PART FOUR: Learning to Love
PART FOUR
We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.
The Four Loves
Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling … Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go … But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct from ‘being in love’—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God … ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.
Mere Christianity
To love you as I should, I must worship God as Creator. When I have learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis
We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. Then they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.
The Four Loves
God lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.
Mere Christianity
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
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you do, and you will presently come to love him.
Mere Christianity
‘They would say,’ he answered, ‘that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.’
That Hideous Strength
I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis
Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.
The Great Divorce
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 of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
The Four Loves
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
The Problem of Pain
Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.
Mere Christianity
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
The Abolition of Man
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
The Problem of Pain
To love at all is to be vulnerable.
The Four Loves
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
God in the Dock
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. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality, and planted the interests of another in the center of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbor as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that.
The Four Loves
It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.
Reflections on the Psalms
It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
If God is love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though he has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
The Problem of Pain
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
People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on ‘being in love’ forever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change—not realizing that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last.
Mere Christianity
Those who love greatly are ‘near’ to God. But of course it is ‘nearness by likeness.’
The Four Loves
I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in themselves. But they were wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy.
Mere Christianity
Have you not seen that in our days Of any whose story, song or art Delights us, our sincerest praise Means, when all's said, ‘You break my heart?’
Poems
Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.
The Four Loves
Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians.
Mere Christianity
God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing … the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a ‘host’ who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and ‘take advantage of ’ Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.
The Four Loves