Andrew, David, and Matt finish the final part of The Four Loves.
Show Notes
Introduction
Quote-of-the-week
Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something. If we cannot “practice the presence of God”, it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like men who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep. But for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
Chit-Chat
Andrew’s Updates
Having a great day! I’m being ambushed by peace, having unexpected meeting with a friend and great conversation with Patti Callahan about Oxford.
Matt’s Updates
Trying to prepare myself spiritually & mentally for lent; the journey I want to go on interiorly will be intense and I know Satan will be fighting against me strong and my issue is I try to be self-sufficient. He will be weak if I just surrender daily to Christ, but in reality, I tend to focus on my strength.
David’s Updates
Life is a little strange at the moment! My parents-in-law were visiting relatives in Kentucky, so Marie hitched a ride with them so that our Kentucky relatives could meet our son. So, I’m going to be flying solo for the next few days!
Beverage and Toast
Recap & Summary
Recap
So far in The Four Loves…
In Chapter 1 and 2, Jack introduced some “love terminology” (Need-Love, Gift-Love, Appreciative-Love) and, by considering patriotism and “love of nature”, demonstrated his thesis that loves become demonic when they’re given god-like status.
In Chapter 3 we explored “Storge”. In Chapter 4 we talked about“Philia”. In Chapter 5 we discussed “Eros”.
And at the start of this month we began Chapter 6 on “Charity”. Lewis explained that our natural loves must be tended like a garden to prevent them getting out of control. He then began to consider how our natural loves can rival the love of God, although he warned that most of us must first first deal with our own selfishness, since we tend to put ourselves before others. Jack then pushed back on his understanding of St. Augustine, saying that there is no such thing as a “safe” investment when it comes to love. And then last week we considered what it means for a love to be “inordinate”. We then began relating Divine Love to the natural loves. We heard how God, who is pure Gift-Love, implants Gift-Love and Need-Love into our natures, but also supplements them with supernatural versions, both in relation to our neighbours and to God Himself.
Summary
Jack says that some natural loves may need to be renounced. Others must remain, but only after being put at the service of Charity, raised to a higher level as humanity was elevated into the Divine at the Incarnation. The invitation to thus transform our natural loves meets us in every frustration of storge, philia, and eros. This transformation is inexorable, since only that which has died and been raised with Love Himself belongs in Heaven. Our hearts are restless for God and it is only out of this relationship that all other loves flow.
S5E28 Episode Summary
Discussion
1. “Deified Love”
So in the previous episode we spoke about how, when God steps in, He can impart supernatural Need-Love and Gift-Love, both in relation to Himself and in relation to our fellow man – we recognize our need of God and our need for each other, and we want to give what we have to both.
However, as we begin this final section, Lewis tells us that this isn’t the only thing which can happen when God gets involved. Two other things may happen…
The first thing which can happen is that God might demand that a natural love be completely renounced.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
He gives the example of Abraham leaving his family and going to the Promised Land. He also gives the example of a forbidden erotic love. This idea of renouncing certain loves for the love of God is fairly easy to understand. However, a second thing may happen which is more difficult to grasp. This is where a natural love is allowed to continue… but only following transformation. So what actually happens in this situation? Jack writes:
In such a case the Divine Love does not substitute itself for the natural – as if we had to throw away our silver to make room for the gold. The natural loves are summoned to become modes of Charity while also remaining the natural loves they were.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
To explain what he means, Lewis compares this process to the Incarnation:
As Christ is perfect God and perfect Man,
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
the natural loves are called to become perfect Charity
and also perfect natural loves.
In the Incarnation, humanity is taken up into divinity, and likewise in this love transformation, the natural love is taken up into Charity:
…made the tuned and obedient instrument of Love Himself.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
All our very natural activities prompted by natural loves (“A game, a joke, a drink together, idle chat, a walk, the act of Venus”) can become the very means for communicating Charity, either as Need-Love or Gift-Love.
Nothing is either too trivial or too animal to be thus transformed
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
We can catch occasional glimpses of this, but Jack says…
The total and secure transformation of a natural love into a mode of Charity is a work so difficult that perhaps no fallen man has ever come within sight of doing it perfectly.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
2. “A Possible Mistake”
In the next section, Lewis describes how all this beautiful theology of Charity transforming natural loves can go wrong. It’s really the stuff of Screwtape… He describes the way in which an overly vocal Christian or circle of Christians…
…can make a show, in their overt behaviour and especially in their words, of having achieved the thing itself – an elaborate, fussy, embarrassing and intolerable show. Such people make every trifle a matter of explicitly spiritual importance… They are always unnecessarily asking, or insufferably offering, forgiveness.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
As far as Jack is concerned, a more no-nonsense, less-showy approach is needed, “letting a meal, a night’s sleep, or a joke mend all”. The more that this becomes second nature, the better.
3. “Endless invitation”
Jack explains that we’re constantly invited to submit our natural loves for transformation, to be taken up into and put to the service of Charity. In what way do we receive these invitations? Amusingly, these invitations come through the “frictions and frustrations” we encounter in the natural loves! The loves are reminding us that they are not enough!
Of course, we can learn our lesson, or if we’re egoists we can choose to learn a different lesson and instead distribute the blame regarding these frustrations elsewhere, typically on the objects of our love themselves – our family, our friends, our spouse. It actually rather reminds me of a saying of St. Josemaría Escrivá:
Don’t say: ‘That person gets on my nerves.’ Think: ‘That person sanctifies me.’
St. Josemaría Escrivá, The Way
The truth is that there are elements in all of us which require forgiveness and forbearance, which requires the natural love of others to be transformed into Charity. Funnily enough, Jack regards this transformation as so important that we’re actually at a sort of disadvantage where we have fairly few frictions and frustrations.
To rise above [a natural love] when it is as fully satisfied and as little impeded as earthly conditions allow… may require a subtler conversion and a more delicate insight. In this way also it may be hard for “the rich” to enter the Kingdom.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
Andrew has a tattoo of hesed.
4. “Eternal or eternally out-of-date?”
Lewis describes this process of transformation as “inexorable”. It puts me in mind of the “Counting The Cost” chapter in Mere Christianity where Lewis unpacks Christ’s command: “Be ye perfect”… Lewis’ point is that entry into Heaven depends upon one condition and relates to the very nature of Heaven:
…nothing can enter there which cannot become heavenly…
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
We can only enter Heaven because Christ died and ascended into Heaven. By being joined to Him, we may join Him there! He says:
Must we not suppose that the same is true of a man’s loves? Only those into which Love Himself has entered will ascend to Love Himself.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
But what must proceed this resurrection?
…these can be raised with Him only if they have, in some degree and fashion, shared His death; if the natural element in them has submitted – year after year, or in some sudden agony – to transmutation.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
The Red Lizard in The Great Divorce. At the end of Mere Christianity he says “Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead”.
He drives home his point about transmutation by considering the question you’ll occasionally hear kicked around among theology nerds: How will we relate to one another in Heaven? Will we even recognize each other? Will relationships, such as marriage, have any bearing in Heaven? Lewis has a wonderful take on these questions. He says that how a love-relation appears in Heaven will very much depend on the kind of love it was becoming on earth. If it was purely natural, he asks whether in eternity it would even be interesting! He says…
In Heaven, I suspect, a love that had never embodied Love Himself would be equally irrelevant. For Nature has passed away. All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
5. “Seeking Heaven for Earth”
Lewis then takes a bit of a detour which initially confused me. In the next section, he says he wants to dispel a possible misunderstanding. He says that he doesn’t want to…
…leave any bereaved and desolate reader confirmed in the widespread illusion that reunion with the loved dead is the goal of the Christian life.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
He quotes St. Augustine’s famous line from The Confessions:
“Thou hast made us for thyself…and our heart has no rest till it comes to Thee.”
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
Lewis says that this can be easy to believe in church or when surrounded by natural beauty in Springtime, but less so when beside a deathbed. He says it’s not hard to imagine that eternity with our loved ones wouldn’t be perfectly satisfying. However, he says that when we try and use faith to this end it weakens. He argues that when God was central, he can believe in Heaven as a corollary, but he finds the reverse just doesn’t work.
We find thus by experience that there is no good applying to Heaven for earthly comfort.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
Why has he been saying all this, talking about believing in Heaven for the sake of the reunion with loved ones? Because this has been the central thesis of this book! We can’t make natural loves our ultimate good. They must be taken up into Charity.
We were made for God.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
He actually argues that anything we’ve loved on earth has pointed to Him:
Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
We’ve got into problems because of how we’ve related to these loves:
It is not that we have loved them too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
In Heaven we’ll see things clearly, see the source of everything we’ve loved:
In Heaven there will be no anguish and no duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. First, because we shall have turned already; from the portraits to the Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made lovable to Love Himself. But secondly, because we shall find them all in Him. By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we now do.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
However, that is Heaven and we are here on earth.
Down here it is all loss and renunciation.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
…and he suggests that we perhaps have our losses sometimes forced upon (like Pam in The Great Divorce) to point us outwards and upwards, towards God.
6. “Is it easy?”
As we come to the final section in this book, Lewis reminds us that he’s spoken about two different Graces under Charity: supernatural Need-Love and supernatural Gift-Love. He claims:
But God can give a third. He can awake in man, towards Himself, a supernatural Appreciative Love… Here… lies the true centre of all human and angelic life.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
…but he then says….
…where a better book would begin, mine must end. I dare not proceed.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
He doesn’t feel qualified. He wonders whether he’s ever really tasted supernatural Appreciative Love. He wonders if he’s only imagined it. He ends by alluding to the classical spiritual book by Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God and suggests:
If we cannot “practice the presence of God”, it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like men who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep. But for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 6)
