We begin discussing the fourth and final love, “charity”.
S5E25: “Charity” – Part I (Download)
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Show Notes
Introduction
Quote-of-the-week
“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. . .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.”
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
Chit-Chat
Andrew’s Updates
Ordered Monastery Candy and a print of Mary Comforting Eve.
Everybody should listen to Chalice!
Matt’s Updates
Leave Friday for a wedding in Florida and will be a mini college reunion.
I seriously can’t wait Sr. Miriam James!!!
David’s Updates
I just received in the mail my copy of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis by Jason M. Baxter, so looking forward to getting into that this weekend.
Since the end of The Four Loves is in sight, I’ve begun all the interviews for some of the specialty months which we’ll be having in the latter portion of the season: Apologetics Month, where we’ll be looking at Lewis’ favourite apologetic arguments, and Poetry Month, where we’ll be looking at Lewis’ often-overlooked poetry.
Beverage and Toast
- Andrew
- Cucumber-Melon Sparking Water
- Penderyn
- Matt
- David
We toasted a Patreon supporter Joanna Marsh.
Recap & Summary
Recap
So, here’s a summary of the first five chapters of The Four Loves…
In Chapter 1 Lewis introduced some terminology, as well as his maxim about how loves become corrupted when they are elevated too high. In Chapter 2 we saw this corruption process with regards to love of nature and love of country. After this, we began looking at the four loves mentioned in the book’s title…
In Chapter 3 we looked Affection (or “Storge”) – the love of family and the familiar and in Chapter 4 we looked at Friendship (or “Philia”) – the humble, uninquisitive love which fortifies us against the rest of the world.
And then last month we looked Romantic Love (or “Eros”) in Chapter 5. In this chapter, Lewis distinguished Eros from its carnal element, which he called Venus. Lewis argues that a wrong kind of seriousness has developed around Venus, and warns us that doing so will cause Venus to take her revenge upon us. We need to embrace St. Francis’ description of the body as “Brother Ass”. Jack also discussed the two crowns in romance, the tinsel paper crown of the Natural Pagan Sacrament and the crown of thorns of Christian Matrimony. Then, last week we saw that since Eros does not make happiness its supreme goal, it can enable us to sacrifice for the beloved and endure much, illustrating to us what Christian charity should look like. However, Lewis ended by warning us that because Eros can speak with a God-like authority, we must be guarded by virtue, since Eros can urge us to evil as well as to good.
Summary
The natural loves are not self-sufficient, but require Christian virtue, much in the same way that a garden requires gardening.
The natural loves can be rivals to the love of God. Jack says he has avoided this question until now because (a) he doesn’t think it’s where most of us need to begin and (b) it’s not necessary in order to see the limits of the natural loves.
Lewis says that St. Augustine taught that it was best to only love God as He is the only sure foundation, but Lewis rejects this, calling us not to love less, but love rightly.
S5E25 Episode Summary
Discussion
1. “The Garden of Love”
Lewis begins by telling a story which Andrew alluded to at the end of the Eros chapter. William Morris wrote the poem Love is Enough, and a critic reviewed it saying “It isn’t”! This is the point which Lewis has been trying to make throughout this book, namely that…
The natural loves are not self-sufficient.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
Of course, this begs the question – if they’re not self-sufficient, then what is needed in addition? Lewis gives the answer by saying it was…
…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.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
While this might sound like he’s denigrating natural loves, Lewis doesn’t think so. He explains why using an analogy of a garden. A garden is beautiful, but it needs work – it doesn’t weed itself, prune itself or cut its own lawns (it would be a dream if mine did that!). What is needed is a gardener, even if the gardener’s contribution is far smaller and less impressive than what he’s working with. Lewis says:
…he has merely encouraged here and discouraged there, powers and beauties that have a different source.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
So, in the same way that a garden benefits from a gardener, the natural loves benefit from this addition of “decency and common sense”. If even the Garden of Eden needed gardening, how much more tending does the fallen human soul need?
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet
Shakespeare, Sonnet 94
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Lewis warns us not to do this gardening “in the spirit of prigs and Stoics”: what we are tending is not bad, but great and glorious!
While we hack and prune we know very well that what we are hacking and pruning is big with a splendour and vitality which our rational will could never of itself have supplied.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
2. “Avoiding the question”
In the next section, Lewis says that it’s time to address an issue he’s been avoiding – how our natural loves can be rivals to the love of God. But first he gives the two reasons he’s delayed addressing this question…
The first reason he delayed talking about this issue is that he doesn’t think it’s where most of us need to begin – it’s not our most pressing problem. He writes:
For most of us the true rivalry lies between the self and the human Other, not yet between the human Other and God.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
He’s concerned that if we mistakenly focus on our rivalry with God, and instead focus on our rivalry with other humans, we can just use it as a justification for being mean since we can convince ourselves that we’re just loving God more!
This explains nasty church Secretary and every Pharisees. It also put me in mind of the Korban Rule. We read about this in the New Testament where Jesus criticizes those who declare their wealth “Korban”, dedicated to God, at the expense of looking after their own parents.
So, the first reason he delayed addressing this question is that he thinks our chief problem lies elsewhere. The second reason is:
… the claim to divinity which our loves so easily make can be refuted without going so far… The loves prove that they are unworthy to take the place of God by the fact that they cannot even remain themselves and do what they promise to do without God’s help.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
The limits of the natural loves can be seen without appealing to an even higher love. He gives a great analogy. He describes some regional king who claims to be Emperor and the claim can be basically ignored because it’s clear that the man can’t even retain his regional rule without the real Emperor’s support. In the same way, the natural loves often fail to fulfill their grander claims.
Lewis actually uses this analogy as a model to describe the interaction between the natural loves and divine love:
For 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.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
He then quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, a quotation we’ve mentioned a few times over the course of this season:
“When half-gods go, the gods arrive.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Give All to Love”
Lewis suggests a correction:
“When God arrives (and only then) the half-gods can remain.”
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
It’s only when God is in his place that anything god-like can remain, since it can now be correctly ordered and even supported.
3. “The Augustinian Strategy?”
So, the natural loves need to be kept in their place and not compete with the love of God. There is one way of ensuring that there is no competition with the love of God, but which Lewis says he has to reject. He says he does this…
…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.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
The person to whom he is referring to is St. Augustine of Hippo, the 4th/5th Century Bishop and Early Century Father, best known for his Confessions and The City of God.
Lewis refers to Book IV of the Confessions where St. Augustine describes the desolation he felt following the death of his friend Nebridius. From this, Lewis says that Augustine draws the moral that one should not give one’s heart to anything but God. He notes that this makes rather a lot of sense. He says:
Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
This is a quotation you’ll often see posted in isolation on the Internet, which is misleading because, although Lewis writes this, he rejects it! While he says that he’s the sort of man who is “a safety-first creature”, naturally responding very positively to warnings of this kind, he says that his conscience has to reject it, as it seems…
…to be a thousand miles away from Christ.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
…and he’s sure that Christ’s teaching was never meant to confirm his…
…congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
…and he wonders who could possibly begin to love God on the grounds that it’s simply more reliable, calculated to produce the minimum of pain. In the Eros chapter we learnt that even lawless Eros prefers the Beloved to happiness, and Lewis says that this is closer to Love Himself rather than this accountancy/liability-based-assessment love of God.
Lewis attributes the origin of this teaching, not to Christainity, but as…
…a hangover from the high-minded Pagan philosophies in which [Augustine] grew up… closer to Stoic “apathy” or neo-Platonic mysticism than to charity.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
Lewis opposes the teaching first by appealing to Jesus:
We 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”.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
Next he appeals to St. Paul, citing an incident mentioned in Paul’s epistle to the Philippians. The Philippian Church had sent support to St. Paul during his incarceration via a man named Epaphroditus. Unfortunately, Epaphroditus became very sick and nearly died died (Philippians 2:27). Lewis says that St. Paul doesn’t suggest that he shouldn’t have suffered, had Epaphroditus died.
4. “No Safe Investment”
Lewis just doesn’t think that love of God will keep us free from heartbreak. He notes that Christ loved the Father, and yet He cried “Why has thou forsaken me?”. I’d also add that Jesus told those who wished to follow Him to take up their crosses…
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.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
Jack seems to think that it’s better to have inordinate loves(!) than to have self-protective love-less-ness. He compares it to the man in Jesus’ parable who buries his talent in the ground because he feared his master.
Paraphrasing St. John, he writes…
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. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
Alluding to his own armour-removal from Surprised By Joy.
5. “Poor Gus”
Of course, we must ask the question whether Lewis is actually accurately representing St. Augustine… and we have reason to think that he’s possibly not.. For a start, Lewis seems to be confusing several incidents in the Confessions. While Lewis had a reportedly excellent memory, it seems he got the name of Augustine’s friend wrong.
If you’d like to learn more about this, I’d recommend listening to S3E30 for my interview with Dr. Jason Lepojarvi where we discuss this disagreement with St. Augustine.
Dr. Lepojarvi also has a paper on the subject.
David will be recording a Skype Session with a teacher from Thomas Aquinas College about this, so keep an eye on our YouTube channel…
