive aids. After a small print run, the book attracted the interest of the Roman Catholic publishers Sheed & Ward, who assumed that the pilgrim’s starting point, Puritania, represented Protestantism, and 5. For a more detailed account of Lewis’s journey to faith, see Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert. 6. Collected Letters 3:282-83.
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Editor’s Introduction that the redemptive character, Mother Kirk, stood for the Catholic Church. When Sheed & Ward brought out a new edition in 1935, Lewis added brief “Arguments,” narrative and thematic summaries, at the beginning of each of the ten books. For the 1943 edition published by Geoffrey Bles, Lewis went even further, adding an explanatory preface on Romanticism and Sweet Desire (included in this edition as an afterword) and composing interpretive headings for each page of the story.7 Even with these helpful notes, however, The Pilgrim’s Regress remains perhaps Lewis’s most arcane book. What he wrote in two weeks might take today’s unaided reader two months, or two years, to fully explore and appreciate. Yet the extensive annotations offered in this edition reveal The Pilgrim’s Regress for what it truly is — a treasure trove of insights about every modern pilgrim’s spiritual journey; a surprisingly prophetic vision of twentieth-century culture; and an enticing preview of the central motifs that would dominate Lewis’s later books: Sweet Desire; the moral law within as clue to the meaning of the universe; the proper synthesis of intellect and imagination; the opposite dangers of excessive rationalism and excessive sensualism. The Pilgrim’s Regress served Lewis almost as a sketchbook for ideas to be developed more fully in later works, scholarly and popular, fictional and nonfictional: The Allegory of Love (1936), The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Abolition of Man (1943), Mere Christianity (1952), several scenes in the Narnia Chronicles, and, most especially, Surprised by Joy (1955). The present annotated edition builds upon the work of Lewis scholars such as Clyde S. Kilby, Henry Noel, Kathryn Lindskoog, John Bremer, and Arend Smilde. But it also offers new clarity and depth provided by Lewis himself, from two little-known sources available at the Marion E. Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois. The Wade Center owns a 1937 edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress purchased by one of Lewis’s students, R. T. Hewitt, an early edition without an author’s preface or explanatory headings. Hewitt must have asked 7. The original Eerdmans pocket edition of 1958 also included the explanatory essay as a preface. It was moved to an afterword in Eerdmans’s deluxe illustrated edition of 1981.
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Editor’s Introduction Lewis for help in understanding the book, because it contains Lewis’s handwritten annotations, explaining dozens of allusions, identifying characters, and providing perceptive interpretive remarks. (Many commentators, for example, have assumed that the character Mr. Neo-Angular represents T. S. Eliot, but Lewis’s own marginal note indicates otherwise.8) The Wade Center also possesses a 62-page autobiographical fragment that Lewis composed about 1930 — after he had become a theist, but before he had embraced Christianity. This fragment states early on that “there is a via media between syllogisms and psychosis: Thomas Aquinas and D. H. Lawrence do not divide the universe between them.”9 In claiming to have found some middle ground between an arid intellectualism and a glorified sensualism, Lewis sounds a note in the fragment similar to his warnings in his 1943 preface about the extremes of the “barren, aching rocks of [the] ‘North’ ” and the “foetid swamps of [the] ‘South’ ” (p. 213). This unpublished account helps solve several mysteries in The Pilgrim’s Regress, especially Lewis’s use of “brown girls” to represent lust and the specific sources Lewis had in mind for characters such as Mr. Halfways and Mr. Sensible. These previously unpublished sources also shed new light on Lewis’s creative process as he pondered his own spiritual journey. In seeking to recount his story for other pilgrims, Lewis first considered recasting Virgil’s Aeneid into allegorical form. Like Virgil’s hero, Aeneas, Lewis felt that he too had lost the home of his youth and was seeking a new one. Lewis read the Aeneid countless times during his life and even considered producing his own complete translation. (Interested readers may discover the fascinating fragments he left behind in C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid [Yale University Press, 2011].) Eventually, though, Lewis chose a literary model closer to his own purposes: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Bunyan’s classic allegorical tale depicts the journey of the protagonist, Chris8. See, for example, Lindskoog, Finding the Landlord, 48, and McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life, 171. 9. This autobiographical fragment, usually called the “Early Prose Joy,” was recently published in Seven: An Anglo-American Review 30 (2013): 13-49.
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Editor’s Introduction tian, from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Along the way, Christian is mired in the Slough of Despond, captured by the giant Despair, and arrested in Vanity Fair. He is also tempted to abandon his pilgrimage by the smooth-talking Mr. Worldly Wiseman and the seductress Wanton. (In Part 2, published in 1684, Bunyan provided a suitable sequel, in which Christian’s wife, Christiana, and their children follow after him in a similar journey fraught with obstacles and detours.) As noted in the annotations that accompany this edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis frequently adapted the characters and scenes in The Pilgrim’s Progress for twentieth-century readers, cleverly updating them to portray new temptations and modern intellectual trends. Lewis first read Bunyan’s classic story at the age of eighteen, noting that he enjoyed it more for its fantasy elements than for its allegory. He also admired Bunyan’s vigorous prose style, saying it showed “the difference between diamonds and tinsel” in comparison to more recent English writers.10 In his essay “The Vision of John Bunyan” (1962), Lewis reaffirmed his delight in Bunyan’s “enthralling narrative” and his “genuinely dramatic dialogue.”11 But Lewis also took Bunyan to task for his excessive exposition, saying that too often the characters abandon the road of their journey in order to take up the pulpit of doctrinal disputation. Lewis also criticized Bunyan for a certain narrowness and self-righteousness, a sense that anyone who disagreed with him deserved ridicule, if not hellfire. It is intriguing that Lewis should single out these two flaws in Bunyan, since the same criticisms also apply to The Pilgrim’s Regress. Too often Lewis allowed what he called his “expository demon” to take over the story, making it seem more like an essay than a narrative.12 This is especially true in the middle of the book, where Mr. Wisdom and the hermit History offer lengthy explanations of their worldviews, causing the storyline to come to a halt. These two charac10. Collected Letters 1:247. 11. “The Vision of John Bunyan,” in SLE 146. 12. Collected Letters 3:630. Lewis attributed the phrase to his friend Owen Barfield.
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Editor’s Introduction ters represent the leading contenders in Lewis’s mind for a plausible philosophy of life, explaining perhaps why he lingered overlong on these philosophical passages. In his preface added a decade after the first edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis apologized not only for the story’s “needless obscurity” but also for its “uncharitable temper.”13 Lewis seemed especially chagrined by his savage satire of the “three pale men,” Mr. Neo-Angular, Mr. Neo-Classical, and Mr. Humanist. Lewis’s personal annotations in his student’s copy of the book are especially helpful in explaining Lewis’s strident tone, in that he specifically identifies Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) as the book he found so irksome. Babbitt’s book is erudite but arrogant in tone, a classic example of what Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” the presumption that one’s own generation sees the world much more clearly than benighted thinkers of the past.14 Babbitt criticizes Rousseau for his view that human nature is essentially good, but goes on to mock the “Arcadian dream,” the longing for some lost paradise. Babbitt calls the “ineradicable longing for some Arcadia, some land of heart’s desire” a mere fiction, fit only for a child’s imagination. Babbitt dismisses Romanticism in general as an “empire of chimeras,” and he derides the source of nameless longing as “not an object at all but only the dalliance of the imagination with its own dream.” What Lewis called Sweet Desire, Irving Babbitt calls “nympholepsy,” the disorder of a mind that seeks raptures over unattainable objects.15 Along the way, Babbitt manages to ridicule at least a dozen authors whom Lewis admired, from Augustine to English Romantic poets such as Words worth, Keats, and Shelley. When Lewis confesses that, “in the end, I lost my temper,”16 he may well have been thinking of Babbitt’s disdainful book, a work that evoked the same tone of disdain in Lewis’s imaginative response. (It should be noted that Lewis apologized for his derogatory tone in passages from Regress depicting twentieth- 13. On p. 207 in this edition. 14. Surprised by Joy, 207. 15. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 52, 73, 225-27. 16. On p. 213 in this edition.
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Editor’s Introduction century Counter Romantics; Babbitt’s later books, though insightful and readable, have the same haughty tone that one finds in Rousseau and Romanticism.) If The Pilgrim’s Regress contains some of the same flaws as the Bunyan classic upon which it was modeled, it also includes some important departures. For one thing, Bunyan’s Christian begins his journey for essentially negative reasons, to escape “The City of Destruction” and the flames of hell. Lewis’s protagonist, by contrast, begins his journey out of a desire for what might lie ahead, not a fear of what might lie behind. In The Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis stressed that the most authentic spiritual journey is rooted in one’s longing for what the Psalmist calls “the beauty of Holiness,” not in the secondary motivation of seeking rewards or escaping punishments in the afterlife. (Lewis would return to this theme at least a half dozen times in later books.) Lewis’s choice of a title is also revealing. When he first wrote to the publishers J. M. Dent about his new allegorical tale, Lewis described it simply as “a kind of Bunyan up to date.”17 It is highly characteristic of Lewis that his eventual title was not “Bunyan Updated” or “A New Pilgrim’s Progress.” Rather, Lewis called his story The Pilgrim’s Regress. Lewis was raised in a Christian home in the north of Ireland, but he lost his faith in his early teens and did not recover it until his early thirties. Lewis did not find himself by putting away childish things, but rather by rediscovering the childlike sense of wonder and imagination that he had lost after his mother died when he was nine years old. The idea of return meant more to Lewis than just a recovery of childhood. For him the need to look back, or to go back, took many forms: a return to the classics and to neglected authors, to objective moral values, to a traditional Christian understanding of the universe and our place in it. Not surprisingly, Lewis’s books abound in metaphors of return, of looking back or going back. In The Great Divorce Lewis answers Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” by saying that good comes only by undoing evil, by “being put back on the right 17. Collected Letters 2:94.
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Editor’s Introduction road.”18 In Miracles, he argues that only supernaturalists truly see Nature for what it is: “You must go a little away from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. . . . Come out, look back, and then you will see.”19 The eightieth anniversary of The Pilgrim’s Regress affords us a perfect opportunity to retrace our own steps, to revisit Lewis’s inaugural work of prose fiction and to see it with new eyes. As readers learn more about The Pilgrim’s Regress in this annotated edition, they will discover that the book is quite simply a good story in itself. For instance, Mr. Sensible, whose excessive quotation goes along with his excessive potation, seems like a character right out of Dickens. And the perils presented by the enchantress of Luxuria or the dragon of Pride seem worthy of two of Lewis’s own favorite authors, Dante Alighieri and J. R. R. Tolkien. Apart from its intellectual acuity and spiritual perceptivity, Regress also reveals the imaginative vitality and sparkling prose that would eventually make Lewis an author of worldwide renown. Despite its limitations, which Lewis himself recognized, The Pilgrim’s Regress remains a seminal text for readers of Lewis — a rollicking satire on modern cultural fads, a vivid account of contemporary spiritual dangers, and an illuminating tale for a whole new generation of pilgrims. David C. Downing
18. The Great Divorce, 6. 19. Miracles, 67.
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The Pilgrim’s Regress
All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status: always reminds, beckons, awakes desire. Our best havings are wantings. C. S. Lewis, letter dated November 5, 1954
Mappa Mundi: (Latin) “Map of the World,” a term usually associated with medieval maps. In his correspondence with the publishers, Lewis suggested that the map might also be labeled “Middle Earth,” the Nordic term for this world, with the heavens above and the underworld below. Mania: Madness. Wanhope: (Middle English) “Despair” (Lewis, p. 216 in this edition). Literally, “waning of hope.” Aphroditopolis: City of Aphrodite, the goddess associated with sensual love. Sodom: Unnatural love. Antinomia: Antinomianism, literally (Greek) “against the law,” the denial or flouting of moral norms. Lyssanesos and Woodey: Isles of Insanity (Lewis, p. 216 in this edition). Magopolis: City of Magic. On magic and magician, see note on p. 123. Note: Other locations on the map are discussed as they occur in the main text.
2
Mappa Mundi