Lewis on love

These two quotes are probably my favourite to date and I have meant to post them for quite some time but was waiting to finish and post my condensed version of the third chapter of The Four Loves first (this is from the fourth chapter) but they're so good that, on the one hand, I can wait no longer to post them (who knows how long it will take me) and, on the other hand, if I do end up re-posting them along with the rest of that chapter, people have the opportunity to read it twice (something worth doing!). So here they are, set apart from the rest of the chapter:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it 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 or 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 dangers and perterbations of love is Hell.

And, coming in a close second in both merit and location on the page is the following:

We shall draw near to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

Actually, I'll throw in this final one since it follows from these two and is quite good too:

It is probably impossible to love any human being simply "too much". We may love him too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the inordinacy.
-C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves from the chapter: "Charity"

Part the second: Friendship

Just under a month ago, I set myself up for defeat by starting a series of long posts on the several chapters in C.S. Lewis' book The Four Loves. However, I am continuing it here and, since I never set myself a time limit, may eventually get all four gleaned of my favourite quotes.

In the chapter on Friendship, C.S. Lewis raises some interesting points. At times I cannot relate to every situation he mentions since it is from the male perspective but most of it is fairly universal truths.

On the topic of whether friendship should be classified as a love at all he notes that "To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves." But in comparison the modern world ignores it. He attributes this to several sources. First he says that "...few value it because few experience it." because it is the least natural of the loves; it is highly possible to go through life without a true taste of it. He says that it is this very "non-natural" quality to it that the Ancients valued (they distrusted the nature of man) and which our age trivialises. He claims that the age of Romanticism and its exaltation of Sentiment is still felt in our world. Within this great tide of emotion Friendship appears colourless.

He also has some good comments in rebuttal of the homosexual theory. It is unfortunate that in our society such an argument is neccessary but he deals with it well. He talks of the subtle ways such accusations worm their way in:

To say that every Friendship is consciously and explicity homosexual would be too obviously false; [they posit]...the less palpable charge that it is really--unconsciously, cryptically...--homosexual. And this, though it cannot be proved, can never of course be refuted. The fact that no positive evidence of homosexuality can be discovered in the behaviour of two friends... [means nothing]: "That", the say gravely, "is just what we should expect." The absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden. Yes--if it exists at all. But we must first prove its existence. Otherwise we are arguing like a man who should say "If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it."

A belief in invisible cats cannot perhaps be logically disproved, but it tells us a good deal about those who hold it. Those who cannot concieve Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elabouration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.

On a broad historical view it is, of course, not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some explanation. We, not they are out of step.

He makes a distinction between companionship and friendship and says that the first is the springboard to the second and stresses the need for a common object:

The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be "I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend", no Friendship can arise...There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and a Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travellers.

He then talks of how friendship "is both a possible benefactor and a possible danger to the community." How they are the start of many movements: "The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the 'World' are those who really transform it." He speaks of what it can mean to society:

Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion... Men who have real Friends are less easy to manage... harder for good Authorities to correct or for bad Authorities to corrupt. Hence if our masters...ever succeed in producing a world where all are Companions and none are Friends, they will have removed certain dangers, and will also have taken from us what is almost our strongest safeguard against complete servitude.
[Friendship] makes good men better and bad men worse.

He talks of some of the bad results in the situation of a debate where he came up against blind resistance to relation on a personal level:

...Behind this, almost certainly, there lies a circle of the Titanic sort--self-dubbed Knights Templar perpetually in arms to defend a critical Baphomet. We--who are they to them--do not exist as persons at all. We are spcimens of various Age Groups, Types, Climates of opinion, or Interests, to be exterminated... They are not, in the ordinary human sense, meeting us at all; they are merely doing a job of work--spraying (I have heard one use the image) insecticide.

Another, perhaps less violent yet still negative, result of the exclusiveness of friendship is the idea of "corporate superiority" which we witness when

...people talk very intimatly and esoterically in order to be overheard. Everyone who is not in the circle must be shown that he is not in it. Indeed the Friendship may be "about" almost nothing except the fact that it excludes.

On a happier, more general note of friendship he says

The mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all.

People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.

He ends with the truth that, whatever we may think, we do not really choose our friends any more than we do our family:

...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one University instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at first meeting--any of the chances might have kept up apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ who said to the disciples "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends "You have not chose one another but I have chosen you for one another." The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others... They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself... At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside.

not a deconstructionist

Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all
its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience. If you begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on.
-C.S. Lewis from the Introduction in The Four Loves.

Part the first: Affection

I just finished reading Lewis' The Four Loves last night and would like to share a few of the passages I underlined. As an aside, I do realize that I am setting myself up with all these 'first in a series' and 'to be continued' entries for failure of completion but I truly would like to continue these posts and think that by showing my intent openly I might be forced to follow up. Time will tell.

In the chapter titled 'Affection' Lewis describes this love thus:

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. If Affection grows out of this--of course it often does not--their eyes begin to open.

When we reach the point of fondness of others this

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

He talks of how it is easy to like our friends but that:

The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has met every day.

However, he also points out (as he does with each form of love) that Affection--on its own--is neutral: it can be brought down by sin or raised by God's love. Lewis demonstrates that this is not the view most people hold toward love (I would venture to say that this is probably the result of common grace--that love is experienced or understood by most more often on the good side).

Affection is often assumed to be provided, ready made, by nature...We have a right to expect it. If the others do not give it, they are "unnatural"...

The "built-in" or unmerited character of Affection thus invites a hideous misinterpretation. So does its ease and informality...

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

He describes courtesy, the outworking of true Affection:

The more intimate the occasion, the less the formalisation; but no therefore the less need of courtesy. On the contrary, affection at its best practices 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...you must really give no kind of preference to yourself; at a party it is enough to conceal the preference...Those who leave their manners behind them when they come home...have no real courtesy even there. They were merely aping those who had.

And finally a few miscellaneous quotes that support his argument yet also stand well on their own (I feel as though I might as well write out the chapter in its entirety or just recommend you read the book yourself since Lewis is much better at representing himself than my mediatory comments and unfortunate gaps could ever hope to do)

-The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.
-[All loves carry] in them the seeds of hatred. If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.
-The unappreciativeness of the others...enabled her to feel ill-used, therefore, to have a continual grievance, to enjoy the pleasures of resentment.
-The really surprising thing is not that these insatiable demands made by the unlovable are sometimes made in vain, but that they are so often met.
-Affection will arise and grow strong without demanding any very shining qualities in its objects. If it is given us it will not necessarily be given us on our merits; we may get it with very little trouble.
-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."
-Affection would not be affection if it was loud and frequently expressed.

And a final quote (I promise) on the world's ideas of normality:

Medicine labours to restore "natural" structure or "normal" function. But greed, egoism, self-deception and self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal the man from whom these failings were wholly absent? "Natural", if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. 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.