Into the Wardrobe

I like the book and it is very specific about everything except the role of the Landlord's son. Any thoughts?

I read the book a couple of years ago and I have always been of the opinion that it's one of Lewis's more underrated books. I never read The Pilgrim's Progress, so I can't comment on that. I do think, though, that the main character of The Pilgrim's Regress was not pursuing some abstract concept of beauty, but trying to recapture a specific apprehension of the Beautiful from his childhood. I think the book is a better explication of Lewis's concept of Joy, and it's role in his salvation and salvation in general, than Surprised by Joy, the book that is usually referenced for discussions of this topic.

I don't think Pilgrim's Regress is about trying to correct Bunyan himself; it seems to be about Lewis' own story. I don't know how much reading of Puritan theologians he might have done. I suspect that his title and the use of the term Puritania has more to do with borrowing from the popular notion of what Puritanism was about.

Lewis' character is leaving Puritania, which has been said to be a picture of the Christianity of Lewis' youth, a particularly Protestant Anglican view, vehemently anti-papal and low-church (although not the congregationalism of the separatist Puritans). Lewis, as an adult, came to appreciate a more high-church Christianity, for the rythm established by the seasons of the Church Year, and for symbols, ecclesiastical wardrobe, candles, colors, and so on. In the meantime, if you've read Suprised by Joy, you're aware that his own journey took him from his childhood faith to atheism and back. I have a feeling that simply reading Surprised by Joy can shed a lot of light upon the journey through Pilgrim's Regress.

Lewis is not trying to correct Bunyan, as I see it. Rather than correcting Bunyan, he is describing a very different journey, albeit one with the same goal.

Pilgrim's Regress is firmly rooted in the early twentieth century. The characters John meets represent the philosophies and world views peculiar to that time, and many would have been completely unknown to Bunyan. Some of them, for example those we meet in Book Three, "Through Darkest Zeitgeisthiem", begin to be unfamiliar to us, less than one hundred years later.

Humphrey Carpenter has an excellent bit of exposition/criticism on Regress, where Lewis was at, and what it meant in

:)

When Pilgrims' Regress was 1st published some reviewers thought that it was written by a Catholic. Other readers found it hard to understand. Lewis tried to remedy this by adding a preface and chapter headings to later editions of the book.