The Four Loves – Chapter 5 (“Eros”)
C.S. Lewis Doodle
Quotations
What is Eros?
…that state which we call “being in love”… Sexuality makes part of our subject only when it becomes an ingredient in the complex state of “being in love”. That sexual experience can occur without Eros… and that Eros includes other things besides sexual activity, I take for granted… The carnal or animally sexual element within Eros, I intend… to call Venus.
Eros, Venus and Morality
I am not at all subscribing to the popular idea that it is the absence or presence of Eros which makes the sexual act “impure” or “pure”… Most of our ancestors were married off in early youth to partners chosen by their parents on grounds that had nothing to do with Eros… Conversely, this act, done under the influence of a soaring and iridescent Eros which reduces the role of the senses to a minor consideration, may yet be plain adultery, may involve breaking a wife’s heart, deceiving a husband, betraying a friend, polluting hospitality; and deserting your children. It has not pleased God that the distinction between a sin and a duty should turn on fine feelings.
Love’s Contemplative
Very often what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved – a general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality. A man in this state really hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself. He is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned. If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, “To go on thinking of her.” He is love’s contemplative.
… Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved…
The thing is a sensory pleasure; that is, an event occurring within one’s own body. We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he “wants a woman”. Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.
The need to appreciate
The reader will notice that Eros thus wonderfully transforms what is par excellence a Need-pleasure into the most Appreciative of all pleasures. It is the nature of a Need pleasure to show us the object solely in relation to our need, even our momentary need. But in Eros, a Need, at its most intense, sees the object most intensely as a thing admirable in herself, important far beyond her relation to the lover’s need.
Without Eros sexual desire, like every other desire, is a fact about ourselves. Within Eros it is rather about the Beloved… That is why Eros, though the king of pleasures, always (at his height) has the air of regarding pleasure as a by-product… [O]ne of the first things Eros does is to obliterate the distinction between giving and receiving.
The Danger of Eros
It has been widely held in the past.. that the spiritual danger of Eros arises almost entirely from the carnal element within it; [and]… is “noblest” or “purest” when Venus is reduced to the minimum. The older moral theologians certainly seem to have thought that the danger we chiefly had to guard against in marriage was that of a soul destroying surrender to the senses. It will be noticed, however, that this is not the Scriptural approach…. The great, permanent temptation of marriage is not to sensuality but (quite bluntly) to avarice. With all proper respect to the medieval guides, I cannot help remembering that they were all celibates, and probably did not know what Eros does to our sexuality: how, far from aggravating, he reduces the nagging and addictive character of mere appetite.
Taking Venus too seriously
I believe we are all being encouraged to take Venus too seriously; at any rate, with a wrong kind of seriousness…But, it will be replied, the thing is serious… But eating is also serious… Yet we do not bring bluebooks to dinner nor behave there as if we were in church.
… We must not attempt to find an absolute in the flesh. Banish play and laughter from the bed of love and you may let in a false goddess… We are under no obligation at all to sing all our love-duets in the throbbing, world-without-end, heart-breaking manner of Tristan and Isolde; let us often sing like Papageno and Papagena instead.
Venus herself will have a terrible revenge if we take her (occasional) seriousness at its face value. And that in two ways… If his imagination had not been misled, its cooling would have brought no such revulsion… When all external circumstances are fittest for her service she will leave one or both the lovers totally indisposed for it… An hour later, when time and place agree, she will have mysteriously withdrawn; perhaps from only one of them…. But sensible lovers laugh. It is all part of the game; a game of catch-as-catch-can, and the escapes and tumbles and head-on collisions are to be treated as a romp.
Angels and Tom-Cats
In Eros at times we seem to be flying; Venus gives us the sudden twitch that reminds us we are really captive balloons. It is a continual demonstration of the truth that we are composite creatures, rational animals, akin on one side to the angels, on the other to tom-cats.
Man has held three views of his body. First there is that of those ascetic pagans who called it the prison or the “tomb” of the soul, and of Christians like Fisher to whom it was a “sack of dung”. Then there are the Neo-Pagans (they seldom know Greek), the nudists and the sufferers from Dark Gods, to whom the body is glorious. But thirdly we have the view which St. Francis expressed by calling his body “Brother Ass”…
Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body. There’s no living with it till we recognise that one of its functions in our lives is to play the part of buffoon… Lovers, unless their love is very short-lived, again and again feel an element not only of comedy, not only of play, but even of buffoonery, in the body’s expression of Eros. And the body would frustrate us if this were not so. It would be too clumsy an instrument to render love’s music unless its very clumsiness could be felt as adding to the total experience its own grotesque charm… There is indeed at certain moments a high poetry in the flesh itself; but also, by your leave, an irreducible element of obstinate and ludicrous un-poetry. If it does not make itself felt on one occasion, it will on another. Far better plant it foursquare within the drama of Eros as comic relief than pretend you haven’t noticed it.
The illusion of Venus
This act can invite the man to an extreme, though short-lived, masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror or a captor, and the woman to a correspondingly extreme abjection and surrender.
…in the act of love we are not merely ourselves. We are also representatives… In us all the masculinity and femininity of the world, all that is assailant and responsive, are momentarily focused. The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman the Earth-Mother…
A woman who accepted as literally her own this extreme self-surrender would be an idolatress offering to a man what belongs only to God. And a man would have to be the coxcomb of all coxcombs, and indeed a blasphemer, if he arrogated to himself, as the mere person he is, the sort of sovereignty to which Venus for a moment exalts him… within the rite or drama they become a god and goddess between whom there is no equality – whose relations are asymmetrical.
Some will think it strange I should find an element of ritual or masquerade in that action which is often regarded as the most real, the most unmasked and sheerly genuine, we ever do. Are we not our true selves when naked? In a sense, no… By nudity the lovers cease to be solely John and Mary; the universal He and She are emphasised. You could almost say they put on nakedness as a ceremonial robe – or as the costume for a charade… a mortal man is not even the Sky-Father, and cannot really wear his crown. Only a copy of it, done in tinselled paper… Paper crowns have their legitimate, and (in the proper context) their serious, uses. They are not in the last resort much flimsier (“if imagination mend them”) than all earthly dignities.
Headship in marriage
As nature crowns man in that brief action, so the Christian law has crowned him in the permanent relationship of marriage, bestowing – or should I say, inflicting? – a certain “headship” on him… The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the Church – read on – and gave his life for her (Eph. v, 25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is – in her own mere nature – least lovable. For the Church has no beauty but what the Bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely.
To say this is not to say that there is any virtue or wisdom in making a marriage that involves such misery. There is no wisdom or virtue in seeking unnecessary martyrdom or deliberately courting persecution; yet it is, none the less, the persecuted or martyred Christian in whom the pattern of the Master is most unambiguously realised. So, in these terrible marriages, once they have come about, the “headship” of the husband, if only he can sustain it, is most Christ-like.
The sternest feminist need not grudge my sex the crown offered to it either in the Pagan or in the Christian mystery. For the one is of paper and the other of thorns. The real danger is not that husbands may grasp the latter too eagerly; but that they will allow or compel their wives to usurp it.
Eros does not aim at happiness
As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise. Everyone knows that it is useless to try to separate lovers by proving to them that their marriage will be an unhappy one. This is not only because they will disbelieve you… For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms. Even if the two lovers are mature and experienced people who know that broken hearts heal in the end and can clearly foresee that, if they once steeled themselves to go through the present agony of parting, they would almost certainly be happier ten years hence than marriage is at all likely to make them even then, they would not part. To Eros all these calculations are irrelevant… Eros never hesitates to say, “Better this than parting. Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together.” If the voice within us does not say this, it is not the voice of Eros.
The voice of Eros
It is in the grandeur of Eros that the seeds of danger are concealed. He has spoken like a god. His total commitment, his reckless disregard of happiness, his transcendence of self-regard, sound like a message from the eternal world.
And yet it cannot, just as it stands, be the voice of God Himself. For Eros, speaking with that very grandeur and displaying that very transcendence of self, may urge to evil as well as to good… The love which leads to cruel and perjured unions, even to suicide-pacts and murder, is not likely to be wandering lust or idle sentiment. It may well be Eros in all his splendour heartbreakingly sincere; ready for every sacrifice except renunciation.
The Platonic and Shavian perspective
There have been schools of thought which accepted the voice of Eros as something actually transcendent and tried to justify the absoluteness of his commands. Plato will have it that “falling in love” is the mutual recognition on earth of souls which have been singled out for one another in a previous and celestial existence… But if one accepted it literally one would he faced by an embarrassing consequence… For Eros may unite the most unsuitable yokefellows; many unhappy, and predictably unhappy, marriages were love-matches.
…According to Shavian Romanticism the voice of Eros is the voice of the…Life Force, the “evolutionary appetite”. In overwhelming a particular couple it is seeking parents (or ancestors) for the superman. It is indifferent both to their personal happiness and to the rules of morality because it aims at something which Shaw thinks very much more important: the future perfection of our species. But if all this were true it hardly makes clear whether – and if so, why – we should obey it. All pictures yet offered us of the superman are so unattractive that one might well vow celibacy at once to avoid the risk of begetting him. And secondly, this theory surely leads to the conclusion that the Life Force does not very well understand its (or her? or his?) own business. So far as we can see the existence or intensity of Eros between two people is no warrant that their offspring will be especially satisfactory, or even that they will have offspring at all… And what on earth was the Life Force doing through all those countless generations when the begetting of children depended very little on mutual Eros and very much on arranged marriages, slavery and rape? Has it only just thought of this bright idea for improving the species?
Nearness of approach
We must not give unconditional obedience to the voice of Eros when he speaks most like a god. Neither must we ignore or attempt to deny the god-like quality. This love is really and truly like Love Himself. In it there is a real nearness to God (by Resemblance); but not, therefore and necessarily, a nearness of Approach. Eros, honoured so far as love of God and charity to our fellows will allow, may become for us a means of Approach. His total commitment is a paradigm or example, built into our natures, of the love we ought to exercise towards God and Man. As Nature, for the Nature-lover, gives a content to the word glory, so this gives a content to the word Charity. It is as if Christ said to us through Eros, “Thus – just like this – with this prodigality – not counting the cost – you are to love me and the least of my brethren.” Our conditional honour to Eros will of course vary with our circumstances. Of some a total renunciation (but not a contempt) is required. Others, with Eros as their fuel and also as their model, can embark on the married life. Within which Eros, of himself, will never be enough – will indeed survive only in so far as he is continually chastened and corroborated by higher principles.
When Eros becomes a demon
But Eros, honoured without reservation and obeyed unconditionally, becomes a demon… Divinely indifferent to our selfishness, he is also demoniacally rebellious to every claim of God or Man that would oppose him… Of all loves he is, at his height, most god-like; therefore most prone to demand our worship.
Theologians have often feared, in this love, a danger of idolatry. I think they meant by this that the lovers might idolise one another. That does not seem to me to be the real danger; certainly not in marriage. The deliciously plain prose and business-like intimacy of married life render it absurd. So does the Affection in which Eros is almost invariably clothed. Even in courtship I question whether anyone who has felt the thirst for the Uncreated, or even dreamed of feeling it, ever supposed that the Beloved could satisfy it… The real danger is to me not that the lovers will idolise each other but that they will idolise Eros himself.
Martyrs of love
When lovers say of some act that we might blame, “Love made us do it,” notice the tone… Notice how tremulously, almost how devoutly, they say the word love, not so much pleading an “extenuating circumstance” as appealing to an authority. The confession can be almost a Boast. There can be a shade of defiance in it. They “feel like martyrs”… Where a true Eros is present resistance to his commands feels like apostasy, and what are really (by the Christian standard) temptations speak with the voice of duties – quasi-religious duties, acts of pious zeal to Love. He builds his own religion round the lovers. Benjamin Constant has noticed how he creates for them, in a few weeks or months, a joint past which seems to them immemorial. They recur to it continually with wonder and reverence…
It seems to sanction all sorts of actions they would not otherwise have dared. I do not mean solely, or chiefly, acts that violate chastity. They are just as likely to be acts of injustice or uncharity against the outer world. They will seem like proofs of piety and zeal towards Eros.
The fickleness of Eros
And all the time the grim joke is that this Eros whose voice seems to speak from the eternal realm is not himself necessarily even permanent. He is notoriously the most mortal of our loves. The world rings with complaints of his fickleness. What is baffling is the combination of this fickleness with his protestations of permanency. To be in love is both to intend and to promise lifelong fidelity. Love makes vows unasked; can’t be deterred from making them… No experience will cure him of the delusion. We have all heard of people who are in love again every few years; each time sincerely convinced that “this time it’s the real thing”, that their wanderings are over, that they have found their true love and will themselves be true till death.
And yet Eros is in a sense right to make this promise. The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory.
Getting over our selfishness
In one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival.
The couple who lasts
Eros is driven to promise what Eros of himself cannot perform.
The couple whose marriage will certainly be endangered by them, and possibly ruined, are those who have idolised Eros… They expected that mere feeling would do for them, and permanently, all that was necessary…. In reality, however, Eros, having made his gigantic promise and shown you in glimpses what its performance would be like, has “done his stuff”. He, like a godparent, makes the vows; it is we who must keep them… We must do the works of Eros when Eros is not present… And all good Christian lovers know that this programme; modest as it sounds, will not be carried out except by humility, charity and divine grace; that it is indeed the whole Christian life seen from one particular angle.