Ch. 1: Introduction

• Initially I thought there were two kinds of loves: Need-love and Gift-love, and obviously the former was bad and the former was good. The problem is that in relation to God, we must of necessity mostly have Need-love, but loving God is the measure of spiritual health: contradiction. Furthermore, the Bible (and Jesus) distinctly says we should come to God with our needs.
• There are two kinds of “near to God” or “like God”.
• Likeness: our likeness to God that was a gift of our nature, being made in his image. This is like being near to your house because you are on a sheer cliff 1000 ft above it. You are are physically near, but you are not near in the sense of being able to enter it and have dinner.
• Nearness: approaching God (via character, disciplines, learning about him, praying, loving others, etc.). This is like walking on the road to your house, which although it may get a lot farther from the house than the top of the cliff, actually gets you closer to eating dinner at home.
• Those who are like God do not necessarily become sons of God, and the likeness of being a son of God is qualitatively different than the likeness of our nature; it is more like we look like Jesus.
• Love becomes a demon when it becomes a god.
• Need-love goes away when the need is meet (e.g. the drink of water when you are thirsty), so it is not enough like to God to be mistaken.
• Gift-love is different because it demands self-sacrifice. “Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. ... It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done ‘for love’s sake’ is thereby lawful and even meritorious.” (8)
• “A silly woman’s temporary indulgence, which is really self-indulgence, to a spoiled child—her living doll while the fit lasts—is much less likely to ‘become a god’ than the deep, narrow devotion of a woman who (quite really) ‘lives for her son'. And I am inclined to think that the sort of love for a man’s country which is worked up by beer and brass bands will not lead him to do much harm (or much good) for her sake. It will probably be fully discharged by ordering another drink and joining in the chorus.” (9)
• Having the Gift-loves does not make us nearer to God, even though the Gift-love is like God.

Ch. 2: Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human

• There are two types of pleasure (as has long been known):
• Need-pleasures (pleasures preceded by need): people drink a glass of water because they are thirsty, not because drinking a glass of water is inherently fun.
• Appreciation-pleasures (pleasures that are pleasures in themselves): walking along a path and smelling the aroma of sweat-pea flowers from a nearby garden.
• Of course, it gets more complicated: if you are thirsty and someone gives you a tea when you were expecting water, you get the first pleasure as well as the second pleasure as a bonus. Addiction can take a second pleasure and turn it into the first, such as the alcoholic who drinks to satisfy the craving, not to appreciate the fine wine.
• The Stoics lauded the Need-pleasures and disparaged the Appreciation-pleasures because the first were self-regulating, but the second tempted to luxury and excess.
• We talk about the two pleasures differently.
• We talk about ourselves for the Need-pleasures (I needed that; I really wanted that), but the Appreciation-pleasures we say that it is (This is a great wine. The sweat peas smell lovely [or rephrased, the sweat pea smell is lovely]).
• Furthermore, we want the thing we appreciate to be preserved and enjoyed, and does so even if they will not enjoy it. (We should preserve far-off wilderness; don’t waste a good claret on Lewis who is unable to appreciate it)
• Nor do we wonder at someone ignored a water fountain if he is not thirsty, but we do wonder why he ignores the lovely smell of the sweat peas.
• Need-love quickly dies when the need is fulfilled, too. (Hence why grown up children neglect their mothers if there is no more than Need-love, or why a lover leaves a mistress once she has satisfied the need.) We cannot stop needing God, but our awareness of needing him may die, and then our Need-love may die, too. “There seems no reason for describing as hypocritical the short-lived piety of those whose religion fades away once they have emerged from ‘danger, necessity, or tribulation'.” (19)
• Appreciation-love
• Appreciation-pleasure is the beginning of experiencing beauty. Beauty has both sensual and aesthetic pleasures. Both a fine wine and beautiful music have sensual and aesthetic components.
• Appreciation-pleasures grow into something that is definitely love Appreciation-love, but which is also disinterested in the object (that is, we desire its continued existence). “We do not merely like things; we pronounce them, in a momentarily God-like sense, ‘very good'.” (21)
• Appreciation-love is a sort of debt, a desire for it to continue existing. “When it is offered to a woman we call it admiration; when to a man, hero-worship; when to God, worship simply.” (21) “Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: ‘We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.’ Need-love says of a woman ‘I cannot live without her'; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection—if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not wholly be dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.” (21)
• Wordsworthian love of nature:
• This love of nature is not that of the individual flower, or of the beautiful scene, but of the mood of the place. To this type of nature lover, a botanist and a landscape photographer are both unpleasant companions in nature. Both the beauty and bleakness, comfort and terror, etc. of a place are what they appreciate and incorporate into themselves.
• In reaction to people like Wordsworth, after the nineteenth century they were thoroughly disparaged and “debunked”. Wordsworth was a magnificent poet, but a silly philosopher.
• Nature does, indeed, present grandeur and desolation, but it does not offer any interpretation; nature is not a teacher. “The only imperative nature utters is, ‘Look. Listen. Attend.’” (25) If we try to take lessons from nature we might end up with the “dark gods”, since sex, hunger, and power are very natural, just as easily as beauty and awe.
• Nature does not teach, nature can “clothe” or “incarnate” our belief; “nature gave the word glory a meaning for me” (25).
• (Note that “love of nature” does not try to integrate parasites and primroses; that is a task for a different discipline and is not what I am talking about.)
• You will not find God through nature, rather you must turn away from nature to the little country church to find God.
• Those who turn nature into God find that nature no longer satisfies after a while. “Coleridge ended by being insensible to her; Wordsworth by lamenting that the glory had passed away. Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring the steadfastly the dew, the birds, and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be overwhelmed and, after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you.” (28)
• Love of country:
• Love of country is like love of nature, both good and bad. Obviously it can go wrong [e.g. the World Wars], but Jesus lamented over Jerusalem, and much great poetry has been written and heroism has been done on behalf of one’s country.
• “We are only considering the sentiment itself in the hope of being able to distinguish its innocent from its demoniac condition. Neither of these is the efficient [direct] cause of national behavior. For strictly speaking it is rules, not nations, who behave internationally.” (29)
• Love of home is positive: it is local, and it has no problem with other places being different. If home were not different, it would not be home. It is only militant when defending home.
• Love of our past is mixed, since all nations have some things that are positive and some things that are horrendous. It works best when it gives a “picture which firs the imagination, the example that strengthens the will” rather than trying to present those things as factual history.
• The belief that ours are the bravest men and fairest women may only produce lovable asses, but it can also produce asses that kick and bite.
• If our nation is so much better, we might see ourselves as having duties or rights towards others, given that we are superior. This is the “white man’s burden” of the British Empire. We [British] did actually do the natives some good, but justifying our Empire in those terms is nauseating. Superiority can decide to exterminate or enslave the inferior. Both duties and rights want to grow and grow, and both produced great evils.
• The worst is when patriotism denies itself. Kipling writes “If England was what England seems / ‘Ow quick we’d drop ‘er. But she ain’t!” (33) It is not love to love your children only if they are good, your wife only if she remains beautiful, your husband only as long as he is successful. Rather, you love your child, wife, husband, country because they are yours. (Which may cause you to irrationally overlook some faults, but that is generally pardonable.) This is how you get Vichy France: you start off with drums and banners, but abandon ship when she starts to sink.
• It seems that rulers will continue to need to defend their countries, but “[w]here the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only by presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for ‘their country’ they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice, or civilisation, or humanity. This is a step down, not up. ... I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it is just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds—whole indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine—I become insufferable.” (37)
• The older patriotism knew itself to be sentiment, and could laugh at itself as well as stir one to action.
• The same dynamics work for things other than country: school, family, class, religion. Regarding the latter, “Here it will be enough to say that the Heavenly Society is also an earthly society. Our (merely natural) patriotism towards the latter can very easily borrow the transcendent claims of the former and use them to justify the most abominable actions.” A book on this topic needs to confess the sins Christendom has committed. (38)
• “When the natural loves become lawless they do not merely do harm to other loves; they themselves cease to be the loves they were—to be loves at all.” (36)
• Whether or not animals qualify as sub-human, no one actually treats them that way, so I do not include them here.

Ch. 3: Affection

• This love is one we have most in common with animals (which does not make it worse). It is also the broadest and most diffuse of the loves.
• The Greek word for Affection, storge, is for parent -> offspring and offspring -> parent, although of course it goes beyond that. It contains both Need-love and Gift-love. The offspring needs nourishment, but the mother also needs to give: she will die if she does not give birth, it will be painful if she does not give suck.
• Affection is wide: cats and dogs can have affection for each other, people very unlike each other can have affection for each other, even if they can really have a long conversation. (The Wind and the Willows is a book of Affection)
• The primary requirement of affection is length of time or familiarity, the always-ness of them being there.
• It is the most undemanding/accepting of the loves, and is comfortable with things as they are—that is the primary attraction. In fact, in public the object Affection may seem rather shabby.
• One side effect of Affection is that because it has low requirements (unlike friends, etc., for which we have requirements specific to ourselves), it can bring people together who would never otherwise interact, and may provide the opportunity for us to see something more in that person.
• It is tempting to think, with the Victorian novelists, that because Affection has similar qualities to godly love that it is the same thing (for instance, Affection can love the unattractive, and godly love loves the unlovable). It is not the same. It is largely ambivalent: it can be good, but also bad.
• The Need-love aspect of Affection can go bad by expecting familiarity to breed Affection without the need to do anything else. Thus, the parent who is upset that their children show no Affection, even though they have done nothing to cultivate love. Their demand of affection then closes off what affection might develop.
• An example is parents treating their adult children poorly, but believing that their home is a place to relax and be themselves without the need for formal relational standards. This is close to true, but is not. In public, among people we do not know well, the standardized expectations allow us to interact as if there were a good relationship (even if we are faking it). In private, the public formality is inappropriate for Affection, true, but if your true self is unpleasant, you cannot expect that to create Affection.
• Affection can breed jealousy, when something outside causes the relationship to change. For example, siblings have shared lives for a long time, and if one of them discovers poetry or religion or something, the other may be jealous of that thing that is giving them new inspiration, new experiences, eventually new relationships that cannot be shared. The next thing that happens is that they denigrate the new thing (“that rubbish religion”, “they are putting on airs with that poetry”, etc.) This also happens in families, if one of the members changes something substantial, like becoming religious (or, in a family of Christians, becoming atheist).
• The old Victorians said things like “you’ll break your mother’s heart, going on like that”. The advantage of parents seeing an uncomfortable change in a child is that they are often right in their assessment. But not necessarily.
• This happens both when the change is for the worse (e.g. becoming an atheist among Christians) as well as for the better (developing a taste for poetry among uneducated family).
• Gift-love goes bad when it needs to be given. For instance, the goal in raising children is to provide for the needs while ensuring that they develop the ability to provide for their own needs. So the mother who “lives for her family” and does all sorts of things for them that they do not want actually makes them miserable. They may be obliged to help her do things for them they do not want. She may do things badly. If she insists on staying up if someone is out late (and then sort of accuses you with her eyes) limits your ability to come back late.
• A similar example would be a professor (“tutor” in Lewis’ world) who is a great teacher, loved by his students, and they may even meet outside of classes, but relationships end as soon as the student expresses a diverging view.
• Likewise pampering an animal (which it is easy to keep in an infantile, needy state).
• Classifying failures such as these as neurotic is unhelpful. There are surely people who are unable to resist temptations without medication, “[b]ut greed, egoism, self-deception, and self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney.” (70) Since temptation is normal, we should not be using medication to restore a supposedly normal condition of resisting temptations. (“We have seen only one such Man. And He was not at all like the psychologist’s picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can’t really be very well ‘adjusted’ to your world if it says you ‘have a devil’ and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.” [70])
• Affection only produces happiness if you add something more: common sense, give and take, “decency”. “You need ‘decency'. There is no disguising the fact that this means goodness; patience, self-denial, humility, and the continual intervention of a far higher sort of love than Affection, in itself, can ever be.” (71) Without this, Affection goes bad.

Ch. 4: Friendship

• Friendship was celebrated by the ancients but not much by moderns (and what moderns mean by “friend” is often much less)
• The ancients had an ascetic bent uncomfortable with physicality, and, unlike Affection and Eros, Friendship is not very physical or sensual, so they lauded it. Since the time of the Sentimentalists, we have seen much less value in it.
• Friendship is not well liked by the Authorities, because friends are drawn apart from the group. Furthermore, a group of friends is more likely to resist acquiescing to the Authorities.
• There is a opinion that every same-sex friendship is really a homosexual relationship. This is ridiculous. First, it’s like saying there is an invisible cat on the chair: no lack of evidence will convince, but of course no one can prove a negative. Second, unlike Eros, Friendships get better with more people. A third Friend brings out characteristics of the other two that neither of them bring out in each other. The fact that we have no demonstratives of friendship while ancients did just means that it is us that are out of step, not them.
• Friendship happens when we discover shared valuing of the same truth. “Oh, you too?! I thought that I was the only one...”
• Friendship arises from a matrix of Companionship. Friendship is not biologically necessary, but Companionship is. Companionship is the community of men planning the hunt, discussing the hunt afterwards, talking shop; working together to build a more effective community. Women do this, too, but I have no insight into it. This Companionship is just as necessary for the survival of the community as rearing children. Likewise, Companionship (or “Clubbability”) is valuable, just as silver is valuable even though it is not gold.
• Friendship is like Companionship in that the people are doing the same things, but in Companionship it is more activity-based and Friendship the activity is less physical and also less valued by the world.
• Friends (and Companions) are pictured facing the same direction; they are on a journey together.
• Friendship and Eros are not the same thing: you will share Friendship with your beloved with others, but you will not share your Eros.
• Friendship is not necessary or “useful” to society. Sure, it produces useful things, but as a byproduct. Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics produced socially useful results (by intention) and are forgotten, but Greek mathematics borne out of discussions of like-minded Friends (not intentionally useful) is the basis of modern mathematics. Similarly, a Friend will surely help during times of trouble, but there is no need to be needed, and rather a desire to be able to get back to the things we want to talk bout.
• “I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” (90)
• There also grows Admiration among Friends, since we undergo the trials together and when we see the other ring true again and again we feel that we are lucky to be among such great people.
• [In Lewis’ time], Friendships exist mostly within sexes, because the companionship matrix from which friendship develops does not exist. In fields equally accessible to both sexes, like being a Professor, inter-sex Friendships often develop (albeit complicated by an offer of Friendship being mistaken for Eros).
• In some residential areas, the men made money, and the women took the advantage of leisure to become educated. They sometimes try to raise the men up to their level, with little success, but generally the men are indulgent (“women have their fads”) and it does little harm.
• In others, the men had more serious education (lawyers, doctors, engineers) and so the women are comparatively uneducated. If neither is willing to admit this, then the men try to bring the women into the conversation, which is impossible for them to understand, and the group sinks to the level of jokes and gossip. This also tends to make Friendship be seen as not actually possible, since all the men talk like women when women are around.
• Sometimes women actively sabotage male Friendships (“don’t let two men sit next to each other or they’ll start Talking”), or find fault with the wives of their husbands’ Friends. But this emasculates her husband (and makes him something she doesn’t really want), and encourages him to find Friendships in secret.
• If relations between men and women are only Appreciation and Eros, that is more impoverished than if they can also be Friends, but it is not bad, as long as everyone understands what the situation is, and can laugh about themselves.
• Friendship is voluntary, free from duty, free from jealousy, free from need. It is “spiritual” in the sense of incorporeal, not animal or instinctual. But it is not to be mistaken for godly love: friends can be bond over evil values just as well as good ones, and friendship can make people worse rather than better.
• A circle of Friends is always at risk of becoming prideful. Essential to the Friendship is the we share something uncommon in the world, which can lead us to thinking we are better than the Outsiders. “I said above that in a good Friendship each member often feels humility towards the rest. He sees that they are splendid and counts himself lucky to be among them. But unfortunately the they and them are also, from another point of view we and us. Thus the transition from individual humility to corporate pride is very easy.” (105) From that point, it can degrade into taking pleasure in the exclusion. Even further to effecting decisions in the real world, by inviting “sound men” into the group, which then manipulates committees and boards, or captures jobs, etc. By the time this happens, the Friendship has ceased to exist, sunk back into the matrix of Companionship.
• Perhaps the reason why the Bible rarely uses Friendship to describe the divine relationship is that it is clear that God is not a physical parent (Affection) or a lover (Eros), whereas Friendship is much more easily confused. Furthermore, Friendship appears to by our choice, while Affection and Eros are less apparently our choice (hence all the love songs talking about how your beloved is your destiny). But even in Friendship, we may choose, but out choice of who we have available to choose from is supervised by God.
• Just as Friendships bring out aspects of other people that we cannot see and bring out ourselves, so the Friendships within the body of Christ bring out aspects of God that we cannot see ourselves.

Ch. 5: Eros

• By “Eros”, I mean “being in love”. I do not not mean sex (traditionally called Venus), since you can have sex without love. (In fact, Lucretius wrote that the emotions of being in love interfered with the pleasure of sex.) Nor is sex more pure if it includes Eros, since that could just as easily describe adultery. It is not less pure without it, either, since many people got married in obedience to their parents, with nothing to work with except animal desire and faithfully lived Christian marriage and child-raising.
• Evolutionists claim that Eros arose out of Venus, but in our experience it is generally the opposite: you enjoy the person and then become sexually attracted.
• Eros desires a specific person, sexual desire wants the act.
• Eros transforms a Need-pleasure (needing the beloved) into the most Appreciative pleasure. This is certainly hard to explain; lovers talk about wanting to “eat” each other; Charles Williams says “‘Love you? I am you.’” (122) Within Eros sexual desire becomes about the beloved, a way of expression.
• People have tended to think “that the spiritual danger arises almost entirely from the carnal element within it” (123), that when Venus is minimized then Eros is purest. St. Paul thinks otherwise. He ignores the carnal aspect (except to say not to deprive each other for long) and focuses on the distractions of marriage and pleasing your spouse as getting in the way of “waiting uninterruptedly on God.” (124) Eros actually makes the desire less addictive. “[Eros] tends, no doubt, to a pre-occupation with the Beloved which can indeed be an obstacle to the spiritual life, but not chiefly a sensual pre-occupation.” (124) “The great, permanent temptation of marriage is not to sensuality but (quite bluntly) to avarice.” (124) I note that the medievals who wrote on the problems of carnality were all celibate, and had no direct experience.
• A modern danger [written in 1960] is that we think we should take Venus seriously, and in the wrong seriousness: without any sort of gaiety.
• Sex is actually serious. "First, theologically, because this is the body’s share in marriage which, by God’s choice, is the mystical image of the union between God and Man. Secondly, as what I will venture to call a sub-Christian, or Pagan or natural sacrament, our human participation in, and exposition of, the natural forces of life and fertility—the marriage of Sky-Father and Earth-Mother. Thirdly, on the moral level, in view of the obligations involved and the incalculable momentousness of being a parent and ancestor. Finally, it has (sometimes, not always) a great emotional seriousness in the minds of the participants. But eating is also serious; theologically, as the vehicle of the Blessed Sacrament; ethically in view of our duty to feed the hungry; socially, because the table is from time immemorial the place for talk; medically, as all dyspeptics know. ... Animals are always serious about food [but not saints]. ... Banish play and laughter from the bed of love and you may let in a false goddess.” (126-7)
• One reason is that Venus is a mischievous elf, and when everything is perfect, one of the lovers is likely to be indisposed, and when it is definitely inappropriate, both people are mad with desire. And when, later, desire can be indulged, it will have left. It is best just to see it as a game and laugh about it. And it reminds us that we are an incongruous mix of angels and tom-cats in one body.
• Three views of the body: people who think it is a prison of the soul or shameful; people like Neo-Pagans and nudists who think the body is glorious; and those like St. Francis, who see it as Brother Ass. “[A donkey] is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable, and infuriating beast” (129). “[The body] would be too clumsy an instrument to render love’s music unless its very clumsiness could be felt as adding to the total experience its own grotesque charm—a sub-plot or antimasque miming with its own hearty rough-and-tumble what the soul enacts in a statelier fashion. (Thus in old comedies the lyric loves of the hero and heroine are at once parodied and corroborated by some much more earthy affair between a Touchstone and an Audrey or a vlaet and a chambermaid.)” (130)
• “When natural things look most divine, the demoniac is just round the corner.” (131)
• “This act can invite the man to an extreme, though short-lived masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror or a captor, and the woman to a correspondingly extreme abjection and surrender.” (131-2) This is wholesome if we see it as a ritual or acting as representatives of masculinity and femininity. “The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman the Earth-Mother; he does play Form, and she Matter. ... “within the rite or drama they become a god and goddess between whom there is no equality—whose relations are asymmetrical.” (132-3) So, within enacting this mystery-play (or masquerade-ball), it is wholesome.
• Naked did not originally mean our true self. “Naked” was what was left after you peeled fruit or removed the shell of a nut. Observe a public bath: we are more ourselves when clothed. When naked we are less individual and more like everyone else. So one could “put on” nakedness and participate in the ritual. But we must remember we are not the Sky-Father, we only wear a paper crown—which is not necessarily bad, in its proper place.
• But this points to a higher mystery: “As nature crowns man in the brief action, so the Christian law has crowned him in the permanent relationship of marriage, bestowing—or should I say, inflicting?—a certain ‘headship’ on him.” (134-5) The man is the head of the wife, but as Christ loved the Church—sacrificing himself for her. “The chrism of this terrible corronation [of headship] is to be seen not in the joys of any man’s marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care of his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence. ... He is King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears.” (135-6) (Of course, there is no merit in “unnecessary martyrdom” in one’s matrimonial selection.)
• “The sternest feminist need not grudge my sex the crown offered to it either in the Pagan or the Christian mystery. For the one is of paper and the other is of thorns. The real danger is not that husbands may grasp the latter too eagerly; but that they will allow or compel their wives to usurp it.” (136)
• “As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness.” (136) Eros wants the beloved, even when it is obvious that this cannot lead to a happy long-term marriage. “‘Let our hearts break provided they break together.’” (137) The voice of Eros sounds like a god: “His total commitment, his reckless disregard of happiness, his transcendence of self-regard, sound like a message from the eternal world.” (138) But Eros may speak of evil as well as good. That which leads to sin is not necessarily a “lower” form of love; “It may well be Eros in all his splendour; heartbreakingly sincere; ready for every sacrifice except renunciation [of the relationship].” (138)
• Plato saw Eros is a divine word, that “‘falling in love’ is the mutual recognition on earth of souls which have been singled out for one another in a previous and celestial existence.” (139) Shaw is a more secular version: Eros is the Life Force seeking parents for the superman. (This is why it ignores happiness and morality, because improving the species is a higher goal.)
• (But “All pictures yet offered us of the superman are so unattractive that one might well vow celibacy at once to avoid the risk of begetting him.” (140) Also, the Life Force must be incompetent, because excellent children [genetically] come from good breeding stock, not mutual attraction.)
• Eros is not God, but “[i]n it there is a real nearness to God (by Resemblance); but not therefore and necessarily, a nearness of Approach.” (140-1) But if done properly, it illustrates what charity means (just like Nature illustrates glory). “It is as if Christ said to us through Eros, ‘Thus—just like this—with this prodigality—not counting the cost—you are to love me and the least of my brethren.’” (141)
• However, complete obedience to Eros produces rebellion to any opposition, and opposition makes them feel like martyrs. I once thought this was just literary, but now I know that “Eros by his nature invites [a religion of love]. Of all loves he is, at his height, most god-like; therefore most prone to demand our worship. Of himself he always tends to turn ‘being in love’ into a sort of religion.” (142)
• Theologians have feared that Eros would lead to idolatry of the beloved, which is not much of a danger. I doubt that anybody “who has felt the thirst for the Uncreated, or even dreamed of feeling it” would imagine that a person would fulfill that. “The deliciously plain prose and business-like intimacy of married life render[s] it absurd.” (142) The danger is idolizing Eros.
• Some take Jesus, who said about the woman in Luke 7:47, she loved much and was therefore forgiven much, to mean that “‘I forgive her unchastity because she was so much in love.’” (143) First, there is no evidence that unchastity was her sin, and second, Eros does not extenuate, sanction, almost sanctify, actions in his service. But while people make excuses for acts, when they say “love made us do it” their tone makes it clear that they are appealing to authority not making excuses.
• “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.” (144) And it is not just unchastity, by “acts of injustice or uncharity against the outer world. ... ‘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.’” (145)
• Eros always promises that this relationship will last. “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. ... Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival.” (146) In a sense, falling out of love is “disredemption”. But Eros is unable to keep the promise.
• A marriage between two “decent and sensible” people will not be destroyed when they lapse into the old self, or Venus lapses into “mere sexuality”. It is people who thought that Eros had made a new creation, requiring no work on their part, that are in danger. “We must do the works of Eros when Eros is not present.” (147)
• Eros becomes a demon if he is not ruled, and he does not always die, 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 ... The lover’s old hyperbole of ‘eating’ each other can come horribly near to the truth” (148), as Anna Kerenina illustrates.

Ch. 6: Charity

• Love needs something more that itself to keep it sweet; it needs the Christian life. There is no shame in this: a garden needs a gardener or it will revert to wilderness. Just as God supplies all the life in a garden (the sun, air, water, and the Life itself which is being cultivated) but we still need to do the work of cultivation, so it is with Love. God supplies the grace of the loves, and we put fences around them and pull up the weeds.
• Our problem is not really replacing love for God with love for other human(s), but rather that we do not love other humans enough. In fact, if our love for other people reduces, we may imagine that it is because we are loving God more, when it may be that we just love less.
• Augustine says that we should not love anything mortal, because of his desolation when a friend died. I think this is a “hangover” from Augustine’s previous Paganism. While congenitally I am a creature of safety, I find myself farthest from Christ when I act to preserve safety. Loving deeply will hurt—as it hurt Jesus (he wept over Jerusalem and Lazarus). But he still had one discipled that he “loved”. Paul also does not seem the kind to avoid loving as a safety mechanism. Even God doesn’t ensure against heartbreak: “why have you foresaken me?” Jesus asks.
• “If you want to make sure of keeping [your heart] intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket of coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.” (155-6) I think self-protective lovelessness is a worse sin than “inordinate” love.
• Inordinate love is not too much love—we probably cannot love enough—but rather to much compared with how much we love God. The problem is we love God too little, rather than we love other people too much.
• Note that “loving God” is not having an intense feeling of love for God, but who do we serve first.
• (When Jesus says to “hate” others in comparison to loving him, or that you cannot serve two masters but will “hate” one of them, he means obeying one and not the other. Esau, whom God “hated” seemed to have a happier life than Jacob, but he was not a patriarch. “Loving” Jacob was accepting him for a high vocation, while “hating” Esau was rejecting him for that vocation.)
• Some of us find it hard to reject those we love the occasion requires obeying God; others find it too easy. “That is why it is of such extreme importance so to order our loves that [the occasion for “hating”] is unlikely to arrive at all.” (159)
• This is illustrated at a lower level in a poem where a Cavalier says “I could not love thee, dear, so much / loved I not honour more.” (159) This would make not sense to some women, but he and his mistress have both agreed that their highest love is to Honour. (Naturally, our actions should be communicating our higher love to God long before the occasion arises, and indeed, before we even marry.)
• God has no needs, and only created us to love and perfect us. So God only has Gift-love, which desires the best for the beloved. He has given us two kinds of loves. One is Gift-love, in which we see a likeness of his love (but not necessarily a nearness of Approach). The second is Need-love, which as far as I can tell does not resemble God, but is the opposite, in the sense that an ice-cube is the opposite of the ice-cube mould. These natural loves “are biased in favour of those goods which [the person] can themselves bestow, or those which they would like best themselves, or those which fit in with a pre-conceived picture of the life they want to lead.” (164)
• God can bestow his Gift-love on us, and this is what enables us to love the unlovable.
• God also enables us to have Gift-love towards him. God has enabled us to give ourselves to him (even though we are his in the first place). Similarly, feeding and clothing a stranger is loving Christ.
• These two are called Charity, and come by Grace.
• There are two others: Need-love of God, and Need-love of one another, received in “glad acceptance”.
• We need God both because we are created and also because we are fallen. “What the Grace gives is the full recognition, the sensible awareness, the complete acceptance—even, with certain reservations, the glad acceptance—of this Need. For without Grace, our wishes and our necessities are in conflict.” (166) We would like to be not quite creatures, to have a little intrinsic quality that is the reason that God loves us. “Grace substitutes a full, childlike, and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence.” (167) In fact, “this pretence that we have anything of our own” is like going to the ocean and trying to keep one toe on the bottom, rather than letting the ocean wash us around.
• Regarding Need-love for others, “We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness, usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering us the highest love of all is a terrible shock.” (168) Imagine a husband, who shortly after marriage contracted an illness that left him totally dependent on his wife, who lovingly and delightedly cared for him. This would require that Divine Need-love to accept, rather than being able to give like you were hoping.
• “There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one’s fault if they do not so love it. Only the lovable can be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some times—and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit—they are receiving charity, are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them.” (170)
• Sometimes God asks us to renounce a natural love for a mission (e.g. Abraham leaving his house) or because the object is forbidden. But usually the natural love is called to be transformed into the Divine Love. This is like the Incarnation, where the Divinity takes into itself the Human. Then our natural love can become glad, receiving Need-love or “selfless, unofficious Gift-love”. “Nothing is either too trivial or too animal to be thus transformed. A game, a joke, a drink together, idle chat, a walk, the act of Venus—all these can be modes in which we forgive or accept forgiveness, in which we console or are reconciled, in which we ‘seek not our own'. Thus in our very instincts, appetites and recreations, Love has prepared for Himself a ‘body'.” (171-2)
• This can go wrong if we try to project that we have already accomplished this.
• Although the transformation can happen, briefly, “in a favoured hour”, for the transformation to be long-term seems near impossible, yet must be attempted. And we have plenty of opportunity to attempt it: all the “frictions and frustrations” that we have with people provide opportunties for it. In fact, the transformation may be hardest if there are few of these (sort of like it being difficult for the ‘rich’ to enter the Kingdom)
• Only our natural loves which have been transformed will enter the heavenly life, since this world is passing away. “Man can ascend to Heaven only because the Christ, who died and ascended to Heaven, is ‘formed in him'. Must we not suppose that the same is true of a man’s loves?” (174)
• Will we love those in Heaven that we loved on earth? Perhaps only if our love is transformed into Charity. Otherwise it would be like someone we loved play conkers with in childhood; since we neither of us play conkers, that love is now mostly meaningless.
• We were made for God, and everything that we have loved is a reflection of God himself. Perhaps bereavement is an enforcement mechanism so that to turn our love of others into a love for God.
• There is a third type of love in Charity (the first two being Divine Gift-love and Divine Need-love): a supernatural Appreciative love, that is, adoration. I shall not speak of it, in case I any experiences I think I have had have only been my imagination, so that I do not lead anyone into mistaking broken flowers for the real thing.