The Pilgrim's Regress

by C.S. Lewis

‘Some have thought that all these loves were copies of our love for the Landlord.’ ‘But surely they have considered that and rejected it. Their sciences have disproved it.’ ‘They could not have, for their sciences are not concerned at all with the general relations of this country to anything that may lie East of it or West of it. They indeed will tell you that their researches have proved that if two things are similar, the fair one is always the copy of the foul one. But their only reason to say so is that they have already decided that the fairest things of all—that is the Landlord, and, if you like, the mountains and the Island—are a mere copy of this country. They pretend that their researches lead to that doctrine: but in fact they assume that doctrine first and interpret their researches by it.’

‘Not quite clearly.’ ‘He showed you by a trick what our inwards would look like if they were visible. That is, he showed you something that is not, but something that would be if the world were made all other than it is. But in the real world our inwards are invisible. They are not coloured shapes at all, they are feelings. The warmth in your limbs at this moment, the sweetness of your breath as you draw it in, the comfort in your belly because we breakfasted well, and your hunger for the next meal—these are the reality: all the sponges and tubes that you saw in the dungeon are the lie.’ ‘But if I cut a man open I should see them in him.’ ‘A man cut open is, so far, not a man: and if you did not sew him up speedily you would be seeing not organs, but death. I am not denying that death is ugly: but the giant made you believe that life is ugly.’

‘Is it surprising that things should look strange if you see them as they are not? If you take an organ out of a man’s body—or a longing out of the dark part of a man’s mind—and give to the one the shape and colour, and to the other the self-consciousness, which they never have in reality, would you expect them to be other than monstrous?’

‘You heard what they said. If anyone argues with them they say that he is rationalizing his own desires, and therefore need not be answered. But if anyone listens to them they will then argue themselves to show that their own doctrines are true.’ ‘I see. And what is the cure for this?’ ‘You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.’

Peccatum Adae.’

Again, this country is full of rules. The Claptrapians say that the Stewards made the rules. The servants of the giant say that we made them ourselves in order to restrain by them the lusts of our neighbours and to give a pompous colouring to our own. The people say that the Landlord made them.

Without doubt, then, all this show of sky and earth floats within some mighty imagination. If you ask Whose, again the Landlord will not help you. He is man: make him as great as you will, he still is other than we and his imagining inaccessible to us, as yours would be to me. Rather we must say that the world is not in this mind, or in that, but in Mind itself, in that impersonal principle of consciousness which flows eternally through us, its perishable forms.

However I think of it, I think of it inadequately.’

Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense, but in thy great, Unbroken speech our halting metaphor translate.

Then I dreamed that once more a Man came to him in the darkness and said, ‘You must pass the night where you are, but I have brought you a loaf and if you crawl along the ledge ten paces more you will find that a little fall of water comes down the cliff.’

Oh, thou that art unwearying, that dost neither sleep Nor slumber, who didst take All care for Lazarus in the careless tomb, oh keep Watch for me till I wake. If thou think for me what I cannot think, if thou Desire for me what I Cannot desire, my soul’s interior Form, though now Deep-buried, will not die, —No more than the insensible dropp’d seed which grows Through winter ripe for birth Because, while it forgets, the heaven remembering throws Sweet influence still on earth, —Because the heaven, moved moth-like by thy beauty, goes Still turning round the earth.

‘You all know,’ said the Guide, ‘that security is mortals’ greatest enemy.’

Habe caritatem et fac quod vis:

Their labour-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving them have banished leisure from their country. There will be no radical change. And as for permanence—consider how quickly all machines are broken and obliterated. The black solitudes will some day be green again, and of all cities that I have seen these iron cities will break most suddenly.’

The Northerners are the men of rigid systems whether sceptical or dogmatic, Aristocrats, Stoics, Pharisees, Rigorists, signed and sealed members of highly organised “Parties’. The Southerners are by their very nature less definable; boneless souls whose doors stand open day and night to almost every visitant, but always with readiest welcome for those, whether Maenad or Mystagogue, who offer some sort of intoxication. The delicious tang of the forbidden and the unknown draws them on with fatal attraction; the smudging of all frontiers, the relaxation of all resistances, dream, opium, darkness, death, and the return to the womb.

It is the sort of thing you cannot learn from definition: you must rather get to know it as you get to know a smell or a taste, the ‘atmosphere’ of a family or a country town, or the personality of an individual.