Scott Freeman

Reading C.S.: The Allegory of Love, Rehabilitations and Other Essays, and The Personal Heresy

Reading through C.S. Lewis chronologically immediately brings some obvious truths to the fore: not all of his works were meant to be read by a general audience. Walter Hooper in his definitive account of the life and works of Lewis does not even include some of these as individual entries. Over the past several days I have endeavored to read three of those books with somewhat mixed results.

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition

In this 1936 work Lewis sets out to discuss the allegory and its rise beginning in 12th century popular literature. The first two chapters were surprisingly fascinating reads. In chapter one Lewis recounts the appearance of courtly love in literary circles.

This courtly love, according to Lewis, was characterized by four elements: Humility, Courtesy, Adultery and the Religion of Love. His argument, a forceful one, was that courtly love and its emergence on the scene was a revolution in literature that ultimately would dwarf even the Renaissance.

Prior to this advent of courtly love there was *no* romantic passion that was a mark of literature. Patriarchal society would preclude such self-sacrifice. In addition, when passion was viewed as a sin then even the consummation of marital bonds was considered to be evil.

In chapter two he recounts a similar rise in the utilization of allegory. In chapter 3 I was able to hang on as he gives a brilliant synopsis of The Romance of The Rose, his telling likely more riveting than the original poem. I struggled through his take on Chaucer, barely following him as he justified omitting The Canterbury Tales from his discussion.

As he weaved on through the rest of Medieval tradition I about pulled my hair out. Most frustrating of all were his frequent lapses into Greek and Latin without so much as an interpretive footnote.

Again, the first two chapters were highly informative but I was not part of his target audience for this. However, it is an important book in his canon when you consider the large role that allegory plays into his work. If you are into Literary Criticism then you might give it an A. As for me, it ekes out a C.

Lewis’ next work would appear two years later as Out of the Silent Planet. I will discuss that book in a separate entry.

Lewis would release two books in 1939 both considered minor works within his collection. As a result I will give them simply a passing mention.

Rehabilitations and Other Essays is largely a further excursion into literary criticism. The first two essays are a defense of Shelley and William Morris, two Romantic poets. He then moves into two essays defending the curriculum at Oxford. More interesting was his take on low-brow literature in chapter 5 which gave me a bit of comfort for some of my literary tastes. The best passage, however, was in his ninth and final essay on Christianity and Literature and is certainly a prophetic denouncement of the current Christian marketplace:

We are familiar, no doubt, with the expression ‘Christian Art,’ by which people usually mean Art that represents Biblical or hagiological scenes, and there is, in this sense, a fair amount of ‘Christian Literature.’ But I question whether it has any literary qualities peculiar to itself. The rules for writing a good passion play or a good devotional lyric are simply the rules for writing tragedy or lyric in general: success in sacred literature depends on the same qualities of structure, suspense, variety, diction, and the like which secure success in secular literature. And if we enlarge the idea of Christian Literature to include not only literature on sacred themes but all that is written by Christians for Christians to read, then, I think, Christian Literature can exist only in the same sense in which Christian cookery might exist. It would be possible, and it might be edifying, to write a Christian cookery book. Such a book would exclude dishes whose preparation involves unnecessary human labour or animal suffering, and dishes excessively luxurious. But there could be nothing specifically Christian about the actually cooking of the dishes included. Boiling an egg is the same process whether you are a Christian or a Pagan. In the same way, literature written by Christians for Christians would have to avoid mendacity, cruelty, blasphemy, pornography and the like, and it would aim at edification in so far as edification was proper to the kind of work in hand. But whatever it chose to do would have to be done by the means common to all literature; it could succeed or fail only by the same excellences and faults as all literature; and its literary success or failure would never be the same thing as its obedience or disobedience to Christian principles.

The Personal Heresy: A Controversy is a series of essays written back and forth between Lewis and E.M.W. Tillyard over a poet’s state of mind. If that sounds mind-numbingly boring, rest assured that it is. Lewis disagreed with Tillyard’s contention that it is the poet’s state of mind that counts in understanding the heart of poetry. To Lewis, the poet in not within the poem itself. They argue that.

Luckily, the next step in Lewis’ career will continue his prolific period of great works which had begun the previous year with the first entry in his Science Fiction trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet. But that is a different entry.