road before him: Allegory, reason, and romanticism in C.S. Lewis' The Pilgrim's Regress, The

Why is it that this part of the creation alternates between regress and progress, between hostilities and reconciliations? You never go away from us. Yet we have difficulty in returning to you.

-Augustine, Confessions

WHEN we speak of the march of Western ideas, it is second nature, and not all that misleading, to do so in military metaphors. Most histories of Western ideas read like accounts of military campaigns much more so than fraternal symposiums. The standard textbook formula is pretty well set; battle lines are quickly drawn: nominalism is opposed to realism, empiricism is pitted against revelation, progress against decline, and relativism against absolutism. The epic is usually begun in medis res with the Greeks. Sides are chosen, and the ebb and flow of combat is recounted. There are stunning defeats, followed by unexpected comebacks. Champions arise, conquer, then are themselves defeated. Truces are signed and broken. Battle tactics are revived, modified, and temporarily abandoned.

The skill of the intellectual historian, however, lies not only in the ability to define the battle lines, but to see clearly each individual's role in the fray. This is a much more complex task. When individual cases are considered, more often than not one finds that, as in the medieval psychomachias, the battle is waged entirely within each great mind. This was certainly the case with C. S. Lewis.

Over the past three hundred years, religion has become more individualistic, faith-oriented, and mythical. With the apparent triumph of empirical science and skeptical philosophy at the turn of the century, Christianity as a whole seemed largely to have given up its millenniumlong attempts to formulate a "rational religion" or a "natural theology." Into this vacuum C. S. Lewis appeared and was quickly hailed as a new champion for rational Christianity and an "apostle to the skeptics." It is this view of Lewis that endeared him to many who had for so long existed on a sparse diet of faith and piety.

Lewis, at times, willingly assumed this persona of rational defender of the faith. Accounts of the meetings of the Socratic Society portray a man confident in his beliefs and in his ability to defend them against all comers. The tone of most of Lewis' apologetic writings, especially in works like Miracles or Abolition of Man, is seldom hesitant or apologetic (though stylistic and generic conventions could account for some of this). But while the modern English-speaking Christian world was grateful to have found a new St. George, among skeptical intellectuals Lewis was often either ignored-dismissed as an anachronistic reviver of old patristic arguments long since laid to rest-or accused of over-simplifying issues that the modern world had since proven to be much more complex and insoluble.

Lewis' own intricate and intensive psychomachic struggles, however, guaranteed early on that his role in the intellectual ebb and flow of modern ideas would be anything but one-sided and stereotypical. Though some enemies were irreconcilable, many apparent adversaries, Lewis discovered, needed to join forces: among them, intellect and intuition, reason and revelation, progress and regress, art and instruction, duty and desire, authoritative tradition and individual experience. The clearest proof of this is an early work of Lewis' that, while it was hailed warmly upon its first publication, has since been too hastily dismissed as a sub-standard work whose "arguments cannot be taken seriously" (Beversluis 10).' The Pilgrim's Regress was the first apologetic work Lewis wrote after his conversion to Christianity. Though this work is at times too complex and assumes too much prior knowledge to serve as the most amiable introduction to Lewis' thought, it is nonetheless the most philosophically synoptic and panoramic of all Lewis' works. Written at the time Lewis was writing his major study of medieval allegory, The Allegory of Love, the Pilgrim's Regress is Lewis' attempt to set forth a large-scale cosmographia, a comprehensive picture of man's place and destiny in the universe after the manner of Bernardus Silvestris, Dante, and, of course, Bunyan. Lewis would later expand many ideas contained in this work. Yet the depth and range of thought, sketching out nearly every important region of Lewis' mappa mundi from joy, myth, reason, romanticism, and morality, to imagination, Idealism, scientism, and trained emotions, is unparalleled in his writings. Important for a balanced understanding of Lewis' later books is the overall dialectical coherency of the work. Artistically speaking, Lewis would write better fantasy than The Pilgrim's Regress. He would also write works which did a more thorough job of surveying various pieces of his mental terrain. The Pilgrim's Regress, however, provides an inclusive and contiguous cognitive map that Lewis never departed from throughout his life. Reading this map accurately is especially vital for a correct understanding of his apparent quest for a rational religion.