A Passionate Review

The Inspirational Writings of C.S. Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Reflections on the Psalms, The Four Loves, The Business of Heaven. By C.S. Lewis. New York City: Inspirational Press, 1994, 523 pp (hardcover).

I remember when I first met Clive Staples Lewis. It was in a movie theatre, and I wondered how the actors could perfectly project my childhood fantasies. I have looked in every wardrobe in every house I entered from then on. He and I continued to meet together, mainly on paper, and I asked myself how he could so contradict Shakespeare: “What’s in the brain that pen and ink may character?” I moved past his children’s literature to his social-theological writings with asperity and anticipation. I had to forgive him for some theological gangrene, thankfully precipitate from the heart of his writing.

As I read The Four Loves, I was reminded how brilliantly Lewis assembles language into concepts that so readily resonate within a Christian. There is this atmosphere that is cultivated in your mind that can only be described by the action it invokes: An involuntary, easy smile that phosphoresces out of the eyes and is rooted in some fond memory or pleasant association.

Lewis’ work always has the flavor of a social-moral exposition that is slyly theological. In The Four Loves, he approaches human love as a natural outpour from God, and so obviously theological that it served his purpose better to address what is common to every Christian.

At the most basic, Lewis shows that every human love is not “that Love which is God,” as is the tendency in every society of every generation, even among Christians. We mustn’t be satisfied with the human love we conjure up on our own, because it is deceivingly near to God, in likeness only. No, Lewis argues, we must also draw near to God in our love (focused on Him) by approach.

The authorial intention is outlined in the introduction, which illustrates the distinction between Need-love and Gift-love argues that the presence of love does not mean the presence of God (at least in the salvific sense) as seen through love’s nearness to God by likeness or approach, and exposes demonized love. Throughout the book Lewis shows how human love relates to ourselves, others, and God.

Need-love is our reaction to basic human needs: physical, emotional, intellectual. Gift-love is the divine love, the sacrificial love. Our Gift-loves may be God-like, but they will not bring us nearness to God by approach, and the danger is to make love a god.

In the chapter entitled “Likings and Loves for the Sub-human,” he further distinguishes human pleasures as they relate to love. Need-pleasures are, of course, very physical and selfish (needing a drink of water). Their existence is only due to the desire. Pleasures of Appreciation, however, “arrive by right”. They are the unexpected, uninvited delights such as the smell of a fresh-cut hayfield or the discovery that cheesecake abounds in the dining hall. These pleasures necessitate another category of Love – Appreciative Love. Being the good Irishman that he is, Lewis illustrates this love by nature, being careful to note that “nature cannot satisfy the desires she arouses” (224). Lewis continues to emphasize throughout the book the insufficiency of every human love in itself.

I attempted to construct a circle diagram of the loves as described by Lewis, but that will have to wait for my dissertation. This primitive recognition will have to suffice: First, Lewis defines the love. Next, misconceptions are addressed, and he further explains his definition with additional metaphors and ties in previous concepts. He then explains why this love is not Love Itself – it is insufficient in that it does not perform what is promised.

The first of these loves is Affection. Affection is the most natural of the four loves. It is the “warm comfortableness, satisfaction in being together,” (230) that is most often experienced with family or lifelong friends. He calls it the humblest love, making no demands and expecting nothing but familiarity.

In the next chapter on Friendship, which Lewis calls “a rehabilitation” (254), he calls it the least biological of loves. It is “a relation between men at their highest level of individuality,” (245). “Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities,” (251). Friendship is the magnetism empowered by common ground. Its insufficiency, or one of them, is that it is not the main bond that Scripture represents between God and Man.

Eros is the term Lewis gives to being “in love,” and is the third of the four loves. It is the “uniquely human experience,” and “notoriously the most mortal of our loves,” (273). Lewis separates Eros from Venus (sexual desire) which is indeed in Eros, yet can exist independently. The insufficiency of Eros is this: “The god dies or becomes a demon unless he obeys God . . . He cannot of himself be what, nevertheless he must be if he is to remain Eros,” (274).

The final love is Charity, the crux of all the other loves. It is the chapter in which the reliance of human love on God is made manifest. We can faintly taste Love through nature, etc, but need divine enablement to know what we desire and how to relate it to others and accept it rightly. The opportunity for the transformation of natural love into Charity is always there, “supplied by clashes and troubles – (and) forces us to . . . let God turn our love into Charity,” (286).

The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis is a must-read for the human molds of society. We need to know that love is not relative, why human love is ultimately not enough. We need to know that love, as Shakespeare would have it, “is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” Indeed, “the best love . . . is not blind,” (281). Human love resembles God-love, but it is not an end in itself, rather, it should help us understand “the Love that is God,” and whet our appetite for this holiness.

For a man so marked by phantasmal thought C.S. Lewis has a grip on reality and an application of scriptural principles that are positively Anselmic in that his faith so affects his understanding. Banal he is not, nor is he original. It is his manner of exploration that so attracts me and opens venues of understanding that the Christian would be unfortunate to miss.