In a couple of weeks I’ll be giving a talk here in San Diego based on The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. I remembered that I had written some notes for our discussion group and posted them here. However, when I went to find them I discovered that I didn’t have a single index page with all the links….so here it is.
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?
