S5E22 – TFL – Eros (Part III)

Today the gang wrap-up the chapter about Romantic Love (“Eros”).

S5E22: “Eros” – Part III (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

“All good Christian lovers know that this programme, modest as it sounds, will not be carried out except by humility, charity and divine grace; that it is indeed the whole Christian life seen from one particular angle.”

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

Chit-Chat

• Andrew’s Updates
  • Full Swing of the Semester
• David’s Updates
  • Back in Wisconsin
  • Carlota has started a new C.S. Lewis group in Saint Louis.
• Matt’s Updates
  • God has been so good with 2022 getting me closer to the virtues I’ve been striving for since 2020. Took longer than expected but the journey continues and is going strong; getting to a good amount of daily masses and a strong morning spiritual routine and can see the fruits of the Holy Spirit working through those times

Beverage and Toast

• Andrew and David
• David
  • Inchmurrin 18 Single Malt
• Matt
  • Glenkinchie

We toasted a Patreon supporter who goes under the pseudonym “Snort Von Gnarlick”.

Recap & Summary

Recap

• Chapter 1: 
  • Need-Love, Gift-Love, and how the divinization of love leads to its demonization…
• Chapter 2: 
  • Love of nature and love of country and how they can become distorted.
• Chapter 3: 
  • Affection (or “Storge”), the love of family and the familiar.
• Chapter 4: 
  • The love of friendship (or “Philia”), which is humbling, uninquisitive, and not prone to jealousy. It can embolden us and make us deaf to those outside of the group, either for good or for ill.
• Chapter 5:
  • At the beginning of this month we started Chapter 5 and our discussion of Romantic Love (or “Eros”)…
    • Jack distinguished Eros from Venus, its carnal component. He said Venus can develop either before or after Eros and its morality doesn’t depend upon the presence or absence of Eros. The morality of Venus depends upon much more prosaic matters.
    • While many think that Eros’ chief danger lies in its carnal element, Lewis suggests that a  wrong kind of seriousness has developed around Venus. He warns that this seriousness will cause us to deify Venus and she herself will take her revenge. 
    • Jack considered three different views of the body, favouring St. Francis’ description of it as “Brother Ass”, since it neither overly elevants nor denigrates the body.
    • We wrapped up last week looking at the two crowns of marriage. Firstly, the tinsel paper crown which comes from what Lewis calls “the Natural Pagan Sacrament”, and secondly the crown of thorns which is derived from the Christian Sacrament of Matrimony.
• Amazingly, I somehow didn’t mention last week how, in the Eastern Christianity, we receive literal crowns in the wedding ceremony. We actually refer to the sacrament as “the crowning in marriage”...

Andrew responded to Carlota’s comments on Slack about the relationship between Eros and Philia.

Summary

Eros does not aim at happiness and, as a result, empowers us to sacrifice and to long-suffering.

Eros can be the stuff of great marriages, but can urge evil as well as good.

Plato and George Bernard Shaw may endorse all utterances of Eros, but the Christian cannot. The irony is that Eros doesn’t even deliver the constancy of what it naturally promises. While Eros may be the fuel and model for Christian charity, the unilateral demands of Eros must sometimes be denied – fine feelings do not justify all actions done in the name of Eros.

S5E22 Episode Summary

Discussion

1. “Seeking Happiness?”

In the last episode, Jack focussed on the carnal element of Eros, which he called Venus. However, in today’s episode, he zooms out and considers Eros as whole. He says that:

As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness.

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

Is that really true though? Lewis offers as evidence…

Everyone knows that it is useless to try to separate lovers by proving to them that their marriage will be an unhappy one. This is not only because they will disbelieve you. They usually will, no doubt. But even if they believed, they would not be dissuaded. For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms. 

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

The upside of this is that it allows lovers to be self-sacrificial and long-suffering. Lewis says:

Eros never hesitates to say, “Better this than parting. Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together.” If the voice within us does not say this, it is not the voice of Eros.

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

Jack describes this as “the grandeur and terror of love”. Lewis also notes that in Eros, like in Venus, grandeur can be mixed with playfulness.

…in want, in hospital wards, on visitors’ days in jail–will sometimes be surprised by a merriment

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

He ends this section with the line:

Until they have a baby to laugh at, lovers are always laughing at each other.

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

…and as someone with a five-month-old infant, this is true, although you still occasionally laugh at your spouse…

2. “The voice of God?”

Lewis thinks the seeds of danger are hidden in its grandeur:

[Eros] has spoken like a god. His total commitment, his reckless disregard of happiness, his transcendence of self-regard, sound like a message from the eternal world.

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

The problem with sounding like the voice of God is that Eros can It may urge evil as well as good. The love which can lead to a beautiful Christian marriage can also be the stuff of which all kinds of evil is made.

3. “Plato”

Lewis points out that various schools of thought really tried to justify the grandeur of Eros’ claims. 

Plato speaks about how falling in love is a recognition of the person with whom one was already joined in a previous, celestial existence.

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

In his dialogue ‘Symposium’, Aristophanes says that humans were originally created with two sets of genitalia and four hands and four feet. However, as they became a threat to the gods (with their prodigious hands, feet, and genitalia!), they were divided. Romantic love, then, is about finding your literal “other half”.

Lewis says that this is a beautiful poetic expression, but if true, it shows that people were dumb even in the celestial existence, since many people who fall in love have predictably terrible marriages.

4. “The Life Force”

So, Plato took the God-like voice of Eros seriously, but so does someone else… He’s someone whom we’ve meet several times over the course of this podcast, George Bernard Shaw, the 19th/20th Century Irish playwright. Here’s a picture of him with G.K. Chesterton, pretending to be cowboys…

He believed in the “Elan Vital”, the Life Force, although here Lewis calls it “Metabiological Romanticism” and “Evolutionary Appetite”. It is relevant to today’s discussion because he claims that this Life Force overwhelms a couple in the process of bringing about the superman.

Lewis offers three objections to this:

1. The image of this Life Force superman is so unattractive he jokes that man and woman might vow celibacy to avoid bringing it about.
2. Intensity of Eros is no guarantee of any (or superior) offspring.
3. What did the Life Force do prior to the general acceptance of love-based marriages?

5. “Fuel and Model”

Naturally Lewis says that we can’t accept either Plato or Shaw on this subject. We can’t give Eros this god-like status. However, we can’t ignore him either, because…

This love is really and truly like Love Himself. In it there is a real nearness to God (by Resemblance); but not, therefore and necessarily, a nearness of Approach. Eros, honoured so far as love of God and charity to our fellows will allow, may become for us a means of Approach. His total commitment is a paradigm or example, built into our natures, of the love we ought to exercise towards God and Man.

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

Sometimes we might have to totally renounce Eros (although never treat it with contempt), but we should also conditionally honour it. The selfless we experience naturally in Eros is what Charity is meant to look like towards God and man. He describes Eros as fuel and model.

He then gives a callback to Chapter 2, when we spoke about love of nature. If listeners recall, Jack said that nature gives content to the word “Glory”. Well, in a similar kind of way, Eros gives us content for the word “Charity”. However, he also notes that:

Eros, of himself, will never be enough – will indeed survive only in so far as he is continually chastened and corroborated by higher principles

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

These “higher principles” are virtue and the Christian moral teaching.

6. “Demonic Eros”

So what’s the real problem with demonic Eros? He rejects all who would oppose him – any claim made by God or Man.

When opposed, he calls his acolytes to become martyrs for love. 

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

The fear of theologians regarding Eros has been that of idolatry. Jack suggests that they were afraid that lovers would idolise each other, but Jack thinks the danger lies elsewhere, and we will see something of this when we discuss A Severe Mercy later this season.

The real danger seems to me not that the lovers will idolise each other but that they will idolise Eros himself.

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

By this, Lewis doesn’t mean that prayers are said to Eros on an altar, but rather that Eros is placed uppermost and justifies anything. He illustrates this by a popular misinterpretation of Luke 7:47, “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven her, for she loved much”. The misinterpretation is that her (assumed) sins of unchastity because she was so much in love. Lewis says that what this really means is that she loves Jesus greatly because she has been forgiven.

Jack says that when lovers say “Love made us do it” they aren’t offering an excuse, but appealing to an authority. He refers to Samson Agonistes by John Milton, where Dalila says:

“These reasons in love’s law have passed for good”

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

Lewis explains:

Where a true Eros is present resistance to his commands feels like apostasy, and what are really (by the Christian standard) temptations speak with the voice of duties–quasi-religious duties, acts of pious zeal to Love.

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

Lewis compares Eros with Christianity. Firstly, its Old Testament:

…[the lovers] recur to it continually with wonder and reverence, as the Psalmists recur to the history of Israel. It is in fact the Old Testament of Love’s religion; the record of love’s judgments and mercies towards his chosen pair up to the moment when they first knew they were lovers.

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

…and secondly, its New Testament:

They are now under a new law… They are new creatures. The “spirit” of Eros supersedes all laws, and they must not “grieve” it.

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

Once Eros is a religion, it emboldens the couple to sin in all kinds of ways and not simply with regards to chastity. Rather like distorted friendship, it causes acts of injustice and uncharity towards those not in the “inner ring” (although now that “inner ring” only contains two people).

Even worse, these are seen as positive proofs of their love:

“It is for love’s sake that I have neglected my parents–left my children–cheated my partner–failed my friend at his greatest need.” …what costlier offering can be laid on love’s altar than one’s conscience?

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

7. “Inconsistent as the moon”

Of course, there’s a great irony in all of this…

To be in love is both to intend and to promise lifelong fidelity. Love makes vows unasked; can’t be deterred from making them.

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

Lewis said the same thing in the chapter on marriage in Mere Christianity.

The world rings with complaints of his fickleness… Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform.

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

Jack isn’t too harsh on Eros here. He says:

The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory.

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

After all, consider the change which it brings about:

In one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being.

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

With virtually no effort we have fulfilled the commandment to love our neighbour as ourselves (albeit for just a single person). This is a single (temporary) example of what needs to happen when we truly live as Christ commands. The fact that the heightened state doesn’t last indefinitely won’t endanger good marriages. However, for those who have made Eros their religion:

They expected that mere feeling would do for them, and permanently, all that was necessary. When this expectation is disappointed they throw the blame on Eros or, more usually, on their partner

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

He compares Eros to a godparent who makes the promises, but another needs to keep them. 

It is we who must labour to bring our daily life into even closer accordance with what the glimpses have revealed. We must do the works of Eros when Eros is not present. This all good lovers know… And all good Christian lovers know that this programme, modest as it sounds, will not be carried out except by humility, charity and divine grace; that it is indeed the whole Christian life seen from one particular angle.

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

So here we come to Lewis’ final assessment of Eros:

[Ero] needs help; therefore needs to be ruled. The god dies or becomes a demon unless he obeys God. It would be well if, in such case, he always died. But he may live on, mercilessly chaining together two mutual tormentors, each raw all over with the poison of hate-in-love, each ravenous to receive and implacably refusing to give, jealous, suspicious, resentful, struggling for the upper hand, determined to be free and to allow no freedom, living on “scenes”. Read Anna Karenina, and do not fancy that such things happen only in Russia. The lovers’ old hyperbole of “eating” each other can come horribly near to the truth.

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

David will be talking with his wife about Anna Karenina in their Eros interview. The description of “eating each other” echos Till We Have Faces:

Some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part I, Chapter 5)

Wrap-Up

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