by Michael Ward
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sometimes disturbing brilliance, takes for granted that this, our habitual linguistic environment, is inherently morally fragile, and thus a mark of fallen-ness. The chapters in the Preface in which he anatomises the self-deception, self-imaging, and increasing self-isolation of the fallen consciousness precisely by anatomising the rhetoric of the first post-Fall speakers (angelic and human) show how closely connected his whole idea of the speaking self is to assumptions about the fractured mode of consciousness that results from the Fall. And this highlights the difficulty of the Miltonic enterprise as Lewis has defined it. If the point of the poem is to provide a rationale for the rebellion of Adam against divine commandment, it cannot be done in the chosen mode—a genre that (assuming Lewis’s typology of secondary epic) explores what it is that is “more important than happiness” and the emotional and imaginative implications of unavoidable loss. Lewis is right to say that the nature of Virgil’s work implies that future epic will in some sense or other be
“religious”;33 but it is perhaps not an unbearable paradox to point out that the narrative of the Fall is not a story about “religious” behaviour in any sense we can conceive, not about the painful negotiations of clear vocation and human ambivalence or confused desire that is part of a “Virgilian” religious-ness. It is Lewis’s own clarity and freshness on the subject of rhetoric that in the long run prompt the reader to suspect that Paradise Lost is in fact in these terms a rhetorical eccentricity, a work that cannot happily embody its goal in its form.
This does not mean—it should hardly need saying—that it is anything other than a great and inexhaustibly fascinating poem at any number of levels; it does mean that it leaves unresolved questions, even, perhaps especially, for readers who largely share Lewis’s own moral and spiritual world.
But the continuing appeal of the Preface must surely lie in just this sense that Lewis is using his analysis of Milton’s epic to say not only something about the character of criticism itself but something about the nature of self-aware speech, about the ethics of communication, about whether or not language is primarily about power. It belongs with his most significant work on what humanity is and what language does.
33. Lewis, Preface, 39.
11
C. S. Lewis on Allegory
Ad Putter 1
The main topic of this essay is a book that C. S. Lewis published in 1936, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition.2 I must confess to having an irrepressible prejudice in favour of Lewis the critic, and I really ought to have added the subtitle “Why I Like C. S. Lewis’s Criticism,” or “Why I Think C. S. Lewis Is One of the Finest Critics of Medieval Literature.”
However, sober titles have the advantage of disguising prejudice; and to complete the disguise I shall in due course take issue with some of the points made by him in The Allegory of Love.
But let me begin with the adulation that I hope will lead beyond itself to more interesting things. Lewis could write beautifully and sympatheti-cally, and I think the source of his perceptiveness was his close self-identification with the lives imagined and implied by the old books he studied.
I have it on good authority that Lewis’s lectures were just as entertaining as his writing. There are now not many people living who were taught by him, but one of the pleasures in preparing this essay was to talk to one of these people, John Burrow, who was an undergraduate in Oxford shortly after the war and there heard Lewis give the lectures that were eventually written up as The Discarded Image. The lectures dealt with the medieval and early modern worldview, and they were crowd-pullers. “One went to 1. Dr. Ad Putter is Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (Clarendon Press, 1995) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
2. Quotations from The Allegory of Love (1936) will be from a later edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).
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C. S. Lewis’s lectures,” John Burrow tells me; and that was at a time when there was no expectation either that students should attend lectures or that lectures should be appealing, with the result that many learned dons gave dry lectures to ever-dwindling cohorts of students. Lewis’s colleague J. R. R.
Tolkien was apparently one such don.
Both The Discarded Image and The Allegory of Love mapped areas of culture that seem quite remote from and uncongenial to the interests of modern readers. In The Discarded Image, that area is the way the world was explained before the advent of science as we now understand it; in The Allegory of Love, it is the allegorical tradition, and in particular allegorical love poetry. However, Lewis made himself so thoroughly at home in these alien territories and describes them so vividly that he speaks like an aboriginal of these distant lands. There was a kind of historical imagination and identification at work in his criticism that made him understand older forms of literature from the inside, as it were. In the conclusion to the inaugural lecture that he gave when he took up the Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance English, which the University of Cambridge created especially for him, he claimed that the reason why he could write about early English literature with special authority was that he was a “dinosaur,”3 one of the few remaining survivors from the days of yore. This superficially absurd claim was, I think, really a way of making light of the vast amount of learning and thinking you need to do in order to achieve genuine inwardness with the literature of an older period.
When you read many books from the Middle Ages you do, of course,
begin to feel at home in the period, and you also come to appreciate, as C. S. Lewis did, that the past is not really “dead” at all, and conversely that there is still much about us that is medieval. In The Discarded Image, that sense of continuity with the past does not come across quite as strongly as in The Allegory of Love, for the simple reason that in the former book Lewis was dealing with “discarded” old science, such as the theory of the four humours, the idea of the seven spheres of the planets with the earth at its centre, and so on. Yet in The Discarded Image, too, there are moments when a witty analogy undoes what Lewis called the “great change” from medieval to modern4—as when he cautions against the assumption that medieval people were woollier in their thinking than we are today:
At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer, nor
a wanderer. He was an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems.
3. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” Selected Literary Essays, ed. Hooper. Available online: https://archive.org/details/DeDescriptioneTemporum.
4. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 214.
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. . . There was nothing that medieval people liked, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions
I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.5
This is a characteristic example of Lewis’s wit. Imagine for a moment that a medieval author entered your work space and looked about for something valuable to take back to his own age. What would it be? Perhaps the radio?
The desk lamp? No, says Lewis, he would make off with your box of index cards (unfortunately, this example of a modern invention is now itself dated). Lewis’s imagination was a place where medieval and modern people met, and by introducing them to each other in this thought-experiment he also illuminates one of the many ways in which we continue to be medieval.
The medieval love of codification, as exemplified by the great Summas of scholastic theologians like Thomas Aquinas, is with us still; it afflicts many academics (myself included), and when some of these academics last used a card index it was perhaps to create something that medieval scribes first invented: the alphabetical index of names and topics for a boo
k (appearing for the first time towards the end of the thirteenth century).6
A more profound point to emerge from The Discarded Image is that our way of understanding the world, too, involves reliance on models, and that when we abandon such models it is not necessarily because new facts are discovered or old ones disproved, but because the old model is no longer elastic enough to accommodate new facts by minor adjustments and complications: “the human mind will not long endure such ever-increasing complications if once it has seen that some simpler conception can ‘save the appearances.’”7 Lewis sent his manuscript of The Discarded Image to Cambridge University Press in 1962 (the preface is dated July ‘62), the same year that Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published.8
Kuhn coined the phrase “paradigm shifts” to designate the adoption of new conceptual models, and historians and philosophers of science now credit Kuhn with the insight that scientific revolutions occur when existing paradigms become overstretched. In fact, it was C. S. Lewis who had the idea first, having floated it in (of all places) a series of undergraduate lectures on medieval literature.9
5. Ibid ., 218.
6. On the development of this and other finding tools, cf. Rouse and Rouse, Authentic Witnesses, 221–55.
7. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 219–20.
8. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
9. The point has been made by Edwards, “The Christian Intellectual in the Public Square: C. S. Lewis’s Enduring American Reception,” in C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and
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It is interesting that, like Kuhn, Lewis had arrived at this insight by acquainting himself with the ways of science. His own term for a set of in-terrelated ideas about the world, a “model,” was borrowed from physics, as he acknowledges;10 and one wishes that historians of science had stuck with it: it is simpler than “paradigm” and has the further advantage of suggesting the indirectness with which we “know” the world around us. I follow Lewis in putting inverted commas around the verb “know,” for the punctuation makes another important and related point. Most of our conceptions of the world—for instance, the fact that the earth is not at the centre of our universe but is a planet that circles the sun—has a kind of certainty for us that has less to do with our actual experience of life than with our trust in the prevailing “model.” So I “know” the earth goes round the sun with the same kind of assurance that underlay Geoffrey Chaucer’s knowledge that it was the other way around; and the same is true for all kinds of other things he
“knew” and we “know”—or trust we know.
There is therefore in Lewis no trace of that sense of intellectual superiority that even some very intelligent acquaintances of mine feel towards the medieval period—that “Dark Age of Superstition.” On the contrary, Lewis’s accounts of the stranger notions of the period are so compelling that one realizes how persuasive these notions must have been and indeed still are.
Take, for example, the doctrine of the four humours. Because of an imbal-ance of the humours, some people are choleric, others phlegmatic, others sanguine, and others melancholic. What is more, they look that way too: thus the sanguine person, cheerful and effusive, is a little chubbier and rud-dier in the face; the choleric man, fretful and rather short-tempered, is lean and has thin legs. Anyone who has read Lewis’s exposition of this theory with an open mind, and has looked at himself and others in the light of it, will find it difficult to resist the conclusion that the theory actually works.
It certainly works for me (I am mildly choleric, though working hard to restore a healthy balance of my humours).
In The Allegory of Love, Lewis is more explicit about his belief that the past is not a foreign country. Thus he makes it clear from the start that he is not interested in approaching allegorical love poetry as if were some dead relic from the past, and that his book should not be read as a study in historical alterity:
The study of this whole tradition may seem, at first sight, to
be but one more example of that itch for “revival,” that refusal
to leave any corpse ungalvanized, which is one of the more
Legacy, vol. IV, ed. Edwards, 1–18 (9).
10. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 218.
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distressing accidents of scholarship. But such a view would be
superficial. Humanity does not pass through phases as a train
passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of
always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we
have been, in some sort we are still. Neither the form nor the
sentiment of this old poetry has passed away without leaving
indelible traces on our minds.11
C. S. Lewis was not in the business of galvanizing corpses; there is more than enough of that already in modern scholarship, as he ruefully noted. The business he practised was rather that of enabling us to see the connections between what we were in the past and what we are today.
To show Lewis at work, I would like to present a couple of examples of apparently unfamiliar moments and characters from medieval literature, and then give his comments on them. The first example is from Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier de la charrette (c. 1180). The hero of this romance, Lancelot, is completely devoted to Queen Guinevere, who has been abducted by the dastardly Meleagant. On his quest to find her, Lancelot comes across a dwarf driving a cart normally used to transport criminals. When Lancelot asks if he has seen the queen, the dwarf replies that he might be able to find her if he gets into the dwarf ’s disreputable cart. Lancelot hesitates briefly, and Chrétien explains what goes on in Lancelot’s mind during that moment of hesitation:
Before he climbs in, the knight hesitates merely for two steps; but it was unfortunate for him that he did so and unfortunate that
his fear of shame stopped him from jumping in at once, for he
will rue the consequences. But Reason, who is at odds with Love,
tells him to avoid getting in, warning and instructing him to do
and engage in nothing that might bring him shame or reproach.
Reason, who dares tell him this, is not in the heart but the mouth; but Love, who bids and urges him to climb quickly into the cart,
is enclosed within his heart. It being Love’s wish, he jumps in re-gardless of the shame, since Love commands and wills it.12
Modern readers are likely to find this mini-personification allegory rather stilted and artificial. We have found other ways of expressing the point that Chrétien is trying to make here. Lancelot, as we might put it today, is torn between conflicting impulses and imperatives: on the one hand he loves the queen, and so wants to get into the cart that will take him to her; but on the other hand he is concerned for his reputation, and this concern 11. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 1.
12. Translation from Owen, Arthurian Romances, 189.
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holds him back. In psychological jargon, Lancelot’s self is briefly divided, one part wanting one thing, another part something else. But Chrétien de Troyes did not have such jargon at his disposal, and, since writers before him were not much given to exploring the inner life, C. S. Lewis was right to insist on the novelty of what Chrétien was doing:
Chrétien de Troyes, judged by modern standards, is on the
whole an objective poet. The adventures still occupy the greater
part of his stories. By the standard of his own time, on the other hand, he must have appeared strikingly subjective. The space
devoted to action that goes forward only in the souls of his char-
acters was probably beyond all medieval precedent.13
And that innovativeness has important consequences. When writers begin to explore conflicts within the soul in stories that traditionally concern conflicts in th
e outer world, inner conflict will necessarily find expression in the language of outer conflict. In this particular case, the language is that of a personification allegory in which one “person,” Reason, demands one thing from Lancelot, while another “person,” Love, demands the opposite.
It is, writes Lewis, “as if the insensible could not yet knock on the doors of the poetic consciousness without transforming itself into the likeness of the sensible: as if men could not easily grasp the reality of moods and emotions without transforming them into shadowy persons. Allegory, besides being many other things, is the subjectivism of an objective age.”14 No-one could have put that better than Lewis did, and no critic has better equipped us to appreciate Chrétien’s allegorical flights of fancy. Such an appreciation not only involves imagining oneself back in the twelfth century, in the position of a writer for whom precedents for literary “subjectivism” were limited; it also involves looking forward from that point in time to see the future of Chrétien’s precocious attempts to psychologise action. Doing both these things enabled Lewis at once to measure the great divide between the modern novelist and the twelfth-century poet and to bridge that divide by recognizing the essential kinship between the two. In Lewis’s words, Chrétien
