C.S. Lewis -- The Four Loves

The C.S. Lewis webinar is almost over. I am behind on my blogging, but I thought I would quickly post a summary of The Four Loves from this week.

But here is the schedule so far.

• "Weight of Glory" in the volume of the same name
• Books I and II of Mere Christianity
• Surprised by Joy (his autobiography)
• "Transposition" in the Weight of Glory volume, which is about being attuned to the spiritual realm beyond the merely material
• "The World's Last Night" on the second coming
• The Last Battle as the last of the Chronicles of Narnia
• Book III of Mere Christianity
• Two more essays in Weight of Glory--"The Inner Circle" and "Membership"
• Screwtape Letters
• Perelandra

I. Summary

The Four Loves was one of his last and, to me, it definitely had a mature feel to it.

He would say there are three "natural loves": affection (a bond such as between mother and child, storge), friendship (which is more than companionship, phileo), and eros (which is more than sex).

They can all play out in good and bad ways. The good ways all resemble God, especially when they function in a "gift" way, for God is the great Giver. They can also function in a "need" way which is not like God.

Being "like" God, however, is different from moving us toward God. The latter is far more important.

Finally, these three natural loves are lower loves. The higher love is God's "charity" or agape. His gift of agape fills and perfects the other loves, and it moves them back to God and toward others.

II. Thoughts

1. I feel like I have entered into Lewis' world here enough that it will take me a little disentangling to get out enough to look at it critically. I have been wrestling with Lewis' metaphysic quite a bit this module, which is to a large extent an Augustinian metaphysic. Lewis' writings have a tendency to shame the non-Platonist, it seems to me. 

He treats ideas and values as real and implies that those who do not are in a sense denying the reality of God. No doubt he received his fair share of mocking at Oxford, so I don't begrudge him portraying his detractors as two-dimensional people who could not perceive the spiritual dimension, the most real dimension. Certainly atheists do tend to be reductionists who do not allow for a reality beyond the empirical.

2. So what is love? I wrestled with this a bit in college. Do I love my girlfriend? I concluded more or less that love is what Lewis calls "affection" or storge (στοργή). It is an attachment to someone. As he says, you don't even have to like someone to be attached to them. They can even be abusive and yet you love them. You are connected to them, drawn to them, attached to them.

Do you wish them well? I suspect a person can have mixed feelings toward someone they love. They may want to "kill them" sometimes. But you find it hard to leave them. You would not want them to die. They are part of you.

3. There are usually feelings attached to such affection. They are feelings of desire. Love, it seems to me, is often a kind of desire for someone. Friendship is a form of this desire when the attachment is very positive. Eros is a form of desire that is more physical in nature and relates to certain kinds of human urges. A number of desires come from our bodies, perhaps all of them are based in our bodies. Lewis calls these "need desires."

There are higher human desires, like the desire for beauty. Lewis calls this "appreciation love." I personally have a strong desire for knowledge. Is the desire to give a different kind of love, a "gift" love, a "grace love"? We can categorize it as different but who is to say that it is not also based in underlying human needs?

4. Then there is Christ's command to love. Most of what I have said so far is not too different from what Lewis says. But it is when he begins to talk about "charity" that his metaphysic begins to come into play.

The Christian command to love is a command to treat other people in a particular kind of way. It means to "do to others as you would have them do to you" (Matt. 7:12). This is not about feelings necessarily. It could involve an attachment to others, but it is in the end about how you behave toward others. The fundamental Christian ethic is to behave in such a way that benefits others.

The New Testament tells us that such a behavior orientation sums up all of God's requirements of us toward others. Again, we do not have to like others to love them in this way. We do not have to desire them or feel attached to them to love them in this way, although I suspect a thoroughgoing attitude of love toward others will create attachment over time. Motion can bring emotion.

Similarly, Paul's theology would suggest, like Lewis, that we cannot consistently exhibit such love without the power of the Holy Spirit. Without the Spirit, we will fail to demonstrate love to others in the manner God commands. This is the plight of Romans 7. There is thus an empowerment from God to love, to behave lovingly toward others. 

Lewis puts it like this: "Only those into which Love Himself has entered will ascend to Love Himself." This is thick language and thus fraught with the potential for extraneous meaning. I have simply said that without God's empowerment, we will find it difficult to behave to the benefit of others and as befits our submission to God--more on this latter category in a moment. 

So we have two senses of love thus far. There is love as a desire of various degrees and kinds toward others. Then there is love as the moral command to act in such a way as to benefit others. [1]

I should also stop here and say that it is the "root" fallacy to think that there must be some common core meaning of love in all these instances. This is a fallacy of hermeneutics. Words often have distinct meanings. They may have historically common origins of meaning we can trace, but meaning is always "synchronic" (a snapshot of usage at a particular place and time) rather than "diachronic" (where past meanings would always be involved in present usage). [2]

The varied meanings of a word are a sort of "word cloud" of meaning. These varied meanings may have some relation to each other, some family resemblance, but they don't have to. Over time, meanings to a word can diverge so extensively that a dictionary will list the words separately rather than as one word with multiple definitions. The fallacious understanding of meaning is very pervasive and especially comes into play in discussions like this one.

5. Our next consideration is what we mean when we say that God is love (1 John 4:8). This is not an ontological statement. It is a metonymy. Love is so associated with God that we can say that "God is love." Any attempt to say, "but it says God is love" and therefore that this must be some sort of statement about God's being is sheer ignorance of language, laughable, linguistic incompetence.

The point is that God behaves thoroughly lovingly toward us. Love so typifies God's orientation toward us that we can say God "is" love. Such a metonymic statement suggests that God is also attached to us. God "desires" us beyond behaving in a certain way toward us. Of course, Lewis is right theologically that God does not "need" us. [3] 

As Lewis says, however, "We had better not follow Humpty Dumpty in making words mean whatever we please." When John says that God is love, we should understand love in normal ways. God wishes our benefit. This is true not only of those who serve him but of his enemies as well (Rom. 5:8). He is "attached" to those who do not serve him.

6. The last dimension of this discussion is the most difficult. What does it mean to say that we must love God with all our being? If God is self-sufficient, it makes little sense that we would act in a way that literally benefits God. Hopefully, the love of God does involve an affection and attachment to God, a desire for God, but I doubt this is what the Old Testament meant. Let's just say that the Ancient Near East was not a touchy-feely place.

So it is doubtful that God commands us to have certain feelings toward him. Feelings are epiphenomena. In themselves they are neither good nor bad. They just are. We can feed them inappropriately. There are ideal emotions to go along with our actions. But raw feeling is amoral and to a large extent biochemical.

The command to love God is a command to orient our behavior in complete allegiance to God. It is thus rooted in an orientation of our behavior. We act in such a way that conforms to his "benefit," understood as that which pleases him. [4]

The vast majority of that which pleases God is the love of our neighbor and enemy, but we probably cannot exhaust the biblical onus in this way without remainder. So we have love as desire. [5] We have love as acting in the benefit of others. The final sense is love as allegiance.

7. So there you have Ken's "three loves," with subcategories: love as desire, love as orientation of action toward the benefit of others, and love as allegiance to God. Since these last two are rooted in action, we could even reduce the list to two kinds of loves: love as desire and love as a type of moral choice toward action.  

[1] To the extent that we do not want ourselves to be harmed and that we are attached to ourselves, we "love" ourselves, a root assumption of the command to love our neighbors as ourselves (e.g., Matt. 22:39).

[2] We had an instance of this dynamic in the Lewis Q & A session. A high school student was puzzled at Lewis' use of the word charity for the highest love. Since meaning is synchronic, she only knew the sense of the word as beneficent giving to those who are in need, sometimes involving pity. Lewis, of course, was operating off the King James Version, where charity is the highest love and translates agape (e.g., 1 Cor. 13:13). The meaning of the word charity changed over the course of the twentieth century.   

[3] These things are theologically messy because of the degree to which metaphor is involved.

[4] It is almost impossible to convey these things without resorting to human analogies that are not quite literal.

[5] With desire perhaps subcategorized into 1) attachment desire, 2) physical desire (e.g., sexual, nourishment, nurture--"need" desires), and perhaps what Lewis calls "gift" loves are more subtle human desires as well-- 3) appreciation and 4) beneficent desires.