Appreciation …

… The Shakespeare Scholar Who Crossed Swords with C.S. Lewis - The Imaginative Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It would be entirely unjust, however, to see the importance of Fr. Milward solely in terms of his correspondence with Lewis, relegating him, so to speak, to being a mere footnote in the life of Lewis. Milward was a formidable foe, disagreeing with what he saw as Lewis’ constricted definition of allegory: “On this discussion of ‘allegory’ I found Lewis limiting his discussion to one, abstract meaning of the term, while I preferred a more concrete application of it—as Aquinas applied it to the Bible, and Dante to his own Divine Comedy, and Spenser to his own Faery Queene, while I wished to carry it further even to the plays of Shakespeare.” Many years later, more than thirty years after Lewis’ death, Milward published a book entitled A Challenge to C.S. Lewis in which he took issue with his former mentor on a host of topics, from the aforementioned subject of allegory to historicism and even to “mere Christianity” itself.