Reflections on God … Man … Life
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…. Read more »
To C. S. Lewis, Friendship is an obvious love, even if it seems to be unnecessary. He says Friendship has fallen by the wayside in modern times. Lewis believes the foundation of Friendship is not the avoidance of loneliness. Rather, it is the recognition of shared truth. In the Friendship chapter of The Four Loves, Lewis asserts, “Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live… Read more »
In my last post, I reviewed the love of Affection, as C. S. Lewis explains it in his masterful work, The Four Loves. Lewis has affection for Affection, as he states near the end of that chapter, “Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.” Yet, he spends the last part of the chapter (as he does in the following chapters on Friendship and Eros) pointing to the dangers that can… Read more »
The first of the “four loves” that C. S. Lewis explains in his book with that title is Affection. The family is where affection may begin, but Lewis extends it further. “Almost anyone can become an object of Affection,” he notes, and then adds that one can also include “the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating.” It ignores the barriers of age, sex, class, and education. It can exist between a clever young man from the university and an old… Read more »
Before C. S. Lewis starts analyzing the loves that his book, The Four Loves, focuses on, he sets the stage with some preliminary perspectives. In the last couple of posts, I’ve noted his identification of the distinctions between a gift-love, a need-love, and appreciative love. He then tackled the problem with making a religion out of the love of nature. In this new post, I will comment on the question he raises in the latter half of chapter 2. Perhaps… Read more »
In my blog series on C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves (which I am teaching at my church currently), I first explained how the book came about, developed from radio broadcasts. Then I focused on an ongoing theme in the work, one that comes up in each chapter: how we can deify one of these loves so that it can go wrong—as Lewis says, a love can become a demon if it takes the place of God in our lives…. Read more »
In my previous post about the class I’m teaching on C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, I explained the background of the book, how it began as radio broadcasts that were then expanded and transformed into the book. Lewis’s first chapter—the Introduction—lays the groundwork for all that follows. He begins by making a distinction between gift-loves and need-loves. A gift-love, Lewis says, is the kind that moves people to do things for others even when they don’t receive anything in… Read more »