Greetings,
I have been recommending some books for individuals to
read for their spiritual enlightenment, and in particular last week C. S.
Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress. The
book is a “pilgrimage allegory” in the style of those by Langland, Bunyan and
the old English poem “The Dream of the Rood.”
The central character—the pilgrim—is typically autobiographical, in this
book it is John who represents Lewis’ personal pilgrimage to
Christianity. It’s been many years
since I last read it through (try 30), but going quickly through it again
caused me to recall a passage from the William Griffin book C. S. Lewis:
Spirituality for Mere Christians (which was very enjoyable work). The following is taken from page 61 ff.
In a sense, Lewis began his work where Bunyan’s left
off. Christian [Bunyan’s pilgrim] had to
face every temptation the seventeenth century had to offer. John, setting out from Puritania
[England/home], met, first of all, the eighteenth century in the character of
Mr. Enlightenment; in the next seventy-two chapters he would meet
personifications of just about every philosophical, literary, and political
movement from that time right down to the 1930s.
To root the allegory somewhere in the theological
firmament, there had to be a creation story, and Lewis decided to have Mother
Kirk [the Church] tell it to John…There was this Landlord who had a farm. He “decided to let the county to tenants, and
his first tenant was a young married man.”
Under the influence of the Enemy, who was one of the Landlord’s children,
the farmer’s wife ate “a nice mountain apple,” something she’d been told not to
do. “And then—you know how it is with
husbands—she made the farmer come round to her mind.”…”the sin of Adam”…At this
blatant act the Landlord’s gorge rose; there was an earthquake, and the
paradisal park became a gorge.
Having traversed half the world in search of the
Landlord, having been beguiled by a variety of temptations and interpretations
of existence, but seemingly no closer to the island or mountain of desires,
John uttered a cry for help. He prayed,
and “a Man came to him in the darkness” and spoke.
“Your life has been saved all this day by crying out to
something which you call by many names, and you have said to yourself that you
used metaphors.”
“Was I wrong, sir?”
“Perhaps not. But
you must play fair. If its help is not a
metaphor, neither are its commands. If
it can answer when you call, then it can speak without your asking. If you can go to it, it can come to you.”
“I think I see it, sir.
You mean that I am not my own man; in some sense I have a Landlord after
all?”
Like a common criminal to a police sergeant, John turned
himself in. He accepted the veracity of
the myth and the credibility of Christianity.
Equanimity restored, he found himself retracing his former steps. The temptations and interpretations that had
so tormented him before, he now saw with clearer eyes.
Like the yachtsman in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy,
who’d sailed around the world only to discover that what he sought was on the coast
of England, John arrived back in Puritania. The pilgrimage was within, he concluded; the
philosophical battles were fought quite independent of geography; and the many
temptations had to be wrestled with on the topsoil of one’s own soul.
I have found Lewis’ work not only personally challenging
and inspiring, but also very useful in sharing faith with others. I also love the connectedness one finds
between the great Christian writers even when they are dealing with very
different topics and out of very different situations. Truth is Truth.
Yours & His,
DED
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