The Four Loves

Book Review (C.S. Lewis)

I confess, I do not have a natural love for C.S. Lewis's non-fiction writing. I know lots of people have found him tremendously insightful and edifying, but although I always appreciate a good Lewis quotation, I have never finished one of his books (except his Latin Letters). I made a good effort on Mere Christianity as an audio book, but his style doesn't sing to me, and the subject matter didn't touch on things that I find pressing matters.

So why am I writing on this book? Well, for three reasons. Firstly, I remember reading Brad East talk about this last year, and really our need for these four kinds of love and what it looks like when they are absent. And that grabbed my interest. Partly, in fact, because even though Lewis is wrong about Greek, he's right about love (see below). Secondly, sometimes it's worth persevering with authors you don't love. Thirdly, I didn't have any neat and tidy book reviews sitting ready to go this week, so I decided to knock this book over once and for all and write about.

Lewis actually doesn't begin with the four loves anyway. He spends the opening introduction and first chapter talking about other ways to analyse love. He discusses the distinction between gift-love and need-love, about how human loves tend to become gods, and about the distinction between need-pleasures (like water when you are thirsty) and appreciative pleasures (like the smell of roses when you walk past them). He considers love of nature, as well as love of country, and takes us on a rambling analysis of all these loves for the sub-human, before he is ready to offer up his fourfold analysis.

Now, I said above that Lewis is right about love and wrong about Greek. And I say this well aware that Lewis was a man of tremendous classical learning. Here's the core of my (and many other Greek scholars) complaint. Lewis' understanding of the four loves got popularised and then people used it as an analytic grid for reading Greek, and especially the New Testament. I still have students say, "oh, it uses the word agape here so that is divine love, right? And here it uses philia, so that's friendship love?" Greek speakers and authors do not function that way. Language doesn't function that way. All four words are used with all kinds of overlap, so that sometimes eros is used for love in contexts that are neither romantic nor erotic; the New Testament does have an odd fondness for using agape more than other bodies of Greek literature, but the overlap between philia and agape usage is large. But he's right about love, or at the least Lewis has a very helpful way of conceptualising different forms of love and helping us think them through.

Storge

He begins with 'Affection', or kinship love (which he ties to storge). Affection is born of proximity and familiarity. Of the ties that bind and the needs we have. And it grows in the same way - shared time, shared space, we become attached even to that which seems not particularly meritorious or worthy or special, but it becomes known and familiar and thus loved.

I think it's fascinating the way Lewis analyses Affection gone awry. That just as familiarity and kinship can birth a kind of love, but also a kind of hate. People grow on our nerves, their everyday things become intolerable. So too, when people are unlovable, precisely because of their vices, then their demand for storge love becomes an intolerable demand. Kinship affection can be, as he says, vampiric - demanding and draining the love of others in its insatiable need to be loved. Lewis treats of jealousy here too, for example the jealousy of siblings when a new child is born. This is part and parcel of the sharp analysis that Lewis brings to our whole topic. Not content to categorise and describe the four loves, he shows us their uses and abuses, the myriad ways in which we can go wrong. And does so with the vivid examples of the everyday. I think his treatment here of the gift-love of Affection gone astray is spot-on - those who have such a need to 'give' of their kinship love, that their giving becomes a kind of demand - to always hold the beloved in a state of need requiring the lover's constant giving.

Philia

The second of Lewis' loves is Friendship (philia).

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.

I think that is as true today as in Lewis' day, if not more so. Last year I read this wonderful book on Friendship, and here's my dear Keller talking on the topic, but let's cleave close to Lewis for today. Lewis begins by pointing out how non-natural it is, in the sense that it is not necessary to society and to procreation, and it does not just 'arise' from kinship. It is a freely chosen relationship that steps outside the necessities of life. Lewis also spends time demolishing (as he puts it) the idea that "every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual". That problem persists, again even worse, today. It is difficult for moderns to read the relationship of Jonathan and David (which arguably is not a healthy friendship at all), or Frodo and Sam, as something not sexual, because we have collapsed all our categories into the sexual. So much so that we had to invent a new word for close male friendships, bromance, out of the category of Eros because we so lacked the intellectual resources to maintain the idea of friendship that wasn't grounded in the romantic or the sexual.

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.

And so here is some of Lewis at his best and most quotable:

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.

and

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out.

Lewis distinguishes between Friendship and Companionship as well. By the latter he means the kinds of social relations that emerge among people when they share common interests, in social clubs or sports clubs or work, and can 'talk shop' and share a common interest. This is not true Friendship per se, but it can be the grounds from which Friendship emerges. Companionship is gregarious, Friendship individual. Again, it is perhaps a modern ill that we mistake Companionship for Friendship, thinking we have 'friends' where we only have companions. And this Friendship arises where the two (or three, or perhaps four) share not just an interest, but some peculiar vision of the same object of binding interest.

Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead.

I think there are aspects of Lewis' treatment of Friendship that I in fact disagree with. So fixated on the idea of the two friends gazing at some third thing and seeing the same truth is Lewis, that he considers caring for friends' needs, or being inquisitive and knowing about friends' affairs, to be necessary and right and proper, but nonetheless distractions from the business of Friendship. I actually think this goes too far, it makes the side-by-sideness of Friendship all consuming. We become Friends for the sake of the third thing, and in fact come to fail to love our Friends as people in themselves. To be fair to Lewis, he explicitly states that he doesn't want his side-by-side image pressed to far! But I think that despite his caveat, he certainly skirts that danger.

There's also some fascinating reflections on men and women, and class and education, and how this plays into friendships, their possibilities and realities. I think this section needs to be read with a gracious consideration both of Lewis context and of his own position, while a thorough-going engagement of it would require a lot more words than I'm willing to spend today. Lewis goes on to discuss the dangers of Friendship in terms of exclusivity. That is, exclusivity is necessary by the nature of Friendship, but when it becomes a principle, when we delight and make a thing of it, and police our boundaries of our little clubs, with who is in and who is out, we have gone wrong. Then he turns to the fact that although, humanly speaking, Friendship is chosen, unless Affection and Romance, it is in fact God who has so arranged who our friends shall be.

I think Lewis on Friendship is a great read, but I think there is more that I want from an account of it, and I think that Austin's book that I linked to above delivers much of that. We need to plunder the Ancients a little more, and read the Scriptures with wider eyes.

Photo by Fadi Xd on Unsplash

Eros

It's worth following Lewis' opening remarks with care. I had been thinking that I would want Lewis to distinguish Romantic Love from Sexual Attraction, and he in fact does so. Sexuality he terms Venus, following the Latin usage, and treats as a sub-section of Eros, "being in love" so to speak. I don't entirely know what to say about this chapter. It rambles a little. I think what it does do, par excellence, is talk about Folly. And Folly needs more airplay. I will say this, though - Lewis thinks and talks more about Eros than we generally do, and with greater integrity and interrogation. And by 'we' I just mean "late modernity westerners"; we're all obsessed with romantic love, we have a whole literary and cinematic culture-machine that endlessly pumps out story after story in which truest fulfilment of ultimate desires (because your inner desires are your truest you) is found in finding the one true Beloved and being in a Romantic Union that completes and affirms you all your days. Ancients at least were honest - Eros is a madness that possesses you. I remember well the Latin class I was in where we read the original context of Vergil's omnia vincit amor - love conquers all. It's a phrase that in situ means that love, a divine raving force that causes you to lose your rational faculties and pursue love with abandon, even to your own destruction, is a force that conquers all things, and all of us. It is far from the idea that the love between two Lovers is a force that can conquer all obstacles!

Of all loves he is, at his height, most god-like; therefore most prone to demand our worship. Of himself he always tends to turn “being in love” into a sort of religion.

I do love (huh!) the way Lewis explores the manner in which Eros becpmes a Law unto itself. That we do not so much idolise the Beloved, but Eros itself, so that Love's Demands excuse all transgressions. Everything is permitted if Eros made me do it.

Agape

It's a shame, again I interject, that English has followed Latin in using 'charity' (caritas) to pick up the language of agape love; I say this because "charity" in English carries a whole range of connotations that are mostly absent, or differently nuances, in Latin and Greek. So it's best to consider Lewis' fourth love as "divine giving love" or something similar. Having treated those three natural loves, Lewis says that he has demonstrated already how, when left to their own devices, they turn into demons, self-aggrandising lords who demand our allegiance. They serve their purpose best when they yield first place.

Lewis also considers, before getting to Agape, the problem of loving too much. Here he draws upon Augustine, but negatively. Here's Lewis' famous passage on what happens if we try to avoid the pain of loss by choosing not to love:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. 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— safe, dark, motionless, airless— it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Divine Love, Lewis says, is Gift-love, not Need-love. God lacks nothing and is not in need of anything. His love overflows and abounds into the act of creation. And among the gifts of God's gift-love, he imparts gift-love into humans. Natural gift-love among us loves others because it finds something lovely in the object of love, but Divine gift-love in us enables us to love that, and those who, are not naturally lovable. And in so loving, to desire their best. Furthermore, God enables us to love God himself with divine Gift-love, not that we have anything to give to God that he needs nor lacks, but we can freely give ourselves to him. At the same time, God makes us aware that we already have a Need-love of him, simply in virtue of being creatures.

Lewis does a marvellous job here of pointing out how "depth beneath depth and subtlety within subtlety, there remains some lingering idea of our own, our very own, attractiveness." We continually find ways to assert that God loves us because we are lovable, and need to continually learn the humility that sees beyond each self-deception. Grace teaches us to accept our neediness.

Furthermore, just as God awakes us to the Need-Love we have for him, he "also transforms our Need-love for one another" - again, that we might love others, or perhaps even more importantly be loved by others, not for anything lovely in ourselves, but out of pure gift-love that seeks the others' good.

Lastly, perhaps, the divine love that is Agape, that loves forgivingly and transformatively, transforms (at times) our other loves, so that they too become vehicles of true Caritas.

And here we end. Well, almost. Lewis ends by speaking about the love for God that is Appreciative Love, which comes to delight in God for who he is, in himself. And he stops there. A topic where angels fear to tread, and Lewis decides it’s not for him to explore. So too this review. There is a love for God that finds all its fulfilment in God himself, in pure delight in him. There too all our other loves find their end.