S5E2 – TFL 1 – “Introduction” (Part II)

Andrew, David, and Matt finish discussing the Introduction to The Four Loves where Lewis looks at two different kinds of nearness, Nearness-by-likeness and Nearness-of-approach, and explains how loves, when they become gods, become demons.

S5E2: “Introduction” – Part II (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred… Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 1)

Chit-Chat

• Andrew’s Updates
  • I’m having a busy week and a busy semester!
  • Received an invitation from Simon Horobin to come to Magdalen.
  • Made a big soup.
  • Prayer requests for strength, discernment, and always, always, the love of God.
  • Toni Christopher from Camp Allen recently died.

“It’s hard… because it’s hard!”

Dr. Heaney, Virginia Theological Seminary

• Matt
  • Rough week at work, but I feel like I am handling the rough weeks better spiritually than I did before, which gives me confidence that I learned through previous rough periods.
  • I am still weak but slightly stronger than I was a year ago in these circumstances and that makes me happy. I can also see the little consolations God is providing.
  • Been listening to “Say I Won’t” by Mercy Me in the mornings.

• David
  • No personal life updates, aside from the fact that my son continues to pile on the weight! When he was born he was 7lbs, and six weeks later he’s nearly 14lbs!
  • However, I did want to say that all of the PWJ mugs have now been sent out. We sent them out to all of our top-tier, premium patrons. We also sent them out to all our Gold-level subscribers who have supported us for over a year to say “thanks for sticking with us!”
  • Please take a picture of yourself with your mug, together with the hashtag #mugShot and tag us!
  • Since we had to order them in bulk, I’ve now got about thirty or so mugs left. If a listener would like one, they should find us on Venmo the username is @pintswithjack. They should then send me some money…. 
    • As usual, we’re selling our stuff at cost, so this just covers the cost of the mug and shipping.
    • Because we bulk ordered the mugs, they’re $5 each. Shipping, depending upon where it’s going is anything from $8.50 to $14.65 depending upon where you are, so let’s even it out and say $15.
    • You can then either include your address with the transaction (be sure to make it private) or you can just email us via our website

Beverage and Toast

• Andrew
  • PG Tips
• Matt
  • Blended Whisky from Lossit Distillery. Opened in 1816 and closed in 1867.
• David
  • Moon Man: A session beer with a bright bold blend of five hops that flirt obligingly with the smooth malty backside

Recap & Summary

Recap

By the end of the last episode, we had read the first half of Chapter 1,
the Introduction to The Four Loves. In it, Lewis admitted that he originally thought that love was only really love in so far as it resembled the love which is God. He therefore divided love into two: Need-love and Gift-love

• Need-love being the kind of love which sends a scared child to its mother 
• Gift-love being the kind of love which causes parents to work, and save, and plan for a future for their children which they themselves will never see.

Jack compared these two loves to the way God loves us and the way we love God. For the rest of the episode, we followed him as he argued that Need-love is actually love, saying that we end up in all kinds of problems if we try to deny that.

“A man is nearest to God when he is least like him”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 1)

“The highest does not stand without the lowest”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 1)

Summary

Jack speaks about two different kinds of “nearness” to God. He says that Nearness-by-likeness is God-given, build-in, and static, whereas Nearness-by-approach is dynamic and growing, and involves the will. He illustrates this with an analogy of travelling to our home in the mountains via a circuitous route.

Next, Jack draws on the Swiss philosopher, Denis de Rougement, pronouncing that love becomes a demon when it becomes a god, not when the love is at its worst, but at its best. He concludes saying that human loves can be a positive, negative, or even neutral force on our approach to God.

S5E2 Episode Summary

Discussion

1. Two Kinds of Nearness

We left off last time as Lewis was saying that our Need-love for God is at the very least the main ingredient of a healthy spiritual condition. He says that a paradox follows from this, namely that we come closest to God when we’re in a sense least like Him. He says:

“For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 1)

But what does it mean to “approach” God or to be “like” Him? Well, as we continue reading, Lewis explains this with another distinction, which began to be developed during Lewis’ “Great War” with Barfield:

1. Nearness-of-approach relates to our union with God. It involves our will. 

2. Nearness-by-likeness is not something we really choose. As the summary said, it’s something God-given, build-in, and static. Jack explains it by pointing out that everything God makes is “like” Him, at least in some way:

• Space and time = His greatness
• All life = His fecundity (fertility)
• Animal Life = His activity
• Humanity = His rationality
• Angels = Immortality and “intuitive knowledge”

The phrase “intuitive knowledge” may be unfamiliar to many. It relates to how it is believed by theologians that spiritual beings know things. Since they’ve got no corporeal bodies and, therefore, their knowledge is not mediated through the senses like it is with us. An angel does not see, hear, and then learn. Instead, an angel immediately apprehends, much like in the Matrix when Neo learns Kung Fu in an instant. For more information on this, please see this entry by St. Thomas Aquinas.

The key point Lewis wants to get across after making these distinctions is that the two kinds of nearness are independent of each other. The nature of angels is closer to God than that of humans. This means that even fallen angels (i.e. demons), can have a greater nearness to God than humans, at least in a sense. Of course, a great Saint is much closer than a demon to God in terms of nearness-of-approach, and only because of the work of Christ:

For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved

St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101

2. Village Analogy

In typical Lewisian fashion, Jack offers us an analogy to help us understand these two kinds of nearness. He describes going on a mountain walk to a village which is our home. He says that we may come to the top of a cliff above the village. In a sense, we are very close to the village. However, because the drop is too steep, we are in another sense, still a long way from home. If we want to get any closer, if we want to get home, we’re going to have to travel along the mountain road to the village, and it’ll even at times take us further away from the village. However, Lewis says this is what we must do if we are ever to get home and have a bath and our tea!

Interestingly, Lewis calls this journey we must make “the long way round”. I think it’s a reference to Ulysses by James Joyce… but it’s also possibly a reference to Joy’s conversion story, The Longest Way Round!

In the text, Jack then takes a brief aside, saying that, since God is the source of all “good” things, whenever we experience those good things (such happiness, strength, freedom, fruitfulness etc.) we somewhat mirror God… Receiving “good things” seems to be nearness-by-likeness. It’s sitting at the top of the cliff, which is great, but it’s not going to get us any nearer to the village. It has nothing to do with holiness… nearness-by-approach. It rather reminds me of what Jack talks about “raw material” in Mere Christianity and his chapter on how Christianity changes us. Even if it’s supported by grace, we must still engage our wills and go on the journey. This is how we become Sons of God:

…the likeness they receive by sonship is not that of images or portraits. It is in one way more than likeness, for it is unison or unity with God in will.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 1)

This points back to Mere Christianity again where Lewis talks about how we are turned into little Christs. And this is how Lewis concludes this section by saying that we need to mimic Jesus, and this is related to the paradox he identified at the beginning of today’s episode – that we are near to God when we are most unlike Him:

…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. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 1)

Due to time constraints, David didn’t mention this in the episode, but it’s worth pointing out that in Eastern theology we have different terminology to express these two ideas of nearness. We’d refer to Image and Likeness. The Image doesn’t change, but we’ve lost the Likeness – this is what Christ came to restore. In a Troparion, in the run-up to Christmas we sing a song where we say:

Bethlehem, make ready, * Eden has been opened for all. * Ephrathah, prepare yourself, * for the Tree of Life has blossomed from the Virgin in the cave. * Her womb has become a spiritual paradise * in which divinity was planted. * If we partake of it we shall live and not die like Adam. * Christ is born to raise up the likeness that had fallen.

Troparion for the Pre-Feast of the Nativity

Here is what St. Basil the Great of Caesarea (brother of St. Gregory of Nyssa) wrote in a treatise on human nature:

“Let us make the human being according to our image and according to our likeness” [Genesis 1:26]. By our creation we have the first, and by our free choice we build the second. In our initial structure co-originates and exists our coming into being according to the image of God. By free choice we are conformed to that which is according to the likeness of God. And this is what is according to free choice: the power exists in us but we bring it about by our activity.’

St. Basil of Caesarea, On the Human Condition

3. Why the distinction is necessary

In the next section he explains why he felt the need to make the distinction between Nearness-by-likeness and Nearness-by-approach…

Jack says that St. John’s maxim that “God is love” needs to be carefully understood, otherwise we might conclude the converse, that “love is God”.  Drawing from the work of the Swiss Philosopher Denis de Rougement (L’amour et l’Occident – 1939), he says that love begins to be a demon the moment it begins to be a god. 

Lewis says that human loves, at their height, claim divine authority. He says this is particularly seen in romance or love of country, but over the course of this book, we’ll see it in other loves as well:

It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done “for love’s sake” is thereby lawful and even meritorious

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 1)

Lewis talks about rightly-ordered priorities in First and Second Things:

Andrew mentioned an audiobook of Lewis’ essays which is available on Audible.

4. Making a plausible claim

Moving on, Jack points out something important. The loves make their divine claim, not when they are at their worst but at their very best. He says that while lust, shallow patriotism or over-indulgence of a child are bad, he says:

Our Need-loves may be greedy and exacting but they do not set up to be gods. They are not near enough (by likeness) to God to attempt that

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 1)

Need-loves gone bad are nothing compared to what can happen when other kinds of loves are allowed to run amok. Loves become hate! Not only that, they do this, not when they are at their worst, but at their best:

A faithful and genuinely self-sacrificing passion will speak to us with what seems the voice of God… Our Gift-loves are really God-like.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 1)

These loves produce a nearness to God, but they are only nearness by likeness. Angels are close to God by likeness, but so are demons! Jack goes on to say that…

…the likeness is a splendour. That is why we may mistake Like for Same. We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. Then they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 1)

All this is reminiscent of The Great Divorce where MacDonald says:

There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)

5. Conclusion

Lewis closes out the chapter by saying that we must neither debunk human love nor make it an idol. He says that in the 19th Century authors wrote about love as though it was the same thing as sanctification and holiness. This resulted in a counterswing, with debunkers dismissing much of love as mere sentimentality and slush:

They are always pulling up and exposing the grubby roots of our natural loves. But I take it we must listen neither “to the over-wise nor to the over-foolish giant”. The highest does not stand without the lowest. A plant must have roots below as well as sunlight above and roots must be grubby. Much of the grubbiness is clean dirt if only you will leave it in the garden and not keep on sprinkling it over the library table.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 1)

The reference to the giant here comes from Hyperion by John Keats.

Lewis ends the chapter by saying that human loves can be glorious images of Divine love, that they are near-by-likeness, and can either help, hinder, or have nothing to do with nearness of approach.

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