S5E8 – TFL 3 – “Affection” (Part II)

After speaking about the goodness of Affection, we now begin to look at how it can go wrong.

S5E6: “Affection” – Part II (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

“The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly 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)

Chit-Chat

• Andrew’s Updates
  • Back from Camp Allen C.S. Lewis retreat!

• Matt’s Updates
  • Currently in Scottsdale!
  • Andrew told him to meet Rev. Bruce Johnson

• David’s Updates
  • Been having some fun theological conversations with a listener, Richard, over on my blog.
  • I was recognized at 6:30am Mass
  • Queen Elizabeth is no longer the head-of-state in Barbados 🙁
  • Received a signed copy of Meg-Hunter Kilmer’s new book for Alexander via Matt.

Beverage and Toast

• Andrew
  • Lagavulin 16

• Matt
  • Water!

• David
  • Tomatin Single Malt (18 Years)

Recap & Summary

Recap

In Chapter 1… Lewis outlined Need-love, Gift-love and the different kinds of “nearness” to God.  There he presented his main thesis, that love becomes a demon when it becomes a god.

In Chapter 2… He analyzed different kinds of pleasures and discovered Appreciative Love! The rest of the chapter was spent analysing the loves for two different kinds of “sub-human” objects – nature and country.

Then, last week we began Chapter 3…and we were introduced to Affection, or “storge” in Greek. We were told that it can exist on its own, or in combination with other loves. It is a built-in, informal, humble, indiscriminate love which just requires the object of love to be familiar.  We learnt that while it’s not an Appreciative Love, it opens our eyes to appreciate those for whom we have affection, even if they are very different from ourselves.

Summary

After previously looking at the goodness of Affection, today we consider some of its dangers… Firstly, Lewis says that some people mistake Affection for Charity. Next, he criticizes the poets who present Affection as ready-made bliss, rather than an opportunity to love. He then explores the way in which some people can develop a sense of entitlement regarding Affection and how, in others, their Need-love can grow insatiable. After this, Jack explains the common misunderstandings concerning Affection’s informality, and concludes this section by explaining how Affection can react badly to changes in the status quo, causing it to rebel.

S5E8 Episode Summary

Discussion

So, last week we spoke exclusively about the goodness of Affection. Today we begin to deal with some potential problems… With that in mind, before we go to the text, I just wanted to quote a relevant section from Screwtape which our Patreon supporter Carlota posted on Slack last week. Uncle Screwtape says:

Leave them to discuss whether “Love”, or patriotism… are “good” or “bad”. Can’t you see there’s no answer? Nothing matters at all except the tendency of a given state of mind, in given circumstances, to move a particular patient at a particular moment nearer to the Enemy or nearer to us.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

So in this episode we’ll be looking at ways in which Uncle Screwtape can encourage us to distort Affection. If you recall, we said that there are Need-love and Gift-love elements in Affection. This week we’ll focus on the dangers of Affection in relation to Need-love and next week we’ll turn to the dangers in relation to Gift-love… 

1. “Mistaken for Charity”

So, the first danger… Jack reminds us of Affection’s good qualities – it is humble, it can love the unattractive, it overlooks faults, it recovers quickly after quarrels, and opens us up to undiscovered goodness in others.  Surprisingly, this results in a temptation! Lewis warns us that…

If we dwelled exclusively on these resemblances we might be led on to believe that this Affection is not simply one of the natural loves but is Love Himself working in our human hearts and fulfilling the law.

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

Don’t think that brass is gold:

There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 11)

2. “Victorian Mistakes”

Lewis speaks about the Victorians, the folks who lived in the mid-to-late 1800s who, according to Lewis, had this very tendency to equate Affection with Christian Charity. In the original radio broadcasts, he specifically mentions fiction writers: Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Elliot.

Many Victorian writers apparently wrote as though they had never heard Christ’s words about. putting Him first, even above family, but Jack doesn’t think this is the main issue… Of course, God does require us to put him first. And, in an aside, Jack suggests that what is sometimes presented as anti-clericalism and anti-superstition is really just an expression of bitterness by those who feel that God has “stolen” the affections of a loved one. He says:

God is the great Rival, the ultimate object of human jealousy; that beauty, terrible as the Gorgon’s, which may at any moment steal from me–or it seems like stealing to me–my wife’s or husband’s or daughter’s heart.

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

They gave me nothing in the world to love but Psyche and then took her from me.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces  (Part I, Chapter 21)

So if the Victorian problem wasn’t just that they seemed to ignore the rivalry of God for our affections, what was it? Well, after questioning whether the Victorian “happy homes” were really happy, Jack asks whether the unhappy ones were due to an absence of Affection? Surprisingly, Lewis says that he thinks many of these homes were unhappy because of Affection! This seems to be his main point in this section

Nearly all the characteristics of this love are ambivalent [a mixture]. They may work for ill as well as for good. By itself, left simply to follow its own bent, it can darken and degrade human life.

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

He offers what seems to me to be a strange proof. He points to the “treacly tunes and saccharine poems in which popular art expresses Affection. In the radio talks he gives the example of Home Sweet Home. I think it’s the 1823 song by John Howard Payne and Henry Rowley Bishop:

1. ‘Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam
Be it ever so humble there’s no place like home
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there
Which seek through the world, is ne’er met with elsewhere

Chorus:
Home! home! sweet, sweet home!
There’s no place like home!
There’s no place like home!

2. An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain
Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage again
The birds singing gaily that came at my call
Give me them with the peace of mind, dearer than all

Home Sweet home, John Howard Payne and Henry Rowley Bishop:

He says they are odious because of their falsity:

They represent as a ready-made recipe for bliss (and even for goodness) what is in fact only an opportunity. There is no hint that we shall have to do anything: only let Affection pour over us like a warm shower-bath and all, it is implied, will be well.

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

Before we leave this section, on Lewisiana.nl, Arend Smilde references a 1942 letter from Lewis which I think sums up his point about Victorian authors. In the letter, Jack is writing to Owen Barfield about Thackeray’s novel Henry Esmond:

What a detestable woman is Lady Castlewood: and yet I believe Thackeray means us to like her on the ground that all her actions spring from “love”. This love is, in his language “pure” i.e. it is not promiscuous or sensual. It is none the less a wholly uncorrected natural passion, idolatrous and insatiable. Was that the great 19th century heresy – that “pure” or “noble” passions didn’t need to be crucified & re-born but wd. of themselves lead to happiness? Yet one sees it makes Lady C. disastrous both as a wife & a mother and is a source of misery to herself and all whom she meets. 

C.S. Lewis to Owen Barfield

3. “Unmerited Love”

One of the key features of Affection is that it is pretty indiscriminate – almost anything can become an object of affection and, because of this, people typically expect to be objects of affection. While we work at stimulating friendship and romance…

…Affection is often assumed to be provided, ready made, by nature; “built-in”, “laid-on”, “on the house”. We have a right to expect it. If the others do not give it, they are “unnatural”.

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

And since we aren’t on personal terms with the same people Lewis knows, he cites literary examples of characters who feel entitled to Affection. He gives examples from…

1. The Way of all Flesh by Samuel Butler. In that book, Mr Pontifex expects his son to love him, even though he’s done nothing to prompt it….
2. Shakepeare’s King Lear…a man who has an insatiable appetite for his daughters’ Affection.

4. “Mr. Pontifex”

So, let’s look at Mr. Pontifex… Lewis concedes that much of Affection is built-in – nature and society encourage it. The problem with Mr. Pontifex is that he reasons that, because people are loved with affection beyond what they deserve, he thinks that he deserves it!  Lewis points out the flaw in this logic by giving a parallel:

…because no man by merit has a right to the Grace of God, I, having no merit, am entitled to it.

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

Lewis says that we can reasonably expect Affection… Typically. However, if we or the other persons are atypical, things will go badly wrong. Jack explains why:

For the very same conditions of intimacy which make Affection possible also – and no less naturally – make possible a peculiarly incurable distaste; a hatred as immemorial, constant, unemphatic, almost at times unconscious, as the corresponding form of love.

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

Familiarity – it breeds contempt! He notes that whereas the word “old” was a term of endearment before, it now becomes one of “wearied loathing”:

…”at his old tricks,” “in his old way,” “the same old thing.”

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

…and, much like Affection, we don’t notice this kind of hatred begins!

He references a Siegfriend from an opera. It’s part of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Siegriend was the son of Siegmund and Sieglinde (brother and sister). HIs mum dies soon after birth. He’s raised by Mime, a dwarf

Siegfried, in the opera, could not remember a time before every shuffle, mutter, and fidget of his dwarfish foster-father had become odious.

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

5. “King Lear”

Okay, so on to Jack’s assessment of King Lear… We’re told that he does love his daughters, but as a result he’s half-crazy with Need-love.  Jack says that even the most unlovable person can have this kind of ravenous love…

But it works to their own misery and everyone else’s. The situation becomes suffocating. …their manifest sense of injury, their reproaches…produce in us a sense of guilt…for a fault we could not have avoided and cannot cease to commit. They seal up the very fountain for which they are thirsty. If ever… any germ of Affection for them stirs in us, their demand for more and still more, petrifies us again.

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

…and this kind of love is always demanding constant proof of our love.

Jack ends this section by noting that the surprising thing isn’t that these insatiable demands are made, but that they are so often met! He speaks of daughters consumed by “a maternal vampire who can never be caressed and obeyed enough”… and while their sacrifice may be beautiful, the one who exacts it, isn’t. Minto?

Lewis actually points to solution. He quotes Ovid who says “If you would be loved, be lovable”. Ovid was a 1st Century BC Roman poet – Publius Ovidius Naso. He says this in The Art of Love. He originally meant “If you want to attract the girls you must be attractive” but Lewis re-interprets it as saying that if you want to be loved, be loving.

6. “Informality”

So, we saw that unmerited nature of Affection can be a means by which it goes bad. Another feature of Affection is its informality… so, how does that go wrong? Jack begins by defending the youngsters, saying that, in his experience, parents are often much ruder than their children.

Dogmatic assertions on matters which the children understand and their elders don’t, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously–sometimes of their religion–insulting references to their friends…

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

He brings this up because he says that if you ever asked such people why they behave like this, they’d say that things should be informal in the home. They’re appealing to the informality which comes from family Affection.

We’re a happy family. We can say anything to one another here.

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

Jack says: 

…it is so nearly true yet so fatally wrong. 

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

He admits that:

Affection is an affair of old clothes, and ease, of the unguarded moment, of liberties which would be ill-bred if we took them with strangers.

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

However, just because things are different in public life and domestic life, it’s not like everything gets thrown out the window. 

The more intimate the occasion, the less the formalisation; but not therefore the less need of courtesy. On the contrary, Affection at its best practises a courtesy which is incomparably more subtle, sensitive, and deep than the public kind. In public a ritual would do. At home you must have the reality which that ritual represented, or else the deafening triumphs of the greatest egoist present. 

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

Jack’s point is that, at its best, Affection can say whatever it wants, but it can do this because Affection “wishes neither to wound nor to humiliate nor to dominee” and only when this is the intent behind it can you do some of the “rude” things which  Affection allows:

• …calling your wife a “Pig” for scarfing both her cocktail and your own
  (I’m utterly convinced this happened with Joy)
• Shout down your father for telling the same old story again

“You may tease and hoax and banter… You can do anything in the right tone and at the right moment–the tone and moment which are not intended to, and will not, hurt”

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

In contrast, the rude person (“Rudesby”) sees this in others doing this and “he arrogates to himself the beautiful liberties which only the fullest Affection has a right to or knows how to manage… He knows that Affection takes liberties. He is taking liberties. Therefore (he concludes) he is being affectionate.”

If this is challenged, then that person will become elaborately “polite” to effectively say “Fine! We’re not close then!”

He then tells a rather amusing story of Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy who had been droning on about, of all things, fornication. When his brother interrupts, he ddhurts Uncle Toby’s feelings and so apologises. He says…

Uncle Toby, to show how complete is his forgiveness, to show that he is not on his dignity, resumes the lecture on fortification.

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

7. “Jealous of change”

In the final section we’re going to be looking at today, Lewis talks about the jealousy which Affection can evoke. Now, we know how romantic love can give rise to jealousy, but Lewis says that:

Every kind of love, almost every kind of association, is liable to it

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

It creeps into Affection via another of Affection’s features – it loves the familiar, even if undeserving. Therefore, we don’t want things to change, even if they improve! Jack says…

Change is a threat to Affection.

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

He gives the example of siblings who have a shared history together, but are driven apart when one of them develops a new interest. It doesn’t really matter what it is – science, music or religion.

The other cannot share it; he is left behind.

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

The person left behind will describe the new interest as 

…”all silly nonsense”, contemptibly childish (or contemptibly grown-up), or else the deserter is not really interested in it at all–he’s showing off, swanking; it’s all affectation.

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

The key element is the change. It could be falling from the family ethos, or raising above it – it doesn’t matter. It could be a conversion from Christianity or to Christianity. 

The reaction of those around can be pretty savage. Lewis says that…

…Affection is the most instinctive, in that sense the most animal, of the loves; its jealousy is proportionately fierce. 

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

It is the reaction to a desertion, even to robbery. Someone or something has stolen “our” boy (or girl). He who was one of Us has become one of Them. What right had anybody to do it? He is ours. There are echos of Till We Have Faces and The Great Divorce (“mine, mine, mine…”)

Jack suggests even a double jealousy can be felt – both jealousy that this “other thing” has stolen a loved one, but also an indignation that our loved one has discovered something we didn’t. 

Parents can at least comfort themselves by saying things like “It’s a phase” (they may believe it and it may even be true!)

Lewis ends today’s section by preparing us for what we’ll focus on next week:

All these perversions of Affection are mainly connected with Affection as a Need-love. But Affection as a Gift-love has its perversions too.

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

Wrap-Up

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• Andrew noted that our date of recording was the one-year anniversary of the death of Walter Hooper.