S5E1 – TFL 1 – “Introduction” (Part I)

It is a new season and a new book! Join Andrew, David, and Matt as they begin reading “The Four Loves” by C.S. Lewis. In this book, Lewis examines love and distinguishes between its many different kinds.

S5E1: “Introduction” – Part I (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

“Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless”

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

Chit-Chat

• Andrew’s Updates
  • I’ve got a busy semester ahead!
  • I was recently on the Upstream podcast talking about The Abolition of Man.
  • My wife, Christin Ditchfield-Lazo, recently graduated from Northwind Theological Seminary, gaining a Doctorate in Spiritual Formation.

• Matt
  • I read Reinventing your life
  • I had dinner with former guest of the show, Father Mark-Mary
  • I’m now a Godfather twice-over!

• David
  • Since the last episode, my son, Alexander Charbel Bates, has been born! A couple of weeks ago he received all his sacraments of initiation in the Byzantine parish in Minneapolis – he was baptized, Chrismated/Confirmed, and received his First Holy Communion.

Beverage and Toast

Matt sent Andrew and David Tomintoul 25 (Speyside Glenlivet). They toasted Patreon supporter, Victoria Smith:

“Victoria, as we begin this season, we pray that you too have many great new beginnings throughout your life, and like this whiskey, may they just get better with age!”

Patreon Toast

Recap & Summary

Recap

Since this was our first episode of the season, there was nothing to recap!

Summary

Lewis begins “The Four Loves” by dividing love into ‘Need-love’ and ‘Gift-love’.

He rejects the assumption that Need-love is just “mere selfishness” and argues that Need-love is actually still love. He defends this claim by pointing to linguistics, as well as pointing out that our human nature is inherently needful. We need each other and we are utterly dependent upon God.

S5E1 Episode Summary

Discussion

Background

Andrew provided some background information about The Four Loves, explaining that it began as a series of radio talks in 1958.

The epigraph was from English poet, John Donne (1572-1631):

That learning, thine Ambassador,
From thine allegeance wee never tempt,
That beauty, paradise’s flower
For physicke made, from poyson be exempt,
That wit, borne apt high good to doe,
By dwelling lazily
On Nature’s nothing, be not nothing too,
That our affections kill us not, nor die;
Heare us, weake echoes, O thou eare, and cry.

John Donne, The Litanie (Stanza XXVII)

The book is dedicated to writer Chad Walsh (1914-1991). Chad published the first substantial book about Jack, C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics.

Gift-love and Need-love

Lewis says that when he first began writing this book, he thought that the maxim from the first epistle of St. John “God is love” (1 John 4:16) would provide what he called “a very plain highroad through the whole subject” of love. He confesses that he originally thought that:

…human loves deserved to be called loves at all just in so far as they resembled that Love which is God

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

He sets about distinguishing between “Gift-love” and “Need-love”…

1. Gift-love, such as when someone works hard for his family’s future, even if he doesn’t get to see all that future.
2. Need-love, which drives a scared child into her mother’s arms.

Under this taxonomy, dividing love into Gift-love and Need-love, he says that Divine Love is obviously Gift-love and he speaks about the life of the Holy Trinity, but Need-love, on the other hand, is very unlike God, since God lacks nothing. To drive this point home he quotes Plato from the Symposion where the priestess Diotima explains that we’re born helpless and need others.

As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

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

Is Need-love actually love?

Lewis goes on to say that he was looking forward to some “fairly easy panegyrics” of Gift-love and some disparagements of Need-love. However, he concluded that even though much of what he thought about love remains true, he finds that he can’t make such a simple assessment.

He does concede that if all we mean by “love” is our craving to be loved, then we’re in a really bad situation. However, along with his hero, George MacDonald in Sir Gibbie, he rejects the idea that in this craving “we are mistaking for love something that is not love at all”.  Lewis (and MacDonald) believe that Need-love is actually love.

He says that when you try to deny that Need-Love is love, you end up in all kinds of problems… Three in particular…

Problem #1: We still call it ‘love’!

Lewis points out that we do violence to language if we deny that Need-love is actually love.

Lewis then says a couple of things which David said were slightly unclear. Firstly, he says that if we disregard language, it will later get its revenge. The co-hosts concluded that by this he meant that we will end up undermine our ability to use language at all.

The second unclear statement he made was regarding Humpty Dumpty. Lewis says that, unlike Humpty, we must not try to make words mean whatever we want. Humpty Dumpty appears is a late-18th Century English nursery rhyme who later appeared in an 1871 book by Lewis Caroll:

 “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

Problem #2: Humans need each other

Some people might characterize Need-love as “mere selfishness”. Although Jack used it in Mere Christianity, he says that:

“Mere is always a dangerous word”

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

Jack says that any impulse can be selfishly indulged, and he admits that:

A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing

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

However, he then gives two examples of Need-love, saying that nobody would call these impulses “mere selfishness”:

• A child seeking its mother for comfort
• An adult seeking the company of his friends

Not only that, even though there are times when we may have to deny ourselves Need-love, if a person never felt Need-Love, he said that’s “the mark of the cold egoist”. It’s “a bad spiritual symptom” when we don’t think we need anyone else…  “just as lack of appetite is a bad medical symptom because men do really need food”.

The point here is that humans need each other – even God says in Genesis 2:18 that “it is not good for man to be alone” 

Problem #3: We need God!

Lewis says that this final issue is the most important. He begins this objection by pointing out something with which every Christian should agree, namely that:

…a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God

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

So, if I love God very little, I’m in poor spiritual health, but if I love Him a lot, then I’m in good shape. However, Lewis then points out a problem… 

Earlier he said that humans are inherently needful. We pray for help in trials and ask Him for forgiveness of our sins. Well, in that case, man’s love for God must be largely, even entirely, Need-love. In fact, as we grow spiritually, we grow in our appreciation that we’re just…

…one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose

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

Now, although we’re just one huge bundle of need, Lewis thinks that we can bring to God something other than just our Need-love. He speaks about “exalted souls”, which David took to mean great Saints, either those on earth or in Heaven who achieve great holiness.

Great Saints suggest that we actually can offer God something other than Need-love. However, he also says that they would warn us against thinking that we could get completely away from Need-love. He says that at this point, such love…

…would cease to be true Graces, would become Neo-Platonic or finally diabolical illusions

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

Update: Listener and Patreon Supporter, Matt, explained this reference to Neo-Platonism:

Essentially, Plotinus, because of his thoughts on the soul, the divine and the purpose of the human, eradicates any creature-creator distinction and forsakes bodily worth. ‘Need’ in the sense in which Lewis is using it would be worthless to Plotinus:

“This is the life of the gods and of the divine and the happy among men: a liberation from all this-worldly concerns, a life unaccompanied by human pleasures, a flight of the alone to the Alone.” – Plotinus

In other words, the ultimate experience to be yearned for and wanted by the Neo-Platonist is to shed matter and the human body, like a snake does its skin, and to become completely absorbed in ‘The One’ or ‘The Alone’ as Plotinus puts it.

Listener and Patreon Supporter, Matt

Lewis then quotes the spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. We’re going to hear this maxim on more than one occasion: 

“The highest does not stand without the lowest” (Latin: Summum non stat sine infimo)

Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (De imitatione Christi)

Jack says that it’d be pretty dumb if creatures came before their Creator saying that they had no need and just loved Him disinterestedly.

He also points out that even the greatest Saints recognize their need for God and repent like the Publican from Jesus’ parable (Luke 18:9-14). He then quotes Scripture, saying that’s how God would have it:

“Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy-laden”

Matthew 11:28 (KJV)

“Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.”

Psalm 81:10 (KJV)

Conclusion

Jack draws some conclusions about Need-love, namely that:

[Need-love] either coincides with or at least makes a main ingredient in man’s highest, healthiest, and most realistic spiritual condition

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

He says that something odd follows from this, but we’ll pick that up next week when we’ll finish this chapter next week!

Vocabulary Notes

• Panegyrics — Words of praise
• Indigence — The state of extreme poverty
• Fecundity — Growth and fertility
• “Imitation” — The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis

Wrap-Up

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