The Four Loves: Affection

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2018. The sched­ule is online.

YouTube has some­thing amaz­ing in rela­tion to this week’s read­ing: the man him­self deliv­er­ing the radio address upon which the chap­ter is based. Check out The Four Loves (‘Storge’ or ‘Affec­tion’) (or you can read the tran­script). You should at least lis­ten to a few min­utes if you’ve nev­er heard the voice of Lewis before.

In this chap­ter, Lewis dis­cuss­es the type of love described by the Greek word storge (στοργή). In Eng­lish we would talk about affec­tion or fond­ness. Inter­est­ing­ly (at least to me), this Greek word appears only in the neg­a­tive in the New Tes­ta­ment. In both Romans 1:31 and 2 Tim­o­thy 3:3 the word astor­gos (ἄστοργος) is ren­dered by var­i­ous trans­la­tions as “heart­less” or “unlov­ing” or “with­out nat­ur­al affec­tion.” When your Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the New Tes­ta­ment con­tains the word affec­tion it is prob­a­bly rep­re­sent­ing splangxnon (σπλαγχηνον) instead. This does­n’t affect what Lewis says in the slight­est. I just find it inter­est­ing.

On to what Lewis actu­al­ly said.

The first thing that stood out to me was a pithy phrase: “They seal up the very foun­tain for which they are thirsty.” (page 769)

Lewis is speak­ing about peo­ple whose crav­ing for affec­tion is so intense that they push away the peo­ple around them. It’s some­thing I’ve seen before, but the imagery Lewis uses is so evoca­tive that it made me real­ize afresh how trag­ic it is. More than that, it made me pause and reflect on whether there are any areas of my life in which I am pur­su­ing some­thing so inept­ly that I make suc­cess less like­ly with every attempt I make.

The next bit that stood out to me came near the end of the chap­ter. Lewis makes a point about our ten­den­cy to treat affec­tion gone bad as a psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lem.

I do not think we shall see things more clear­ly by clas­si­fy­ing all these malef­i­cal states of Affec­tion as patho­log­i­cal. No doubt there are real­ly patho­log­i­cal con­di­tions which make the temp­ta­tion to these states abnor­mal­ly hard or even impos­si­ble to resist for par­tic­u­lar peo­ple. Send those peo­ple to the doc­tors by all means. But I believe that every­one who is hon­est with him­self will admit that he has felt these temp­ta­tions. Their occur­rence is not a dis­ease; or if it is, the name of that dis­ease is Being a Fall­en Man. In ordi­nary peo­ple the yield­ing to them—and who does not some­times yield?—is not dis­ease, but sin. Spir­i­tu­al direc­tion will here help us more than med­ical treat­ment. Med­i­cine labours to restore “nat­ur­al” struc­ture or “nor­mal” func­tion. But greed, ego­ism, self-decep­tion and self-pity are not unnat­ur­al or abnor­mal in the same sense as astig­ma­tism or a float­ing kid­ney. For who, in Heaven’s name, would describe as nat­ur­al or nor­mal the man from whom these fail­ings were whol­ly absent? “Nat­ur­al,” if you like, in a quite dif­fer­ent sense; arch­nat­ur­al, unfall­en. We have seen only one such Man. And He was not at all like the psychologist’s pic­ture of the inte­grat­ed, bal­anced, adjust­ed, hap­pi­ly mar­ried, employed, pop­u­lar cit­i­zen. You can’t real­ly be very well “adjust­ed” to your world if it says you “have a dev­il” and ends by nail­ing you up naked to a stake of wood. (page 778)

As oth­ers have said, we live in a ther­a­peu­tic age. We are con­di­tioned to assume neg­a­tive thoughts and emo­tions are psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lems, but that’s not always true. I remem­ber a quote from Carl Elliott that hit me like a thun­der­bolt when I was in grad school.

On Prozac, Sisy­phus might well push the boul­der back up the moun­tain with more enthu­si­asm and more cre­ativ­i­ty. I do not want to deny the ben­e­fits of psy­choac­tive med­ica­tion. I just want to point out that Sisy­phus is not a patient with a men­tal health prob­lem. To see him as a patient with a men­tal health prob­lem is to ignore cer­tain larg­er aspects of his predica­ment con­nect­ed to boul­ders, moun­tains, and eter­ni­ty. (UPDATE: I for­get where I first saw this quote — I thought it was from The Atlantic in an arti­cle called  “The Pur­suit of Hap­pi­ness”, but it was pub­lished too late for that to be the case)

Some­times neg­a­tive thoughts and feel­ings are nat­ur­al (one might even say healthy) respons­es to our sit­u­a­tion, some­times they are mis­tak­en but not espe­cial­ly harm­ful, some­times they are sin­ful, and some­times they are the result of psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lems. Be open to the full range of pos­si­bil­i­ties.  

Before wind­ing this down, I’d like to high­light one more of Lewis’s insights. Ear­ly in the chap­ter as bit of an aside, Lewis says

The rival­ry between all nat­ur­al loves and the love of God is some­thing a Chris­t­ian dare not for­get. God is the great Rival, the ulti­mate object of human jeal­ousy; that beau­ty, ter­ri­ble as the Gorgon’s, which may at any moment steal from me—or it seems like steal­ing to me—my wife’s or husband’s or daughter’s heart. The bit­ter­ness of some unbe­lief, though dis­guised even from those who feel it as anti-cler­i­cal­ism or hatred of super­sti­tion, is real­ly due to this. (page 767–768, empha­sis added)

Some of your friends who are angry about reli­gion are angry because they are jeal­ous. Your friend is bent — per­haps with­out even real­iz­ing it — because some­one’s love for God has cre­at­ed dis­tance between them and your friend.  If you’re ever talk­ing about God with some­one and you can hear anger in their voice, bear this insight in mind. It might help explain what’s going on.

I’m lov­ing the Lewis read­ings so far. Next week: the love between friends. 

P.S. If, per­chance, you are behind on your read­ings then just skip ahead. Start keep­ing up now — you can always go back and read the parts you missed lat­er.