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C. S. Lewis' Allegory of Love
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- Опубліковано 21 січ 2020
- His scholarly study of the poetical tradition of courtly love, from 11th century France to Edmund Spencer. It radically influenced our modern conception of romantic love.
thanks again, you're an outstanding teacher. liked and subscribed.
Dude, thank you SO much for this summary. The Allegory of Love is a very difficult book, and really requires such a huge familiarity with medieval literature to get. For my purposes, I just wanted to know what the core argument was, and to better understand how this whole courtly love tradition arose and how it has influenced us today. I have been looking and looking for a companion book to The Allegory of Love, but haven’t found one. Your explanation here is the best one I’ve found yet! Keep up the good work!!
such a kind thing to say! thank you. I have just started his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, coincidentally.
@@ColinForBooks Ok, interesting!
happy new year
Northrop Frye's collection of essays under the name Fables of Identity would provide a peculiar insight for modern readers, specially the one under the title Myth and Displacement.
He shows that the narrative genre is always grounded upon recurring topoi, the myths. As the expositive genre relies on the usage of symbols and its refinement (abstraction), so does the narrative genre on myths by displacing them under diferent circumstances (until the romantic period, writers were well aware of their ancient sources and references, contrarlly to the misconception that it was renaissance that rediscovered the ancient), the allegory being a crossover of both. Whenever narrative and exposition intertwine as it happens unevitably in allegory, it is a good idea to tell them apart while having a second read as a critic. In allegory, the ends are to instill morals by the means of a made-up narrative (as late fairy tale do), wich is much more an rethoric approach then poetic in one direction or dialetic in the other. I'm am not disowning rethoric or, in a more palatable and modern term, the act of preaching. Each aproach to a problem has its own place and time.
To understand the western roman Christian culture, one has to understand ancient paganism. Romanticism is a late development and was a very clever device in its origin. It is a long road from the fall of Rome at St. Augustin times to medieval Scholastic. The church has been progressivelly overburdened with the role of palying the state, so it had to act like one since Rome's fall. The Thomasian notion of "vices and virtues are made of the same stuff" was a remark on very pratical affairs on his times: how to turn man full of lust and not bound to civic life into an element of an medieval emerging order - chivalry. The solution is clever: not to kill the sensual yearning for love, but to transmute it into something diferent and virtuous. Freud may well have seen that trough the mist. Love should not seek saciety, but aim higher then passing pleasure. On the other hand, it seems not far fetched to say that pain was overlooked in that equation. And as Christ has been gradually removed out of the sight, we have those poets insisting in falling in love and suffer its pangs for the mere sake of writing poetry without even perceiving the cynism of that behavior. We may not say that of Dante, but what about Chaucer and Shakespeare?
I believe no one felt beter that dilema than Miguel de Cervantes.
By the way, minutes ago I finished reading Chaucer's Cantebury Tales prologue. That piece enlightened me on Bunyan: he was reacting to that tipical prince's mirror literature of renaissance. The description of the Parson also gave me the hint from where Chesterton may have produced forth his Father Brown from a literary perspective.
Last not least, thanks for the review and forgive me also my broken english. Not a native at all.
Brasilian regards.
thanks for your thoughtful comment. Your English is better than my Portuguese! You would think I would have a handle on Frye, since I live about 3 hours away from Toronto. I have only begun to dabble in his thought. The whole idea of how Christianity has molded our concept of love fascinates me, and I am grateful to Lewis for having written this book. I think a lot about it. I have recently looked at Ovid's Ars Amatoria - which would be good to video about too. I need to get further into Courtly Romances too.
Please comment as often as it occurs to you, Klaus!
@@ColinForBooks Thanks for your patience and effort. I know I should provide quotes and references for what I said, but I am not a schollar and I am also not involved in any academic activity. I am a plain blue collar. It is a long story how I became interested in literature and criticism. It all begun when I did engage myself in an online seminar of philosophy somewhat a decade ago: our master told us that we would never understand the high level abstractions of philosophy unless we would provide ourselves with a literary background and an educated imagination. By the way, It did not cross my mind to think you were from Canada.
Here are then some sources for what I said above: Augustinus' Civitas Dei , Otto Maria Carpeaux's História da Literatura Ocidental ( I do not know if there is any translated edition - it is an index with comentary of authors and works in four volumes), and Ernest Robert Curtius' European Literature And The Latin Midle Ages.
I know it is a discouraging and bulky stack of thik books to look upon. On the other hand, if one has nothing better to do, it is a pleasure to read them. That's my trick: to be idle enough. ;)
Thank you also for reminding me of Ovid's Ars Amatoria. I did not read the whole bulk of the Metamorphosys yet. I need also to go for the Romance of the Rose and those other Chivalry romances to get a better picture. All in due time if the span of my life allows.
As for you, beg your pardon, I would sugest having a look on Plato's works on the subject of love, specially the Banquet dialogue. I would also like to point out that Plato had a very strong notion of one God above the olimpic gods - not only he: that's one of Chesterton thesys in The Everlasting Man. It would be heresy in his time to hold those views openly against the gods of the city (Socrates' fate was still very fresh in his mind), so he carefully concealed his view under the notion of Sumum Bonum wich was latter picked up by Christian theology and became a pivotal concept in the scholastic theological thiking. To make the thesys short: love becomes evil if it detains itself upon any intermediary object as for its final end. An instance: if I do eat or drink for the mere pleasure of eating (as if those pleasures could be ends in themselves), I shall end up ruining the health of my body and damning my soul. Another: if a study for the sake of satisfying mere itelectual curiosity (curiosity = the pleasant element derived from knowing or the pursuit of that pleasure), I shall become vain and proud, damning my soul. Plato also said that a know truth is an obeyied one, and that may not be so pleasant all the time. And we also know what Our Lord Jesus said about loving one's own life and of loving parents, consorts and our children above him. It would have made all the sense for Plato, if he would had come to know that God has come in flesh, for he had very skilfully comented the first comandment already wihtout even knowing he was doing so. It could not have been the faith of the pagans considering their gods (Augustinus knew that too well, since he had been a pagan), but only the hope of those pious pagan that one day that unknow God would come. But it was a very wild dream to phatom he would come in person, as the scripture itself states: scandal to the jews, madness for the gentiles. It had to happen first (revelation) for others to theologise afterwards.
P.S. Since you are interested in Lewis, have you already perused Apuleius' Psyche and Eros story whitin the Asinus Aureus? Just wondering because I have not yet read Lewis' Till We Have Faces. Let me know your thougts!
Again, thank you for the kindness of bearing with me awhile and providing the oportunity. I wish to you that you may have a ton of good reads and also impove your hope, faith and charity upon.
God bless.
Love your channel! Pedantic correction; Lewis died in 1963, so he couldn’t have written The Discarded Image in 1964, rather, that book was based on lectures he had been delivering for a while.
thanks for the correction! Glad you like the channel. Encouraging!
Great review, thank you