The Four Loves

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly 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.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

I finished reading The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis yesterday for the umpteenth time. I have a used copy of the book, picked up from a dusty bookshop whose name I've long forgotten; there were scribbled notes and lines enough in the book before it came to me, and I no longer remember whose notes are mine and whose belong to the previous owner(s).

The Four Loves is my favorite C.S. Lewis book - perhaps more for sentimental reasons, as it was the first Lewis book I ever picked up and read. I know most people are introduced to him through Mere Christianity; that was the fifth or sixth book I ever read by him, and only then because one of my friends insisted on buying and giving it to me because he was so appalled at my never reading it.

I have a deep affinity for clarity, being able to clearly define emotion and relationships and what I owe to God and to the people in my life; and that is another reason I read The Four Loves again and again. The loves Lewis sets out in the book - Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity, along with the introductory chapter on Sub-Human Likes and Loves - help me to define how I feel towards my parents, my friends, my fellow Christians, even God. It helps me to recognize the blessings and pitfalls inherent in any "natural" love, such as Affection and Eros.

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
- C.S. Lewis, "Friendship", The Four Loves

Charity is my favorite chapter, because in it is described the love between God and man - the Gift-Love of God, as He blesses us and bestows on us everything we need for life; and the Need-Love of man, in that I can fully embrace my utter dependence on God and emptiness apart from Him, as something God has put inside me. In "Charity", he describes how we as Christians have to move on past thinking we have anything of value that makes God love us; that I deserve God's love because of my intelligence, my self-sacrificing behavior, my good choices, even my humility. God does not love me because I am loveable; I have to get past that idea if I am ever to truly experience Charity. God loves me simply because He is Love Himself; He cannot do or be anything else.

"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. "
- 1 John 4:7-12

"Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is imperfect and poor. Nor is it then the love that yields, but its alloy...For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected - not in itself, but in the object...Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire."
- George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons