S5E20 – TFL – “Eros” (Part II)

Today we continued discussing Eros, focussing on the act of Venus and how we regard the human body.

S5E20: “Eros” – Part II (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

“I believe we are all being encouraged to take Venus too seriously; at any rate, with a wrong kind of seriousness. . .We have reached the stage at which nothing is more needed than a roar of old-fashioned laughter.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

Chit-Chat

• David’s Updates
  • Visiting San Diego
• Matt’s Updates
  • Re-listened to Matt Fradd & Sr Miriam James and also moved to tears – so beautiful

• Andrew’s Updates
  • Tests passed, Last Semester!

Beverage and Toast

• David
  • Big cup of black tea
• Andrew
  • HEB San Antonio blend in my Bucc-ees mug
• Matt
  • Peppermint Tea

We toasted Evan Griffin who just upgraded his support on Patreon

Recap & Summary

Recap

Chapter 1: Love ceases to be demon when it ceases to be a God!

Chapter 2: Love of nature and love of country can become twisted

Chapter 3: Affection (or “Storge”), is the love of the familiar and the family. It can become ravenous.

Chapter 4: Friendship (or “Philia”), is the love between companions who discover some shared care or insight. It is humbling, uninquisitive, and not prone to jealousy. It can exist between the sexes, but only if companionship exists already. It can embolden us for good or ill, make us deaf to outsiders for good or ill, and can foster pride. 

We’ve actually had some really great feedback from our listeners on the Slack channel about Friendship. Carlota came across this passage in one of Jack’s letters:

“We meet… theoretically to talk about literature, but in fact nearly always to talk about something better. What I owe to them [the inklings] all is incalculable… Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?”

Letters of C.S. Lewis

Her brother, Santiago, had been reading “The Fellowship: the Literary Lives of the Inklings” by the Zaleskis and he came across this line:

“Arthur (Greeves) sometimes complained that their talk was too much of books and music, not enough of inner struggles”. 

Phil and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: the Literary Lives of the Inklings

Santiago commented that sharing those “inner struggles” is a key component of many of his friendships, and this is something we had also brought up over the course of our study in January.

Then, last week, we began Chapter 5 on Romantic Love (or “Eros”). Jack distinguished Eros from its carnal component, which he called Venus. The morality of Venus depends not on Eros but on more basic matters. Sexual attraction may preceed Eros, but Lewis thinks that it more often follows Eros, a preoccupation with the person preceding the sexual element. When we left off last time, Lewis had been refuting the idea that the chief danger in Eros is its carnal element…

Summary

While the carnal element in Eros is serious, Lewis warns us against taking Venus too seriously. He says if we allow this to happen, Venus herself will take her revenge upon us.

Eros might feel transcendent, but Venus, due to its bodily nature, keeps our feet firmly on earth. Jack considers the views of the body according to the Ascetics, the Neo-Pagans, and St. Francis, preferring St. Francis’ description of the body as “Brother Ass”.

Lewis ends this section by speaking about the two kinds of crowns of Eros – one of tinsel paper and the other of thorns.

S5E20 Episode Summary

Discussion

1. “Why so serious?!”

Last time we left things on a bit of a cliff-hanger. Lewis had said that he didn’t think the chief danger of Eros was its carnal element, Venus, but we drew things to a close before discovering where he thinks the main issue lies…

As we resume today, Lewis says that, while many of the “gravest spokesmen” of humanity would disagree with him, he says…

I believe we are all being encouraged to take Venus too seriously; at any rate, with a wrong kind of seriousness. All my life a ludicrous and portentous solemnisation of sex has been going on.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

He gives three examples:

1. An unidentified author how says sex should recur in married life in “a solemn, sacramental rhythm”
2. A young man who objected to Lewis’ description of a novel as “pornographic” because it took the whole thing very seriously (“as if a long face were a sort of moral disinfectant”)
3. Those who “harbour Dark Gods, the ‘pillar of blood’ school” who want to restore the Phallic religion.

Psychologists have been messing with our heads – maybe we need to be a bit more like Ovid?

We have reached the stage at which nothing is more needed than a roar of old-fashioned laughter.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

2. “But it IS serious!”

The Christian would argue that Venus is serious. Lewis agrees and, rather than straw-manning the argument, he steel-mans it, makes it strong. He gives four reasons why Venus is something serious:

1. It’s an image of Christ and the Church
2. It’s “a sub-Christian, or Pagan or natural sacrament”
3. It involves great moral obligations and parenthood is a big deal
4. It often has a great natural emotional seriousness in the minds of those involved.

However, he then points out that eating is also serious: theologically, ethically, socially, and medically:

1. It’s the means by which we receive Christ in Holy Communion.
2. We have a duty to feed the hungry
3. The dinner table is often where we bond
4. Digestive issues are a big deal.

…yet despite this, we don’t react in the same way.

3. “Venus’ Revenge!”

Lewis warns us that if we are totally serious about Venus, we end up doing violence to our humanity. We can take it seriously, but not completely seriously. He points to the universal presence of old jokes about sex. They can be in poor taste , but Jack asserts that this sort of attitude is far less dangerous to the Christian life than “a reverential gravity”. He warns:

Banish play and laughter from the bed of love and you may let in a false goddess.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

Love songs need not always be tragic – they can be comic too!

But What happens if we do take it too seriously though and let in a false goddess? Lewis says that Venus herself will have her revenge in two ways…

Revenge #1: He quotes Sir Thomas Brown: (“the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cool’d imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he had committed” – Sir Thomas Browne)

Revenge #2: The other way that Lewis says Venus gets her revenge is what we alluded to earlier, that Venus will tease the couple who take her too serious and frustrates their amorous intentions:

When all external circumstances are fittest for her service she will leave one or both the lovers totally indisposed for it. When every overt act is impossible and even glances cannot be exchanged–in trains, in shops, and at interminable parties–she will assail them with all her force. An hour later, when time and place agree, she will have mysteriously withdrawn; perhaps from only one of them. What a pother this must raise–what resentments, self-pities, suspicions, wounded vanities and all the current chatter about “frustration”–in those who have deified her! 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

And the solution here is, as he says, ..

…sensible lovers laugh. It is all part of the game; a game of catch-as-catch-can, and the escapes and tumbles and head-on collisions are to be treated as a romp.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

Jack points out the hilarious incongruity between a soaring, transcendent passion such as Eros, which is so deeply tied to very earthly, bodily, “mundane factors as weather, health, diet, circulation, and digestion”. This is because, as Screwtape said, humans are amphibians – soul, but also body. Lewis says:

In Eros at times we seem to be flying; Venus gives us the sudden twitch that reminds us we are really captive balloons. It is a continual demonstration of the truth that we are composite creatures, rational animals, akin on one side to the angels, on the other to tom-cats.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

He says that this is God’s big joke, but one which is for our benefit.

4. “Three Views of the Body”

Since he’s been talking about the body, Lewis then takes an aside to consider the three main views humanity has had about the body:

1. The Ascetics: The Pagans described the body as the tomb of the soul. Some Christians have described it as a “sack of dung” (St. John Fisher?)
2. The Neo-Pagans, the nudists and “the sufferers from Dark Gods”. The body is glorious
3. St. Francis’ description of the body as “Brother Ass”

Lewis thinks St. Francis has the best assessment:

Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

He says that just because Eros sometimes requires us to take it with total seriousness, that shouldn’t mean that we should always take it seriously, particularly when it so involves the body, which Lewis regards as “the oldest joke there is”…and he believes that he has the lovers of the world on his side:

Lovers, unless their love is very short-lived, again and again feel an element not only of comedy, not only of play, but even of buffoonery, in the body’s expression of Eros.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

He taught the brothers to flee with all their might from idleness, the cesspool of all evil thoughts; and he demonstrated to them by his own example that they should master their rebellious and lazy flesh by constant discipline and useful work. Therefore he used to call his body Brother Ass, for he felt it should be subjected to heavy labor, beaten frequently with whips, and fed with the poorest food.

Francis of Assisi: Early Documents

5. “The two crowns”

For the remainder of this episode we look at where  Lewis describes the two kinds of crowns which are given in romance – one of tinsel paper and one of thorns.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t a 100% sure as to what he was saying about the first crown, but I’ll have a go at explaining what I think he means. He begins by asserting that Venus can often make lovers react… strangely. Here’s what he says:

This act can invite the man to an extreme, though short-lived, masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror or a captor, and the woman to a correspondingly extreme abjection and surrender.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

Jack says that this is “harmless and wholesome on one condition” and refers to what he said earlier about how sex functions almost as a Pagan sacrament. He claims that in the act of love, we aren’t merely ourselves, but are representatives, as:

“forces older and less personal than we work through us. In us all the masculinity and femininity of the world, all that is assailant and responsive, are momentarily focused. The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman the Earth-Mother; he does play Form, and she Matter.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

…and he says that this is okay as long as we understand that we’re just playing a role.

I thought of when I was reading about a paper crown worn by Shift the Ape wore a paper crown. In this chapter of The Four Loves he says that he doesn’t hold paper crowns in contempt, he likes them, the theatricals, the charades. He says paper crowns have their legitimate and serious uses. The problem in The Last Battle is that Shift doesn’t realize how ridiculous he is and how ridiculous is his crown – if he did, it’d solve quite a few problems. 

Lewis had ben talking about the Natural Pagan Sacrament and its paper crown, and goes on to consider the Christian Sacrament of Matrimony, which he describes as “incomparably higher mystery”. Listeners will recall that Lewis talks about headship in marriage in Mere Christianity and he addresses it again here:

As nature crowns man in that brief action, so the Christian law has crowned him in the permanent relationship of marriage, bestowing–or should I say, inflicting?–a certain “headship” on him. This is a very different coronation. And as we could easily take the natural mystery too seriously, so we might take the Christian mystery not seriously enough.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

He’s referring to the headship which St. Paul talks about in several places, particularly in his Epistle to the Ephesians. Quite rightly, Lewis criticizes John Milton for speaking about “the husband’s headship with a complacency to make the blood run cold”, reminding his readers that headship in marriage means imitation of Christ and therefore death to self for love of the beloved, for love of the bride bride.

He ends this section by reflecting on the two different crowns he’s discussed:

The sternest feminist need not grudge my sex the crown offered to it either in the Pagan or in the Christian mystery. For the one is of paper and the other of thorns. The real danger is not that husbands may grasp the latter too eagerly; but that they will allow or compel their wives to usurp it.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

Wrap-Up

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