Tag: The Four Loves

Some of us are read­ing through C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves this sum­mer for the Chi Alpha Sum­mer Read­ing Project. Every oth­er week I’ll post some reflec­tions on the read­ings.

Today we com­plete our first read­ing, the ten pages of chap­ter 1.

What stood out to me is some­thing that prob­a­bly seemed like a throw­away obser­va­tion back in 1960.

I was look­ing for­ward to writ­ing some fair­ly easy pan­e­gyrics on the first sort of love and dis­par­age­ments of the sec­ond. And much of what I was going to say still seems to me to be true…. Every time I have tried to think the thing out along those lines I have end­ed in puz­zles and con­tra­dic­tions. The real­i­ty is more com­pli­cat­ed than I sup­posed.

Lewis knew what he intend­ed to write, but try­ing to work it out clear­ly enough to put it on paper showed him that his think­ing was fuzzy. Con­tra­dic­to­ry, even. Putting feel­ings, impres­sions, and assump­tions into words is clar­i­fy­ing.

gen­er­a­tive AI has entered the chat

Chat­G­PT and its com­peti­tors are tools and they have a place, but please don’t let them under­mine your abil­i­ty to write out a clear argu­ment. Writ­ing what you think is one of the only ways to force your­self to grap­ple with what you think. Talk­ing it out can also help, but it’s not as bru­tal as writ­ing. The flow of con­ver­sa­tion can allow you to gloss over a weak point in your argu­ment, but hav­ing to write out each of your assump­tions and infer­ences on paper does­n’t pro­vide such wig­gle room.

I think most of you know that I write my ser­mons out word-for-word and then try to deliv­er the ser­mon with­out con­sult­ing my notes. Why do I write my ser­mons out if I don’t intend to read the result­ing man­u­script? It’s for pre­cise­ly the rea­sons I men­tioned above: to write it out means that any weak spots in my think­ing become clear. I still make mis­takes in both inter­pre­ta­tion and argu­men­ta­tion, but I avoid a lot of obvi­ous mis­takes that would oth­er­wise crop up. Deliv­er­ing the ser­mon with­out the notes is about bet­ter con­nect­ing with the audi­ence. If my think­ing on the sub­ject is suf­fi­cient­ly clear, I don’t need the notes except for when I’m quot­ing a pas­sage from the Bible or some oth­er source.

How does gen­er­a­tive AI play into this? I don’t use AI to write my ser­mons because the goal isn’t a well-writ­ten ser­mon, the goal is a thought-through ser­mon. And specif­i­cal­ly, a thought-through-by-me ser­mon. A well-writ­ten ser­mon is most­ly the byprod­uct of prepar­ing a well-thought-through ser­mon. And so if I were to use a tool like chat­G­PT to write a ser­mon for me, I would be an actor, not a preach­er. Actors need scripts. Preach­ers need con­vic­tions. I need to know (and I need you to know) that I believe what I preach, and I can only know I believe it ful­ly if I write it myself.

Even if I became con­fi­dent that a Chat­G­PT ser­mon would be bet­ter than mine and you would enjoy it more, that would­n’t sway me. Preach­ing that way would enfee­ble me, per­haps even cor­rupt me. To be a preach­er means many things, but among them is the claim that I real­ly mean it. Not just that I mean the things I say in that spe­cif­ic ser­mon. I have to mean the whole Chris­tian­i­ty thing. To be a preach­er is to claim that I’m doing my best to fol­low Jesus. Even if I nev­er preached a ser­mon against slan­der, if I had a habit of post­ing slan­der­ous things on social media you would nonethe­less judge me a hyp­ocrite and some­one who should be kept away from the pul­pit. To stand in the pul­pit is to stand before God and man and say, “I real­ly mean it and I’m try­ing.” Part of that “real­ly mean­ing it” is man­i­fest in the way I pre­pare ser­mons.

This isn’t a new thing. Even before tools like chat­G­PT came along every preach­er had the option of pla­gia­riz­ing oth­er preach­ers’ ser­mons. It has always been looked down upon, part­ly for its dis­hon­esty (one of the implic­it claim of a ser­mon is “this is what I came up with”) and part­ly because it meant the preach­er was­n’t grow­ing — the act of craft­ing a ser­mon makes you a bet­ter Chris­t­ian (or forces you to embrace hypocrisy) and a clear­er thinker.

This is not an anti-AI rant. I will some­times use gen­er­a­tive AI after I’ve writ­ten my ser­mon. I will give it prompts like “Here is the man­u­script of a ser­mon I intend to preach to a group of Stan­ford stu­dents. What’s the biggest blind spot in this ser­mon?” or “What’s the most dev­as­tat­ing cri­tique you can make of it?” or “Is there any­one this might need­less­ly offend?” And then I’ll take that feed­back and use it to refine the ser­mon. Using AI like this is fine because it forces me to strength­en my think­ing and wres­tle with my con­vic­tions. At times the AI has sug­gest­ed that I should take out a poten­tial­ly offen­sive claim or tone down some rhetoric and I’ve thought, “Nah — this is what peo­ple need to hear and this is how they need to hear it.” Oth­er times I con­sid­er the feed­back and say, “Huh — I had­n’t thought about it that way. Yeah, let me reword that so that I’m mak­ing the point I intend to make and not being dis­tract­ing­ly offen­sive.”

Obvi­ous­ly, none of you are preach­ers (at least, none of you has that as a key part of your job). But there is prob­a­bly some area of your life where you need to be able to think clear­ly and to know that you have thought clear­ly. Don’t allow the won­der­ful tool of gen­er­a­tive AI to keep you from devel­op­ing that skill. If you’d like to mull that over, I rec­om­mend the won­der­ful and very short sto­ry The Whis­per­ing Ear­ring.

Lewis, of course, had no idea that such a thing as gen­er­a­tive AI would ever be invent­ed. He just men­tioned that his think­ing about love was unclear until he tried to write about it. One of the beau­ties of read­ing a well-thought-through book is that it con­tin­ues to have rel­e­vance decades after it was writ­ten and that its insights are rel­e­vant to new domains that did not exist when its argu­ments were craft­ed.

If you’re not read­ing The Four Loves with us, I high­ly rec­om­mend it. You can down­load a free copy at archive.org.

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.

I hope you’ve been enjoy­ing the read­ings as much as I have. I send these week­ly reminders out both as a lit­tle nudge to remind you to pick up the book and also as a quick overview of some of Lewis’s best insights in case you’re hope­less­ly busy and unable to get to this week’s read­ing.

This week we fin­ish up The Four Loves with Lewis’s thoughts on agape (ἀγάπη — benev­o­lent love). Old­er Bible trans­la­tions some­times ren­dered this word as char­i­ty, as does the King James in 1 Corinthi­ans 13.

Inter­est­ing­ly to me, Lewis does not use the word agape at all in this chap­ter. He assumes his audi­ence is well-edu­cat­ed enough to know that agape is the word under­ly­ing his com­men­tary on char­i­ty.

I’m feel­ing a lit­tle under the weath­er today, so I’ll con­tent myself with three quotes from the chap­ter and some very brief com­men­tary on them.

I’ll begin with what may be Lewis’s most famous obser­va­tion in The Four Loves — the inher­ent risk­i­ness of love. If you read noth­ing else, read this and pon­der it. It’s straight fire and stands on its own apart from the chap­ter.

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. Wrap it care­ful­ly round with hob­bies and lit­tle lux­u­ries; avoid all entan­gle­ments; lock it up safe in the cas­ket or cof­fin of your self­ish­ness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motion­less, airless—it will change. It will not be bro­ken; it will become unbreak­able, impen­e­tra­ble, irre­deemable. The alter­na­tive to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damna­tion. The only place out­side Heav­en where you can be per­fect­ly safe from all the dan­gers and per­tur­ba­tions of love is Hell. (pages 823–824)

I also found this obser­va­tion both help­ful and chal­leng­ing.

It remains cer­tain­ly true that all nat­ur­al loves can be inor­di­nate. Inor­di­nate does not mean “insuf­fi­cient­ly cau­tious.” Nor does it mean “too big.” It is not a quan­ti­ta­tive term. It is prob­a­bly impos­si­ble to love any human being sim­ply “too much.” We may love him too much in pro­por­tion to our love for God; but it is the small­ness of our love for God, not the great­ness of our love for the man, that con­sti­tutes the inor­di­na­cy. (page 824)

When­ev­er I love some­one or some­thing more than God it is very like­ly the case that I do not love the rival too much but that I love God too lit­tle. There are excep­tions, of course. There are some bro­ken impuls­es which I might mis­tak­en­ly label love and the solu­tion there is not mere­ly to love God more but also to repent of my aber­rant attrac­tion.

And I thought his obser­va­tion on what the rare Bib­li­cal com­mands to hate mean was quite insight­ful:

Con­sid­er again, “I loved Jacob and I hat­ed Esau” (Malachi I, 2–3). How is the thing called God’s “hatred” of Esau dis­played in the actu­al sto­ry? Not at all as we might expect. There is of course no ground for assum­ing that Esau made a bad end and was a lost soul; the Old Tes­ta­ment, here as else­where, has noth­ing to say about such mat­ters. And, from all we are told, Esau’s earth­ly life was, in every ordi­nary sense, a good deal more blessed than Jacob’s. It is Jacob who has all the dis­ap­point­ments, humil­i­a­tions, ter­rors, and bereave­ments. But he has some­thing which Esau has not. He is a patri­arch. (page 825)

The entire sec­tion from which this last excerpt is tak­en is quite good — I rec­om­mend it high­ly even if you skim the rest of the chap­ter.

Next week we begin The Screw­tape Let­ters!

 

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.

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.

We live in an area that often over­val­ues the love of nature and under­val­ues the love of coun­try. At the end of “Lik­ings and Loves for the Sub-human” (the first chap­ter of The Four Loves) Lewis makes some astute obser­va­tions about each.

Con­cern­ing nature, he makes the claim that nature doesn’t teach us any­thing on its own.

If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exact­ly the lessons you had already decid­ed to learn; this is only anoth­er way of say­ing that nature does not teach.… Over­whelm­ing gai­ety, insup­port­able grandeur, som­bre des­o­la­tion are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imper­a­tive that nature utters is, “Look. Lis­ten. Attend.” (page 755 in The C.S. Lewis Sig­na­ture Clas­sics)

While I think his main point is sound, he words things too strong­ly here. If I adopt­ed this per­spec­tive as he phrased it, I wouldn’t be able to make sense of such pas­sages as Romans 1:20 and Psalm 19.

• Romans 1:20, “For since the cre­ation of the world God’s invis­i­ble qualities—his eter­nal pow­er and divine nature—have been clear­ly seen, being under­stood from what has been made, so that peo­ple are with­out excuse.”
• Psalm 19:1–2, “The heav­ens declare the glo­ry of God;    the skies pro­claim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech;    night after night they reveal knowl­edge.”

These and oth­er Scrip­tures clear­ly teach that there are things God expects us to learn from nature. But there are not many of these things. Lewis is right that nature gives con­fus­ing mes­sages — we can con­struct clever nat­ur­al argu­ments for cru­el­ty as well as for mer­cy.

Rather than look­ing to nature to pro­vide our entire sys­tem of moral­i­ty and mean­ing, Lewis says it is enough to allow nature to give us a frame­work for think­ing:

Nature nev­er taught me that there exists a God of glo­ry and of infi­nite majesty. I had to learn that in oth­er ways. But nature gave the word glo­ry a mean­ing for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. I do not see how the “fear” of God could have ever meant to me any­thing but the low­est pru­den­tial efforts to be safe, if I had nev­er seen cer­tain omi­nous ravines and unap­proach­able crags. And if nature had nev­er awak­ened cer­tain long­ings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the “love” of God would nev­er, so far as I can see, have exist­ed. (pages 755–756)

Good stuff and well worth pon­der­ing.

Lewis goes on to make some great obser­va­tions about patri­o­tism. Patri­o­tism is a virtue for Chris­tians as Dou­glas Wil­son points out in his 2016 essay Amer­i­can Jesus:

Patri­o­tism, right­ly devel­oped, is a duty that falls under the fifth com­mand­ment. I am to hon­or my father and moth­er, and this extends beyond them in such a way as to include my peo­ple, my tribe. Ordi­nary and ordered patri­o­tism is not just okay; it is a duty, one that needs to be cul­ti­vat­ed.

I high­ly com­mend that essay to you. Wil­son is on point and adds all the caveats you might be wor­ried about.

One of Lewis’s insights about patri­ot­ic love is that it allows us to love and respect peo­ple from oth­er nations:

Of course patri­o­tism of this kind is not in the least aggres­sive. It asks only to be let alone. It becomes mil­i­tant only to pro­tect what it loves. In any mind which has a pen­ny­worth of imag­i­na­tion it pro­duces a good atti­tude towards for­eign­ers. How can I love my home with­out com­ing to realise that oth­er men, no less right­ly, love theirs? Once you have realised that the French­men like cafe com­plet just as we like bacon and eggs—why, good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make every­where else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were dif­fer­ent.

And he has par­tic­u­lar­ly strong words to say about those who try to replace the love of coun­try with a com­mit­ment to high­er ideals:

If peo­ple will spend nei­ther sweat nor blood for “their coun­try” they must be made to feel that they are spend­ing them for jus­tice, or civil­i­sa­tion, or human­i­ty. This is a step down, not up.… If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of anni­hi­la­tion. A false tran­scen­dence is giv­en to things which are very much of this world. (page 761)

Much of what Lewis says in this sec­tion reminds me of the way G.K. Chester­ton talked about patri­o­tism in Ortho­doxy chap­ter 5, “The Flag of This World.” Chesterton’s point is that patri­ots see the flaws of their nation and grieve them. Because they love their nation they want to fix it.

Let us sup­pose we are con­front­ed with a des­per­ate thing—say Pim­li­co [Glen’s note: Pim­li­co is part of Lon­don]. If we think what is real­ly best for Pim­li­co we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mys­tic and the arbi­trary. It is not enough for a man to dis­ap­prove of Pim­li­co: in that case he will mere­ly cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, cer­tain­ly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pim­li­co: for then it will remain Pim­li­co, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for some­body to love Pim­li­co: to love it with a tran­scen­den­tal tie and with­out any earth­ly rea­son. If there arose a man who loved Pim­li­co, then Pim­li­co would rise into ivory tow­ers and gold­en pin­na­cles; Pim­li­co would attire her­self as a woman does when she is loved. For dec­o­ra­tion is not giv­en to hide hor­ri­ble things: but to dec­o­rate things already adorable. A moth­er does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly with­out it. A lover does not give a girl a neck­lace to hide her neck. If men loved Pim­li­co as moth­ers love chil­dren, arbi­trar­i­ly, because it is THEIRS, Pim­li­co in a year or two might be fair­er than Flo­rence. Some read­ers will say that this is a mere fan­ta­sy. I answer that this is the actu­al his­to­ry of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the dark­est roots of civ­i­liza­tion and you will find them knot­ted round some sacred stone or encir­cling some sacred well. Peo­ple first paid hon­our to a spot and after­wards gained glo­ry for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

So to sum­ma­rize:

• Nature is wor­thy of love but not wor­thy of wor­ship. Our cul­tur­al cel­e­bra­tion of envi­ron­men­tal­ism far to often runs beyond the con­cerns of ecol­o­gy and veers into reli­gious ter­ri­to­ry.
• Nations are wor­thy of love but not wor­thy of wor­ship, and we ought to cul­ti­vate a healthy and mea­sured patri­o­tism in our­selves what­ev­er our home­land may be.

See you next week!