As an admirer of the venerable scholar, C.S. Lewis, I will attempt an integral view of C.S. Lewis’s “The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936)”, “Studies in Words (1960)”, and “The Four Loves (1960)” attempting a coherent doctrinal inquiry into language, literary history, and the taxonomy of human affection.
My hope is to do more book reviews and synthesis concerning Dr. Lewis’s works and other scholars of his caliber.
I preface as a key to the exacting mind of Dr. Lewis a triadic view of three of his works which demonstrate Lewis’s methodological precision summed as philological rigor underpinning accurate literary exegesis, which in turn informs theological anthropology.
In The Allegory of Love, Lewis identifies the abrupt emergence of courtly love in late eleventh-century Languedoc. He enumerates its four constitutive marks: humility, courtesy, adultery, and the religion of love. Lewis writes, “The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. There is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady’s ‘man’. He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord’. The whole attitude has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’.”
This feudalisation, drawing on troubadour poetry, Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot, and Andreas Capellanus’s “De Arte Honeste Amandi”, contrasts sharply with classical depictions of love as sensual indulgence or tragic madness. Allegory serves as the necessary vehicle, described as “the subjectivism of an objective age,” enabling the externalization of inner psychological conflict through personification, as refined in Prudentius’s Psychomachia and the Chartres Platonists such as Alanus ab Insulis’s De Planctu Naturae. “The Roman de la Rose” exemplifies their synthesis, with Guillaume de Lorris’s dream-vision and Jean de Meun’s encyclopedic continuation. Chaucer adapts these forms in Troilus and Criseyde, while Spenser’s Faerie Queene resolves the tradition by subordinating courtly adultery to virtuous marriage, as seen in Britomart’s chastity and the Mutability cantos.
C.S.’s “Studies in Words” supplies the lexical foundation for such literary analysis. Lewis warns against the “dangerous sense,” the modern connotation unconsciously imposed upon historical texts, which distorts interpretation of medieval and classical sources. He introduces “verbicide,” the murder of words through inflation, partisan appropriation, or evaluative drift: “A skillful doctor of words will pronounce the disease to be mortal at the moment when the word in question begins to harbour the adjectival parasites real or true.” Semantic change must be traced with philological care, distinguishing lexical from speaker meaning, to avoid anachronistic readings of terms central to courtly literature—courtesy, love, nature—whose medieval senses differ profoundly from contemporary usage. Recovery of original meanings, including Latin and Old French roots, is prerequisite to faithful exegesis of the texts Lewis examines in The Allegory of Love.
The Four Loves furnishes the theological capstone. Lewis classifies affection, friendship, Eros, and charity. On romantic love he notes “an unmistakable continuity connects the Provençal love song with the love poetry of the later Middle Ages, and thence with that of the present day,” acknowledging Eros as potentially ennobling yet perilous. “Eros ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god.” Natural loves, including the idealized passion of courtly tradition, become demonic when divinized; they achieve proper order only when subordinated to charity, the supernatural love modeled on divine agape.
Collectively these works exhibit Lewis’s unified intellect: lexical exactitude prevents misreading of literary tradition, while both disciplines reveal the moral and spiritual dynamics of human affection. His scholarship moves from semantic analysis through historical literary forms to theological discernment, illuminating how medieval innovations in sentiment and expression continue to shape Western understandings of love, language, and the soul’s orientation toward the transcendent.
This is only a mere synthesis underscoring the interdependence of philology, literary history, and Christian anthropology found in Lewis’s writings and talks.
