to embrace and love him. Consequently, what Spenser had to say about marriage was popularized and spread like wildfire.
Lewis observed that The Faerie Queene “is full of marriages.”40 These marriages are laudable, celebrated, and passionate. The image inculcated into the popular culture affected change for the good. This is the very point Lewis is making in The Allegory of Love. Lewis, as an academic, was gaining an ear and an eye for something of the biblical ideal. He did not compromise his craft to preach a sermon, but his careful research and convincing writing gained credit for the biblical ideal in a unique way. He realized that his scholarship could be a vehicle to help others take notice of the pleasures God intended for marriage.
Lewis took delight in this material, and elsewhere says:
Spenser was certainly, in his own way, a religious man. And also a religious poet. But the deepest, most spontaneous, most ubiquitous devotion of that poet goes out to God, not as the One of Plotinus, not as the Calvinists’ predestinator, not even as the Incarnate Redeemer, but as “the glad Creator,” the fashioner of flower and forest and river, of excellent trout and pike, of months and seasons, of beautiful women and “lovely knights,” of love and marriage, of sun, moon, and planets, of angels, above all of light. He sees the creatures, in Charles Williams’ phrase, as “illustrious with being.”41
Lewis uses Spenser’s vision of life to awaken in his readers a similar longing and desire. From here, one sees some of the Spenserian ideals manifesting themselves in a variety of ways in Lewis’s other works. A few poignant examples might make the case: the awakening of love and the hope for passion between the once psychologically estranged Mark and Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength, Lewis’s speculation about unfallen sexuality in A Preface to Paradise Lost, ideas about Christian marriage expressed in Mere Christianity, as well as others developed in the text on Eros in The Four Loves.
On a Journey of Discovery
While this is no exhaustive study of what Lewis thought of marriage, it does take into account some significant texts from which readers might draw to discover Lewis’s thoughts on the topic.
Marriage, as Lewis would see it, is by holy design. Since this is the case, where the Scriptures are unambiguous, any compromise is likely to imperil the joys and benefits of marriage as God intended them. The continuity of history regarding marriage rests in marriage as the gift of God. And human passions are best realized in marriage when God is at the center of the relationship as prescribed by Scripture. If there is design for marriage—creation implies intention—then what God had in mind for marriage must ultimately be for his glory and purpose. That which is most pleasurable for his creatures is present in the design and made malignant when divorced from the design.
In The Allegory of Love, Lewis chronicled the cultural shift in attitudes whereby romantic passion found its highest expression in marriage. This account is heartening. While history seems to be a record of cultural entropy, nevertheless, in this matter of marriage, Lewis unpacked a positive change that occurred over time. Was this change for the better due to some kind of divine guidance? Was it due to human and cultural adjustment to reality? Were graces operational so that, at some level, the image of God was being restored? If this might be so, it is interesting to note that the return to a biblical ideal did not occur by means of a revival in response to fiery prophetic preaching. Rather, the continuity and change occurred slowly, over time. Literature kept the record of the cry of the human heart, longing for its ideal, embedded in its very soul since creation.
Lewis marks a change in the understanding of marriage over time: full romantic passion for another ought to be found in marriage, not outside of it. Moreover, while this has not been perfectly realized from a biblical perspective, the change that occurred in the Middle Ages was a change for the good. This historical instance should be a cause for hope no matter how things in the culture may look currently.
Lastly, Christian authors working through the fiction and poetry of the Middle Ages were the ones who rescued marriage from the threats of adultery and utility. It is important to note that a kind of cultural restoration of the dignity of marriage came from the fiction writers of the Middle Ages. It would appear that the poets did more to rescue marriage from its utility than the theologians did. If this is so, it might be advantageous to consider the use of the arts to elevate marriage once again to its biblical idealization. In fact, while one could suggest the popular arts, in their wide range of expression, have done much to assault the biblical understanding of marriage, it might require the use of the arts to once again engage the imagination to visualize the restoration of the biblical ideal. It may be possible for artists to create in a way that popular culture once again thirsts for the pleasures of an archetypal design.
Lewis takes his readers on a journey to discover the glory of God’s ideal in marriage as it was traced in the developing literature of the Middle Ages. It is a journey as timely today as it was in the days of Chaucer and Spenser. In this way, Lewis as a faith-integrated Christian scholar provides an example of how sound scholarly work can function—as an apologetic for faith—speaking to the culture without preaching. In his personal life, we know that Lewis held marriage in high regard without neglecting the truth that even the best of marriages can have their ups and downs. This does not count against marriage; it only means that those who would make the best approximations to a good marriage must do so with eyes wide open. For example, in The Horse and His Boy, Shasta (Prince Cor) and Aravis argue throughout their adventure. And Lewis concludes the story realistically:
Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I’m afraid even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.42
Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Lewis was encouraging chaplains of the R.A.F. in their ministries to the airmen.
Public Domain image.
8 Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth, 1991), 207.
9 Cantor, 206.
10 Cantor, 214.
11 Cantor, 216.
12 Stephen Yandell, “The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image: C. S. Lewis as Medievalist” in C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy. Volume 4: Scholar, Teacher, and Public Intellectual, Bruce Edwards, ed. (Westport, CT: Prager, 2007), 126.
13 Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), 1.
14 Lewis, Of Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, 1966), 25.
15 Lewis states this concept explicitly in A Grief Observed, and in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer; but the idea occurs in all of his writing from his pre-Christian works up until his death.
16 Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956), 165–67.
17 Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 166. While Lewis sees the importance of allegory in medieval literature, he writes much about appropriate literary form, generally, as a framework for what an author wants to say. In A Preface to Paradise Lost he writes that we must remember that the man who writes a love sonnet not only loves the beloved, he also loves the sonnet. In Of
