2. Love
If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. . . .
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.
I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness.
The Four Loves, ch. 6
All natural affections can become rivals to spiritual love: but they can also be preparatory imitations of it, training (so to speak) of the spiritual muscles which Grace may later put to a higher service; as women nurse dolls in childhood and later nurse children. There may come an occasion for renouncing this love; pluck out your right eye. But you need to have an eye first: a creature which had none—which had only got so far as a ‘photosensitive’ spot—would be very ill employed in meditation on that severe text.
The Four Loves, ch. 2
‘You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God.’
The Great Divorce, ch. 11
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.
The Four Loves, ch. 6
Have you read Esmond lately? What a detestable woman is Lady Castlewood: and yet I believe Thackeray means us to like her, on the ground that all her actions spring from ‘love’. This love is, in his language, ‘pure’—i.e., it is not promiscuous or sensual. It is none the less a wholly uncorrected natural passion, idolatrous and insatiable. Was that the great 19th century heresy—that ‘pure’ or ‘noble’ passions didn’t need to be crucified and reborn, but could of themselves lead to happiness? Yet one sees it makes Lady C. disastrous both as a wife and a mother, and is a source of misery to herself and all whom she meets.
Letters (c. January 1942)
Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: ‘We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.’ Need-love says of a woman ‘I cannot live without her’; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection—if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.
The Four Loves, ch. 2