The Pilgrim’s Regress by C.S. Lewis is a strange book.

Regress is an allegorical journey of John, from atheism to idealism to pantheism to theism to Christianity. Lewis loosely illustrates his coming to the Christian faith in this manner, and he uses his experience in each of these theologies to describe what they are like.

Allegories are often used to teach the effects of certain scenarios. I felt as though I needed to understand some of the ideas the author was getting at before I could appreciate the allegory. Some parts of the book I chuckled at and understood, but others I felt I was missing a point. In the afterward to this book, published after the 3rd edition and 10 years after the initial publishing, Lewis admits that the book is too vague and that he assumes most atheists come to Christianity through the same roundabout way that he did.

The author does help the reader somewhat by including a one-line scrawl across the top of each page. The hints helped. A better knowledge of Latin and a smattering of Greek would have also helped, as he uses both in dealing with Mr. Sensible, a character representing the hatred of systematic reasoning.

Some of Lewis’s insights are made through the genealogy of some of the characters. The representatives of communism and fascism are children of a warrior named Savage. Mr. Enlightenment sires Freudianism with one wife and Neo-Angularism, Neo-Classicism, and Neo-Humanism with another.

Other insights that struck me include the character Reason who only deals with things that can be perceived. The black hole that is clearly analogous to Hell is God’s tourniquet for losing everything to evil, for evil cannot govern itself. I was disappointed in “The Man” allegory of Christ, who helps John and his companion Vertue up the wall of a valley. The sacrifice of Aslan in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was a much more satisfying allegory.

The best part of this book is one of the themes, that if you obtain what you desire, and you are still desiring more, then what you obtained wasn’t really what you desired. That was cool. It reminded me of my older daughter and her desires for Build-a-Bear. :)

The title of this book is a play off of The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. I’ve not read that book, and I am curious if reading that book would have helped understand some elements in Regress.