The Allegory of Love

First published in 1936, this work of literary criticism traces two intertwined developments across several centuries of European literature: the rise of the sentiment known as courtly love and the evolution of the allegorical method. C. S. Lewis, then an Oxford scholar specializing in medieval and Renaissance literature, argues that these two strands converged to produce the allegorical love poetry of the Middle Ages, a tradition that modern readers dismiss as artificial but that in fact shaped the foundations of Western romantic feeling. The study follows this tradition from its emergence in eleventh-century Provence through its greatest achievements in the Romance of the Rose and Chaucer, its transformation in the fifteenth century, and its culmination in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene.

Lewis opens by acknowledging that allegorical love poetry, with its personified abstractions and submissive lovers kneeling before cruel ladies, repels modern readers. He insists, however, that the tradition cannot be dismissed as a literary curiosity. What seems natural about romantic love in the modern West is actually a specific historical development that began in eleventh-century Provence. French Troubadour poetry introduced a conception of love defined by four marks: Humility, in which the lover abases himself before the lady as a feudal vassal; Courtesy, in which love and refined manners are inseparable; Adultery, in which the beloved is normally another man's wife; and the Religion of Love, in which the god Amor is worshipped with quasi-religious devotion. Lewis contends that this conception had no precedent in classical antiquity, where love was treated as merry sensuality, domestic comfort, or tragic madness. He rejects theories tracing courtly love to Germanic reverence for women or to the cult of the Virgin Mary, and argues that while the social conditions of Provençal courts come close to explaining the phenomenon, something in the new feeling remains unexplained.

Two factors ensured this love would be adulterous. Feudal marriages were purely utilitarian, so any idealization of passion had to begin outside marriage. Moreover, the medieval Church taught that ardent desire, even for one's own spouse, was morally suspect. The result was a deep cleavage between the values of court and Church that Lewis calls the most striking feature of medieval sentiment. The Religion of Love arose partly from Ovid's mock-worship of Amor, partly from the transfer of feudal and religious emotions to the erotic sphere, and partly as a deliberate parody of Christianity.

Lewis examines Chrétien de Troyes as the poet who fused Arthurian romance with the new love sentiment. He contrasts the early Erec, where love follows archaic patterns, with the later Lancelot, in which the hero's momentary hesitation before mounting a cart of shame earns the Queen's merciless rejection. Lewis observes that Chrétien's psychological passages almost invariably slip into allegory: indecision becomes a debate between Reason and Love. He concludes that allegory is "the subjectivism of an objective age," the only available method for rendering inner experience visible. He also analyzes Andreas Capellanus's De Arte Honeste Amandi, a Latin prose treatise that codifies the rules of courtly love, declares love and marriage incompatible, and yet ends with a dramatic palinode urging the reader to abstain from love entirely.

The second chapter traces the independent history of allegory. Lewis distinguishes allegory from symbolism: the allegorist starts with immaterial realities and invents visible fictions to express them, while the symbolist starts with the visible world and reads it as a copy of an invisible archetype. He traces a drift toward allegory in post-Virgilian Latin poetry, showing that the traditional Olympian gods were becoming mere personifications of psychological states while abstract personifications were gaining the gravity formerly reserved for real deities. Behind this double movement Lewis detects two great changes in the ancient world: the advance of monotheism and a moral revolution that made people acutely conscious of the divided will. This experience of inner conflict, he argues, is the root of all allegory. The gaze turned inward discovers not a unified character but contending forces that can be described only through personification. Lewis judges Prudentius's Psychomachia, the first fully developed allegorical poem, as an important symptom rather than a satisfying work of art, and argues that the journey, not the pitched battle, is the natural allegorical form for inner experience. A crucial argument emerges: the allegorization of the pagan gods preserved them for later imaginative use, providing a "sleeping-place" where they survived until they could be enjoyed as acknowledged myth.

Lewis devotes special attention to the twelfth-century school of Chartres, whose Platonic naturalism reverenced Nature as the vicar of God. These thinkers attempted to reunite the courtly and religious ideals, enlarged the scope of allegory beyond narrow ethical schemes, and enriched it with the powerful figure of personified Nature, even though their attempted reconciliation between religion and courtesy soon came undone.

The third chapter analyzes the Romance of the Rose. Lewis argues that Guillaume de Lorris, the poem's first author, stripped away fantastic adventures and presented courtly passion exclusively through allegory. The Lady is abolished as a character and distributed among personifications: Bialacoil ("fair welcome") is her natural friendliness, Danger is her pride and rebuff, Shame is concern for reputation, and Venus represents natural sexual passion. Lewis praises Guillaume's psychological subtlety, claiming that the allegory gives intimate knowledge of the heroine even though she never appears as a character. Jean de Meun's massive continuation Lewis characterizes as brilliant but formless, a work that repeatedly collapses the allegory into encyclopedic digressions on philosophy, science, and satire, yet contains scattered excellences including a powerful hymn to Nature and a mystical passage on eternity.

The chapter on Geoffrey Chaucer reinterprets him as primarily a poet of courtly love. Lewis argues that Chaucer's great achievement in Troilus and Criseyde was to present directly, without allegory, the inner experience that Guillaume de Lorris could render only through personification. He demonstrates that Troilus's love story follows the same structural pattern as the Romance of the Rose and provides an extended analysis of Criseyde as a woman governed by fear, whose need for protection drives both her sincere love and her later betrayal. Lewis concludes that Troilus brings the romance of adultery to the very frontiers of the romance of marriage, and that Chaucer's final palinode, recalling readers from human to divine love, is genuinely medieval rather than ironic.

A chapter on John Gower and Thomas Usk follows, praising Gower's Confessio Amantis for its ingenious structure and its deepest subject: the death of love, as an aging lover gradually reconciles himself to the truth that passion must yield to age. Lewis then surveys the period between Chaucer and Spenser, tracing both the decay of allegorical convention and a vital transformation through the fusion of homiletic allegory (the Psychomachia tradition of virtues battling vices) with erotic allegory (the Romance of the Rose tradition), producing poems that treat human life more broadly and open the way to free imaginative creation. He gives his most enthusiastic treatment to the Echecs Amoureux, praising its sunshine and charity, and finds in Stephen Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure a stumbling but visionary attempt to combine allegory with chivalrous romance on the scale Spenser would later achieve.

The final chapter argues that The Faerie Queene, while formally descended from the Italian romantic epic of Matteo Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso, completes the medieval allegorical tradition. Lewis distinguishes Spenser's poem from its Italian models: where the Italians have the actual Mediterranean world beneath their fantastic adventures, Spenser's deeper levels are the world of popular imagination and the primitive mind with its fundamental antitheses of Light and Darkness, Life and Death, Nature and Art. He demonstrates the systematic contrast between the Bower of Bliss, where art strives to outdo nature, and the Garden of Adonis, where everything grows by the divine word, arguing that the Bower depicts not passion but diseased appetite, voyeurism, and paralysis of will. Lewis analyzes the poem book by book, giving particular attention to Books III and IV as the final struggle between the romance of marriage and the romance of adultery. Britomart's rescue of Amoret from Busirane's prison is the rescue of love from the courtly tradition that had imprisoned it for centuries. The Mutabilitie cantos present the conflict of Change and Permanence resolved by Nature's verdict that change is the mode in which permanence expresses itself. Lewis concludes by claiming that the experience of reading The Faerie Queene is like living itself, with its clashing antitheses resolving into higher unities. Spenser, he argues, is the great mediator between the Middle Ages and the modern poets, and one of the founders of the romantic conception of marriage that replaced courtly adultery as the basis of European love literature.