The Four Loves – Chapter 3 (“Affection”)
I’m changing the format of my notes for these summaries of “The Four Loves”. This is so they reflect the format I use to prepare for our book group meetings. Perhaps when Matt and I look at this book in the podcast, I’ll construct new notes. Until then…
C.S. Lewis Doodle
Notes & Questions
Introduction
My Greek Lexicon defines storge as “affection, especially of parents to offspring”; but also of offspring to parents.. The image we must start with is that of a mother nursing a baby, a bitch or a cat with a basketful of puppies or kittens; all in a squeaking, nuzzling heap together; purrings… Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives
The Need and Need-love of the young is obvious; so is the Gift-love of the mother. She gives birth, gives suck, gives protection. On the other hand, she must give birth or die. She must give suck or suffer. That way, her Affection too is a Need-love. There is the paradox. It is a Need-love but what it needs is to give. It is a Gift-love but it needs to be needed. We shall have to return to this point.
1. How does Jack define “storge”/”affection”?
2. Why is there a paradox within affection?
3. To what kind of objects do we attach affection?
4. Do Americans know “The Wind in the Willows”?!
The objects of affection
[Affection] is indeed the least discriminating of loves… almost anyone can become an object of Affection; the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating. There need be no apparent fitness between those whom it unites… It ignores the barriers of age, sex, class and education… It ignores even the barriers of species.
But Affection has its own criteria. Its objects have to be familiar… I doubt if we ever catch Affection beginning. To become aware of it is to become aware that it has already been going on for some time. The use of “old”…as a term of Affection is significant… It is no proof of our refinement or perceptiveness that we love them; nor that they love us. What I have called Appreciative Love is no basic element in Affection. It usually needs absence or bereavement to set us praising those to whom only Affection binds us. We take them for granted: and this taking for granted, which is an outrage in erotic love, is here right and proper up to a point. It fits the comfortable, quiet nature of the feeling… It lives with…soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor…
1. What kind of limits are there on affection?
2. Lewis says that affection has its own criteria. What is it?
The love cocktail
As gin is not only a drink in itself but also a base for many mixed drinks, so Affection…can enter into the other loves and colour them all through and become the very medium in which from day to day they operate. They would not perhaps wear very well without it… when your friend has become an old friend, all those things about him which had originally nothing to do with the friendship become familiar and dear with familiarity. As for erotic love, I can imagine nothing more disagreeable than to experience it for more than a very short time without this homespun clothing of affection…. No need to talk. No need to make love. No needs at all except perhaps to stir the fire.
…all three of [the loves] had in common, as their expression, the kiss. In modern England friendship no longer uses it, but Affection and Eros do… Again, both these loves tend – and it embarrasses many moderns – to use a “little language” or “baby-talk”… Different sorts of tenderness are both tenderness and the language of the earliest tenderness we have ever known is recalled to do duty for the new sort.
1. In what way is affection like gin?
2. Why does Jack think affection is so important in relation to friendship and eros?
3. Jack points to two things which remind us of the blending/overlappping of the loves. What are they?
Widening the palate of appreciation
[Affection] can “rub along” with the most unpromising people. Yet oddly enough this very fact means that it can in the end make appreciations possible which, but for it might never have existed… [W]e have chosen our friends and the woman we love for their various excellencies – for beauty, frankness, goodness of heart, wit, intelligence, or what not. But it had to be the particular kind of wit [etc]…and we have our personal tastes in these matters. That is why friends and lovers feel that they were “made for one another”. The especial glory of Affection is that it can unite those who most emphatically, even comically, are not; people who, if they had not found themselves put down by fate in the same household or community, would have had nothing to do with each other… we are getting beyond our own idiosyncracies, that we are learning to appreciate goodness or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence flavoured and served to suit our own palate…
The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop. The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the crosssection of humanity whom one has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who “happen to be there”. Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.
1. How can affection widen our tastes and appreciations?
2. Why does having lots of friends not show wide tastes?
Is Affection a natural love or Love Himself?
And now we are drawing near the point of danger. Affection, I have said, gives itself no airs… can love the unattractive… “does not expect too much”, turns a blind eye to faults, revives easily after quarrels… opens our eyes to goodness we could not have seen, or should not have appreciated without it. If we dwelled exclusively on these resemblances we might be led on to believe that this Affection… is Love Himself working in our human hearts and fulfilling the law. The answer… I submit, is certainly No.
1. Why might some think that Affection isn’t even a natural love? How does Jack respond?
2. What characteristic of Affection can cause it to go wrong?
Need-Love Affection going wrong… (Mr. Pontifex)
I have said that almost anyone may be the object of Affection. Yes, and almost everyone expects to be. The egregious Mr. Pontifex in The Day of all Flesh is outraged to discover that his son does not love him; it is “unnatural” for a boy not to love his own father. It never occurs to him to ask whether, since the first day the boy can remember, he has ever done or said anything that could excite love… We all know that we must do something, if not to merit, at least to attract, erotic love or friendship. But Affection is often assumed to be provided, ready made, by nature; “built-in”, “laid-on”, “on the house”. We have a right to expect it. If the others do not give it, they are unnatural….
This assumption is no doubt the distortion of a truth. Much has been “built-in”… From a dim perception of the truth (many are loved with affection far beyond their deserts) Mr. Pontifex draws the ludicrous conclusion “Therefore I, without desert, have a right to it.”… What we have is not “a right to expect” but a “reasonable expectation” of being loved by our intimates if we, and they, are more or less ordinary people. But we may not be. We may be intolerable… [and] the very same conditions of intimacy which make Affection possible also – and no less naturally – make possible a peculiarly incurable distaste.
1. What characteristic of Affection can cause it to go wrong as a Need-Love?
2. What truth is there that affection is “built-in”?
3. Where does Mr. Pontifex go wrong?
Need-Love Problem #1: Its unmerited character
The most unlovable parent (or child) may be full of such ravenous love. But it works to their own misery and everyone else’s. The situation becomes suffocating. If people are already unlovable a continual demand on their part (as of right) to be loved… produce in us a sense of guilt… They seal up the very fountain for which they are thirsty.
The really surprising thing is not that these insatiable demands made by the unlovable are sometimes made in vain, but that they are so often met. Sometimes one sees a woman’s girlhood, youth and long years of her maturity up to the verge of old age all spent in tending, obeying, caressing, and perhaps supporting, a maternal vampire who can never be caressed and obeyed enough. The sacrifice – but there are two opinions about that – may be beautiful; the old woman who exacts it is not.
1. How can the Need-Love of Affection ensure our own misery?
2. What does Jack think about the “maternal vampire”?
Need-Love Problem #2: Ease and informality
If you asked any of these insufferable people [who speak to the young in this way]… why they behaved that way at home, they would reply, “Oh, hang it all, one comes home to relax. A chap can’t be always on his best behaviour. If a man can’t be himself in his own house, where can he?.. We’re a happy family. We can say anything to one another here. No one minds. We all understand.”
Once again it is so nearly true yet so fatally wrong. Affection is an affair of old clothes, and ease, of the unguarded moment, of liberties which would be ill-bred if we took them with strangers. But old clothes are one thing; to wear the same shirt till it stank would be another. There are proper clothes for a garden party; but the clothes for home must be proper too, in their own different way. Similarly there is a distinction between public and domestic courtesy. The root principle of both is the same: “that no one give any kind of preference to himself.” But the more public the occasion, the more our obedience to this principle has been “taped” or formalised.There are “rules” of good manners. The more intimate the occasion, the less the formalisation; but not therefore the less need of courtesy. On the contrary, Affection at its best practises a courtesy which is incomparably more subtle, sensitive and deep than the public kind. In public a ritual would do. At home you must have the reality which that ritual represented…
“We can say anything to one another.” The truth behind this is that Affection at its best can say whatever Affection at its best wishes to say, regardless of the rules that govern public courtesy; for Affection at its best wishes neither to wound nor to humiliate nor to domineer. You may address the wife of your bosom as “Pig!” when she has inadvertently drunk your cocktail as well as her own… You may tease and hoax and banter… You can do anything in the right tone and at the right moment – the tone and moment which are not intended to, and will not, hurt. The better the Affection the more unerringly it knows which these are (every love has its art of love). But the domestic Rudesby means something quite different…he arrogates to himself the beautiful liberties which only the fullest Affection has a right to or knows how to manage… He knows that Affection takes liberties. He is taking liberties. Therefore (he concludes) he is being affectionate. Resent anything and he will say that the defect of love is on your side. He is hurt. He has been misunderstood.
He then sometimes avenges himself by getting on his high horse and becoming elaborately “polite”… To be free and easy when you are presented to some eminent stranger is bad manners; to practise formal and ceremonial courtesies at home… is – and is always intended to be bad manners.
1. How does Jack regard the young?
2. How formal and informal courtesy have their place?
Need-Love Problem #3: Jealousy
The jealousy of Affection is closely connected with its reliance on what is old and familiar… We don’t want the “old “familiar faces” to became brighter or more beautiful, the old ways to be changed even for the better, the old jokes and interests to be replaced by exciting novelties. Change is a threat to Affection.
A brother and sister, or two brothers – for sex here is not at work – grow to a certain age sharing everything… Then a dreadful thing happens. One of them flashes ahead – discovers poetry or science or serious music or perhaps undergoes a religious conversion. His life is flooded with the new interest. The other cannot share it; he is left behind.. it is jealousy of the thing itself… [which] will probably be expressed by ridicule… Affection is the most instinctive, in that sense the most animal, of the loves; its jealousy is proportionately fierce. It snarls and bares its teeth like a dog whose food has been. snatched away… Something or someone has snatched away from the child I am picturing his life-long food, his second self. His world is in ruins.
Few things… are more nearly fiendish than the rancour with which a whole unbelieving family will turn on the one member of it who has become a Christian, or a whole lowbrow family on the one who shows signs of becoming an intellectual. This is not, as I once thought, simply the innate and, as it were, disinterested hatred of darkness for light. A church-going family in which one has gone atheist will not always behave any better. It is the reaction to a desertion, even to robbery.
Sometimes… two inconsistent jealousies which chase each other round in the sufferer’s mind. On the one hand “This” is “All nonsense, all bloody high-brow nonsense, all canting humbug”. But on the other, “Supposing – it can’t be, it mustn’t be, but just supposing there were something in it?”… Why was it never opened to us?.. And since that is clearly incredible and unendurable, jealousy returns to the hypothesis “All nonsense “.
Affection was bitterly wounded when one member of the family fell from the homely ethos into something worse – gambling, drink, keeping an opera girl. Unfortunately it is almost equally possible to break your mother’s heart by rising above the homely ethos.
Gift-Love Affection going wrong… Maternal (Mrs. Fidget)
Mrs. Fidget very often said that she lived for her family. And it was not untrue… She did all the washing; true, she did it badly, and they could have afforded to send it out to laundry, and they frequently begged her not to do it. But she did. There was always a hot lunch for anyone who was at home and always a hot meal at night (even in mid-summer). They implored her not to provide this… She always sat up to “welcome” you if you were out late at night; two or three in the morning, it made no odds; you would always find the frail, pale, weary face awaiting you, like a silent accusation. Which means of course that you couldn’t with any decency go out very often. She was always making things too; being in her own estimation (I’m no judge myself) an excellent amateur dressmaker and a great knitter. And of course, unless you were a heartless brute, you had to wear the things… And then her care for their health! She bore the whole burden of that daughter’s “delicacy” alone… For Mrs. Fidget, as she so often said, would “work her fingers to the bone” for her family. They couldn’t stop her. Nor could they – being decent people – quite sit still and watch her do it. They had to help. Indeed they were always having to help… As for the dear dog, it was to her, she said, “just like one of the children”. It was in fact as like one of them as she could make it… The Vicar says Mrs. Fidget is now at rest. Let us hope she is. What’s quite certain is that her family are.
It is easy to see how liability to this state is, so to speak, congenital in the maternal instinct. This, as we saw, is a Gift-love, but one that needs to give; therefore needs to be needed. But the proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift. We feed children in order that they may soon be able to feed themselves; we teach them in order that they may soon not need our teaching. Thus a heavy task is laid upon this Gift-love. It must work towards its own abdication. We must aim at making ourselves superfluous. The hour when we can say “They need me no longer” should be our reward. But the instinct, simply in its own nature, has no power to fulfil this law. The instinct desires the good of its object, but not simply; only the good it can itself give. A much higher love…must step in and help or tame the instinct before it can make the abdication… when it does not, the ravenous need to be needed will gratify itself either by keeping its objects needy or by inventing for them imaginary needs. It will do this all the more ruthlessly because it thinks (in one sense truly) that it is a Gift-love and therefore regards itself as “unselfish”.
Gift-Love Affection going wrong… The Patron and protege (Emma, Dr. Quartz)
In Jane Austen’s novel, Emma intends that Harriet Smith should have a happy life; but only the sort of happy life which Emma herself has planned for her. My own profession – that of a university teacher – is in this way dangerous. If we are any good we must always be working towards the moment at which our pupils are fit to become our critics and rivals. We should be delighted when it arrives, as the fencing master is delighted when his pupil can pink and disarm him…
I am old enough to remember the sad case of Dr. Quartz. No university boasted a more effective or devoted teacher… Naturally, and delightfully, they continued to visit him after the tutorial relation had ended… [until] the fatal evening when they knocked on his door and were told that the Doctor was engaged. After that he would always be engaged. They were banished from him forever. This was because, at their last meeting, they had rebelled. They had asserted their independence – differed from the master and supported their own view, perhaps not without success.
Animals
This terrible need to be needed often finds its outlet in pampering an animal. To learn that someone is “fond of animals” tells us very little until we know in what way. For there are two ways.
On the one hand the higher and domesticated animal is, so to speak, a “bridge” between us and the rest of nature….It is personal enough to give the word with a real meaning; yet it remains very largely an unconscious little bundle of biological impulses. It has three legs in nature’s world and one in ours…
But of course animals are often used in a worse fashion. If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it of from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant… The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can’t speak.
Just the Neurotic?
I do not think we shall see things more clearly by classifying all these maleficial states of Affection as pathological. No doubt there are really pathological conditions which make the temptation 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… Spiritual direction will here help us more than medical treatment…
We have seen only one such [unfallen] 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.
Affection needs something else
Affection produces happiness if – and only if – there is common sense and give and take and “decency”. In other words, only if something more, and other, than Affection is added. The mere feeling is not enough. You need “common sense”, that is, reason. You need “give and take”; that is, you need justice, continually stimulating mere Affection when it fades and restraining it when it forgets or would defy the art of love. You need “decency”. There is no disguising the fact that this means goodness; patience, selfdenial, humility, and the continual intervention of a far higher sort of love than Affection, in itself, can ever be. That is the whole Point. If we try to live by Affection alone, Affection will “go bad on us”. How bad, I believe we seldom recognise.
Why defective Affection persists
Can Mrs. Fidget really have been quite unaware of the countless frustrations and miseries she inflicted on her family? It passes belief…
She continued all these practices because if she had dropped them she would have been faced with the fact that she was determined not to see; would have known, that she was not necessary.
…the very laboriousness of her life silenced her secret doubts as to the quality of her love. The more her feet burned and her back ached, the better, for this pain whispered in her ear “How much I must love them if I do all this!”
…But I think there is a lower depth. The unappreciativeness of the others, those terrible, wounding words – anything will “wound” a Mrs. Fidget – in which they begged her to send the washing out, enabled her to feel ill-used, therefore, to have a continual grievance, to enjoy the pleasures of resentment. If anyone says he does not know those pleasures, he is a liar or a saint. It is true that they are pleasures only to those who hate. But then a love like Mrs. Fidget’s contains a good deal of hatred….
If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.