The Six Loves, Part 1: Introduction

C.S. Lewis was, for me, the beginning of adult thinking. I have read everything of his that I know of, from the most obscure essays to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, start to finish. Multiple times. I teach The Discarded Image to my eleventh grade medieval history students, and when one of them enjoys the Space Trilogy I hand them Miracles. So nothing in what follows is written because I think Lewis got something objectively wrong.

He gave four talks on love in London in the summer of 1958, recorded for American radio (Lewis' only professional voice recording), and the book that grew out of them, The Four Loves, came out in 1960. Lewis left behind a method for looking at love.

He started with something everyone has seen and drew distinctions. By using real examples that everyone could relate to or at least understand in some way, he showed how John Q. Public understands the form of love he means, then how the love can go bad, and ended with a prescription on how to bring the love back into alignment.

Ultimately, no love that tries to exist without eventually becoming Godly love (charity, or agape as it is now much more commonly known) will be able to survive.

This series borrows that method for a time he did not, either fortunately or unfortunately, live to see.

The Word 'Love'

I love seafood. I love my children. I love music I probably shouldn't. I love God. I love my wife. I love my church. I love debating. I just used the same verb in a multitude of ways for very different things, and through a shared context every reader knows what I meant because I meant them all in the most natural way.

Seafood tastes good. I would die for my children to protect them. I turn on music in my car that would make people blush from time to time. I love the Lord, and try like Deuteronomy 6 tells me to. I love my wife on many levels. I love my church because of other levels still. I enjoy debate because the free exchange of ideas is important to me.

However, if I were to change the inflection just slightly, it would get nonsensical at best, and horrifically awkward or perhaps criminal at worst. I do not love seafood exactly like I love my wife; that would be bizarre. I do not love my wife exactly like I love my children; that would be heinous.

Distinctions are important because they clear up misunderstandings and avoid mayhem. The Greeks had several words where English has one. A separate Greek name for each love means that when two of them are confused, the confusion can be named.

Written language often builds in a benefit of the doubt. We hear plain expression and infer the deeper meaning from the context the object brings. Trouble starts when the word is used with no shared or agreed meaning around it, as in a slogan, such as "Love is love."

Slogans

In the Paradigm Apologetics series I spent a post on words that do not carry built-in meaning for the listener, and the insider vocabulary that stops an argument before the listener can hear it with intended meaning.

Slogans about love fail in the opposite way, usually for the sake of malicious intent in some way. Some are worse than others, but they have the same effect as a slogan - ending discussion.

• "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

A well-intended phrase from a romantic era. It is a call to experience humanity and, in the medieval mind, to give balance to the vegetable soul, the sensitive soul, and the rational soul. However, the beloved ought to be a 'valid' target, or else this longing is sin.

Tennyson's line is the oldest of the three. Most people hear it as a line about romance. Tennyson wrote it in In Memoriam, a poem of grief for his friend Arthur Hallam, and the love he meant was friendship.

• "If you love them, you'll let them go."

I give thanks to God every day he did not listen to this tired maxim. Is love worth fighting for, or is love worth letting go? Without context, this is either a call to let the beloved have freedom or a license to allow a spouse to quit a marriage unjustly. And, worst of all, it can be weaponized to do whatever is necessary.

"If you love them, you'll let them go" can be the right counsel for a parent and the wrong counsel for a spouse, and nothing in the slogan says which of the two is meant.

• "Love is love."

This is the most useless phrase of the lot. It says that a word means itself, and people say it to close a question that has been open since Plato's Symposium. Quite possibly the most vacuous slogan of the last twenty years, but only used as a weapon to try to shut up opponents of your preferred vice.

Slogans like these are only as helpful as the understanding behind them.

Lewis' Four

For the sake of completeness, or for those who have never encountered C.S. Lewis' book or recordings, I want to go over what he meant.

Lewis described Storge, which he called Affection, the love that grows between people who happen to be around each other. It can be as plain and obvious as parents to children, or children to parents, or as comical as when dogs and cats become friends.

Next he moved to Philia, Friendship, as the love between people who care about the same thing. It's not a required love, but it was the one the Greeks considered the highest of the loves. It is a symbol of the closest friendships, or often, in times of war, between brothers in arms.

He took Eros, the state of being in love. It was the erotic form of the word. God may have made mankind, but no more humans would have happened if it were not for Eros.

And he took Agape, which he called Charity, the love that comes from God and is commanded of us.

Before he got to the four he set out a distinction he kept through the whole book: Need-love and Gift-love. A frightened child running to its mother is Need-love. A parent working to provide for a family they may not live to see is Gift-love.

He also changed his mind as he worked on the book, adding a third, Appreciative love, which is the love that stands back and simply admires what it loves for being what it is. This makes sense, as Lewis, being the greatest medievalist of the 20th century (in my humble opinion), chose it because he understood the kind of love that exists in medieval courtly literature as a real thing.

Every one of the loves turns out to have all three inside it, in different proportions, and most of the trouble inside any love comes from one of the three crowding the others out.

Lewis also borrowed a warning from Denis de Rougemont: a natural love turns into a demon the moment it is made into a god.

Affection, friendship and being in love are all good, and each of them becomes a tyrant as soon as it is treated as the highest thing there is. And Lewis observed that the natural loves resemble God without bringing anyone nearer to Him. Gift-love looks like God's love, and a person can pour out gift-love for a lifetime and never once turn toward God.

The Greek

This surprises some evangelicals, but there are other terms that can be used to describe love in more detail, so I intend to use six Greek terms to tell kinds of love apart.

However, there are some odd features in Greek, as there are in any language. In the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, you find that the Song of Songs, the Bible's love poem, uses agape (God's love, charity) for the love of the lovers.

This is an odd decision for fans of C.S. Lewis, because anyone who has read Song of Songs hears the love poetry going on in that book and the excitement of the lovers. The love poetry is so strong that, as Jerome reports in his letter to Paulinus, the Jews of his day did not let a man read it before the age of thirty, and the Talmud condemns anyone who sings it as a tavern song. Yet eros is not found in the most likely places.

The word eros never appears in the New Testament at all to my knowledge, despite what a former Bible college professor I once had said about Jesus to make an awkward point.

In John 21, when Jesus asks Peter three times whether he loves him, John uses both agape and phileo, and nothing in the passage seems to depend on the difference.

This all goes to say that Lewis was using a method to help people understand that context is key, above all else, to help theologians draw distinctions. R. C. Sproul commonly said that it is the "... prerogative of the theologian to make distinctions," and Lewis was using language as his tool to help others draw distinctions.

Compare and Contrast

Augustine argued, long before Lewis, that loves have an order. In On Christian Doctrine he says the just man "neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less, nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more." The order shows itself when two loves collide. A man who loves his work and his children finds out which comes first the night both need him. A Christian who loves his country finds out the day his country asks for something God forbids.

A good rule of thumb is to notice which one you make excuses for neglecting. That is the one you love less.

There is one major thing C.S. Lewis understood about his time that is sadly exactly the same as now: contemporary society has its loves out of order. People ask the lower loves to do what only a higher love can do, and then describe the higher love in the language of the lower ones until the difference is gone.

Six Loves

Lewis' four loves all concern people who are already in your life: your family, your friends, the person you fell for, and God. I've decided to add two new ones to the list, because they have been very popular topics in the current zeitgeist.

The first new one is the love of self, Philautia. Nobody needs to be taught to want their own good. The question is what kind of self-love a person has, and a person can rate themselves highly and still be unable to stand themselves. Lewis also wrote about the love of nature. Being alone with nature can become a form of self-love, and I think a mistaken one.

The second is the love of the stranger, Philoxenia, which the New Testament calls hospitality. A stranger is someone you have no natural reason to love, which makes the stranger the test of whether a person's love reaches past the people already in their life. You cannot choose your family, but you do actively choose your guests, and the act of choosing them adds a new layer of responsibility.

Lewis did not treat love of self or love of the stranger as loves in their own right. As I've studied more of Scripture and Greek, I've found myself wondering why. After some long thought, part of the supposed reason makes sense in one way, but not in the other.

Lewis saw his contemporaries constantly vie to be part of the inner circle, loving themselves to the exclusion of all others. We see this demonstrated most vividly in That Hideous Strength and in his public but lesser-known disputes with Professor Haldane.

Conversely, Philoxenia appears to almost be a zero-sum game when it comes to Philautia, as he also saw men sacrifice themselves for a greater cause in numbers and frequency in ways my American culture is distanced from.

We talk about sacrifice. We rarely see it on the level and scale that Lewis' epoch did.

Love of self concerns the person nearest to you, namely, you, and love of the stranger concerns a person with no claim or right on you at all.

That leaves Agape. Lewis put it last because it is the love that comes from outside the natural loves and keeps each of them in its place, and I will put it last for the same reason. It is also the one love that can be commanded, including toward enemies, and no one can be commanded to feel. So whatever Agape is, it is more than a feeling, and the five loves before it will have to be measured against something they cannot supply on their own.

The next post takes up the issue of Storge, analyzing where Lewis matches our culture now, and where the change in culture gives some additional distinctions that need to be made.

Blessings.