I tried to make my way through “The Pilgrim’s Regress” again, armed with “Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C. S. Lewis’ Pilgrim’s Regress.” I thought it would help me unravel all the esoteric allegories. I’d love to report that it did, but … nope. I still only partly understand who Mr. Sensible and the city of Eschropolis are supposed to represent.

Too bad, because that allegory is a unique narrative about how one extraordinary person navigated the trendy philosophies at work in the world and made it to mere Christianity. The fact that Lewis wrote the entire book in a short period of time almost immediately after his conversion shows both a great mind and a generous nature at work. Unfortunately, that haste is also one of the reasons that “Pilgrim’s Regress” is impossible for many to make out. Lewis remarked later that the book was needlessly obscure and subjective.

For those that haven’t picked it up in a while, or ever, “Pilgrim’s Regress” is in the form of a dream and follows the narrative of a sort of everyman individual named John as his spiritual life unfolds. Subtitled “An Allegorical Apology for Christianity Reason and Romanticism,” the book follows John from the first Sunday-School-calibre information about God to his Christian conversion and beyond. After his baptism, John has to face all of the schools of thought that had contributed wrongfully to his spiritual state — this is the ‘regress’ in the title — to eventually combat the demons that lay at the heart of them.

It could be a powerful weapon in understanding how the world’s culture entrapped so many in the last century and give us one great thinker’s prescription for how Christian victory is possible.

The problem with the book, as Lewis acknowledged later, is that he wasn’t clear enough about what those trends of thought were. When Lewis has John encounter a bohemian character named Mr. Halfways, his sanguine daughter Media Halfways and his angry son Gus Halfways, Lewis assumes:

1. that we will be able to figure out that Mr. Halfways is the sort of idealistic spirit of the early 1900’s that Lewis called Romanticism, that Media Halfways is that spirit expressed in art, music and poetry, and that Gus is the angry off-shoot of beatnik poetry and abstract art.
2. that we will know what Romanticism, Romanticist culture and the beatnik subculture were all about.

The latter issue is just a matter of education, and we could all feel worse that we’re not up to snuff on this until we remember that C. S. Lewis had degrees in literature and philosophy from Oxford and knew more than we could be expected to. The former issue stems from a mistake that Lewis made. In an afterword written ten years after “Regress” came out, Lewis said:

There were two causes, I now realize, 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. …

The second cause of obscurity was the (unintentionally) ‘private’ meaning I then gave to the word ‘Romanticism’.

So enough about Lewis’ mistakes, what about this “Guidebook”? Well, all I can say is that a person would need a guidebook to make it through the guidebook.

It’s just downright weird to me that when the “Guidebook” author undertakes to interpret the difficult character of Mr. Sensible, for example, she translates all of the classical Greek quotations, restates obvious parts of the chapter and then says, “Lewis wrote to his American correspondent that Mr. Sensible is the type of person of which Montaigne was the best literary specimen.” Who? I hope I’m not a complete dunce, but replacing one esoteric name with another is like a dictionary that offers to explain the word ‘Brobdignagian” by telling me to see “antidisestablishmentarianism.”

So what can you do? I’ve already taken more words than I meant to with this. It just seems like a bit of a shame to me, that’s all. And I think there’s still room for the book that this “Guidebook” should have been. Because there’s still a great need for the book that “Pilgrim’s Regress” is, if only someone could translate it for the rest of us.