To get right to it, C.S. Lewis assigns 4 English words to 4 distinct Greek words translated love in the New Testament, with parenthetical clarification:
- Storge = Affection (family love, the sort of love that ought to be between near relations)
- Philia = Friendship (friendship love, defined as more than mere companionship)
- Eros = Eros (erotic or sexual love, the special love between the sexes)
- Agape = Charity (divine love, or love in the distinctly Christian sense)
When you read The Four Loves, however, you will find that C.S. Lewis did not
get right to them since he has 6 chapters total in the book. The first
chapter is an Introduction and the second is titled "Likings and Loves
for the Sub-human"—a clue that the first two chapters are not user friendly. Neither chapter is included in a rare and wonderful audio recording Lewis himself did of what are literally The Four Loves. Of
course, that doesn't mean the first two chapters aren't worthy, but I
will not emphasize them. (Comparing the audio recordings with the book chapters, I uncovered many gems from the recordings that did not make it into the book that I presented in a separate post: *. They are here included throughout this post, when appropriate and where indicated.)
C.S.
Lewis was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge
University when he retired shortly before he died in 1963. He wrote an
important academic work called The Allegory of Love: A Study of Medieval Tradition in 1936 so in one sense Lewis was an expert on love for decades. By the time he wrote The Four Loves
from a set of radio talks in 1958 (which were criticized in America at
the time for their frankness about sex), he was all the more an expert
on love because he married a wonderful woman named Joy in 1956, lost her
to cancer in 1960, yet they enjoyed a truly glorious marriage in those
four years. We are privileged that C.S. Lewis wrote down what he learned
about love while he still had time.
Introduction
"'God
is love,' says St. John. When I first tried to write this book I
thought...I should be able to say that human loves deserved to be called
loves at all just in so far as they resembled the Love which is God. The first distinction I made was...between...Gift-love and Need-love....
Divine Love is Gift-love. The Father gives all He is and has to the
Son. The Son gives Himself back to the Father, and gives Himself to the
world....What, on the other hand, can be less like anything we believe
of God's life than Need-love?...I was looking forward to writing some
fairly easy panegyrics on the first sort of love and disparagements of
the second....The reality is more complicated than I supposed....
"Every
Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly
proportional to his love for God. But man's love for God...must always
be very largely, and must often be entirely, a Need love....Our whole being by its very nature is one of vast need:
incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who
can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that
are still dangling loose....Man approaches God most nearly when he is in
one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and
need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless
power and a cry for help?...
"We must distinguish two things which might both possibly be called 'nearness to God.' One is likeness to God." The other is "what we may call nearness of approach....They
do not necessarily coincide....Let us suppose that we are doing a
mountain walk to the village which is our home. At mid-day we come to
the top of a cliff where we are...near it because it is just below us.
We could drop a stone into it. But...we can't get down. We must go a
long way round...further from the village...but...in terms of progress
we shall be far nearer our baths and teas....What is near [God] by
likeness is never, by that fact alone, going to be any nearer....The
likeness is given to us—and can be received with or without thanks, can be used or abused—the approach, however initiated and supported by Grace, is something we must do....
"As a better writer has said [Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ], our imitation of God in this life...must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus,
not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the
clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and
privacy, the interruptions...the Divine life operating under human conditions....
"God
is love has long been balanced in my mind against the remark...that
'Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god.'...If we
ignore it, the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the
converse, that love is God.... We must join neither the idolators nor the debunkers of human love.... A plant must have roots below as well as sunlight above
and roots must be grubby.... The human loves can be glorious images of
divine love...but also no more...which in once instance may help, and in
another may hinder, proximity of approach."
Likings and Loves for Objects
"Most
of my generation were reproved as children for saying that we 'loved'
strawberries.... Nearly all speakers, however pedantic or however pious,
talk every day about 'loving' a food, a game, or a pursuit.... To 'like'
anything means to take some sort of pleasure in it.... Pleasures can be divided into two classes...Need-pleasures and Pleasures of Appreciation.... Need-pleasure is the state in which Appreciative pleasures end up when they go bad (by addiction).... The
most innocent and necessary of Need-pleasures [such as eating and
drinking]...'die on us' with extraordinary abruptness.... The smell of
frying food is very different before and after breakfast.... Pleasures of
Appreciation...make us feel that something has not merely gratified our
senses but claimed our appreciation by right....
"How
the Need-pleasures foreshadow our Need-loves is obvious enough.... The
Need-love, like the Need-pleasure, will not last longer than the need.
This does not, fortunately, mean that all affections which begin in
Need-love are transitory.... Moral principles (conjugal fidelity, filial
piety, gratitude, and the like) may preserve the relationship for a
lifetime. But where Need-love is left unaided we can hardly expect it
not to 'die on us'.... Our need-love for God is in a different position
because our need of Him can never end...but our awareness of it can, and
then the Need-love dies too.... Appreciative pleasure...is the starting
point for our whole experience of beauty.... Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve...God; Appreciative love says: 'We give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory'....
"Two
forms of love for what is not personal demand special treatment." These
are the love of nature and the love of country. "The only imperative
that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend'.... Nature cannot satisfy the desires she arouses nor answer theological questions nor sanctify us.
Our real journey to God involves constantly turning our backs on her;
passing from the dawn-lit fields into some poky little church.... Nature
'dies' on those who try to live for a love of nature....
"I turn now to the love of one's country.... This
love becomes a demon when it becomes a god. Some begin to suspect that
it is never anything but a demon. But then they have to reject half the high poetry and half the heroic action [the human] race has achieved. We cannot keep even Christ's lament over Jerusalem. He too exhibits love for His country...."
Affection
"In Greek they have four words for love: storge (two syllables and the g is hard) means affection, the sort of love that ought to be between near relations; philia means friendship; eros is, of course, the love between the sexes; and agape (three syllables, long e) is love in the Christian sense—God's love for man and the Christian's love for the brethren. I want to talk about all four and I'll begin with storge or affection,
the humblest of the loves, the love which seems to differ
least from that of the animals. I do not on that account give it a
lower value. Nothing in Man is either worse or better for being shared
with the beasts. When we blame a man for being 'a mere animal,' we mean
not that he displays animal characteristics (we all do) but that he
displays these...on occasions where the specifically human was
demanded..... The Greeks called this love storge (two syllables and the g is 'hard). I shall here call it simply Affection. My Greek Lexicon defines storge as 'affection, especially of parents to offspring'; but also of offspring to parents.... The image we must start with is that of a mother nursing a baby...a cat with a basketful of...kittens; all in a squeaking nuzzling heap together; purrings, lickings, baby-talk, milk, warmth, the smell of young life....
 |
| Only in the Presence of the Familiar |
"But
even in animal life, and still more in our own, Affection extends far
beyond the relation of mother and young. This warm comfortableness, this
satisfaction in being together, takes in all sorts....Almost anyone can become an object of Affection:
the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating.... It ignores the barriers
of age, sex, class, and education.... It ignores even the barriers of
species. We see it not only between dog and man but, more surprisingly,
between dog and cat.... But Affection has its own criteria. Its objects have to be familiar.
We can sometimes point to the very day and hour when we fell in love or
began a new friendship. I doubt if we ever catch Affection beginning.
To become aware of it is to become aware that it has already been going
on for some time.... The dog barks at strangers who have never done it
any harm and wags its tail for old acquaintances even if they never did
it a good turn....
"People can be proud of being 'in love,' or of friendship. Affection is modest—even
furtive and shame-faced. Once when I had remarked on the affection
quite often found between cat and dog, my friend replied, 'Yes. But I
bet no dog would ever confess it to the other dogs.'... It usually needs
absence or bereavement to set us praising those to whom only Affection
binds us. We take them for granted: and this taking for granted, which
is an outrage in erotic love, is here right and proper up to a point. It
fits the comfortable, quiet nature of the feeling." In the audio recordings C.S. Lewis adds, "The
feeling of storge is so nearly organic, so gradual, so unemphatic, that
you could no more pride yourself on it than on getting sleepy towards
bedtime. It lives with humble, undressed private things: the thump
of a drowsy dog's tail on the kitchen floor...a toy left on the lawn.
It's the most comfortable and least ecstatic of loves. It is to our
emotions what soft slippers and an easy, almost worn-out chair and old
clothes are to our bodies. Wraps you around like a blanket, almost like
sleep."
"I
am talking of Affection as it is when it exists apart from the other
loves ... but ... Affection ... can enter into the other loves and ... become
the medium in which from day to day they operate. They would not
perhaps wear very well without it." Lewis adds here in the radio broadcast, "Every
good marriage, even every courtship, makes for its eros, so to speak, a
nest of storge, like the nest of rice you build for your helping of
curry." It is something mellow that balances the spice in life. Lewis continues in the book, "To make a friend is not the same as
to become affectionate. But when your friend has become an old friend,
all those things about him which had originally nothing to do with the
friendship become familiar and dear with familiarity.... There is indeed a peculiar charm, both in friendship and in Eros, about those moments when Appreciative love lies...curled up asleep, and the mere ease and ordinariness of the relationship...wraps us round....
"Affection...is
not primarily an Appreciative love. It is not discriminating....
The...glory of Affection is that it can unite those who most
emphatically, even comically...if they had not found themselves...in the
same households or community, would have had nothing to do with each
other. If Affection grows out of this—of course it often does not—their
eyes begin to open. Growing fond of 'old so-and-so,' at first simply
because he happens to be there, I...begin to see that there is
'something in him' after all....We are learning to appreciate goodness
or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence
flavoured and served to suit our own palate....Truly wide taste in humanity will...find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day. In
my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us
first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and
finally to appreciate, the people who 'happen to be there'...odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.
 |
| King Lear Demands Affection |
"And
now we are drawing near the point of danger.... Symptomatic of this,
perhaps, is the odiousness of nearly all...tunes and...poems in which
popular art expresses Affection. They are odious because of their
falsity. They represent as a ready-made recipe for bliss (and even for
goodness) what is in fact only an opportunity. There is no hint that we
shall have to do anything: only let Affection pour over us like a warm
shower...and all, it is implied, will be well. Affection...includes both
Need-love and Gift love. I begin with the Need—our craving for the Affection of others....At the beginning of King Lear the hero is shown as a very unlovable old man devoured with a ravenous appetite for Affection....We
all know that we must do something, if not to merit, at least to
attract, erotic love or friendship. But Affection is often assumed to be
provided, ready made, by nature....We have a right to expect it. If the others do not give it, they are 'unnatural.'...
 |
| A Sealed Fountain |
"What we have is not 'a right to expect' but a 'reasonable expectation' of being loved by our intimates
if we, and they, are more or less ordinary people. But we may not be.
We may be intolerable.... The very same conditions of intimacy which
make Affection possible also...make possible...distaste.... Old is a term of wearied loathing as well as of endearment: 'at his old tricks'...'the same old thing.'... If people are already unlovable a continual demand on their part...to be loved...[seals] up the very fountain for which they are thirsty.
And of course such people always desire the same proof of our love: we
are to join their side, to hear and share their grievance against
someone else.... All the while they remain unaware of the real road. 'If you would be loved, be lovable.'...
"The really surprising thing is not that these insatiable demands...are sometimes made in vain, but that they are so often met. Sometimes one sees a woman's girlhood, youth...up
to the verge of old age all spent in tending, obeying, caressing, and
perhaps supporting, a maternal vampire who can never be caressed and
obeyed enough. The sacrifice—but there are two opinions about that—may be beautiful; the old woman who exacts it is not.
"The 'built-in' or unmerited character of Affection...invites a hideous misinterpretation. So does its ease and informality. We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation...but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.
Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father
or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which,
offered to any other young people, would simply have terminated the
acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on matters which the children
understand and their elders don't, ruthless interruptions, flat
contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously...insulting
references to their friends—all
provide an easy answer to the question, Why are they always out?...If
you asked any of these insufferable people...why they behaved that way
at home, they would reply, '...One comes home to relax....If a man can't
be himself in his own house, where can he?...We're a happy family. We
can say anything to one another here. No one minds. We all understand.'...
"It
is so nearly true yet so fatally wrong. Affection is an affair of old
clothes, and ease...but old clothes are one thing; to wear the same
shirt till it stank would be another.... There is a distinction
between public and domestic courtesy. The root principle of both is the
same: 'that no one give any kind of preference to himself.'...Affection at its best practices a courtesy which is...more subtle, sensitive, and deep that the public kind....Affection...can
say whatever Affection at its best wishes to say, regardless of the
rules that govern public courtesy, for [it] wishes neither to wound nor
to humiliate nor to domineer....You may tease and hoax and banter. You
can say 'Shut up. I want to read.' You can do anything in the right tone and at the right moment....The better the Affection the more unerringly it knows which these are (every love has its art of love)....To
be free and easy when you are presented to some...stranger is bad
manners; to practice formal and ceremonial courtesies at home ('public
faces in private places')" is also bad.
"We have not yet touched on jealousy....Change is a threat to Affection.
A brother and sister, or two brothers [the latter being C.S. Lewis's experience] ...grow...sharing everything. They
have read the same comics, climbed the same trees, been pirates or
spacemen together.... Then...one of them...discovers poetry or science or
serious music or perhaps undergoes a religious conversion. His life is
flooded with the new interest. The other cannot share it; he is left
behind.... Affection is the most instinctive, in that sense the most animal, of the loves; its jealousy is proportionately fierce.
It snarls and bares its teeth like a dog whose food has been snatched
away....Something or someone has snatched away from the child I am
picturing his lifelong food, his second self. His world is in ruins. But
it is not only children who react thus. Few things...are more
nearly fiendish than the rancour with which a whole unbelieving family
will turn on the one member of it who has become a Christian.... It
is the reaction to a desertion...he who was one of Us has become one of
Them.... Sometimes a curious double jealousy is felt....'Supposing—it
can't be, it musn't be...there was something in...Christianity? How if
the deserter has really entered a new world which the rest of us never
suspected? But, if so, how unfair! Why him?... A [mere boy] being shown
things that are hidden from their elders?' And since that is clearly
incredible and unendurable, jealousy returns to the hypothesis 'All
nonsense.'...
"All these perversions of Affection are mainly connected with Affection as a Need-love. But Affection as a Gift-love has its perversions too.... The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.
We feed children in order that they may soon be able to feed
themselves.... Thus a heavy task is laid upon this Gift-love. It must
work towards its own abdication.... A much higher love—a love which desires the good of the object...must step in and help.... Where it does not, the ravenous need to be needed will gratify itself either by keeping its objects needy or by inventing for them imaginary needs.... My own profession—that of a university teacher—is
in this way dangerous. If we are any good we must always be working
towards the moment...our pupils are fit to become our critics and
rivals.... This terrible need to be needed often finds its outlet in
pampering an animal....
"I hope I am not being misunderstood.... Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and
durable happiness there is in our natural lives.... Selfish or neurotic
people can twist anything, even love, into some sort of misery or
exploitation.... But I believe that everyone who is honest with himself
will admit that he has felt these temptations. Their occurrence is not a disease; or if it is, the name of that disease is Being a Fallen Man. In ordinary people the yielding to them—and who does not sometimes yield?—is not disease, but sin. Spiritual directing will here help us more than medical treatment. Medicine labors to restore 'natural'
structure or 'normal' function. But greed, egoism, self-deception, and
self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal.... For who ...
would describe as natural or normal the man from whom these failings
were wholly absent?... We have seen only one such Man. And He was not at
all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be very well adjusted to your world if it says you 'have a devil' and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.
"Affection produces happiness if—and only if—there is common sense [reason] and give and take [justice] and 'decency'....
This means goodness, patience, self-denial, humility, and the continual
intervention of a far higher sort of love than Affection, in itself,
can ever be. That is the whole point. If we try to live by Affection
alone, Affection will 'go bad on us.' How bad, I believe we seldom
recognize.... [All forms of love] carry in them the seeds of
hatred. If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the
seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon."
Friendship
 |
| Few Modern Counterparts |
"When either Affection or Eros is one's theme, one finds a
prepared audience. The importance and beauty of both have been stressed
and almost exaggerated again and again.... Very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all. I cannot remember that any poem since In Memoriam,
or any novel, has celebrated it. ["'Tis better to have loved and lost
than never to have loved at all" is the most famous line from Tennyson's
memorial to his college friend.] Tristan and Isolde, Antony and
Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, have innumberable counterparts in modern literature: David and Jonathan...have not.
To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of
all the loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern
world, in comparison, ignores it. We admit of course that besides a wife
and family a man needs a few 'friends.' But the very tone of the
admission, and the sort of acquaintanceships which those who make it
would describe as 'friendships,' show clearly that what they are talking
about...is something quite marginal; not a main course in life's banquet; a diversion; something that fills up the chinks of one's time. How has this come about?
"The first and most obvious answer is that few value it because few experience it.... Friendship is...least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological...and necessary....
Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection
none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without
Friendship.... The pack or herd—the
community—may even dislike and distrust it. Its leaders very often
do.... This...quality in Friendship goes far to explain why it was
exalted in ancient and medieval times and has come to be made light of
in our own. The deepest and most permanent thought of those ages was
ascetic and world-renouncing. Nature and emotion and the body were feared as dangers to our souls.... Inevitably that sort of love was most prized which seemed most independent...of mere nature.... But then came Romanticism and...the 'return to nature' and the exaltation of Sentiment...which, though often criticised, has lasted ever since. Finally, the exaltation of instinct....
"Other
causes have contributed. To those...who see human life merely as a
development and complication of animal life, all forms of behaviour
which cannot produce certificates of an animal origin...are suspect.... That outlook which values the collective above the individual necessarily disparages Friendship:
it is a relation between men at their highest level of
individuality.... Some forms of democratic sentiment are naturally
hostile to it....
"It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual." C.S. Lewis adds in the radio broadcast, "It
doesn't at all prove that those who bring the charge are homosexuals
themselves, nor would I moralize upon them if they were. How a man can feel anything but bewildered pity for the genuinely homosexual I've never been able to understand. What it does prove is that they've either never known friendship or never known eros." He goes on to explain in the book, "In some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair.
Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends
hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face,
absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common
interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two
only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important....
"True friendship is the least jealous of loves.
Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if
only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can...say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.'... In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious 'nearness by resemblance' to Heaven itself
where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number)
increases the [experience] each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him
in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the
rest.... The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more
we shall all have....
"On a broad historical view it is...not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors [kisses, tears, and embraces regardless of gender] but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation. We, not they, are out of step.
I have said that...both the individual and the community can survive
without [Friendship]. But there is something else, often confused with
Friendship, which the community does need; something which is the matrix of Friendship. In
the early communities the co-operation of the males as hunters or
fighters was no less necessary than the begetting and rearing of
children. A tribe where there was no taste for the one would die no
less surely than a tribe where there was no taste for the other.... We
men [got] together and [did] things. We had to. And to like doing what
must be done is a characteristic that has survival value. We not only
had to do the things, we had to talk about them. We had to plan the hunt
and the battle. When they were over we had to...draw conclusions for
future use. We liked this even better. We ridiculed or punished the
cowards and bunglers, we praised the star-performers. We revelled in
technicalities (...'I had a lighter arrowhead; that's what did it'...).
In fact, we talked shop...all bound together by shared skill, shared dangers and hardships, esoteric jokes—away from the women and children.... They certainly often had rituals from which men were excluded....
"This
pleasure in co-operation, in talking shop, in the mutual respect and
understanding of men who daily see one another tested
is...something...we all understand.... I prefer to call it Companionship—or Clubbableness. This Companionship is, however, only the matrix of Friendship. It is often called Friendship, and many people when they speak of their 'friends' mean only their companions.
But it is not Friendship in the sense I give to the word. By saying
this I do not at all intend to disparage the merely Clubbable relation.
We do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold. Friendship
arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions
discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even
taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each
believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical
expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one.'...In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?—Or at least, 'Do you care about the same truth?'
The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by
others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with
us about the answer....
 |
| Common Interest Needed |
"People
who simply 'want friends' can never make any. The very condition of
having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the truth? would be 'I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend,' no Friendship can arise—though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something.... Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travelers.
"When...two
people who... discover...they are on the same secret road are of
different sexes, the friendship which arises between them [may] very
easily pass...into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically
repulsive to each other or unless one or both already loves elsewhere,
it is almost certain to do so sooner or later. And conversely, erotic
love may lead to Friendship between the lovers. But this, so far from
obliterating the distinction between the two loves, puts it into clearer
light. If one who was first, in the deep and full sense, your
Friend, is then gradually or suddenly revealed as also your lover you
will certainly not want to share the Beloved's erotic love...but you will have no jealousy at all about sharing the Friendship.
Nothing so enriches...as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply,
truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with the Friends you
already had: to feel that not only are we two united by erotic love but
we three or four or five are all travelers on the same quest, have all a
common vision....
"It could be argued that Friendships are of practical value to the Community. Every
civilised religion began in a small group of friends. Mathematics
effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about
numbers and lines and angles.... Communism...Methodism, the movement
against slavery, the Reformation, the Renaissance, might perhaps be
said...to have begun in the same way.... But nearly every reader would
probably think some of these movements good for society and some bad.
The whole list, if accepted, would tend to show, at best, that
Friendship is both a possible benefactor and a possible danger to the
community....
"Others...would
say that Friendship is extremely useful...to the individual. They could
produce plenty of authority: 'bare is back without brother behind it'
and 'there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.' But [that
is] using friend to mean 'ally.' In ordinary usage friend
means, or should mean, more than that. A Friend will, to be sure, prove
himself to be also an ally when alliance becomes necessary; will lend or
give when we are in need...because you would be a false friend if you
would not.... The role of benefactor, [however], always remains
accidental, even a little alien, to that of Friendship.... We are sorry
that any gift or loan...should have been necessary—and
now, for heaven's sake, let us forget all about it and go back to the
things we really want to do or talk of together.... 'Don't mention
it'...expresses what we really feel. The mark of perfect Friendship is
not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will)
but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all....
"Friendship,
unlike Eros, is uninquisitive. You became a man's Friend without
knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his
living. What have all these 'unconcerning things, matters of fact' to do
with the real question, Do you see the same truth?... In a circle of true Friends...no one cares...about
anyone else's family, profession, class, income, race, or previous
history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end.
But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy...never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts....
"Hence
(if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and
irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and
no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of
necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like
the universe (for God did not need to create). It has no survival
value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival." C.S. Lewis observes in the radio broadcast that "the
friend is most clearly distinguishable from the companion in that after
any tract of time or any change of residence or occupation, the old
unity will be intact. Everything will be taken up again as if we had
been parted for only a few hours. We've no need to fall back on
reminiscences, though we may do so for the pleasure of it, but we're not
reduced to them. Whereas the attempted revival of mere companionship
has no other coin. The difference between mere companionship and
friendship depends on the nature of the shared activity."
The book goes on to explain that "the
common quest or vision which unites Friends does not absorb them in
such a way that they remain ignorant or oblivious of one another. On the
contrary it is the very medium in which their mutual love and knowledge
exist. One knows nobody so well as one's 'fellow.' Every step of the
common journey tests his metal; and the tests are tests we fully
understand because we are undergoing them ourselves. Hence, as he
rings true time after time, our reliance, our respect and our admiration
blossom into an Appreciative love of a singularly robust and
well-informed kind. If, at the outset," we payed more attention "to
him and less to the thing our Friendship is 'about,' we should not have
come to know or love him so well. You will not" come to know "the
warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his
eyes as if he were your [mate]: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.
"In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each
member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the
rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is [blessed] beyond desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together, each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others. Those are the golden sessions...an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life—natural life—has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?" That is why, says Lewis in the radio broadcast, "the
death of a friend may impoverish us every year or every month until we
die. We are like a man who has lost a limb. The stump may not ache or
not much, but no more tennis, no more mountain walks. Write it all off."
In his book C.S. Lewis observes that "in most societies at most periods friendships will be between men and men or between women and women ...
for they will seldom have had with each other the companionship in
common activities which is the matrix of Friendship.... It is this lack,
rather than anything in their natures, which excludes Friendship; for where they can be companions they can also become Friends.
Hence in a profession (like my own) where men and women work side by
side, or in the mission field, or among authors and artists, such
Friendship is common. To be sure, what is offered as Friendship on one
side may be mistaken for Eros on the other, with painful and
embarrassing results. Or what begins as Friendship in both may become
also Eros.... Sensible women...if they wanted, would certainly be able
to qualify themselves for the world of discussion and ideas [as opposed
to mainly narrative forms of communication].... If they are not
qualified, [they] never try to enter it or to destroy it. They have
other fish to fry. At a mixed party they gravitate to one end of the
room and talk women's talk to one another. They don't want us, for this
sort of purpose, any more than we want them. It is only the riff-raff of each sex that wants to be incessantly hanging on the other." In the audio recordings C.S. Lewis emphatically states, "I have the deepest suspicions of those wretched people who find no pleasure in the society of their own sex. Heaven protect me from a man who needs only women and a woman who needs only men!" In the book he observes that women enriched by same-sex camaraderie laugh at men "a good deal. That is just as it should be.... No one
ever really appreciated the other sex...without at times feeling them to
be funny. For both sexes are. Humanity is tragi-comical....
"Friendship...love,
free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has
freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free from...the
need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.... Let us beware.... There is spiritual evil as well as spiritual good. There are unholy, as well as holy, angels." In the radio broadcast Lewis states plainly, "Friends give us moral support—or immoral support....There's
a moral ambivalence inherent in friendship.... Friendship is a resistance movement. It can resist God as well as society." The book takes into account the following three significant facts:
- The distrust Authorities tend to have of close Friendships among their subjects. It may be unjustified; or there may be some basis for it.
- The attitude of the majority towards all circles of close Friends.
Every name they give such a circle is more or less derogatory: a set, a
gang, or a mutual admiration society. Of course this is the voice of
Envy. But Envy always brings the truest charge, or the charge nearest to
the truth...it hurts more. The charge, therefore, will have to be
considered.
- Friendship is very rarely the image under which Scripture represents the love between God and Men.
It is not entirely neglected; but far more often, seeking a symbol for
the highest love of all, Scripture ignores this seemingly almost angelic
relation and plunges into the depth of what is most natural and
instinctive. Affection is taken as the image when God is represented as
our Father; Eros, when Christ is represented as the Bridegroom of the
Church.
"Let
us begin with the suspicions of those in Authority.... Alone among
unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly,
half ashamed to avow them and half doubtful if they can after all be
right. Put me back among my Friends and in half an hour—in ten minutes—these
same views and standards become once more indisputable. The opinion of
this little circle, while I am in it, outweighs that of a thousand
outsiders. It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on
Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a
rebellion. It may be a rebellion...of good men against the badness of
society or of bad men against its goodness.... Men who have real
Friends are less easy to manage or 'get at'; harder for good Authorities
to correct or for bad Authorities to corrupt.... The element of
secession, of indifference or deafness (at least on some matters) to the
voices of the outer world, is common to all Friendships.... As I know I
should be an Outsider to a circle of golfers, mathematicians, or
motorists, so I claim the equal right of regarding them as Outsiders to
mine. People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who
interest one another, often. The danger is that this partial
indifference or deafness to outside opinion, justified and necessary
though it is, may lead to a wholesale indifference or deafness....
"But that is not all. The partial and defensible deafness was based on some kind of superiority—even
if it were only a superior knowledge about stamps. The sense of
superiority will then get itself attached to the total deafness. The
group will disdain as well as ignore those outside it.... I have said
that in a good Friendship each member often feels humility towards the
rest. He sees that they are splendid and counts himself lucky to be
among them. But unfortunately the they and them are also, from another point of view we and us. Thus the transition from individual humility to corporate pride is very easy....
I think we have all recognised some such tendency in...circles to which
we are the Outsiders. I was once at some kind of conference where two
clergymen, obviously close friends, began talking about 'uncreated
energies' other than God. I asked how there could be any uncreated
things except God if the Creed was right in calling Him 'the maker of
all things visible and invisible.' Their reply was to glance at one
another and laugh. I had no objection to their laughter, but I wanted an
answer in words as well. It was not at all a sneering or unpleasant
laugh. It expressed very much what Americans would express by saying
'Isn't he cute?'...
"We can detect the pride of Friendship—whether Olympian [tranquil and tolerant, making Outsiders feel like children], Titanic [militant and embittered against Outsiders], or merely vulgar
[meant to make people feel like Outsiders]—in many circles of Friends.
It would be rash to assume that our own is safe from its danger; for of
course it is in our own that we should be slowest to recognise it....
Friendship must exclude. From the innocent and necessary act of
excluding to the spirit of exclusiveness is an easy step; and thence to
the degrading pleasure of exclusiveness.... The mass of the people,
who are never quite right, are never quite wrong. They are hopelessly
mistaken in their belief that every knot of friends came into existence
for the sake of...conceit and superiority.... But they would seem to be
right in diagnosing pride as the danger to which Friendships are
naturally liable. Just because this is the most spiritual of loves the
danger which besets it is spiritual too....
 |
| Safe Symbols |
"Perhaps
we may now hazard a guess why Scripture uses Friendship so rarely as an
image of the highest love. It is already, in actual fact, too spiritual
to be a good symbol of Spiritual things. The highest does not stand
without the lowest. God can safely represent Himself to us as Father
and Husband because only a lunatic would think that He is physically our
sire or that His marriage with the Church is other than mystical. But
if Friendship were used for this purpose we might mistake the symbol for
the thing symbolised....
"Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself.... Because it is spiritual and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must...invoke the divine protection if it hopes to remain sweet.
For consider how narrow its true path is. It must not become...'a
mutual admiration society'; yet if it is not full of mutual admiration,
of Appreciative love, it is not Friendship at all.... It must be for us
in our Friendships as it was for Christiana and her party in The Pilgrim's Progress: 'They...could
not see that glory each one on herself which they could see in each
other. Now therefore they began to esteem each other better than
themselves. For you are fairer than I am, said one; and you are more
comely than I am, said another.' There is...only one way...we can
taste this illustrious experience with safety. And Bunyan has indicated
it in the same passage. It was in the House of the Interpreter, after
they had been bathed, sealed and freshly clothed in 'White Raiment' that
the women saw one another in this light. If we remember the bathing,
sealing and robing, we shall be safe....
"In Friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a
few years' difference in the date of our births, a few more miles
between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances.
A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ...can truly
say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one
another but I have chosen you for one another.' The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.... At this feast it is He who has chosen the guests.
It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should,
preside. Let us not reckon without our Host. Not that we must always
partake of it solemnly.... It is one of the difficult and delightful
subtleties of life that we must deeply acknowledge certain things to be
serious and yet retain the power and will to treat them often as lightly
as a game."
Sexual Love
"...I
am inquiring not into the sexuality which is common to us and the
beasts...but into one uniquely human variation of it which develops
within 'love'—what
I call Eros [the state of being in love]. The sexual element within
Eros I intend (following an old usage) to call Venus.... Sexuality may
operate without Eros or as part of Eros. Let me hasten to add that I
make the distinction simply in order to limit our inquiry and without
any moral implications. I am not at all subscribing to the popular
idea that it is the absence or presence of Eros which makes the sexual
act 'impure' or 'pure,' degraded or fine, unlawful or unlawful....The times and places in which marriage depends on Eros are in a small minority. Most
of our ancestors were married off in early youth to partners chosen by
their parents on grounds that had nothing to do with Eros. They went
to the act with no other 'fuel,' so to speak, than plain animal desire.
And they did right; honest Christian husbands and wives [in some
cases], obeying their fathers and mothers, discharging to one another
their 'marriage debt,' and bringing up families in the fear of the Lord.
"Conversely, this act, done under the influence of a soaring and iridescent Eros...may
yet be plain adultery, may involve breaking a wife's heart, deceiving a
husband, betraying a friend, polluting hospitality, and deserting your
children. It has not pleased God that the distinction between a sin
and a duty should turn on fine feelings. This act, like any other, is
justified (or not) by far more...definable criteria: by the keeping or
breaking of promises, by justice or injustice, by charity or
selfishness, by obedience or disobedience....
"There
may be those who have first felt mere sexual appetite for a woman and
then gone on at a later stage to fall in love with her." That is what schoolboys imagine falling in love will be like, states C.S. Lewis in his radio broadcast, but he goes on to state there and in the book, "I doubt if
this is at all common. Very often what comes first is simply a delighted preoccupation with the Beloved—a general, unspecified preoccupation with her in her totality.
A man in this state really hasn't leisure to think of sex. He is too
busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less
important than the fact that she is herself.... If you asked him what he
wanted, the true reply would often be, 'To go on thinking of her.'...
When at a later stage the explicitly sexual element awakes, he will not
feel (unless scientific theories are influencing him) that this had all
along been the root of the whole matter.... Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved.
"The thing
is a sensory pleasure...an event occurring within one's own body. We
use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the
streets, that he 'wants a woman.' Strictly speaking, a woman is just
what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to
be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman...may
be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does
not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes
a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some
mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved
herself, not the pleasure she can give. No lover in the world ever
sought the embraces of the woman he loved as the result of a
calculation...that they would be more pleasurable than those of any
other woman. If he raised the question he would, no doubt, expect that
this would be so. But to raise it would be to step outside the world of
Eros altogether....
"Eros
thus wonderfully transforms ...a Need-pleasure into the most
Appreciative of all pleasures.... In Eros, a Need, at its most intense,
sees the object most intensely as a thing admirable in herself,
important far beyond her relation to the lover's need. If we...were mere
logicians, we might boggle at the conception of desiring a human being,
as distinct from desiring any pleasure, comfort, or service that human
being can give. And it is certainly hard to explain.... Without Eros
sexual desire, like every other desire, is a fact about ourselves.
Within Eros it is rather about the Beloved.... Eros, though the king of pleasures, always (at his height) has the air of regarding pleasure as a by-product." "Hence in his realm," as Lewis explains in his audio recording, "the miraculous combination of great desire with great ease in abstaining. And anyway, whose pleasure? One of the first things Eros does is to obliterate the distinction between giving and receiving," as both the book and the audio state.
"Hitherto
I have been trying merely to describe, not to evaluate. But certain
moral questions now inevitably arise, and I must not conceal my own view
of them. It is submitted rather than asserted, and of course open to
correction by better men, better lovers and better Christians. It has been widely held in the past...that
the spiritual danger of Eros arises almost entirely from the carnal
element within it; that Eros is 'noblest' or 'purest' when Venus is
reduced to the minimum.... This is not the Scriptural approach.
St. Paul, [mildly] dissuading his converts from marriage, says nothing
about that side of the matter except to discourage prolonged abstinence
from Venus (1 Cor. 7:5). What he fears is pre-occupation, the need for
constantly 'pleasing'—that is, considering—one's
partner, the multiple distractions of domesticity. It is marriage
itself, not the marriage bed, that will be likely to hinder us from
waiting uninterruptedly on God. And surely St. Paul is right? If I may
trust my own experience, it is (within marriage as without) the
practical...cares of this world, and even the smallest...of those cares,
that are the great distraction. The gnat-like cloud of petty anxieties
and decisions about the...next hour have interfered with my prayers more
often than any passion or appetite whatever....
 |
| Antidote to Too Much Solemnity |
"Eros...reduces
the nagging and addictive character of mere [sexual] appetite. And that
not simply by satisfying it. Eros, without diminishing desire, makes
abstinence easier. He tends, no doubt, to a pre-occupation with the
Beloved which can indeed be an obstacle to the spiritual life.... The
real spiritual danger in Eros as a whole lies, I believe, elsewhere. I
will return to the point. For the moment, I want to speak of the danger
which at present...haunts the act of love. This is a subject on which I
disagree, not with the human race (far from it), but with many of its
gravest spokesmen. I believe we are all being encouraged to take Venus
too seriously; at any rate, with a wrong kind of seriousness. All my life a ludicrous...solemnization of sex has been going on....
A young man to whom I had described as 'pornographic' a novel that he
much admired, replied with genuine bewilderment, 'Pornographic? But how
can it be? It treats the whole thing so seriously'—as if a long face were a sort of moral disinfectant....
Our advertisements, at their sexiest, paint the whole business in terms
of the rapt, the intense, the swoony-devout; seldom a hint of
gaiety.... We have reached the stage at which nothing is more needed than a roar of old-fashioned laughter.
"But, it will be replied, the thing is serious. Yes; quadruply so.
- First,
theologically, because this is the body's share in marriage which, by
God's choice, is the mystical image of the union between God and Man.
- Second...our human participation in...the natural forces of life and fertility....
- Third,
on the moral level, in view of the obligations involved and the
incalculable momentousness of being a parent and ancestor.
- Finally, it has (sometimes, not always) a great emotional seriousness in the minds of the participants.
"But eating is also serious...yet we do not bring [exam books] to dinner nor behave there as if we were in church. And it is gourmets, not saints, who come nearest to doing so. Animals are always very serious about food....
"It is not for nothing that every language and literature in the world is full of jokes about sex.
Many of them may be dull or disgusting and nearly all of them are
old...[but if you] banish play and laughter from the bed of love...you
may let in a false goddess.... Venus...herself is a...mischievous
spirit.... When all external circumstances are fittest for her service
she will leave one or both lovers totally indisposed for it. When every
overt act is impossible and even glances cannot be exchanged—in
trains, in shops, and at interminable parties—she will assail them with
all her force. An hour later, when time and place agree, she will have
mysteriously withdrawn; perhaps from only one of them.
What...resentments, self-pities, suspicions, wounded vanities and all
the current chatter about 'frustration' in those who have deified her! But sensible lovers laugh. It is all part of the game; a game of catch-as-catch-can, and the escapes and tumbles and head-on collisions are to be treated as a romp." As the broadcast delightfully adds, "Only if we so treat them shall we fall soft, and lose with good temper, and win (when we do win) lightheartedly."
In the book Lewis continues, "I
can hardly help regarding it as one of God's jokes that a passion so
soaring, so apparently transcendent, as Eros, should thus be linked in
incongruous symbiosis with a bodily appetite which, like any other
appetite, tactlessly reveals its connections with such mundane factors
as weather, health, diet, circulation, and digestion.... It is a
continual demonstration of the truth that we are composite creatures,
rational animals, akin on one side to the angels, on the other to
tom-cats. It is a bad thing not to be able to take a joke. Worse, not to
take a divine joke; made, I grant you, at our expense, but also (who doubts it?) for our endless benefit.
"Man has held three views of his body.
- First
there is that of those ascetic Pagans who called it the prison or the
'tomb' of the soul, and of Christians like Fisher to whom it was a 'sack
of dung,' food for worms...a source of nothing but temptation to bad
men and humiliation to good ones.
- Then there are the Neo-Pagans, the nudists...to whom the body is glorious.
- Third we have the view which St. Francis expressed by calling his body 'Brother Ass.'
"All three may be—I am not sure—defensible; but give me St. Francis for my money. Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey.
It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and
infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot; both
pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body. There's no living with
it till we recognise that one of its functions in our lives is to play
the part of buffoon. Until some theory has sophisticated them, every
man, woman and child in the world knows this.... Lovers, unless their
love is very short-lived, again and again feel an element not only of
comedy, not only of play, but even of buffoonery, in the body's
expression of Eros.... It would be too clumsy an instrument to
render love's music unless its very clumsiness could be felt as adding
to the total experience...with its own hearty rough-and-tumble what the
soul enacts in statelier fashion....
"Indeed we require this relief.... Pleasure, pushed to its extreme, shatters us like pain....
Amourousness as well as grief can bring tears to the eyes. But Venus
does not always come thus 'entire, fastened to her prey,' and the fact
that she sometimes does so is the very reason for preserving always a
hint of playfulness in our attitude to her.... This refusal to be quite
immersed—this
recollection of the levity even when, for the moment, only the gravity
is displayed—is especially relevant to a certain attitude which Venus,
in her intensity, evokes from most (I believe, not all) pairs of lovers.
This act can invite the man to an extreme, though short-lived masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror...and the woman to a correspondingly extreme subjection and surrender. Hence the roughness, even fierceness, of some erotic play.... How should a sane couple think of this? or a Christian couple permit it?
 |
| Ritual, Not Reality |
"I think it is harmless and wholesome on one condition.
We must recognise that...in the act of love we are not merely
ourselves. We are also representatives.... In us all the masculinity and
femininity of the world, all that is assailant and responsive, are
momentarily focused.... A woman who accepted as literally her own this
extreme self-surrender would be an idolatress offering to a man what
belongs only to God. And a man would have to be...a blasphemer if he
arrogated to himself, as the mere person he is, the sort of sovereignty
to which Venus for a moment exalts him. But what cannot lawfully be
yielded or claimed can be lawfully enacted. Outside this ritual or drama
he and she are two immortal souls, two free-born adults, two
citizens....
"Some
will think it strange I should find an element of ritual or masquerade
in that action which is often regarded as the most real, the most
unmasked and sheerly genuine, we ever do. Are we not our true selves when naked? In a sense, no. The word naked was originally a past participle; the naked man was the man who had undergone a process of naking,
that is, of stripping or peeling (you used the verb of nuts and
fruit).... The naked man has seemed to our ancestors not the natural but
the abnormal man; not the man who has abstained from dressing but the
man who has been for some reason undressed. And it is a simple
fact...that nudity emphasizes common humanity and soft-pedals what is
individual. In that way we are 'more ourselves' when clothed. By nudity
the lovers cease to be solely John and Mary; the universal He and She
are emphasized. You could almost say they put on nakedness
as...the costume for a charade [that includes a paper crown].... Paper
crowns have their legitimate, and (in the proper context) their serious,
uses.... As nature crowns man in that brief action, so the Christian
law has crowned him in the permanent relationship of marriage,
bestowing—or should I say, inflicting?—a certain 'headship' on him.
This is a very different coronation. And as we could easily take the
natural mystery too seriously, so we might take the Christian mystery
not seriously enough.
 |
| King Cophetua Woos the Beggar |
"We must go back to our Bibles. The
husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what
Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the church—read on—and give his life for her
(Ephesians 5:25). This headship, then is most fully embodied not in the
husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like
a crucifixion: whose wife receives most and gives least, is most
unworthy of him, is—in her own mere nature—least
lovable. For the Church has no beauty but what the Bridegroom gives
her; He does not find, but makes her, lovely.... As Christ sees in the
flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that Bride who will
one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter,
so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other
sort) never despairs. He is [like the legendary African] King Cophetua,
who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl [he married]
will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears.
"To
say this is not to say that there is any virtue or wisdom in making a
marriage that involves such misery. There is no wisdom or virtue in
seeking unnecessary martyrdom or deliberately courting persecution; yet
it is, nonetheless, the persecuted or martyred Christian in whom the
pattern of the Master is most unambiguously realised.... The sternest feminist need not grudge my sex the crown offered to it
either...of paper [or] of thorns. The real danger is not that husbands
may grasp [headship] too eagerly, but that they will allow or compel
their wives to usurp it.
 |
| Eros Is Willing to Face a Bleak Future |
"From
Venus, the carnal ingredient within Eros, I now turn to Eros as a
whole. Here we shall see the same pattern repeated. As Venus within Eros
does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness....
Everyone knows that it is useless to try to separate lovers by proving
to them that their marriage will be an unhappy one.... It is the very
mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with
the Beloved than be happy on any other terms. Even if the two
lovers are mature and experienced people who know that broken hearts
heal...and can clearly foresee that, if they once steeled themselves to
go through the present agony of parting, they would almost certainly be
happier...even then, they would not part.... When...marriage with the
Beloved...cannot even profess to offer any other life than that of
tending an incurable invalid [exactly the situation C.S. Lewis was in
with his beloved wife], of hopeless poverty, of exile, or of disgrace—Eros
never hesitates to say, 'Better this than parting.... Let our hearts
break provided they break together.' If the voice within us does not say
this, it is not the voice of Eros. This is the grandeur and terror of love.
"But
notice, as before, side by side with this grandeur, the playfulness.
Eros, as well as Venus, is the subject of countless jokes. And even when the circumstances of the two lovers are so tragic that no bystander could keep back his tears, they themselves—in want, in hospital wards, on visitors' days in jail—will sometimes be surprised by a merriment which
strikes the onlooker (but not them) as unbearably pathetic.... Until
they have a baby to laugh at, lovers are always laughing at each other.
"It is in the grandeur of Eros that the seeds of danger are concealed....
His total commitment, his reckless disregard of happiness, his
transcendence of self-regard, sound like a message from the eternal
world. And yet it cannot, just as it stands, be the voice of God
Himself. For Eros...may urge to evil as well as to good....
The love which leads to cruel and perjured unions, even to
suicide-pacts and murder, is not likely to be wandering lust or idle
sentiment. It may well be Eros...heartbreakingly sincere, ready for every sacrifice except renunciation.... Eros may unite the most unsuitable yokefellows: many unhappy, and predictably unhappy, marriages were love-matches....
"We
must not give unconditional obedience to the voice of Eros when he
speaks most like a god. Neither must we ignore or attempt to deny the
god-like quality. This love is really and truly like Love Himself....
His total commitment is a paradigm or example, built into our natures,
of the love we ought to exercise towards God and Man.... It is as if
Christ said to us through Eros, 'Thus—just like this—with this prodigality—not counting the cost—you
are to love Me and the least of My brethren.' Our conditional honour to
Eros will of course vary.... Of some a total renunciation...is
required. Others...can embark on the married life, within which Eros, of
himself, will never be enough—will indeed survive only insofar as he is continually chastened and corroborated by higher principles.
"But Eros, honoured without reservation and obeyed unconditionally, becomes a demon....
Divinely indifferent to our selfishness, he is also demoniacally
rebellious to every claim of God or Man that would oppose him. Hence as
the poet says: 'People in love cannot be moved by kindness, and
opposition makes them feel like martyrs.'... Years ago when I wrote
about medieval love-poetry and described its strange, half make-believe,
'religion of love,' I was blind enough to treat this as an almost
purely literary phenomenon. I know better now. Eros...always tends to turn 'being in love' into a sort of religion.
"Theologians have often feared, in this love, a danger of idolatry...that
the lovers might idolize one another. That does not seem to me to be
the real danger; certainly not in marriage. The deliciously plain...and
businesslike intimacy of married life renders it absurd.... Even in
courtship I question whether anyone who has felt the thirst for the
Uncreated, or even dreamed of feeling it, ever supposed that the Beloved
could satisfy it. As a fellow-pilgrim pierced with the very same
desire...the Beloved may be gloriously and helpfully relevant; but as an
object for it—well (I would not be rude), ridiculous. The real danger seems to me not that the lovers will idolize each other but that they will idolize Eros...[as if] Eros extenuates—almost sanctions—almost
sanctifies—any actions it leads to. When lovers say of some act that we
might blame, 'Love made us do it,' notice the tone.... The confession
can be almost a boast. There can be a shade of defiance in it.... What are really (by the Christian standard) temptations speak with the voice of duties—quasi-religious duties, acts of pious zeal to love....
"All
the time the grim joke is that this Eros whose voice seems to speak
from the eternal realm...is notoriously the most mortal of our loves.
The world rings with complaints of his fickleness. What is baffling is
the combination of this fickleness with his protestations of permanency.
To be in love is both to intend and to promise lifelong fidelity. Love
makes vows unasked; can't be deterred from making them.... Not
hypocritically but sincerely.... The event of falling in love is of
such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that
it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive
wall of our selfhood...and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being.
Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one
person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a
foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us
without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that.... Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform.
"Can
we be in this selfless liberation for a lifetime? Hardly for a week.
Between the best possible lovers this high condition is intermittent.
The old self soon turns out to be not so dead as he pretended—as
after a religious conversion. In either he may be momentarily knocked
flat; he will soon be up again; if not on his feet, at least on his
elbow.... But these lapses will not destroy a marriage between two
'decent and sensible' people. The couple whose marriage will certainly
be endangered by them, and possibly ruined, are those who...expected
that mere feeling would do for them, and permanently, all that was
necessary. When this expectation is disappointed they throw the blame on
Eros or, more usually, on their partners. In reality, however, Eros, having made his gigantic promise and shown you in glimpses what its performance would be like, has 'done his stuff.'...It is we who must labour to bring our daily life into even closer accordance with what the glimpses have revealed. We must do the works of Eros when Eros is not present.
"This
all good lovers know, though those who are not reflective or articulate
will be able to express it only in a few conventional phrases about 'taking the rough along with the smooth,' not 'expecting too much,' having 'a little common sense,' and the like. And all good Christian lovers know that this programme, modest as it sounds, will not be carried out except by humility, charity and divine grace; that is indeed the whole Christian life seen from one particular angle."
 |
| Love Lasts When Swimming Follows Diving |
C.S. Lewis ended his radio broadcast about romantic love with some vivid illustrations: "Love
makes vows without being asked; 'I will be true' are the first words he
ever utters. Now, appetites don't speak with that voice. The man who is
moved to over eat or over drink doesn't at all necessarily resolve on
lifelong gluttony or drunkenness. If anything he is far more likely
to assure himself that this is the very last time he will indulge in
either. He reaches out his hand for the decanter in order to fortify
with one more glass his resolution to become a teetotaler!" Eros is like
the amorous man with a new woman each time you see him, but firm in his
belief that "this time it's the real thing" or like the intellectual
faddist who thinks he has finally found the truth. "Both trust the
passion, at a very early phase of it, to do for them what no passion can
do. A passion can only move us, only supply incentive and energy. It
is merely the dive that gets us into the water. Once in, swimming—not diving's—the thing.
The faddist's delight in the discovery of what he thinks is truth is to
be admired, not mocked. The trouble is, he expects the possession and
use of truth to be exactly like the discovery. If after his dive he used
his muscles and swam, his history would be quite different. The amorist
similarly expects being in love to be exactly like falling in love.
When the delicious falling is over, when the dive's got him into the
water, he doesn't know how to go on. He has enjoyed the incentive of the
passion; he never discovers what it is an incentive to so he presently
climbs out and tries a dive in a different pond. For love by itself will
not keep us in love, or not for very long. Falling in love is something that happens to us; being in love—still more, remaining permanently in love—is something we do. No passion is self-preservative. The promise Eros makes can be kept but it isn't Eros that can keep it.... In clearer language, you
need a firm will to justice. You need a will already pretty well
trained and disciplined; in the long run you need the grace of God. And
in this Eros is like all the natural loves: they have not within themselves resources to secure their own permanence or to keep themselves from internal corruptions, nor to be innocent in dealing with those outside the circle of love." Thus Lewis prepares anyone who has ever felt like an outsider to appreciate the unique benefits of divine love.
Divine Love
"William
Morris wrote a poem called 'Love Is Enough' and someone is said to have
reviewed it briefly in the words 'It isn't.' Such has been the
[message] of this book. The natural loves are not self-sufficient. Something else,
at first vaguely described as 'decency and common sense,' but later
revealed as goodness, and finally as the whole Christian life in one
particular relation, must come to the help of the mere feeling if the feeling is to be kept sweet.
"To say this is not to belittle the natural loves but to indicate where their real glory lies. It is no disparagement to a garden to say that it will not...weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor...cut its own lawns.... It will remain a garden...only if someone does all these things to it [because]...it teams with life.
It glows with colour and smells like heaven and puts forward...beauties
which man could never have created and could not even, on his own
resources, have imagined.... The gardener's contributions to that glory
[seem]...in a sense paltry compared with those of nature.... When he has
done all, he has merely encouraged here and discouraged there, powers
and beauties that have a different source. But his share, though small,
is indispensable and laborious.
"When God planted a garden He set a man over it and set the man under Himself.
When He planted the garden of our nature and caused the flowering,
fruiting loves to grow there, He set our will to 'dress' them.... Unless
His grace comes down, like the rain and the sunshine, we shall use this
tool to little purpose. But its laborious...services are
indispensable. If they were needed when the garden was still Paradisal,
how much more now when the soil has gone sour and the worst weeds seem
to thrive on the best?... To liberate that splendour, to let it become fully what it is trying to be...is part of our purpose.
"But
only part. For now we must face a topic that I have long
postponed...our natural loves as rivals to the love of God.... This...is
not the place at which most of us need begin.... For most...the true rivalry lies between the self and the human Other, not yet between the human Other and God. It is dangerous to press...the duty of getting beyond earthly love when [the] real difficulty lies in getting so far.
And it is no doubt easy enough to love the fellow-creature less and to
imagine that it is happening because we are learning to love God more,
when the real reason may be quite different." As C.S. Lewis explains further in the radio broadcast, "In
my critique of the loves, I have stressed their rivalry to God less
than their failure without God to be completely or remain securely the
sorts of love they profess to be. And this, I hope, might make it easier
for us to believe and not merely to acknowledge verbally that they are,
after all, second things because to let us down while legitimately
attracting us is the very characteristic of a second thing which has
been treated as a first thing."
 |
| The Emperor Controls the Prince |
"To
have stressed the rivalry earlier," states Lewis in the book, "would have been premature in
another way also. The claim to divinity which our loves so easily make
can be refuted without going so far as that. The loves prove that they are unworthy to take the place of God by the fact that they cannot...do what they promise to do without God's help.
Why prove that some petty princeling is not the lawful Emperor when
without the Emperor's support he cannot even keep his subordinate throne
and make peace in his little province for half a year?... When God
rules in a human heart, though He may sometimes have to remove certain
of its native authorities altogether, He often continues others in their
offices and, by subjecting their authority to His, gives it for the
first time a firm basis.... The rebellious slogan 'All for love' is really love's death warrant (date of execution, for the moment, left blank)....
 |
| Augustine's Heart Breaks |
"If
the Victorians needed the reminder that love is not enough, older
theologians were always saying very loudly that (natural) love is likely
to be a great deal too much. The danger of loving our fellow-creatures
too little was less present to their minds than that of loving them
idolatrously. In every wife, mother, child and friend they saw a possible rival to God. So of course does Our Lord (Luke 14:26). There is one method of dissuading us from inordinate love of the fellow-creature which I find myself forced to reject....
I do so with trembling, for it met me in the pages of a great saint and
a great thinker to whom my own glad debts are incalculable. In words
which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Augustine describes the
desolation in which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him (Confessions
4:10). Then he draws a moral. This is what comes, he says, of giving
one's heart to anything but God. Do not let your happiness depend on
something you may lose.... Of course this is excellent sense...and there
is no man alive who responds more naturally than I to such canny
maxims. I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none
makes so strong an appeal to my nature as 'Careful! This might lead you
to suffering.'
"To
my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to
that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If
I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to
confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited
liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases
Him less. And who could conceivably begin to love God on
such...ground—because the security...is better? Would you choose a wife
or a friend [or] a dog in this spirit?... I think that this passage in
the Confessions is less a part of St. Augustine's Christendom
than a hangover from the high-minded Pagan philosophies in which he grew
up.... [Christians] follow One who wept over Jerusalem and at the grave
of Lazarus, and, loving all, yet had one disciple whom, in a special
sense, He 'loved.'... There is no escape along the lines St. Augustine
suggests. Nor along any other lines....
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.
[Imagine facing and articulating that fact in the clearest terms
possible when, like C.S. Lewis, your spouse has terminal cancer!] If you
want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no
one.... Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid
all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your
selfishness. But in that casket...it will become unbreakable,
impenetrable, irredeemable.... The only place outside Heaven where you
can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is
Hell.
"I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a...self-protective lovelessness.
It is like hiding the talent in a [field] and for much the same reason:
"I knew thee that thou art a hard man" [Matthew 25:24]. Christ did not
teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more
careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the
earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so
towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by
trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting
them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour....
"It is probably impossible to love any human being simply 'too much.' We may love him too much in proportion
to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not
the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the
inordinancy.... The real question is, which...do you serve, or choose,
or put first? To which claim does your will, in the last resort, yield?
As so often, Our Lord's own words are both far fiercer and far more
tolerable than those of the theologians. He says nothing about guarding
against earthly loves for fear we might be hurt; He says something that
cracks like a whip about trampling them all under foot the moment
they hold us back from following Him. 'If any man come to Me and hate
not his father and mother and wife...and his own life also, he cannot be
My disciple' (Luke 14:26).
"But how are we to understand the word hate?...
I think Our Lord, in the sense here intended, 'hated' St. Peter when he
said, 'Get thee behind Me.' To hate is to reject, to set one's face
against, to make no concession to the Beloved when the Beloved utters,
however sweetly and however pitiably, the suggestions of the Devil. A
man, said Jesus, who tries to serve two masters, will 'hate' the one and
'love' the other.... He will adhere to, consent to, work for, the one
and not for the other.... In the last resort, we must turn down...our nearest and dearest when they come between us and our obedience to God.
Heaven knows, it will seem to them sufficiently like hatred. We must
not act on the pity we feel; we must be blind to tears and deaf to
pleadings.
"I
will not say that this duty is hard; some find it too easy; some, hard
almost beyond endurance. What is hard for all is to know when the
occasion for such 'hating' has arisen. Our temperaments deceive us....
That is why it is of such extreme importance to so order our loves that
it is unlikely to arrive at all.... We may see [this] on a far lower
level when the Cavalier poet, going to [war], says to his [lady]: 'I
could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more.'...
[Lovelace's lady] admits, as he does, the claims of Honour. He does not
need to 'hate' her, to set his face against her, for he and she
acknowledge the same law. They have agreed and understood each other on this matter long before.... It is this prior agreement which is so necessary when a far greater claim than that of Honour is at stake....
Indeed, a real disagreement on this issue should make itself felt early
enough to prevent a marriage or a friendship from existing at all. The
best love of either sort is not blind.... If 'All'—quite seriously all—'for
love' is implicit in the Beloved's attitude, his or her love is not
worth having. It is not related in the right way to Love Himself.
 |
| How to Scale the Heights of God's Love? |
"And this brings me to the foot of the last steep ascent this book must try to make. We must try to relate the human...loves to that Love which is God.... 'God is love.... Herein is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us' (1 John 4:8, 10). We must not begin with mysticism, with the creature's love for God, but with God's love for the creatures." In the audio recording Lewis states eloquently, "Love itself, God's love, is utterly disassociated from need.
It is manifested first in creation and then in redemption. The doctrine
that God was under no necessity to create is not a bit of useless and
abstract scholasticism. It is essential, for it reveals the nature of
agape: that which in itself is complete, self-sufficient, eternally
blessed, which has no wants to satisfy, creates what it doesn't need,
creates because it desires to give, and gives seeing in the very moment
of creation the necessity for the crucifixion. Insofar as we've become
capable of that sort of love, agape is entering our lives."
However, the book warns,
"no sooner do we believe that God loves us than there is an impulse to
believe that He does so, not because He is Love, but because we are
intrinsically lovable.... It is easy to acknowledge, but almost
impossible to realise for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if
we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.... This
pretense that we have anything of our own or could for one hour retain
by our own strength any goodness that God may pour into us, has kept us
from being happy. We have been like bathers who want to keep their feet—or one foot—or one toe—on the bottom, when to lose that foothold would be to surrender themselves to a glorious tumble in the surf.
The consequences of parting with our last claim to intrinsic freedom,
power, or worth, are real freedom, power and worth, really ours just
because God gives them....
 |
| Some Things No One Can Like But... |
"We all need at times, some of us at most times, that Charity from others which, being Love Himself in them, loves the unlovable.
But this, though a sort of love we need, is not the sort we want. We
want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness,
usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering us the highest love
of all is a terrible shock." (In a separate chapter on this love in Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis explains that Charity now means giving to the poor, but it originally had a much wider meaning.
"You can see how it got the modern sense," says he: "If a man has
'charity,' giving to the poor is one of the most obvious things he does,
and so people came to talk as if that were the whole of charity. In the
same way, 'rhyme' is the most obvious thing about poetry, and so people
come to mean by 'poetry' simply rhyme and nothing more.") We all need
Charity in the highest sense because "there is something in each one of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one's fault if they do not so love it....
You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the
sound of a mechanical drill. We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved
in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good
parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some
times...they are receiving Charity, are loved not because they are
lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them.
"Thus God, admitted to the human heart, transforms not only...our [love for] Him, but our [love for] one another. This is...not the only thing that can happen.
He may come on what seems to us a more dreadful mission and demand that
a natural love be totally renounced. A high and terrible vocation, like
Abraham's, may constrain a man to turn his back on his own people and
his father's house. Eros, directed to a forbidden object, may have to be
sacrificed. In such instances, the process, though hard to endure, is
easy to understand. What we are more likely to overlook is the necessity
for a transformation even when the natural love is allowed to
continue....
"The invitation to turn our natural loves into Charity is never lacking.
It is provided by those frictions and frustrations that meet us in all
of them; unmistakable evidence that (natural) love is not going to be
'enough.'... In everyone, and of course in ourselves, there is that
which requires forbearance, tolerance, forgiveness. The necessity of
practising these virtues sets us, forces us, upon the attempt to
turn...our love into Charity. These frets and rubs are beneficial....
Where they are plentiful the necessity of rising above [them] is
obvious.... The necessity for the conversion is inexorable; at least, if
our natural loves are to enter the heavenly life.... Nothing can enter
[heaven] which cannot become heavenly. 'Flesh and blood,' mere nature,
cannot inherit that Kingdom [1 Corinthians 15:50].... Only those into
which Love Himself has entered will ascend to Love Himself. And these
can be raised with Him only if they have...shared His death: if [by
faith] the natural element in them has submitted—year after year, or in
some sudden agony—to transmutation.
"The fashion of this world passes away [1 Corinthians 7:31]. The very name of nature implies the transitory.
Natural loves can hope for eternity only insofar as they have allowed
themselves to be taken into the eternity of Charity; have at least
allowed the process to begin here on earth.... The process will always
involve a kind of death. There is no escape. In my love for wife or friend the only eternal element is the transforming presence of Love Himself.
By that presence...the other elements may hope, as our physical bodies
hope, to be raised from the dead. For this only is holy in them, this
only is the Lord.... All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
"But...I
dare not...leave any...reader...confirmed in the widespread illusion
that reunion with the loved dead is the goal of the Christian life....
'Thou has made us for Thyself,' said St. Augustine, 'and our heart has
no rest till it come to Thee.'... Believing first in reunion with the
Beloved, and then, for the sake of that reunion, believing in Heaven,
and finally, for the sake of Heaven, believing in God—this will not
work.... A self-critical person will soon be increasingly aware...he is
only weaving a fantasy.... We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him...
a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom, or goodness, has
any earthly Beloved excited our love. It is not that we have loved them
too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving. It
is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a
Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always
known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved
moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love.
All that was true in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours,
and ours only because His. In Heaven there will be no anguish and no
duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. First, because we shall
have turned already; from the portraits to the Original, from the
rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made lovable to Love
Himself. But second, because we shall find them all in Him. By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we do now.
"But
all that is far away in 'the land of the Trinity,' not here in exile,
in the weeping valley.... The very purpose of... bereavement ...may have
been to force this upon us. We are then compelled to try to believe,
what we cannot yet feel, that God is our true Beloved." The radio broadcast concludes, "Such
I conceive as the world of agape: a world of unbounded giving and
unashamed receiving, where all blessed creatures need and know that they
need nothing but God and are therefore set free to love one another
disinterestedly. And so your love shall be like His, born neither of my
need nor your deserving but of plain bounty. I think those are drawing
near to heaven who in this life find that they need men less and love
men more and delight more in being loved without being needed.... All
this time I've taken the love of God to mean solely God's love for man.
St. John led me into it; I still think it's the safe and sober
approach, but is there no more than this? Isn't the First Commandment to love God? Yes...there
is indeed a way of loving God which is easy to none but possible to
all: 'Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these, My brethren, ye did
it to Me' [Matthew 25:40]. We can see the face of Christ in every man
and act accordingly. And there is also the love expressed solely in
obedience. There is love for the humanity of our Lord, for the Holy
Child or the Sufferer. There is also the unsatisfied love thirst or
longing for God. But of what is beyond all these, what is neither love of God in man, nor in obedience, nor love of the man in God, nor love longing—of fruition in this life and foretaste of Beatitude [Beatific vision of God]—I'm not the man to speak.
Even if I heard rumors or made guesses, I couldn't put them into this
form; I'd need myths and symbols [which, in a sense, he already used in The Last Battle, the last Narnian chronicle, when describing Aslan's Country or Heaven]. All that can be said here is that even on those high levels, though something goes from man to God, yet all—including this something—comes from God to man. If he rises, he does so lifted on a wave of the incoming tide of God's love for him."
Remember to check here for more nuggets: Additional Gems from C.S. Lewis's Audio Recordings of The Four Loves
To get right to it, C.S. Lewis assigns 4 English words to 4 distinct Greek words translated love in the New Testament, with parenthetical clarification:
C.S.
Lewis was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge
University when he retired shortly before he died in 1963. He wrote an
important academic work called The Allegory of Love: A Study of Medieval Tradition in 1936 so in one sense Lewis was an expert on love for decades. By the time he wrote The Four Loves
from a set of radio talks in 1958 (which were criticized in America at
the time for their frankness about sex), he was all the more an expert
on love because he married a wonderful woman named Joy in 1956, lost her
to cancer in 1960, yet they enjoyed a truly glorious marriage in those
four years. We are privileged that C.S. Lewis wrote down what he learned
about love while he still had time.
"Every
Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly
proportional to his love for God. But man's love for God...must always
be very largely, and must often be entirely, a Need love....Our whole being by its very nature is one of vast need:
incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who
can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that
are still dangling loose....Man approaches God most nearly when he is in
one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and
need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless
power and a cry for help?...
"We must distinguish two things which might both possibly be called 'nearness to God.' One is likeness to God." The other is "what we may call nearness of approach....They
do not necessarily coincide....Let us suppose that we are doing a
mountain walk to the village which is our home. At mid-day we come to
the top of a cliff where we are...near it because it is just below us.
We could drop a stone into it. But...we can't get down. We must go a
long way round...further from the village...but...in terms of progress
we shall be far nearer our baths and teas....What is near [God] by
likeness is never, by that fact alone, going to be any nearer....The
likeness is given to us—and can be received with or without thanks, can be used or abused—the approach, however initiated and supported by Grace, is something we must do....
"As a better writer has said [Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ], our imitation of God in this life...must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus,
not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the
clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and
privacy, the interruptions...the Divine life operating under human conditions....
"How
the Need-pleasures foreshadow our Need-loves is obvious enough.... The
Need-love, like the Need-pleasure, will not last longer than the need.
This does not, fortunately, mean that all affections which begin in
Need-love are transitory.... Moral principles (conjugal fidelity, filial
piety, gratitude, and the like) may preserve the relationship for a
lifetime. But where Need-love is left unaided we can hardly expect it
not to 'die on us'.... Our need-love for God is in a different position
because our need of Him can never end...but our awareness of it can, and
then the Need-love dies too.... Appreciative pleasure...is the starting
point for our whole experience of beauty.... Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve...God; Appreciative love says: 'We give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory'....
"I turn now to the love of one's country.... This
love becomes a demon when it becomes a god. Some begin to suspect that
it is never anything but a demon. But then they have to reject half the high poetry and half the heroic action [the human] race has achieved. We cannot keep even Christ's lament over Jerusalem. He too exhibits love for His country...."
"In Greek they have four words for love: storge (two syllables and the g is hard) means affection, the sort of love that ought to be between near relations; philia means friendship; eros is, of course, the love between the sexes; and agape (three syllables, long e) is love in the Christian sense—God's love for man and the Christian's love for the brethren. I want to talk about all four and I'll begin with storge or affection,
the humblest of the loves, the love which seems to differ
least from that of the animals. I do not on that account give it a
lower value. Nothing in Man is either worse or better for being shared
with the beasts. When we blame a man for being 'a mere animal,' we mean
not that he displays animal characteristics (we all do) but that he
displays these...on occasions where the specifically human was
demanded..... The Greeks called this love storge (two syllables and the g is 'hard). I shall here call it simply Affection. My Greek Lexicon defines storge as 'affection, especially of parents to offspring'; but also of offspring to parents.... The image we must start with is that of a mother nursing a baby...a cat with a basketful of...kittens; all in a squeaking nuzzling heap together; purrings, lickings, baby-talk, milk, warmth, the smell of young life....
"I
am talking of Affection as it is when it exists apart from the other
loves ... but ... Affection ... can enter into the other loves and ... become
the medium in which from day to day they operate. They would not
perhaps wear very well without it." Lewis adds here in the radio broadcast, "Every
good marriage, even every courtship, makes for its eros, so to speak, a
nest of storge, like the nest of rice you build for your helping of
curry." It is something mellow that balances the spice in life. Lewis continues in the book, "To make a friend is not the same as
to become affectionate. But when your friend has become an old friend,
all those things about him which had originally nothing to do with the
friendship become familiar and dear with familiarity.... There is indeed a peculiar charm, both in friendship and in Eros, about those moments when Appreciative love lies...curled up asleep, and the mere ease and ordinariness of the relationship...wraps us round....
"Affection...is
not primarily an Appreciative love. It is not discriminating....
The...glory of Affection is that it can unite those who most
emphatically, even comically...if they had not found themselves...in the
same households or community, would have had nothing to do with each
other. If Affection grows out of this—of course it often does not—their
eyes begin to open. Growing fond of 'old so-and-so,' at first simply
because he happens to be there, I...begin to see that there is
'something in him' after all....We are learning to appreciate goodness
or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence
flavoured and served to suit our own palate....Truly wide taste in humanity will...find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day. In
my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us
first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and
finally to appreciate, the people who 'happen to be there'...odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.
"The really surprising thing is not that these insatiable demands...are sometimes made in vain, but that they are so often met. Sometimes one sees a woman's girlhood, youth...up
to the verge of old age all spent in tending, obeying, caressing, and
perhaps supporting, a maternal vampire who can never be caressed and
obeyed enough. The sacrifice—but there are two opinions about that—may be beautiful; the old woman who exacts it is not.
"The 'built-in' or unmerited character of Affection...invites a hideous misinterpretation. So does its ease and informality. We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation...but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.
Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father
or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which,
offered to any other young people, would simply have terminated the
acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on matters which the children
understand and their elders don't, ruthless interruptions, flat
contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously...insulting
references to their friends—all
provide an easy answer to the question, Why are they always out?...If
you asked any of these insufferable people...why they behaved that way
at home, they would reply, '...One comes home to relax....If a man can't
be himself in his own house, where can he?...We're a happy family. We
can say anything to one another here. No one minds. We all understand.'...
"We have not yet touched on jealousy....Change is a threat to Affection.
A brother and sister, or two brothers [the latter being C.S. Lewis's experience] ...grow...sharing everything. They
have read the same comics, climbed the same trees, been pirates or
spacemen together.... Then...one of them...discovers poetry or science or
serious music or perhaps undergoes a religious conversion. His life is
flooded with the new interest. The other cannot share it; he is left
behind.... Affection is the most instinctive, in that sense the most animal, of the loves; its jealousy is proportionately fierce.
It snarls and bares its teeth like a dog whose food has been snatched
away....Something or someone has snatched away from the child I am
picturing his lifelong food, his second self. His world is in ruins. But
it is not only children who react thus. Few things...are more
nearly fiendish than the rancour with which a whole unbelieving family
will turn on the one member of it who has become a Christian.... It
is the reaction to a desertion...he who was one of Us has become one of
Them.... Sometimes a curious double jealousy is felt....'Supposing—it
can't be, it musn't be...there was something in...Christianity? How if
the deserter has really entered a new world which the rest of us never
suspected? But, if so, how unfair! Why him?... A [mere boy] being shown
things that are hidden from their elders?' And since that is clearly
incredible and unendurable, jealousy returns to the hypothesis 'All
nonsense.'...
"I hope I am not being misunderstood.... Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and
durable happiness there is in our natural lives.... Selfish or neurotic
people can twist anything, even love, into some sort of misery or
exploitation.... But I believe that everyone who is honest with himself
will admit that he has felt these temptations. Their occurrence is not a disease; or if it is, the name of that disease is Being a Fallen Man. In ordinary people the yielding to them—and who does not sometimes yield?—is not disease, but sin. Spiritual directing will here help us more than medical treatment. Medicine labors to restore 'natural'
structure or 'normal' function. But greed, egoism, self-deception, and
self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal.... For who ...
would describe as natural or normal the man from whom these failings
were wholly absent?... We have seen only one such Man. And He was not at
all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be very well adjusted to your world if it says you 'have a devil' and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.
"The first and most obvious answer is that few value it because few experience it.... Friendship is...least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological...and necessary....
Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection
none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without
Friendship.... The pack or herd—the
community—may even dislike and distrust it. Its leaders very often
do.... This...quality in Friendship goes far to explain why it was
exalted in ancient and medieval times and has come to be made light of
in our own. The deepest and most permanent thought of those ages was
ascetic and world-renouncing. Nature and emotion and the body were feared as dangers to our souls.... Inevitably that sort of love was most prized which seemed most independent...of mere nature.... But then came Romanticism and...the 'return to nature' and the exaltation of Sentiment...which, though often criticised, has lasted ever since. Finally, the exaltation of instinct....
"It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual." C.S. Lewis adds in the radio broadcast, "It
doesn't at all prove that those who bring the charge are homosexuals
themselves, nor would I moralize upon them if they were. How a man can feel anything but bewildered pity for the genuinely homosexual I've never been able to understand. What it does prove is that they've either never known friendship or never known eros." He goes on to explain in the book, "In some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair.
Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends
hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face,
absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common
interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two
only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.... 
"True friendship is the least jealous of loves.
Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if
only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can...say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.'... In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious 'nearness by resemblance' to Heaven itself
where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number)
increases the [experience] each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him
in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the
rest.... The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more
we shall all have....
"On a broad historical view it is...not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors [kisses, tears, and embraces regardless of gender] but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation. We, not they, are out of step.
I have said that...both the individual and the community can survive
without [Friendship]. But there is something else, often confused with
Friendship, which the community does need; something which is the matrix of Friendship. In
the early communities the co-operation of the males as hunters or
fighters was no less necessary than the begetting and rearing of
children. A tribe where there was no taste for the one would die no
less surely than a tribe where there was no taste for the other.... We
men [got] together and [did] things. We had to. And to like doing what
must be done is a characteristic that has survival value. We not only
had to do the things, we had to talk about them. We had to plan the hunt
and the battle. When they were over we had to...draw conclusions for
future use. We liked this even better. We ridiculed or punished the
cowards and bunglers, we praised the star-performers. We revelled in
technicalities (...'I had a lighter arrowhead; that's what did it'...).
In fact, we talked shop...all bound together by shared skill, shared dangers and hardships, esoteric jokes—away from the women and children.... They certainly often had rituals from which men were excluded....
"This
pleasure in co-operation, in talking shop, in the mutual respect and
understanding of men who daily see one another tested
is...something...we all understand.... I prefer to call it Companionship—or Clubbableness. This Companionship is, however, only the matrix of Friendship. It is often called Friendship, and many people when they speak of their 'friends' mean only their companions.
But it is not Friendship in the sense I give to the word. By saying
this I do not at all intend to disparage the merely Clubbable relation.
We do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold. Friendship
arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions
discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even
taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each
believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical
expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one.'...In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?—Or at least, 'Do you care about the same truth?'
The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by
others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with
us about the answer....
"It could be argued that Friendships are of practical value to the Community. Every
civilised religion began in a small group of friends. Mathematics
effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about
numbers and lines and angles.... Communism...Methodism, the movement
against slavery, the Reformation, the Renaissance, might perhaps be
said...to have begun in the same way.... But nearly every reader would
probably think some of these movements good for society and some bad.
The whole list, if accepted, would tend to show, at best, that
Friendship is both a possible benefactor and a possible danger to the
community....
"Others...would
say that Friendship is extremely useful...to the individual. They could
produce plenty of authority: 'bare is back without brother behind it'
and 'there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.' But [that
is] using friend to mean 'ally.' In ordinary usage friend
means, or should mean, more than that. A Friend will, to be sure, prove
himself to be also an ally when alliance becomes necessary; will lend or
give when we are in need...because you would be a false friend if you
would not.... The role of benefactor, [however], always remains
accidental, even a little alien, to that of Friendship.... We are sorry
that any gift or loan...should have been necessary—and
now, for heaven's sake, let us forget all about it and go back to the
things we really want to do or talk of together.... 'Don't mention
it'...expresses what we really feel. The mark of perfect Friendship is
not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will)
but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all....
"Friendship,
unlike Eros, is uninquisitive. You became a man's Friend without
knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his
living. What have all these 'unconcerning things, matters of fact' to do
with the real question, Do you see the same truth?... In a circle of true Friends...no one cares...about
anyone else's family, profession, class, income, race, or previous
history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end.
But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy...never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts....
"Hence
(if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and
irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and
no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of
necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like
the universe (for God did not need to create). It has no survival
value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival." C.S. Lewis observes in the radio broadcast that "the
friend is most clearly distinguishable from the companion in that after
any tract of time or any change of residence or occupation, the old
unity will be intact. Everything will be taken up again as if we had
been parted for only a few hours. We've no need to fall back on
reminiscences, though we may do so for the pleasure of it, but we're not
reduced to them. Whereas the attempted revival of mere companionship
has no other coin. The difference between mere companionship and
friendship depends on the nature of the shared activity."
The book goes on to explain that "the
common quest or vision which unites Friends does not absorb them in
such a way that they remain ignorant or oblivious of one another. On the
contrary it is the very medium in which their mutual love and knowledge
exist. One knows nobody so well as one's 'fellow.' Every step of the
common journey tests his metal; and the tests are tests we fully
understand because we are undergoing them ourselves. Hence, as he
rings true time after time, our reliance, our respect and our admiration
blossom into an Appreciative love of a singularly robust and
well-informed kind. If, at the outset," we payed more attention "to
him and less to the thing our Friendship is 'about,' we should not have
come to know or love him so well. You will not" come to know "the
warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his
eyes as if he were your [mate]: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.
"In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each
member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the
rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is [blessed] beyond desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together, each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others. Those are the golden sessions...an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life—natural life—has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?" That is why, says Lewis in the radio broadcast, "the
death of a friend may impoverish us every year or every month until we
die. We are like a man who has lost a limb. The stump may not ache or
not much, but no more tennis, no more mountain walks. Write it all off."
In his book C.S. Lewis observes that "in most societies at most periods friendships will be between men and men or between women and women ...
for they will seldom have had with each other the companionship in
common activities which is the matrix of Friendship.... It is this lack,
rather than anything in their natures, which excludes Friendship; for where they can be companions they can also become Friends.
Hence in a profession (like my own) where men and women work side by
side, or in the mission field, or among authors and artists, such
Friendship is common. To be sure, what is offered as Friendship on one
side may be mistaken for Eros on the other, with painful and
embarrassing results. Or what begins as Friendship in both may become
also Eros.... Sensible women...if they wanted, would certainly be able
to qualify themselves for the world of discussion and ideas [as opposed
to mainly narrative forms of communication].... If they are not
qualified, [they] never try to enter it or to destroy it. They have
other fish to fry. At a mixed party they gravitate to one end of the
room and talk women's talk to one another. They don't want us, for this
sort of purpose, any more than we want them. It is only the riff-raff of each sex that wants to be incessantly hanging on the other." In the audio recordings C.S. Lewis emphatically states, "I have the deepest suspicions of those wretched people who find no pleasure in the society of their own sex. Heaven protect me from a man who needs only women and a woman who needs only men!" In the book he observes that women enriched by same-sex camaraderie laugh at men "a good deal. That is just as it should be.... No one
ever really appreciated the other sex...without at times feeling them to
be funny. For both sexes are. Humanity is tragi-comical....
"Friendship...love,
free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has
freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free from...the
need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels.... Let us beware.... There is spiritual evil as well as spiritual good. There are unholy, as well as holy, angels." In the radio broadcast Lewis states plainly, "Friends give us moral support—or immoral support....There's
a moral ambivalence inherent in friendship.... Friendship is a resistance movement. It can resist God as well as society." The book takes into account the following three significant facts: 
"We can detect the pride of Friendship—whether Olympian [tranquil and tolerant, making Outsiders feel like children], Titanic [militant and embittered against Outsiders], or merely vulgar
[meant to make people feel like Outsiders]—in many circles of Friends.
It would be rash to assume that our own is safe from its danger; for of
course it is in our own that we should be slowest to recognise it....
Friendship must exclude. From the innocent and necessary act of
excluding to the spirit of exclusiveness is an easy step; and thence to
the degrading pleasure of exclusiveness.... The mass of the people,
who are never quite right, are never quite wrong. They are hopelessly
mistaken in their belief that every knot of friends came into existence
for the sake of...conceit and superiority.... But they would seem to be
right in diagnosing pride as the danger to which Friendships are
naturally liable. Just because this is the most spiritual of loves the
danger which besets it is spiritual too....
"Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself.... Because it is spiritual and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must...invoke the divine protection if it hopes to remain sweet.
For consider how narrow its true path is. It must not become...'a
mutual admiration society'; yet if it is not full of mutual admiration,
of Appreciative love, it is not Friendship at all.... It must be for us
in our Friendships as it was for Christiana and her party in The Pilgrim's Progress: 'They...could
not see that glory each one on herself which they could see in each
other. Now therefore they began to esteem each other better than
themselves. For you are fairer than I am, said one; and you are more
comely than I am, said another.' There is...only one way...we can
taste this illustrious experience with safety. And Bunyan has indicated
it in the same passage. It was in the House of the Interpreter, after
they had been bathed, sealed and freshly clothed in 'White Raiment' that
the women saw one another in this light. If we remember the bathing,
sealing and robing, we shall be safe....
"In Friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a
few years' difference in the date of our births, a few more miles
between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances.
A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ...can truly
say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one
another but I have chosen you for one another.' The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.... At this feast it is He who has chosen the guests.
It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should,
preside. Let us not reckon without our Host. Not that we must always
partake of it solemnly.... It is one of the difficult and delightful
subtleties of life that we must deeply acknowledge certain things to be
serious and yet retain the power and will to treat them often as lightly
as a game."
"Conversely, this act, done under the influence of a soaring and iridescent Eros...may
yet be plain adultery, may involve breaking a wife's heart, deceiving a
husband, betraying a friend, polluting hospitality, and deserting your
children. It has not pleased God that the distinction between a sin
and a duty should turn on fine feelings. This act, like any other, is
justified (or not) by far more...definable criteria: by the keeping or
breaking of promises, by justice or injustice, by charity or
selfishness, by obedience or disobedience....
"There
may be those who have first felt mere sexual appetite for a woman and
then gone on at a later stage to fall in love with her." That is what schoolboys imagine falling in love will be like, states C.S. Lewis in his radio broadcast, but he goes on to state there and in the book, "I doubt if
this is at all common. Very often what comes first is simply a delighted preoccupation with the Beloved—a general, unspecified preoccupation with her in her totality.
A man in this state really hasn't leisure to think of sex. He is too
busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less
important than the fact that she is herself.... If you asked him what he
wanted, the true reply would often be, 'To go on thinking of her.'...
When at a later stage the explicitly sexual element awakes, he will not
feel (unless scientific theories are influencing him) that this had all
along been the root of the whole matter.... Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved.
"The thing
is a sensory pleasure...an event occurring within one's own body. We
use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the
streets, that he 'wants a woman.' Strictly speaking, a woman is just
what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to
be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman...may
be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does
not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes
a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some
mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved
herself, not the pleasure she can give. No lover in the world ever
sought the embraces of the woman he loved as the result of a
calculation...that they would be more pleasurable than those of any
other woman. If he raised the question he would, no doubt, expect that
this would be so. But to raise it would be to step outside the world of
Eros altogether....
"Eros
thus wonderfully transforms ...a Need-pleasure into the most
Appreciative of all pleasures.... In Eros, a Need, at its most intense,
sees the object most intensely as a thing admirable in herself,
important far beyond her relation to the lover's need. If we...were mere
logicians, we might boggle at the conception of desiring a human being,
as distinct from desiring any pleasure, comfort, or service that human
being can give. And it is certainly hard to explain.... Without Eros
sexual desire, like every other desire, is a fact about ourselves.
Within Eros it is rather about the Beloved.... Eros, though the king of pleasures, always (at his height) has the air of regarding pleasure as a by-product." "Hence in his realm," as Lewis explains in his audio recording, "the miraculous combination of great desire with great ease in abstaining. And anyway, whose pleasure? One of the first things Eros does is to obliterate the distinction between giving and receiving," as both the book and the audio state.
"But eating is also serious...yet we do not bring [exam books] to dinner nor behave there as if we were in church. And it is gourmets, not saints, who come nearest to doing so. Animals are always very serious about food....
"But
notice, as before, side by side with this grandeur, the playfulness.
Eros, as well as Venus, is the subject of countless jokes. And even when the circumstances of the two lovers are so tragic that no bystander could keep back his tears, they themselves—in want, in hospital wards, on visitors' days in jail—will sometimes be surprised by a merriment which
strikes the onlooker (but not them) as unbearably pathetic.... Until
they have a baby to laugh at, lovers are always laughing at each other.
"Indeed we require this relief.... Pleasure, pushed to its extreme, shatters us like pain....
Amourousness as well as grief can bring tears to the eyes. But Venus
does not always come thus 'entire, fastened to her prey,' and the fact
that she sometimes does so is the very reason for preserving always a
hint of playfulness in our attitude to her.... This refusal to be quite
immersed—this
recollection of the levity even when, for the moment, only the gravity
is displayed—is especially relevant to a certain attitude which Venus,
in her intensity, evokes from most (I believe, not all) pairs of lovers.
This act can invite the man to an extreme, though short-lived masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror...and the woman to a correspondingly extreme subjection and surrender. Hence the roughness, even fierceness, of some erotic play.... How should a sane couple think of this? or a Christian couple permit it?
"Some
will think it strange I should find an element of ritual or masquerade
in that action which is often regarded as the most real, the most
unmasked and sheerly genuine, we ever do. Are we not our true selves when naked? In a sense, no. The word naked was originally a past participle; the naked man was the man who had undergone a process of naking,
that is, of stripping or peeling (you used the verb of nuts and
fruit).... The naked man has seemed to our ancestors not the natural but
the abnormal man; not the man who has abstained from dressing but the
man who has been for some reason undressed. And it is a simple
fact...that nudity emphasizes common humanity and soft-pedals what is
individual. In that way we are 'more ourselves' when clothed. By nudity
the lovers cease to be solely John and Mary; the universal He and She
are emphasized. You could almost say they put on nakedness
as...the costume for a charade [that includes a paper crown].... Paper
crowns have their legitimate, and (in the proper context) their serious,
uses.... As nature crowns man in that brief action, so the Christian
law has crowned him in the permanent relationship of marriage,
bestowing—or should I say, inflicting?—a certain 'headship' on him.
This is a very different coronation. And as we could easily take the
natural mystery too seriously, so we might take the Christian mystery
not seriously enough.
"It is in the grandeur of Eros that the seeds of danger are concealed....
His total commitment, his reckless disregard of happiness, his
transcendence of self-regard, sound like a message from the eternal
world. And yet it cannot, just as it stands, be the voice of God
Himself. For Eros...may urge to evil as well as to good....
The love which leads to cruel and perjured unions, even to
suicide-pacts and murder, is not likely to be wandering lust or idle
sentiment. It may well be Eros...heartbreakingly sincere, ready for every sacrifice except renunciation.... Eros may unite the most unsuitable yokefellows: many unhappy, and predictably unhappy, marriages were love-matches....
"All
the time the grim joke is that this Eros whose voice seems to speak
from the eternal realm...is notoriously the most mortal of our loves.
The world rings with complaints of his fickleness. What is baffling is
the combination of this fickleness with his protestations of permanency.
To be in love is both to intend and to promise lifelong fidelity. Love
makes vows unasked; can't be deterred from making them.... Not
hypocritically but sincerely.... The event of falling in love is of
such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that
it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive
wall of our selfhood...and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being.
Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one
person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a
foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us
without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that.... Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform.
"Can
we be in this selfless liberation for a lifetime? Hardly for a week.
Between the best possible lovers this high condition is intermittent.
The old self soon turns out to be not so dead as he pretended—as
after a religious conversion. In either he may be momentarily knocked
flat; he will soon be up again; if not on his feet, at least on his
elbow.... But these lapses will not destroy a marriage between two
'decent and sensible' people. The couple whose marriage will certainly
be endangered by them, and possibly ruined, are those who...expected
that mere feeling would do for them, and permanently, all that was
necessary. When this expectation is disappointed they throw the blame on
Eros or, more usually, on their partners. In reality, however, Eros, having made his gigantic promise and shown you in glimpses what its performance would be like, has 'done his stuff.'...It is we who must labour to bring our daily life into even closer accordance with what the glimpses have revealed. We must do the works of Eros when Eros is not present.
"This
all good lovers know, though those who are not reflective or articulate
will be able to express it only in a few conventional phrases about 'taking the rough along with the smooth,' not 'expecting too much,' having 'a little common sense,' and the like. And all good Christian lovers know that this programme, modest as it sounds, will not be carried out except by humility, charity and divine grace; that is indeed the whole Christian life seen from one particular angle."
"To say this is not to belittle the natural loves but to indicate where their real glory lies. It is no disparagement to a garden to say that it will not...weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor...cut its own lawns.... It will remain a garden...only if someone does all these things to it [because]...it teams with life.
It glows with colour and smells like heaven and puts forward...beauties
which man could never have created and could not even, on his own
resources, have imagined.... The gardener's contributions to that glory
[seem]...in a sense paltry compared with those of nature.... When he has
done all, he has merely encouraged here and discouraged there, powers
and beauties that have a different source. But his share, though small,
is indispensable and laborious.
"When God planted a garden He set a man over it and set the man under Himself.
When He planted the garden of our nature and caused the flowering,
fruiting loves to grow there, He set our will to 'dress' them.... Unless
His grace comes down, like the rain and the sunshine, we shall use this
tool to little purpose. But its laborious...services are
indispensable. If they were needed when the garden was still Paradisal,
how much more now when the soil has gone sour and the worst weeds seem
to thrive on the best?... To liberate that splendour, to let it become fully what it is trying to be...is part of our purpose.
"But
only part. For now we must face a topic that I have long
postponed...our natural loves as rivals to the love of God.... This...is
not the place at which most of us need begin.... For most...the true rivalry lies between the self and the human Other, not yet between the human Other and God. It is dangerous to press...the duty of getting beyond earthly love when [the] real difficulty lies in getting so far.
And it is no doubt easy enough to love the fellow-creature less and to
imagine that it is happening because we are learning to love God more,
when the real reason may be quite different." As C.S. Lewis explains further in the radio broadcast, "In
my critique of the loves, I have stressed their rivalry to God less
than their failure without God to be completely or remain securely the
sorts of love they profess to be. And this, I hope, might make it easier
for us to believe and not merely to acknowledge verbally that they are,
after all, second things because to let us down while legitimately
attracting us is the very characteristic of a second thing which has
been treated as a first thing."
"To
my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to
that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If
I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to
confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited
liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases
Him less. And who could conceivably begin to love God on
such...ground—because the security...is better? Would you choose a wife
or a friend [or] a dog in this spirit?... I think that this passage in
the Confessions is less a part of St. Augustine's Christendom
than a hangover from the high-minded Pagan philosophies in which he grew
up.... [Christians] follow One who wept over Jerusalem and at the grave
of Lazarus, and, loving all, yet had one disciple whom, in a special
sense, He 'loved.'... There is no escape along the lines St. Augustine
suggests. Nor along any other lines....
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.
[Imagine facing and articulating that fact in the clearest terms
possible when, like C.S. Lewis, your spouse has terminal cancer!] If you
want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no
one.... Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid
all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your
selfishness. But in that casket...it will become unbreakable,
impenetrable, irredeemable.... The only place outside Heaven where you
can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is
Hell.
"I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a...self-protective lovelessness.
It is like hiding the talent in a [field] and for much the same reason:
"I knew thee that thou art a hard man" [Matthew 25:24]. Christ did not
teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more
careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the
earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so
towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by
trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting
them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour....
"It is probably impossible to love any human being simply 'too much.' We may love him too much in proportion
to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not
the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the
inordinancy.... The real question is, which...do you serve, or choose,
or put first? To which claim does your will, in the last resort, yield?
As so often, Our Lord's own words are both far fiercer and far more
tolerable than those of the theologians. He says nothing about guarding
against earthly loves for fear we might be hurt; He says something that
cracks like a whip about trampling them all under foot the moment
they hold us back from following Him. 'If any man come to Me and hate
not his father and mother and wife...and his own life also, he cannot be
My disciple' (Luke 14:26).
"But how are we to understand the word hate?...
I think Our Lord, in the sense here intended, 'hated' St. Peter when he
said, 'Get thee behind Me.' To hate is to reject, to set one's face
against, to make no concession to the Beloved when the Beloved utters,
however sweetly and however pitiably, the suggestions of the Devil. A
man, said Jesus, who tries to serve two masters, will 'hate' the one and
'love' the other.... He will adhere to, consent to, work for, the one
and not for the other.... In the last resort, we must turn down...our nearest and dearest when they come between us and our obedience to God.
Heaven knows, it will seem to them sufficiently like hatred. We must
not act on the pity we feel; we must be blind to tears and deaf to
pleadings.
"I
will not say that this duty is hard; some find it too easy; some, hard
almost beyond endurance. What is hard for all is to know when the
occasion for such 'hating' has arisen. Our temperaments deceive us....
That is why it is of such extreme importance to so order our loves that
it is unlikely to arrive at all.... We may see [this] on a far lower
level when the Cavalier poet, going to [war], says to his [lady]: 'I
could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more.'...
[Lovelace's lady] admits, as he does, the claims of Honour. He does not
need to 'hate' her, to set his face against her, for he and she
acknowledge the same law. They have agreed and understood each other on this matter long before.... It is this prior agreement which is so necessary when a far greater claim than that of Honour is at stake....
Indeed, a real disagreement on this issue should make itself felt early
enough to prevent a marriage or a friendship from existing at all. The
best love of either sort is not blind.... If 'All'—quite seriously all—'for
love' is implicit in the Beloved's attitude, his or her love is not
worth having. It is not related in the right way to Love Himself.
However, the book warns,
"no sooner do we believe that God loves us than there is an impulse to
believe that He does so, not because He is Love, but because we are
intrinsically lovable.... It is easy to acknowledge, but almost
impossible to realise for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if
we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.... This
pretense that we have anything of our own or could for one hour retain
by our own strength any goodness that God may pour into us, has kept us
from being happy. We have been like bathers who want to keep their feet—or one foot—or one toe—on the bottom, when to lose that foothold would be to surrender themselves to a glorious tumble in the surf.
The consequences of parting with our last claim to intrinsic freedom,
power, or worth, are real freedom, power and worth, really ours just
because God gives them....
"Thus God, admitted to the human heart, transforms not only...our [love for] Him, but our [love for] one another. This is...not the only thing that can happen.
He may come on what seems to us a more dreadful mission and demand that
a natural love be totally renounced. A high and terrible vocation, like
Abraham's, may constrain a man to turn his back on his own people and
his father's house. Eros, directed to a forbidden object, may have to be
sacrificed. In such instances, the process, though hard to endure, is
easy to understand. What we are more likely to overlook is the necessity
for a transformation even when the natural love is allowed to
continue....
"The invitation to turn our natural loves into Charity is never lacking.
It is provided by those frictions and frustrations that meet us in all
of them; unmistakable evidence that (natural) love is not going to be
'enough.'... In everyone, and of course in ourselves, there is that
which requires forbearance, tolerance, forgiveness. The necessity of
practising these virtues sets us, forces us, upon the attempt to
turn...our love into Charity. These frets and rubs are beneficial....
Where they are plentiful the necessity of rising above [them] is
obvious.... The necessity for the conversion is inexorable; at least, if
our natural loves are to enter the heavenly life.... Nothing can enter
[heaven] which cannot become heavenly. 'Flesh and blood,' mere nature,
cannot inherit that Kingdom [1 Corinthians 15:50].... Only those into
which Love Himself has entered will ascend to Love Himself. And these
can be raised with Him only if they have...shared His death: if [by
faith] the natural element in them has submitted—year after year, or in
some sudden agony—to transmutation.
"The fashion of this world passes away [1 Corinthians 7:31]. The very name of nature implies the transitory.
Natural loves can hope for eternity only insofar as they have allowed
themselves to be taken into the eternity of Charity; have at least
allowed the process to begin here on earth.... The process will always
involve a kind of death. There is no escape. In my love for wife or friend the only eternal element is the transforming presence of Love Himself.
By that presence...the other elements may hope, as our physical bodies
hope, to be raised from the dead. For this only is holy in them, this
only is the Lord.... All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
"But...I
dare not...leave any...reader...confirmed in the widespread illusion
that reunion with the loved dead is the goal of the Christian life....
'Thou has made us for Thyself,' said St. Augustine, 'and our heart has
no rest till it come to Thee.'... Believing first in reunion with the
Beloved, and then, for the sake of that reunion, believing in Heaven,
and finally, for the sake of Heaven, believing in God—this will not
work.... A self-critical person will soon be increasingly aware...he is
only weaving a fantasy.... We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him...
a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom, or goodness, has
any earthly Beloved excited our love. It is not that we have loved them
too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving. It
is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a
Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always
known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved
moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love.
All that was true in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours,
and ours only because His. In Heaven there will be no anguish and no
duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. First, because we shall
have turned already; from the portraits to the Original, from the
rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made lovable to Love
Himself. But second, because we shall find them all in Him. By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we do now.
"But
all that is far away in 'the land of the Trinity,' not here in exile,
in the weeping valley.... The very purpose of... bereavement ...may have
been to force this upon us. We are then compelled to try to believe,
what we cannot yet feel, that God is our true Beloved." The radio broadcast concludes, "Such
I conceive as the world of agape: a world of unbounded giving and
unashamed receiving, where all blessed creatures need and know that they
need nothing but God and are therefore set free to love one another
disinterestedly. And so your love shall be like His, born neither of my
need nor your deserving but of plain bounty. I think those are drawing
near to heaven who in this life find that they need men less and love
men more and delight more in being loved without being needed.... All
this time I've taken the love of God to mean solely God's love for man.
St. John led me into it; I still think it's the safe and sober
approach, but is there no more than this? Isn't the First Commandment to love God? Yes...there
is indeed a way of loving God which is easy to none but possible to
all: 'Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these, My brethren, ye did
it to Me' [Matthew 25:40]. We can see the face of Christ in every man
and act accordingly. And there is also the love expressed solely in
obedience. There is love for the humanity of our Lord, for the Holy
Child or the Sufferer. There is also the unsatisfied love thirst or
longing for God. But of what is beyond all these, what is neither love of God in man, nor in obedience, nor love of the man in God, nor love longing—of fruition in this life and foretaste of Beatitude [Beatific vision of God]—I'm not the man to speak.
Even if I heard rumors or made guesses, I couldn't put them into this
form; I'd need myths and symbols [which, in a sense, he already used in The Last Battle, the last Narnian chronicle, when describing Aslan's Country or Heaven]. All that can be said here is that even on those high levels, though something goes from man to God, yet all—including this something—comes from God to man. If he rises, he does so lifted on a wave of the incoming tide of God's love for him."
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