{"id":5052,"date":"2018-07-12T16:02:07","date_gmt":"2018-07-13T00:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/?p=5052"},"modified":"2018-07-12T16:07:33","modified_gmt":"2018-07-13T00:07:33","slug":"the-four-loves-affection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2018\/07\/12\/the-four-loves-affection","title":{"rendered":"The Four Loves: Affection"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_5041\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5041\" style=\"width: 192px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-5041\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/220px-The_Four_Loves.jpg?resize=192%2C300&#038;ssl=1\" alt width=\"192\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/220px-The_Four_Loves.jpg?resize=192%2C300&amp;ssl=1 192w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/220px-The_Four_Loves.jpg?w=220&amp;ssl=1 220w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 192px) 85vw, 192px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-5041\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Four Loves by C. S.&nbsp;Lewis<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><em>Blog readers: Chi Alpha @ Stanford is engaging in our annual summer reading project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I\u2019ll post my thoughts here (which will largely consist of excerpts I found insightful). They are all tagged <a href=\"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/tag\/summer-reading-project-2018\">summer-reading-project-2018<\/a>. The schedule is <a href=\"https:\/\/xastanford.org\/summer-reading\">online<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">YouTube has something amazing in relation to this week\u2019s reading: the man himself delivering the radio address upon which the chapter is based. Check out <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=m4hI638mskQ\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Four Loves (\u2018Storge\u2019 or \u2018Affection\u2019)<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (or you can <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/0B8lkIorOqTUySlloZUtRT2hMMXM\/view\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">read the transcript<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">). You should at least listen to a few minutes if you\u2019ve never heard the voice of Lewis before.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Four Loves ('Storge' or 'Affection') by C.S. Lewis Doodle\" width=\"840\" height=\"473\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/m4hI638mskQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In this chapter, Lewis discusses the type of love described by the Greek word&nbsp;<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/%CF%83%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%81%CE%B3%CE%AE\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">storge (\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03c1\u03b3\u03ae<\/span>)<\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. In English we would talk about affection or fondness.&nbsp;<\/span>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&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/biblehub.com\/greek\/794.htm\">astorgos (\u1f04\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03c1\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2)<\/a> is rendered by various translations as&nbsp;\u201cheartless\u201d or \u201cunloving\u201d or \u201cwithout natural affection.\u201d When your English translation of the New Testament contains the word affection it is probably representing&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/biblehub.com\/greek\/4698.htm\">splangxnon (\u03c3\u03c0\u03bb\u03b1\u03b3\u03c7\u03b7\u03bd\u03bf\u03bd)<\/a>&nbsp;instead. This doesn\u2019t affect what Lewis says in the slightest. I just find it interesting.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On to what Lewis actually said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The first thing that stood out to me was a pithy phrase: \u201cThey seal up the very fountain for which they are thirsty.\u201d (page&nbsp;769)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Lewis is speaking about people whose craving for affection is so intense that they push away the people around them. It\u2019s something I\u2019ve 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&nbsp;make.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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\u2014and who does not sometimes yield?\u2014is not disease, but sin. Spiritual direction will here help us more than medical treatment. Medicine labours to restore \u201cnatural\u201d structure or \u201cnormal\u201d 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\u2019s name, would describe as natural or normal the man from whom these failings were wholly absent? \u201cNatural,\u201d 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\u2019s picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can\u2019t really be very well \u201cadjusted\u201d to your world if it says you \u201chave a devil\u201d and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood. (page&nbsp;778)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As others have said, we live in a therapeutic age. We are conditioned to assume negative thoughts and emotions are psychological problems, but that\u2019s not always true. I remember a quote from Carl Elliott that hit me like a thunderbolt when I was in grad school.<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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 \u2014 I thought it was from The Atlantic in an article called &nbsp;\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2003\/08\/the-pursuit-of-happiness\/303096\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Pursuit of Happiness<\/a>\u201d, but it was published too late for that to be the case<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Before winding this down, I\u2019d like to highlight one more of Lewis\u2019s insights. Early in the chapter as bit of an aside, Lewis&nbsp;says<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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\u2019s, which may at any moment steal from me\u2014or it seems like stealing to me\u2014my wife\u2019s or husband\u2019s or daughter\u2019s heart. <\/span><b>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.<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (page 767\u2013768, emphasis added)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Some of your friends who are angry about religion are angry because they are jealous. Your friend is bent \u2014 perhaps without even realizing it \u2014 because someone\u2019s love for God has created distance between them and your friend.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If you\u2019re ever talking about God with someone and you can hear anger in their voice, bear this insight in mind. It might help explain what\u2019s going&nbsp;on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m loving the Lewis readings so far.&nbsp;<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Next week: the love between friends.&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>P.S. If, perchance, you are behind on your readings then just skip ahead. Start keeping up now \u2014 you can always go back and read the parts you missed later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Blog readers: Chi Alpha @ Stanford is engaging in our annual summer reading project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I\u2019ll 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 \u2026 <a href=\"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2018\/07\/12\/the-four-loves-affection\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> \u201cThe Four Loves: Affection\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Lewis's comments on affection, in which he notes that some people inadvertently\"seal up the very fountain for which they are thirsty.\u201d","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[230,229,232],"class_list":["post-5052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources-reviews","tag-c-s-lewis","tag-summer-reading-project-2018","tag-the-four-loves"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Ded-1ju","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5052"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5061,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5052\/revisions\/5061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}