S5E6 – TFL 3 – “Affection” (Part I)

Today we begin looking at the first of “The Four Loves”, which Lewis calls “Affection”.

S5E6: “Affection” – Part I (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

[Affection] lives with humble un-dress, private things; soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing-machine, a [child’s toy] left on the lawn.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

Chit-Chat

• Andrew’s Updates
  • Thanksgiving in Florida
  • Going to Camp Allen retreat and will be meeting up with our audio engineer, Taylor Schroll
  • Working on a paper about Lewis and Autobiography for the Perichoresis Journal
  • Posting books on eBay!

• Matt’s Updates
  • Family!

• David’s Updates
  • Lots of family for Thanksgiving this year! 
  • I had my sister-in-law visiting from the University of Dallas. We had both her and my parents-in-law staying over the course of the weekend so all the family could be together.
  • …and I just found out one of my brothers-in-law, is also moving to Wisconsin before the end of the year!

Beverage and Toast

• Andrew
  • Glen Allachie

• Matt
  • Water 🙁

• David
  • GlenDronach Original (12 Year)

Recap & Summary

Recap

In the first chapter we learnt about Need-love and Gift-love, Nearness-by-likeness and Nearness-of-approach. It was also there that we heard the central maxim of this book, that love, when it becomes a god, ceases to even be a love and becomes a demon.

In the second chapter we first considered pleasures, dividing them up into Need-pleasures and Appreciative-pleasures. Inadvertently, we discovered a new kind of love! While Need-pleasures foreshadow Need-loves, Appreciative-pleasures foreshadow Appreciative-love. Incidentally, listener Abby shared on Slack this quotation from The Way of Philosophy which describes something of the power of appreciative love:

“We do not stop to smell the roses, but instead the roses stop us”.

The Way of Philosophy

We then considered love towards two entities which aren’t human. We first of all considered love of nature. We saw how nature isn’t a teacher, but how she can be used to give meaning to the words we use about God. The second sub-human love we discussed was love of country. Lewis dissected the different elements of patriotism, love of home, attitude to history, superiority over other nations, as well as rights and responsibilities towards other countries. We also heard about the dangers of grounding one’s patriotism in one’s country’s merits, as well as the problems which would follow if one attempted to dispense with patriotism altogether.

Summary

Lewis defines Affection as the love between parents and their children. However, due to its indiscriminate nature, many objects can be loved with Affection.

The main criterion is that the object must be familiar. Because of this familiarity, it is a love which grows unnoticed. It is also a love which can exist between those of different age, class, education… and even species!

Although not an Appreciative Love, it creates a space to appreciate the objects of love in a new way. Finally, Affection can exist either on its own, or as a support to other loves.

S5E6 Episode Summary

Discussion

1. “Storge”

Today we begin the first of the “big four” in The Four Loves… Lewis begins with “the humblest and most widely diffused of loves”, Affection.

In comparison to the other loves, our experience with this love is most similar to that of the animals. However, Lewis is quick to point out that this doesn’t mean it’s automatically of lower value. 

Nothing in Man is either worse or better for being shared with the beasts

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

Humans are rational animals – we’re animals! But when someone is being brutish, he’s actually failing to live up to the rational part of his nature, and very often being far more cruel than animals would ever be!

Jack notes that in Greek, this love is called “storge”. He says his lexicon describes “storge” as the affection which parents have towards their offspring, and Lewis then widens this definition to make it mutual, including affection of offspring towards their parents. Lewis tells us that, when we think of Affection, these are the sorts of images we should have in our minds:

…a mother nursing a baby, a bitch or a cat with a basketful of puppies or kittens; all in a squeaking, nuzzling heap together; purrings, lickings, baby-talk, milk, warmth, the smell of young life.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

Lewis says that from this image, we see Need-love and Gift-love are elements of Affection. The Need and the Need-love of the young is pretty obvious, as is the Gift-love of the mother. However, Jack notes that there’s also something of a paradox, something which we’ve hinted at in previous episodes:

[The mother] gives birth, gives suck, gives protection. On the other hand, she must give birth or die. She must give suck or suffer. That way, her Affection too is a Need-love. There is the paradox. It is a Need-love but what it needs is to give. It is a Gift-love but it needs to be needed.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

2. “Indiscriminate”

Next, Lewis extends the definition of “storge” far beyond that of parents and children, saying that the warmth and comfortableness of affection can be directed towards innumerable other objects, and it can do this because Affection is not a very discriminating love. He says…

There are women for whom we can predict few wooers and men who are likely to have few friends. They have nothing to offer. But almost anyone can become an object of Affection; the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating. There need be no apparent fitness between those whom it unites…. It ignores the barriers of age, sex, class and education… It ignores even the barriers of species. We see it not only between dog and man but, more surprisingly, between dog and cat. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

Lewis gives many other examples of Affection between unlikely characters from literature:

• Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
  • Knight and servant in the novel by Cervantes. 
• Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad
  • The children’s classic The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
• Tristram Shandy
  • Novel written by Laurence Sterne.
• Pickwick and Sam Weller
  • The Pickwick Papers and Master Humphrey’s Clock by Charles Dickens.
• Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness
  • Husband and wife in The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens

The object of affection must be familiar. Because of the familiarity, Lewis remarks that, while you can probably point to a moment when you make a friend or fall in love, you don’t notice Affection developing until it’s already well underway. He gives the example of a child’s attitude towards an old gardener, or the dog who barks at strangers doing everything they can to be friends, and yet is excited to see an old acquaintance who has never shown the dog any kindness.

3. “Humble”

Much David, Affection is incredibly humble and modest! You can be proud of a friendship or of a romantic attachment, but you don’t have this with Affection. Lewis recounts a story…

Once when I had remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my friend replied, “Yes. But I bet no dog would ever confess it to the other dogs.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

It’s the same in human affection – it’s nothing to brag about. He says…

It is no proof of our refinement or perceptiveness that we love them; nor that they love us.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

Jack says that also there’s no Appreciative Love in Affection. We take it for granted and only tend to notice it by the absence of the object of love (through death or parting in some way):

Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed…. Affection almost slinks or seeps through our lives. It lives with humble, un-dress, private things; soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing-machine, a gollywog left on the lawn.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

Gollywog is a kind of rag doll which has come under fire recently for being racist.

David shared about his time in with a housemate who was a Broney:

4. “Ideal for cocktails!”

Lewis says that Affection often does not always exist by itself. In the most Pints With Jack quotation ever, he says:

As gin is not only a drink in itself but also a base for many mixed drinks, so Affection, besides being a love itself, can enter into the other loves and colour them all through and become the very medium in which from day to day they operate. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

He gives examples of how Affection complements friendship and even saves romantic love…

Regarding friendship, he explains how, when you’ve been friends with someone for a long time, things about them which have nothing to do with your friendship become “dear with familiarity” – it broadens your love. 

Regarding erotic love, Lewis says that eros by itself can be “too angelic or too animal or each by turn”. Affection adds something else…. In both friendship and romance, there’s a charm when…

…the mere ease and ordinariness of the relationship… wraps us round. No need to talk. No need to make love. No needs at all except perhaps to stir the fire.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

To demonstrate the overlapping and blending of the loves, Jack points to two different things:

Firstly, Affection, Friendship and Eros all have an expression in common, the kiss, and it’s not clear which love was borrowing from which.

To be sure, you may say that the kiss of Affection differs from the kiss of Eros. Yes; but not all kisses between lovers are lovers’ kisses.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

Secondly, different loves use a “little language” or “baby talk”. He cites a scientist (Konrad Zacharias Lorenz) who says the same thing happens in the animal kingdom. Somewhat in the vein of “The highest doesn’t stand without the lowest”, he says:

Different sorts of tenderness are both tenderness and the language of the earliest tenderness we have ever known is recalled to do duty for the new sort.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

In the radio talk on Affection, Lewis admits this kind of thing embarrasses him:

The second expression in common is more embarrassing: lovers as well as parents tend to indulge in baby language. This makes many modern people, me among them, uncomfortable

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves Radio Talk on Affection

5. “Nurturing Appreciation”

In the final section of this chapter which we’re going to look at today, Lewis returns to the question of Appreciative Love. Affection has Need-love and Gift-love components, but earlier he said that it’s not an Appreciative Love. Having said that, he notes something rather odd about Affection…

It can “rub along” with the most unpromising people. Yet oddly enough this very fact means that it can in the end make appreciations possible which, but for it might never have existed.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

We choose our friends and spouses not only for their various excellences, but for those particular kind of excellences which we personally prefer. 

I’m a simple man. I like pretty, dark-haired women and breakfast food.

Ron Swanson, Parks and Recreation

We may say that we have chosen our friends or our spouse for their various merits based on our tastes, but….

The especial glory of Affection is that it can unite those who most emphatically, even comically, are not; people who, if they had not found themselves put down by fate in the same household or community, would have had nothing to do with each other. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

What happens is that, as Affection grows, our eyes begin to be open and we begin…

…getting beyond our own idiosyncrasies, …learning to appreciate goodness or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence flavoured and served to suit our own palate.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

Having lots of friends doesn’t prove that you have a wide abbreviation of human excellence. Jack argues that makes as little sense in saying that you have a wide literary taste because you enjoy all the books in your study. You chose them – of course you enjoy them. If you truly had a wide taste, you would always be able to find something to enjoy in the bargain bin at the secondhand bookshop.

Affection can broaden our minds, meaning that one will find…

…something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who “happen to be there”. Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 3)

Wrap-Up

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