The Pilgrim's Regress

by C.S. Lewis

‘Well, as to that . . . I see that you have a very crude notion of how science actually works. To put it simply—for, of course, you could not understand the technical explanation—to put it simply, they know that the escaped elephant must have been the source of the trunk story because they know that an escaped snake must have been the source of the snake story in the next village—and so on. This is called the inductive method. Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact.

‘That,’ said Mr. Enlightenment, ‘is the city of Claptrap. You will hardly believe me when I say that I can remember it as a miserable village. When I first came here it had only forty inhabitants: it now boasts a population of twelve million, four hundred thousand, three hundred and sixty-one souls, who include, I may add, the majority of our most influential publicists and scientific popularizers. In this unprecedented development I am proud to say that I have borne no small part: but it is no mock modesty to add that the invention of the printing press has been more important than any merely personal agency. If you would care to join us—’

THEN I SAW JOHN bounding forward on his road so lightly that before he knew it he had come to the top of a little hill. It was not because the hill had tired him that he stopped there, but because he was too happy to move. ‘There is no Landlord,’ he cried. Such a weight had been lifted from his mind that he felt he could fly. All round him the frost was gleaming like silver; the sky was like blue glass; a robin sat in the hedge beside him: a cock was crowing in the distance. ‘There is no Landlord.’ He laughed when he thought of the old card of rules hung over his bed in the bedroom, so low and dark, in his father’s house. ‘There is no Landlord. There is no black hole.’ He turned and looked back on the road he had come by: and when he did so he gasped with joy. For there in the East, under the morning light, he saw the mountains heaped up to the sky like clouds, green and violet and dark red; shadows were passing over the big rounded slopes, and water shone in the mountain pools, and up at the highest of all the sun was smiling steadily on the ultimate crags. These crags were indeed so shaped that you could easily take them for a castle: and now it came into John’s head that he had never looked at the mountains before, because, as long as he thought that the Landlord lived there, he had been afraid of them. But now that there was no Landlord he perceived that they were beautiful.

For being unlike the magnanimous man, they yet ape him; and that in such particulars as they can. ARISTOTLE Much of the soul they talk, but all awry, And in themselves seek virtue. MILTON I do not admire the excess of some one virtue unless I am shewn at the same time the excess of the opposite virtue. A man does not prove his greatness by standing at an extremity, but by touching both extremities at once and filling all that lies between them. PASCAL Contempt is a well-recognized defensive reaction. I. A. RICHARDS

Now is the seventh winter since Troy fell, and we Still search beneath unfriendly stars, through every sea And desert isle, for Italy’s retreating strand. But here is kinsman’s country and Acestes’ land; What hinders here to build a city and remain? Oh fatherland, oh household spirits preserved in vain From the enemy, shall no new Troy arise? Shall no New Simois there, re-named for Hector’s memory, flow? Rather, come!—burn with me the boats that work us harm! VIRGIL Through this and through no other fault we fell, Nor, being fallen, bear other pain than this, —Always without hope in desire to dwell. DANTE Some also have wished that the next way to their Father’s house were here that they might be troubled no more with either Hills or Mountains to go over; but the way is the way, and there’s an end. BUNYAN

‘To be sure you do. I wouldn’t for the world hold you back. At the same time, my dear boy, I think there is a very real danger at your age of trying to make these things too definite. That has been the great error of my profession in past ages. We have tried to enclose everything in formulae, to turn poetry into logic, and metaphor into dogma; and now that we are beginning to realize our mistake we find ourselves shackled by the formulae of dead men. I don’t say that they were not adequate once: but they have ceased to be adequate for us with our wider knowledge. When I became a man, I put away childish things. These great truths need re-interpretation in every age.’

What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring.

He that hath understanding in himself is best; He that lays up his brother’s wisdom in his breast Is good. But he that neither knoweth, nor will be taught By the instruction of the wise—this man is naught. HESIOD Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction—they see their objects always near, never in the horizon. HAZLITT

You rest upon me all my days The inevitable Eye, Dreadful and undeflected as the blaze Of some Arabian sky; Where, dead still, in their smothering tent Pale travellers crouch, and, bright About them, noon’s long-drawn Astonishment Hammers the rocks with light. Oh, for but one cool breath in seven, One air from northern climes, The changing and the castle-clouded heaven Of my old Pagan times! But you have seized all in your rage Of Oneness. Round about, Beating my wings, all ways, within your cage, I flutter, but not out.

‘It comes from the Landlord. We know this by its results. It has brought you to where you now are: and nothing leads back to him which did not at first proceed from him.’

The strangest shape it ever took was in Medium Aevum—that was a master stroke of the Landlord’s diplomacy; for of course, since the Enemy has been in the country, the Landlord has had to become a politician. Medium Aevum was first inhabited by colonists from Pagus. They came there at the very worst period in the history of Pagus, when the Enemy seemed to have succeeded completely in diverting all the desires that the Landlord could arouse into nothing but lust. These poor colonists were in such a state that they could not let their fancies wander for a minute without seeing images of black, craving eyes, and breasts, and gnawing kisses. It seemed hopeless to do anything with them. Then came the Landlord’s crowning audacity. The very next picture he sent them was a picture of a Lady! Nobody had ever had the idea of a Lady before: and yet a Lady is a woman: so this was a new thing, which took the Enemy off his guard, and yet at the same time it was an old thing—in fact, the very thing which he was reckoning on as his strongest point. He got the shock of his life. The people went mad over the new picture, and made songs that are sung still, and looked away from the picture at the real women around them and saw them quite differently—so that ordinary love for women became, for a time, itself a form of the real desire, and not merely one of the spurious satisfactions offered to it. Of course the Landlord was playing a dangerous game (nearly all his games are dangerous) and the ...

And if, when he returned into the cave, he were constrained once more to contend with those that had always there been prisoners, in judgment of the said shadows, would they not mock him, and say of him that by going up out of the cave he had come down again with his eyes marred for his pains, and that it was lost labour for any so much as to try that ascent? PLATO First I must lead the human soul through all the range Of heaven, that she may learn How fortune hath the turning of the wheel of change, How fate will never turn. BERNARDUS SILVESTRIS Let us suppose a person destitute of that knowledge which we have from our senses. . . . Let it be supposed that in his drought he puts golden dust into his eyes: when his eyes smart, he puts wine into his ears; that in his hunger, he puts gravel into his mouth; that in pain, he loads himself with the iron chains; that feeling cold, he puts his feet in the water; that being frighted at the fire, he runs away from it; that being weary, he makes a seat of his bread. . . . Let us suppose that some good being came to him, and showed him the nature and use of all the things that were about him. LAW

‘Upon my soul,’ said John, ‘I think Mother Kirk treats us very ill. Since we have followed her and eaten her food the way seems twice as narrow and twice as dangerous as it did before.’

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

‘Thou only art alternative to God, oh, dark And burning island among spirits, tenth hierarch, Wormwood, immortal Satan, Ahriman, alone Second to Him to whom no second else were known, Being essential fire, sprung of His fire, but bound Within the lightless furnace of thy Self, bricked round To range in the reverberated heat from seven Containing walls: hence power thou hast to rival heaven. Therefore, except the temperance of the eternal love Only thy absolute lust is worth the thinking of. All else is weak disguisings of the wishful heart, All that seemed earth is Hell, or Heaven. God is: thou art: The rest, illusion. How should man live save as glass To let the white light without flame, the Father, pass Unstained: or else—opaque, molten to thy desire, Venus infernal starving in the strength of fire!’

‘Lord, open not too often my weak eyes to this.’

‘All that solidity,’ said the Guide, ‘belonged not to him but to his predecessors in that house. There was an appearance of temperance about him, but it came from Epicurus. There was an appearance of poetry, but it came from Horace. A trace of old Pagan dignities lingered in his house—it was Montaigne’s. His heart seemed warm for a moment, but the warmth was borrowed from Rabelais. He was a man of shreds and patches, and when you have taken from him what was not his own, the remainder equals nought.’ ‘But surely,’ said Vertue, ‘these things were not the less his own because he learned them from others.’

Still less does he know that Rabelais himself was following a great Steward of the olden days who said Habe caritatem et fac quod vis: and least of all that this Steward in his turn was only reducing to an epigram the words of his Master, when He said, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” ’

The twilight was now far advanced and they were in sight of the brook. And John said, ‘I thought all those things when I was in the house of Wisdom. But now I think better things. Be sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place—to one friend rather than another and one shire more than all the land.

‘But Thou, Lord, surely knewest Thine own plan When the angelic indifferences with no bar Universally loved but Thou gav’st man The tether and pang of the particular; ‘Which, like a chemic drop, infinitesimal, Plashed into pure water, changing the whole, Embodies and embitters and turns all Spirit’s sweet water to astringent soul.

I heard the voice of the Guide, mixed with theirs and not unlike them, singing this song: ‘I know not, I, What the men together say, How lovers, lovers die And youth passes away. ‘Cannot understand Love that mortal bears For native, native land —All lands are theirs. ‘Why at grave they grieve For one voice and face, And not, and not receive Another in its place. ‘I, above the cone Of the circling night Flying, never have known More or lesser light. ‘Sorrow it is they call This cup: whence my lip, Woe’s me, never in all My endless days must sip.’

ON RE-READING THIS BOOK ten years after I wrote it, I find its chief faults to be those two which I myself least easily forgive in the books of other men: needless obscurity, and an uncharitable temper. There were two causes, I now realise, 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. 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 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.

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 least learn, let a fool bring his experience into the common stock that wiser men profit by it.

With both the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ a man has, I take it, only one concern—to avoid them and hold the Main Road. We must not ‘hearken to the over-wise or to the over-foolish giant’. We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men—things at once rational and animal. The fact that, if I say anything in explanation of my North and South, I have to say so much, serves to underline a rather important truth about symbols. In the present edition I have tried to make the book easier by a running headline. But I do so with great reluctance. To supply a ‘key’ to an allegory may encourage that particular misunderstanding of allegory which, as a literary critic, I have elsewhere denounced. It may encourage people to suppose that allegory is a disguise, a way of saying obscurely what could have been said more clearly. But in fact all good allegory exists not to hide but to reveal; to make the inner world more palpable by giving it an (imagined) concrete embodiment. My headline is there only because my allegory failed—partly through my own fault (I am now heartily ashamed of the preposterous allegorical filigree on p. 90), and partly because modern readers are unfamiliar with the method. But it remains true that wherever the symbols are best, the key is least adequate. For when allegory is at its best, it approaches myth, which must be grasped with the imagination, not with the intellect. If, as I still sometimes hope, my North and Sout...