LITMIR.BIZ

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as the place where romantic human passions ought to have their highest expression. Still, Lewis has his readers consider a few more phases in the transition from the idealization of adultery to God’s ideal—in Christian marriage—as the proper place, the God-given place, to express and find fulfillment for one’s earthly passions.

      For example, Lewis observes that John Gower (1330–1408) is first among these transitional poets, and Lewis says Gower’s significant contribution lies in his explicit concern for form and unity. The great contribution he makes to the literature of this age is to take seeming contrasts and weave them together into a coherent whole.²⁹ This feature in his writing resembles Christianity and how it works. If Christianity is true, and what is observed in the Scriptures is accurate, then existing tensions are often exacerbated in a fallen world. Estrangements lead to deeper estrangements and alienations proliferate unless they can be woven back together by grace. Thus, in Gower, as in Christianity, we see reconciled transcendence and immanence. Eternity can be encountered in mutability and God’s sovereignty and human free will may be harmonized and reconciled. So too, concord can be found between the genders: male and female can be made into one. The universe, created by the triune God, is a place where unity and diversity can coexist. This transition step found in Gower is important in the movement from courtly love to the Spenserian reconciliation 29 Lewis, 198–99. uniting passion and marital love with great literary success. Spenser, inheritor of all that has come before him, will rescue marriage from the challenge of courtly love and the practice of adultery. So Gower is an important link in the chain from Chaucer to Spenser.

      Lewis again reminds his readers, “There are few absolute beginnings in literary history, but there is endless transformation.”³⁰ While Lewis mentions many writers, the following will be sufficient to show that he keeps to his task. He is explaining how the literature of the Middle Ages went through incremental changes using allegory to connect passion and marriage.

      The King’s Quair is the next highlighted by Lewis, and of this work Lewis wrote that James I of Scotland (1394–1437) “sat down to write what most emphatically deserves to be called ‘sum newe thing.’”³¹ This is because James wrote of his own love for the woman who became his wife. Lewis adds that in this work one sees clearly such transition that “As the love-longing becomes more cheerful it also becomes more moral.”³² Lewis describes The King’s Quair as the first modern book of love. Next, follows John Ludgate (c. 1371–1449) who wrote The Temple of Glas, in which the hero appeals to Venus that she might make a way not to “adultery but to marriage.”³³ In a passage that makes the heart sink, Lewis descries the plight of young women in all times—be it in the Middle Ages, or today—who are trapped in the bondage of human trafficking, or groped by predators. Ludgate pleads on behalf of “young girls forced into marriage to mend their father’s estates, and for yet younger and more deeply wronged oblates, snatched from the nursery to the cloister for the good of their father’s souls.”³⁴ This text is so contemporary. Each age has those who have drifted from a traditional view of marriage. The abusers become self-referential and thereby tend toward utilitarianism. In denying the humanity of others, their own is unwittingly diminished. The abuses against conjugal fidelity have underscored the need for some kind of restoration in every age. Again, this is a reason why the path charted in The Allegory of Love is so important, and in some ways, so contemporary.

      In William Nevill’s (1497–1545) The Castle of Pleasure, the literary form develops into what Lewis calls “a moral allegory.”³⁵ With Nevill, Lewis notes, “What was originally a moral necessity is becoming a structural characteristic” and “The love which he celebrates is a perfectly respectable love, ending in marriage.”³⁶ The change is duly noted and the way is paved for Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

       Spenser’s Goal for The Fairie Queene

      The Fairie Queene was written to give pleasure to Spenser’s readers. Nevertheless, Lewis summarizes the author’s purpose: “The goal of love which Spenser here celebrates is lawful, carnal fruition within marriage.”³⁷ To accomplish this, Spenser utilized the influence of the Italian epic. In fact, Lewis says, “‘Influence’ is too weak a word for the relation which exists between the Italian epic and The Faerie Queene.”³⁸ The style was best used by Ariosto and even more by Boiardo’s Orlando Furioso (“The Madness of Roland”) and the Innamorato. Supreme characteristics of this genre are “The speed, the pell-mell of episodes, the crazy carnival jollity of Boiardo [which] are his very essence.”³⁹

      Lewis says the formula is to take any number of chivalrous romances and arrange such a series of coincidences that they interrupt one another every few pages. There is no rest. The action gives way to new and constant twists and adventure. For a popular, modern comparison, the action of an Indiana Jones movie would best capture something of the flavor. In addition, Spenser co-opts the Italian epic—a literary form already so beloved and popular in his day—for an English audience, and his readers were quick 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

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