The Six Loves, Part 2: Storge, the Love That Does Not Choose

I've heard more than a few people begin invoking Lewis' work on the loves by describing agape as the kind of love a parent has for their child. I wish that was true. Perhaps there is some wishcasting going on, or maybe people hear about the Father's love for Christ and God's love for his children and immediately make the connection.

A parent's love for a child is most often a misunderstanding of agape. You can tell it is by the reaction. When we rage against God, we cannot harm him. When a child rages against us, he may not harm us physically, but we can feel hurt. Sometimes it's guilt, or frustration, or the sting of ingratitude, but God suffers none of those things.

Children and parents are bound instead most by storge. Lewis called it Affection.

Lewis began his four loves with Affection, the humblest of them. Nobody picks their family. Nobody picks the people in the next pew or at the next desk either. Most of the people a person loves in this life were set down next to them, and the love grew anyway.

What Storge Means

To make sure this is understood, I want to repeat it: Storge is the old Greek word for family love, used above all for the love of parents for children and children for parents.

As far as the usage of the word, biblically, the noun never appears in the New Testament. However, two words built on it do.

The apostle Paul uses astorgos, "without natural affection," twice, both times in a list of vices: Romans 1:31 and 2 Timothy 3:3. In 2 Timothy it comes one verse after philautoi, the lovers of self, which we'll talk about a few posts from now.

He also uses philostorgos once, in Romans 12:10. The word joins philia and storge, and Paul uses it to tell the church to love one another with family affection, as it should be. People who did not grow up together are commanded to love each other as if they had.

However, storge seems to beg to be qualified, given the prefixes and situational understanding. You may have noticed in the last post that many of the things in my long list of 'loves' fit under the category of storge. In fact, there is a little bit of storge in all the other loves, because of its very nature. When I say I love my children and I love my coworkers, I obviously mean two different things, but the common point between the two is the affection.

Lewis' Description

In chapter 3 of The Four Loves, Lewis begins with a picture: a mother nursing a baby, or a dog or cat with a basket of young, all in one warm heap. Affection is Need-love and Gift-love at once. The baby needs the mother, the mother gives, and the mother also feels the need to give.

That's one of the things that catches the attention of the internet: we like cute. Cute baby videos leave everyone smiling. Puppies, kittens, and small cute animals of every kind inspire this kind of "stop and watch" awe. Millions and billions of hours of streaming video are dedicated to the ingestion of videos that catch our natural propensity towards affection.

In fact, for the last 25 years, when someone asks me how I'm doing, they predictably have come to expect me to say, "Puppies and sunshine." It's a catch all. The warm sun and puppies leave fond memories for most.

Lewis calls affection the humblest love, and I believe that is one of the neatest observations about it. It's these kinds of little but important observations that have left me with my own affection for Lewis. People boast about being in love, and they are proud of their friendships, but I can't think of a single instance of anyone bragging about affection.

Metaphorically, storge is the smell of warm dinner in the home as much as it is the familiar pile of dirty clothes you haven't washed yet but know you need to.

Therefore, affection is by definition the least picky of the loves.

It can attach to almost anyone, including the dull and the exasperating. It crosses age and class and even species, which is how the dog and the cat end up asleep together in the cute videos.

Lewis said affection teaches a person to notice, then put up with, then smile at, then enjoy, and finally appreciate the people who happen to be there. It's the kind of thing that also lets friends haze each other one moment, but the moment anyone outside starts trouble the entire group defends the victim.

Most friendships any of us have are storge. I know most want to believe their friend groups encapsulate philia, but that's more rare than you might think. A good way to determine the difference is a simple question: how much would you miss that friend if they were not there? Would their absence be a long-term or irreplaceable gap? That's not a negative thing. It's the distinction that thinkers need and teachers use to help grow understanding.

Corruption

Lewis credited affection with nine-tenths of the solid and durable happiness in natural life, and in the same chapter he warned that it causes a great deal of misery. That also gives it a natural problem: it sneaks in. The corruptions he describes all happen at home, the place where our guard is usually down to begin with.

The first is treating affection as a debt. Affection grows without being earned, so a person can come to expect it without earning it, and then demand it. A parent can demand affection from a grown child on no other ground than being the parent. And in the Christian home, this is tragically easy to weaponize.

There is, after all, the fifth commandment: honor your father and mother, which the apostle Paul calls the first commandment with a promise.

The familiarity is a strength as much as it can be a blind spot. The danger there is rudeness that calls itself comfort. Affection allows a freedom at home that would be rude in public.

Family members talk to each other with a kindness and generosity, but they are also blunt, and sometimes rude to the point where in any other situation it would end friendships. They are the kind of instances we defend spouses over. "Don't talk to my wife like that" (or my son, or my mother) is the way affection defends its own in public, while the same brash phrases pass without comment inside the home.

Lewis also held that affection at its best has a courtesy deeper and more sensitive than the public kind. Lewis' rule for courtesy at home is the same as in public: nobody gives any kind of preference to himself. A family that saves its worst manners for one another has confused license with affection; just because you shouldn't need to be formal in the home doesn't mean you ought never be sensitive in the home.

Affection also loves the familiar, so it can resent anything that makes a member of the family unfamiliar. Lewis' examples are the child who grows up and the family member who takes up a new faith or a new kind of learning, and I'll hold my peace until the next section. The rest of the household feels the change as a betrayal, and the old love turns into resentment.

Finally, and this is tragic, and something I see as an incoming figurative missile to my United States, there is the need to be needed. Lewis' example is Mrs. Fidget, who lived for her family, did everything for them whether they wanted it or not, and made sure they knew what it cost her. After she died, her family brightened. A Gift-love that has to be needed works to keep the people it loves in need of it.

Lewis held that affection needs common sense, give and take, and ordinary decency, and in the end it needs Charity to keep it from going bad.

Joy Davidman

As a brief aside before talking about the present, C. S. Lewis wrote over a number of decades. There is a younger theology in his Pilgrim's Regress and a more comfortable faith by the time he wrote The Four Loves. Part of the reason he changed over the years is obvious: he married.

You might think I would say Eros is the chief love that existed between Lewis and his wife. I don't think that is the overwhelming love that affected their relationship, though. I believe storge was involved far more.

Lewis married Joy Davidman Gresham in a civil ceremony in 1956, and after her cancer was diagnosed in a Christian one at her hospital bed in March 1957. When Lewis recorded the radio talks that became The Four Loves in August 1958, she was in remission and recovering. By the time the book came out in 1960, he would only have about four months left with his wife before she passed away.

When teaching on C. S. Lewis' literature, I call A Grief Observed the unofficial addendum to The Four Loves. I sometimes wonder what Lewis would have said had he begun his work on this topic in 1961. The Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation asked Lewis for the talks in 1958 and left the subject to him. He chose love, and Joy had a hand in the result, as she did in most of what he wrote in those years.

It's no secret that Lewis found his eventual wife, Joy Davidman, utterly brilliant. Meanwhile, most of his friends found her opinionated, coarse, and (perhaps worst of all) very American. Her status as divorced didn't help. Lewis' older brother Warren, who shared the house with them, did like her quite a bit though.

It makes sense to think that some of Lewis' friends felt genuine concern over a love they could not understand. It was probably their own sense of storge being intruded on, as Lewis was pulling away and changing.

On the other hand, storge's chief multiplier is proximity, which is why Lewis presumably tried to bring her into some of his circles. "If you just get to know her," was probably at the heart of those efforts, but the wounded affections of his friends (to say nothing yet about the sin against philoxenia) likely made it very difficult for any true kind of affection to take hold.

Some didn't have enough time, in any case.

Joy died in July 1960, when the bone cancer that had put her in the hospital came back. The lack of storge in some of his friends' disposition towards Joy caused some stress for Lewis who felt mourning with their help was not as possible, as a result hurting the other loves he had with his own friends. For certain, he had well-wishers: Sayer, Havard, the Greens. But there was a void. Tolkien, for one, never heard about their marriage until after the deed was done. But I imagine he may have thought about the missing pieces as well.

Love is a communal feeling; without an outside object, it is vanity, as we will observe in a later piece.

While Lewis had an intellectual understanding of love, I do not yet believe he had experienced the destruction of love on such a wide scale. He shared the mourning of his mother with his brother, and to some extent, his father Albert. With his friend Paddy Moore, he could share and act with grief alongside Mrs. Moore.

With Joy, I can imagine some loneliness if the reports are to be believed at their worst, as Lewis knew his wife's company was not as enjoyed.

That's not to throw Lewis under the bus at all; his introduction to the ideas of storge is amazing. Most, if not all, of Lewis' descriptions hold well, but there are places where I think Lewis would also be aghast to know how affection has suffered, and suffered in ways he likely could not foresee.

As Lewis felt the medieval person would be surprised by the near-total discarding of their model of the world, Lewis might be surprised to see how little storge is left in the societies that still read him.

Proximity and Family

Affection needs people who stay put long enough to become familiar, and for most of American history the first place that happened outside the house was church. Even in America, which has a reputation for loving glory, guns, and God, attendance struggles.

When Lewis recorded his talks in 1958, Gallup found more Americans in church on a Sunday than it has found before or since, and the pews have been emptying ever since. England was already in a rather bleak state, and somehow time has left it in an even worse state.

The local church was one of the few places left where people who did not choose each other sat in the same row every week for years, which is exactly long enough to notice, put up with, smile at, and eventually appreciate each other. But even among some church-goers, the rise of the mega-church has made anonymity easier than ever.

The people who study megachurches for a living found that a good share of the people in them never volunteer for anything, and the researchers said outright that some come because they can be, and want to remain, anonymous. A person can sit in a crowd of four thousand for five years and never once be seriously engaged, because nobody there knows them well enough to be appreciated or annoyed by them.

Love is not neutral, and finding a place where you can remain neutral for years raises questions about the commitment to the bride Jesus died to save.

The United Methodist Church, which has lost nearly half its members in ten years, is an amazing case study. I know of dozens who have decided to forego smaller churches specifically because of the anonymity that can exist in a crowd. A large church where they can blend in and heal in silence is one of the most common reasons people choose large churches.

More Americans live alone than ever before. In 1975, one household in five was a single person. Now it is closer to one in three. Someone who stays with an empty apartment and no church has nobody to grow familiar with except the dog, and I'll get to that pitfall soon.

I'm always surprised by the wide range of stories I hear about single-mother households. I've experienced, second-hand, the lives of friends raised by only their mother. In one instance, I saw a woman who sacrificed so much to give her child a great life, and went on to find friendships that were strong and loving until the day she died.

Meanwhile, I've also experienced households where the opposite happens. The desire for a family leads the child out into a dangerous world that preys on people looking for a sense of belonging. Regardless of the mother's or father's involvement, when there is a separation, there is a wound; where there is a wound, there is a desire for healing; where there is a desire to be healed, there is a vulnerable person.

In traditional parent households, when the children grow older and the means of affection change, the parents cling to each other; they grow together, with storge and eros pulling the two closer in the right ways. With no natural outlet that comes from a spouse, when children pull away, parents find affections to replace missing desires.

Storge does exist quite easily between husbands and wives. Most of a long marriage is affection: the same chair, the same arguments, the same face across the table for forty years. California passed the first no-fault divorce law in 1969, and every other state eventually followed. Before that, a marriage ended when one spouse proved in court that the other had committed adultery, deserted the home, or been cruel. After it, "irreconcilable differences" was enough, so the wounded feeling itself became grounds.

Marriage was not only a covenant that was designed for love, but it was also an act of protection meant to be guarded by the witnesses of the marriage.

Affection is the love built to outlast wounded feelings. A husband puts up with his wife's temper for thirty years because she is his wife and he has put up with it before, and she does the same with his. The old law of God concerning marriage was there to provide protection. Plenty of people abused those grounds, so the law's strength was lessened.

But are we really able to say that was for the better of society? Is society really in better shape as a result?

The Secret Life of Pets

Pew Research found in 2023 that nearly every American pet owner counts the pet as part of the family, and about half of them say the pet is as much a part of the family as a human member.

Lewis had no quarrel with loving animals; he was an avid lover of animals and nature, as anyone who has ever read his Chronicles of Narnia can easily recount. Of course there's the obviousness of Aslan, but beyond that is Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, the horses Strawberry, Hwin, and Bree, and many other representatives of nature, all the way back to the talking animals of Boxen, the world he and his brother invented as boys.

If dogs and cats can come together and show storge, it obviously stands to reason that storge is the chief love that exists between mankind and beasts. And for what it is, it's hard to deny the appeal.

Lewis talks about this somewhat, but I'm unsure how surprised he would be to know much of the modern world does the exact thing he described in horrific detail.

Parents often lament the change from small children to adolescence, because what goes with it is the dependence and the 'cuddles' that are often synonymous with small children. From Ecclesiastes we hear the familiar words about a time and a place for everything, but the trouble with cute, small children is that they do grow up, and it sneaks up on every loving, unsuspecting parent.

Pets have become one of those places. I see the trend in both young and older people, but with the elderly at least I can see the utility, especially if immediate companionship is wanted after the spouse has passed on. But in younger, I have to be honest; I flinch.

See if the generalized pattern rings true in your experience: A young couple move in together (usually unmarried, unfortunately) and rather than having the desire for a child decide to see how they do with a pet. They buy or "rescue" a dog. When they see the demands of the dog, they decide the affection for the dog is enough and dedicate themselves to work, and over time, talk less and less about the dog meant to be the test.

Now, I don't want to sound completely unsympathetic here. There are special cases where the couple are unable to have children, and agape compels man and wife to honor the vows made. But, that is why I called it a "generalized pattern." Not universal or guaranteed, but generalized.

Lewis wrote, "If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you."

Lewis also calls the creature unfortunate, but that is only because it is a substitute target with no means to defend itself against the selfish wrath that storge can command.

Most of Lewis' corruptions involve a family member who changes. A pet will never grow up in the same way a child does and leave home or take up a new faith, except in the saddest of circumstances. So, an animal can meet the desire to be needed and never test affection the way a son or a daughter does. Having four children, I can understand the appeal. Having a wife, I do not struggle with the urge to seek being needed.

Upkeep

People can assume that affection will last even when they neglect it. Lewis didn't; he knew better.

He ended the chapter by saying that affection makes people happy only when something else gets added to it. The mere feeling, he wrote, is not enough. You need common sense, you need give and take, and you need decency. Then he admitted what those homely words really mean.

Common sense means reason. Give and take means justice. Decency means goodness, which means patience, self-denial, humility, and a far higher sort of love than affection can ever be on its own.

So what does the upkeep actually look like?

The debt comes first. Nobody is owed affection, including by the people they raised. The commandment to honor your father and mother is addressed to the child, and it hands the parent no bill to present. If I want my children's affection when they are thirty, I will get it the same way their coworkers get it, by being someone they like having around. Though, the sooner I start, I have a natural leg up when they reach that age.

The manners come next. Lewis' rule at home is the same as the rule at a dinner party, that nobody gives any preference to himself, except at home there is no ritual to hide behind. The test is easy. If you wouldn't say it to a guest at your table, then affection is not the reason you said it to your wife.

The one who changes is harder. Lewis' picture is two brothers who did everything together until one of them found poetry, or science, or God, and the other was left standing there. The one left standing has two options, ridicule or curiosity, and ridicule is the one affection reaches for first. The cure is to go along, at least far enough to see what your brother sees. A family that won't crack the book or come to the church even once has decided to stop being familiar with the person who did.

The need to be needed is the hardest of the four. Lewis said the proper aim of giving is to put the other person where he no longer needs your gift. You feed a child so he can feed himself, and you teach him so he will stop needing you to. A parent's Gift-love has to work toward its own abdication, as Lewis put it, and the day you hear "they don't need me anymore" is supposed to be the reward. Mrs. Fidget never got there because she never intended to. A parent who intends to can start with the shoelaces and keep going right through the wedding.

Lewis' four corruptions are all things affection does when it goes bad. The newer problems are what happens when affection has nobody to work on at all. Living alone, hiding in a crowd at church, keeping an exit open in a marriage, and putting a dog where a family was are all ways of having nobody around long enough to grow fond of. Proximity, at least, can be chosen. You can eat with the same people every week, sit in the same row, and stay in one church long enough to be put up with, and then long enough to be smiled at. Lewis said affection ignores age, sex, class, and education, which means the coworker and the old woman in the next pew both count, and neither of them has to be interesting.

That last part is where the church comes in. Paul's command in Romans 12:10 is addressed to people who did not pick each other, and it tells them to love each other like family anyway. A congregation small enough that your absence gets noticed is already obeying it, whether or not anyone there could spell philostorgos. A person who picks a church precisely so that nobody will know their name has picked the one place where being known is commanded.

Affection is also supposed to survive being hurt, and more and more it doesn't. Karl Pillemer, who studies family estrangement at Cornell, found that cutting off a relative is common enough that he wrote a book on mending it. Lewis' "give and take" was his word for justice, and justice means the injury gets settled while the relationship stays put. The quarrel ends and the person is still at the table. Marriage is the same case with a lawyer available, and the discipline is the same: settle it and stay.

Lewis admitted that affection cannot do any of this by itself. On its own it cannot step aside for a grown child, and it cannot forgive. A far higher sort of love has to keep stepping in, and that is where this series is headed.

The next post takes up Philia, the love the ancients prized most.

Blessings.