I’ve been teaching a class at church on C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. We’ve worked our way through Affection, Friendship, and Eros. In each case, we’ve seen that God meant for these types of love to be blessings for mankind. They are never wrong in themselves with respect to what God intended for them. Yet, in each case, Lewis spends time showing how each of these loves can go wrong. Affection can develop a neediness that becomes quite selfish. Friendship might descend into an “inner ring” of close-knit people who exclude others in a wrong spirit. Eros can lead us to believe that the romantic impulse within us can be made into an idol.
What we discover is that, regardless of the good aspects of these loves, they can, as Lewis repeats throughout the book, become demons. We cannot rely on them in their natural states.
This is where Charity comes in to save those loves from themselves. Lewis uses the word “Charity” in the older sense. Nowadays, we limit that word to when we give money to a worthy cause. But the Greek word is one that most people have at least heard before: Agape. This is the essence of God’s love. Everything He does is done out of Agape, a heart of giving that will continue to give even if nothing is ever received in return. It is pure love. It’s also something we rarely achieve without God’s help.
We are tempted, Lewis warns, to avoid giving any type of love to others. The fear is that we might get hurt in the process. In what is probably the most often-quoted portion of not only this chapter, but of the entire book, Lewis tells us,
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.
Notice the stark imagery Lewis uses here. Selfishness is like a coffin/casket. If you lock up your love and not allow it to reach out to others, you will eventually discover that you have lost your ability to love in God’s way.
The danger, therefore, is that your capacity to love will be drastically altered. You will be on the path toward being irredeemable. Lewis’s stark wording continues:
The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
We shall draw nearer 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.
God’s love—His Agape/Charity—takes the risks of rejection and pain. “Herein is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us,” we are told in 1 John 4:10. “In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give,” Lewis says. God didn’t have to create humans; He was under to necessity to do so. He did it out of love, the desire to extend His Agape to new beings created in His image. Lewis’s words here make it clear: “God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them.”
God does this even with the knowledge that He might have to go to the extreme limits of His love to redeem a rebellious creation.
He creates the universe, already foreseeing the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a “host” who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and “take advantage of” Him.
This is where I ended my class this past week. My hope is that the startling realism of this image will help those in the class consider more deeply than ever before just what is meant by the love of God. This is the ultimate Agape. We can enter into that realm only with His divine help. That help is available to us, and I will conclude The Four Loves in my final class with the hope that we will avail ourselves of what He offers.