Talk:The Pilgrim's Regress

Miscellaneous

Should be more on the "Landlord"... AnonMoos 15:40, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Should be less on MLJ. Also, Dymer was Lewis's first published fictional piece. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.163.0.41 (talk) 16:30, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Fiction --> prose fiction: Fixed. Bigturtle (talk) 16:12, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Out-of-the-Blue Summary Sentence

At the end of the first paragraph, the article claims that Pilgrim's Regress "balances Lewis's neoplatonic mindset with a Kierkegaardian faith-based understanding." Such a substantial summary statement should be cited from a scholarly analysis, not dropped into the article. This is especially true in this case, given that Pilgrim's Regress never explicitly mentions Lewis's supposed neoplatonic and Kierkegaardian leanings. My inclination is to delete the sentence entirely, but in a spirit of good faith, and in case I am missing something, I've merely added a "citation needed" at the end of the sentence. If no citation is given after several months, I recommend that the sentence be deleted. 71.90.218.18 (talk) 05:34, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree. Soren Kierkegaard was not a major influence on Lewis. I have Lewis's collected letters Vol III and in one (to Mary Van Deusen 13 Feb 1961) he writes "at the back of the religious Existentialists lies Kierkegaard. They all revere him as their pioneer. Have you read him? I haven't, or hardly at all."

Preface to third edition of Pilgrims Regress: "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."

James Patrick writes in The Pilgrims Guide that : His first prose work, The Pilgrims Regress, was constructed around the problem of the relation between what we desire and imagine on the one hand and the rules we are to follow on the other, and is (as far as the middle of its ninth book) essentially moral philosophy.

Nearly a year has elapsed so I went ahead a took it out. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.20.22.146 (talk) 12:43, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Just to clarify - While the reference to neo-platonism may have some merit, to say its balanced with a "Kierkegaardian faith based understanding" is not something I have been able to find support for, if a citation can be found from one of the many Lewis scholars then it can be put back. The Pilgrims Regress is mostly but not entirely based on Lewis's own journey but it more a journey through different intellectual and spiritual landscapes, beginning with the semi-political christianity of his childhood, it doesn't however seem to be chronological. It ends with Lewis's discovery of Grace. The Kierkegaardian understanding of faith would be far more subjective than Lewis's after his eventual return to Christianity. Lewis passed through Hegelian Idealism, he didn't rise up in opposition to the Hegelian system like Kierkegaard, a century earlier. It was a watered-down Hegelianism and that period of his journey became one where he took philosophy more seriously, but it would be difficult to say he moved from Hegel to Kierkegaard, given his stated unfamiliarity with the latter. Lewis's faith would have had affinities to some extent with Kierkegaard's incarnational christianity. But Lewis described himself as a rationalist, he didn't advance to faith without asking questions, or as a leap in the dark, while Kierkegaard was a fideist. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.20.22.146 (talk) 14:04, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

"Revision" of Bunyan?

The article calls the Pilgrim's Regress a "revision" of Pilgrim's Progress. I don't think Lewis would have called it that; he seems to be very opposed to revisionism. The regress is more of a "response" or tribute, as "The Great Divorce" is on the Divine Comedy

I agree that revision is not the best word. To say it was modeled on The Pilgrim's Progress might be better. Lewis used it (The Pilgrims Progress) as a literary model. He also says in the preface to the third edition that the reader must not assume everything in it is autobiographical, and that he was attempting to generalise, not tell people about his own life, but describe an intellectual and spiritual journey he thought others might have travelled as well as him (perhaps because of shared influences from literature and place). He thought there were more that had travelled on the intellectual side along the same path as he had. According to William Griffin (in the quote below) Lewis opted for it as a model over several other dramas and poems, such as Everyman (a 15th Century Dutch play), The Dream of the Rood (an Old English Poem), The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman (an allegorical poem) by William Langland.

Lewis also described it to his publisher J.M. Dent as "a kind of Bunyan up to date."

"He had tried to write it in prose a few years before, he had tried it in verse a few months before; he wanted to try again to record his conversion from atheism to Christianity in some literary way. His passage had indeed been pilgrimage, albeit an interior one, and pilgrimage literature was no stranger to him....Pilgrimage was indeed the motif Lewis was looking for, but a dramatic model was of no use to him...There was also The Pilgrim's Progress, a prose allegory published in 1678. The dream-vision would be a far better model than drama; it would allow for the many use of allegory. Lewis could move backward and forward in time without respect to causality. He could fabricate the incidents of the allegory in such a way that they had one meaning for the characters and an additional meaning, perhaps several meanings, for the reader. What was philosophically complex in his own pilgrimage, therefore, Lewis felt he could make ridiculously simple and not a little interesting."

"Personified and prancing about allegories like Piers Plowman and The Pilgrim's Progress...were characters like Death and Good Deeds, abstractions of a sort he was sure he could use in his own work...If Langland could invent Lady Holychurch to stand for Christianity, then he could create Mother Kirk...

"The central character of an allegory was usually the author himself and, as that author fervently hoped, a multitude of readers would identify themselves with that character...Bunyan was Christian as he set out on the sort of journey all puritans could understand. And Lewis was John, the twentieth-century pilgrim who would be drawn inexorably towards the island and mountain of his desires. In a sense, he began his work where Bunyan left off. Christian had to face every temptation the 17th century had to offer; John, setting out from Puritania, met, first of all, the 18th Century in the character of Mr Enlightenment; in the next 72 chapters he would meet personifications of every philosophical, literary, and political movement from that time right down to the 1930s. (William Griffin - The Authentic Voice)" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.20.22.146 (talk) 22:49, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

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Initially panned by critics???

Sounds a bit strong. Which critics, reviewers "panned" it? Would it not be better to say it got a mixed reception, and a couple of examples? It does seem to be the case that it did not sell many copies at first. But it received a good review in the Times Literary Suppliment (July 6 1933) and also in New York Times Book Review in 1935. The last paragraph needs corrected / balanced. And I agree there is too much about ML-J in it.

I've gone ahead and changed it to "received mixed reviews" and taken out the Martyn Lloyd Jones material which seemed only relevant as a positive appraisal. But even initially the literary reviews where not entirely negative (as the word "panned" suggested)

Nordic Viking Culture sentence

This seems like original research, and / or incorrect interpretation and should be removed if a citation is not provided. It may have been more a difficult association to articulate given the varied literary influences Lewis was receptive to. Lewis credited the Nordic Myths with a giving him a sense of "Northerness", not nothingness (nihilism)! He didn't associate Nazism with Nordic culture, he recognised that Nazism (for its own political ends) sometimes attempted to draw on Nordic Culture, and use figures from Nordic Mythology, a gimmick Lewis very much disliked. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.20.22.146 (talk) 15:24, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

I have taken out the reference of Nordic / Viking culture in this paragraph, not because Norse culture had no influence on Lewis, it did, but because it is incorrect to say he associated that with Nihilism. It may be more difficult to articulate in a few sentences.

A full list of the figures John meets?

What about a full list of the figures John meets on his journey? I have edited the article to mention a few. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.20.22.146 (talk) 00:16, 22 May 2014 (UTC)