S5E9 – TFL 3 – “Affection” (Part III)

Today we look at how the Gift-Love element of Affection can go wrong and we wrap up the chapter.

S5E6: “Affection” – Part III (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

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Matt’s Updates

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David’s Updates

I don’t have a lot to share today… except a couple more iTunes reviews… Trying to now share these when they’re left, rather than leaving it until the end of the Season.

“Great job Gentlemen! Between this podcast and Pints With Chesterton I’ve found my people… it’s so hard to find people to discuss these things with… I feel like I’m home, with people like me, talking about the things I love most…”

– Deadwood007 via Apple Podcasts · United States of America · 11/13/21

“…I’m very impressed with the knowledge of this podcast trio and am grateful to be able to enjoy it.

One minor note but something that I really appreciate is that when you are listening to an episode, they even change the image based on what segment of the show they are on or what they are discussing. I don’t listen to any other podcasts that do this and it’s a really nice touch!”

– Deanchile via Apple Podcasts · United States of America · 11/13/21

Beverage and Toast

• Andrew
  • Glen Allachie

• Matt
  • Bacardi and coke

• David
  • I’m drinking GlenDronach Original (12 Year)

Recap & Summary

Recap

So, in the Introduction, Lewis gave us Need-love and Gift-love, different kinds of nearness to God, and the maxim that when a love becomes a god, it becomes a demon.

In the second chapter we analyzed pleasures and discovered a third kind of love, Appreciative Love, and also discussed love of nature and country.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, we began Chapter 3…  We began by discussing Affection (“storge” in Greek), a humble love which just requires an object to be familiar.  Then last week we heard some of the ways this love can go wrong, such as confusing it with charity and the degradations of Need-love – feeling entitled to  Affection, misunderstanding its informality, becoming ravenous, and freaking out when “the familiar” changes.

Summary

In the final section, Lewis explains how the Gift-love elements of Affection can go wrong. He tells the story of the legendary Mrs. Fidget, explaining how we can force others to remain dependent upon us so we can keep giving, even focussing our affections on a pet. Jack says that we are all tempted to these kinds of distortions, simply by being a member of the fallen human race. He concludes by saying something else needs to be added to Affection in order to keep it in line and prevent it from becoming demonic.

S5E9 Episode Summary

Discussion

1. “Mrs Fidget”

So, last week we began looking at the dangers of Affection, how it goes wrong… We focussed on the dangers which come from the Need-love dimension of Affection. Today we continue looking at the problems, but this time via Affection’s Gift-love.

Today’s opening section is just hilarious. In three of my favourite paragraphs of the book, Lewis tells the story of Mrs. Fidget, the mother who “lived for her family” and, by doing so, terrorized them in the process! When she then dies and all her family starts to flourish… even the dog who now gets to pee on the lampposts in the street. Jack ends with the line:

The Vicar says Mrs. Fidget is now at rest. Let us hope she is. What’s quite certain is that her family are.

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

She’s rather like Marie from Everbody Loves Raymond. We see Mrs. Fidget across Jack’s books. The clearest echo is probably in the grieving mother and the controlling wife characters of The Great Divorce).

2. “Maintained Dependence”

Lewis says it’s easy to see how the maternal instinct can degenerate into something like Mrs. Fidget… He reminds us of the paradox we discussed in our first week on this chapter, how in Affection there is:

…Gift-love, but one that needs to give; therefore needs to be needed

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

The goal of the giving, should be to ultimately bring the recipient to a point where the gift is no longer needed:

We feed children in order that they may soon be able to feed themselves; we teach them in order that they may soon not need our teaching… [Gift-love] must work towards its own abdication. We must aim at making ourselves superfluous.

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

If we achieve this and become redundant, but a twisted form of Affection will do anything to maintain the status quo:

…the ravenous need to be needed will gratify itself either by keeping its objects needy or by inventing for them imaginary needs. It will do this all the more ruthlessly because it thinks…that it is a Gift-love and therefore regards itself as “unselfish”.

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

Makes me think of Church Ministry. Good leaders should be trying to make themselves redundant. Even Jesus first called his Apostles and then sent them to go and do what He Himself had been doing.

It would be easy to think that Lewis is just having a go at mothers, but he says that any relationship based on Affection can fall into the same trap. He gives the example of a Mentor/Mentee relationship from Jane Austen’s Emma: 

Emma intends that Harriet Smith should have a happy life; but only the sort of happy life which Emma herself has planned for her.

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

Emma thinks of herself as a matchmaker and determines to have Harriet Smith married, but when she receives an offer of marriage she convinces her to turn him down, because it is not the man that Emma wants for her.

Lewis says that teachers have a similar temptation, to permanently ensure pupils remain pupils. He tells the story of Dr. Quartz who poured himself into his pupils, but rejected them whenever they reached a point where they could respectfully challenge him. In The Most Reluctant Convert, there’s a lovely scene where we see a much more healthy Teacher-Pupil relationship between Jack and The Great Knock, who celebrates his pupil’s challenge.

Lewis ends this section saying that we need a “much higher love” to elevate the Gift-love instinct:

But the instinct, simply in its own nature, has no power to fulfil this law. The instinct desires the good of its object, but not simply; only the good it can itself give. A much higher love–a love which desires the good of the object as such, from whatever source that good comes–must step in and help or tame the instinct before it can make the abdication.

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

3. “Animals”

In Chapter 2, “Likings and loves for the sub-human”, Lewis said that he was going to delay talking about animals until this chapter. Now, we have actually already spoken about animals in Part I, when he mentioned there being Affection between dogs and cats, but as we come to the last part of the chapter, Lewis speaks about how pets can become an outlet for the distorted Gift-love of Affection (such as with Mrs. Fidget).

Okay, so what does Jack say in this section about animals? Well, he first of all speaks about how pets can act as a bridge to nature.  However, relationships with animals can become distorted with Affection’s Gift-love…

This terrible need to be needed often finds its outlet in pampering an animal. … You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant. 

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

Of course, the upside of treating an animal like this is that it lets the person’s family off the hook:

The unfortunate creature thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain–you are too busy spoiling a dog’s life to spoil theirs. 

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

He says it sucks for the animal, but at least it typically won’t fully reasonlise how it is being wronged.

The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can’t speak.

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

Lewis says that…

Dogs are better for this purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all.

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

This puts me in mind of Tricki Woo, the pampered Pekingese from All Creatures Great And Small, as well as Bruiser Woods from Legally Blonde.

He ends this section by telling those who prefer pets to people to some self-examination of their motives…

4. “Original Sin or Neurosis?”

As Lewis begins to draw the chapter to a close, he wants to reiterate that if we have lives which lack Affection, we have a real problem. He says it’s “responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives”. Jack wants to respond to the critic who responds to this chapter by saying:

“Of course. Of course. These things do happen. Selfish or neurotic people can twist anything, even love, into some sort of misery or exploitation. But why stress these marginal cases? A little common sense, a little give and take, prevents their occurrence among decent people.”

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

Lewis admits that there do exist pathological conditions which makes temptation to the sorts of distortions of love much harder. Fine – send those people to the doctor.

However, he thinks that everyone is tempted towards these distortions, simply by being a Son of Adam, a fallen human creature. It’s not a disease, but a sin. This is our “natural” state… This is contrasted with Jesus who wasn’t “the psychologist’s picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen”. People told him he was possessed and nailed him to a cross.

But for ourselves, Lewis suggests that spiritual direction may help. 

5. “In need of something else”

Lewis says that the person making this objection to this chapter is actually communicating the very thing he himself has been trying to say:

Affection produces happiness if–and only if–there is common sense and give and take and “decency”. In other words, only if something more, and other, than Affection is added. The mere feeling is not enough. 

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

You need “common sense”, that is, reason. You need “give and take”; that is, you need justice, continually stimulating mere Affection when it fades and restraining it when it forgets or would defy the art of love. You need “decency”. There is no disguising the fact that this means goodness; patience, self-denial, humility…

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

He gives his own explanation, but I think it would be neater to simply describe it as virtue. Consider the Cardinal Virtues of prudence (“common sense”), justice (“give and take”), temperance (“decency”) and fortitude to follow these, even when it’s hard and you’re tempted to give in.

… the continual intervention of a far higher sort of love than Affection, in itself, can ever be. That is the whole point. If we try to live by Affection alone, Affection will “go bad on us”.

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

So, Lewis rejects, please forgive me for mixing Greek and Latin, Sola Storge, and ends the chapter by saying that we rarely recognise how badly Affection can be distorted.  He asks whether Mrs Fidget could have been completely unaware of what a pain she was. He says she did, but she continued her reign of terror because she didn’t want to accept that she wasn’t needed. She used her own suffering as proof of her “love” and actually enjoyed the pleasures of resentment, nursing any “wound” given to her by her family. Jack says if someone doesn’t know of these pleasures, that person is either a liar or a saint.

He ends by quoting the Roman poet, Catullus, who said “I love and hate”… Jack says that Mrs. Fidget’s love contained a good deal of hate as well and that other loves also carry the seeds of hatred within them. 

He finally closes the chapter by restating a variation of his core thesis:

If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate.  Love, having become a god, becomes a demon

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

Wrap-Up

I listen to a lot of podcasts but I have to say that this is the best I’ve heard… I have recently been ordained as a permanent deacon, and I intend to be working him into my homilies!

…I particularly like having discovered the podcast a couple years in[,] so I can binge like mad! And it’s fun to hear David mention Marie for the first time and think, “You’re gonna marry her! And you don’t even know it!”

Thanks for the joy and enthusiasm you’ve brought into my day.

– Mrohana via Apple Podcasts · Canada · 11/23/21

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