Meditations on Love
Why we love inanimate nature
To Dom Bede Griffiths January 8, 1936
What indeed can we imagine Heaven to be but unimpeded obedience. I think this is one of the causes of our love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful: and though their kind of obedience is infinitely lower than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and water.
(CL 2, 177)
On loving one’s enemies, even the Nazis
To His Brother, Warren Lewis May 4, 1940
Your other question about loving our enemies has been very much in my mind lately, and it must be faced, every time we say the Lord’s Prayer. No exemption seems to be allowed—of [Samuel] Johnson’s Rambler 185 (for Xmas Eve 1751) which ends thus: “Of him that hopes to be forgiven, it is indispensably required that he forgive. On this great duty eternity is suspended: and to him that refuses to practice it, the throne of mercy is inaccessible, and the Savior of the world has been born in vain.” It sounds impossible. I pray every night for the people I am most tempted to hate or despise (the present list is Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini . . . ) and in the effort to make this real I have had to do a good deal of thinking.
There were three words in Greek which covered most kinds of love (Eros = sexual love, Storge = family affection, Philia = friendship) but the New Testament word for “love” or “charity” is Agape, which has hardly any use in classical Greek—i.e. it is a new word for a new thing. It is obvious that it cannot mean “an involuntary sentiment.” We all say that God is wise, and habitually argue as if He were a fool! How could He be commanding the involuntary? Agape is best seen, I think, in the words “love your neighbor as yourself,” i.e. by an act of will, aim at your neighbor’s good in the same way as you aim at your own.
Now you don’t “love” yourself because of your own “lovable qualities.” You may, in moments of vanity, attribute lovable qualities to yourself, but that is not the cause of your self-love but one of the results of it. At other moments, when you dislike yourself, you still wish for your own happiness. This attitude to one’s own self is dictated by nature: towards other selves it has to be acquired.
I take it, it has nothing in the world to do with trying to pretend that the enemy is “not so bad after all” or that his sins “don’t matter,” or that he is really lovable. Not a bit. It’s the old business about “loving the sinner and hating the sin” which becomes alive to me when I realize that this is what I do to myself all the time. In fact I provisionally define Agape as “steadily remembering that inside the Gestapo-man there is a thing which says I and Me just as you do.”
If one takes seriously your suggestion that they [Nazis] are literally possessed, really it only makes this point of view easier. Suppose your eyes were opened and you could see the Gestapo man visibly fiend-ridden—a twisted and stunted human form, covered with blood and filth, with a sort of cross between a mandrill and a giant centipede fastened onto it? Surely you, and the human remains, become almost allies against the horror which is tormenting you both, him directly and you through him?
(CL 2, 408–409)
On being-in-love
To Daphne Harwood March 6, 1942
My view of Being-in-love is that (like everything except God and the Devil) it is better than some things and worse than others. Thus it comes in my scale of values higher than lust, selfishness, or frigidity, but lower than charity or constancy—in fact about on a level with friendship. Like everything (except God and the Devil) it therefore is sometimes opposed to things lower than itself and—in that situation—good: sometimes to things higher than itself and in that situation—bad. Thus Being-in-love is a better motive for marriage than, say, worldly advancement: but the intention to obey God’s will by entering into an indissoluble partnership in all virtue and mutual charity for the preservation of chastity and the admission of new souls to the chance of eternal life is better even than Being-in-love.
So far it is fairly plain sailing. The trouble arises when poets and others set up this thing (good in certain conditions with its own proper degree of goodness) as an absolute. Which many do. An innocent and well-intentioned emphasis on the importance of Being-in-love with one’s spouse (i.e. its superiority over lust or ambition as a basis for marriage) is in fact widely twisted into the doctrine that only Being-in-love sanctifies marriage and that therefore as soon as you are tired of your spouse you get a divorce. Thus the over-praising of a finite good, the pretense that it is absolute, defeats itself and corrupts the very good it set out to exalt: and what begins by wanting to go beyond the prayer book idea of marriage ends by reducing marriage to mere concubinage. Treat “Love” as a good and you in fact make it a fiend.
As to “Fate,” which I call providence—I believe that the coming together of a man and woman, like everything else (e.g. the fall of [a] sparrow) is in the hand of God. In our society the hand is usually displayed in the form of mutual “falling in love.” In a society in which Our Lord spoke about “one flesh” this was not so: marriages were usually arranged by parents—and so in the vast majority of times and places. I therefore cannot make “Falling-in-love” the universal necessary pre-condition. We must always no doubt support it as against any inferior one, but not against any other one in general. . . .
And is it Being-in-love that really makes the happy marriage work? Isn’t it something different—higher? Eros won’t do without Agape.
(CL 2, 510–512)
On the temptation to love people on earth more than God
To Mrs. Percival Wiseman May 26, 1942
The most helpful remark I know is Westcott’s* “Only he who completely resists temptation knows its true strength”—i.e. if you give in at point X you never know how fierce it would have become an hour later. You only discover the strength of the German army by fighting it.
We are quite ignorant of the real power of our habits until we try to give them up. The particular temptation you mention (of loving men more than God) does certainly present difficulties. I don’t expect that was the cardinal temptation for Him. In the Gospel accounts of the temptation in the wilderness (which, by the way, must come from His own life for they are temptations no mere human has and none could have invented) it is the temptation to work miracles—i.e. to set up His own deity in independence of His Father. You and I don’t know this temptation, of course, and may be thankful we don’t . . . or, after all, don’t we?
The one you mention is ticklish, because is it not always really a way of loving humans too little? I know it sounds odd, but think it over. I mean, as soon as one tries to seek the other person’s real good & freedom as opposed to the gratification of one’s own affection (which often includes some will to power) isn’t one driven to loving them in and for God?
*Brooke Foss Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews (1892)
(CL 2, 521–522)
Loving God and one’s neighbors with more than feelings
To Edith Gates May 23, 1944
Certainly, I cannot love my neighbor properly till I love God. As George MacDonald says in his Unspoken Sermons:
“And beginning to try to love his neighbor he finds that this is no more to be reached in itself than the Law was to be reached in itself. As he cannot keep the Law without first rising into the love of his neighbor, so he cannot love his neighbor without first rising higher still. The whole system of the universe works upon this principle—the driving of things upward toward the center.”
On the other hand we have no power to make ourselves love God. The only way is absolute obedience to Him, total surrender. He will give us the “feeling” if He pleases. But both when He does and when He does not, we shall gradually learn that feeling is not the important thing. There is something in us deeper than feeling, deeper even than conscious will. It is rather being. When we are quite empty of self we shall be filled with Him, for nature abhors a vacuum. Of course it is good, as you say, to “realize” that the source of all our good feelings is God. (That is the right way to deal with pride: not to depreciate the good thing we are tempted to be proud of but to remember where it comes from). But “realization” depends on faculties that fail us when we are tired or when we try to use them too often, so we can’t depend on it. It is the self you really are and not its reflection in consciousness that matters most.
May I take what is really the closest parallel? No child is begotten without pleasure. But the pleasure is not the cause of life—it is a symptom, something that happens when life is in fact being transmitted. In the same way “feeling love” is only the echo in consciousness of the real thing which lies deeper.
(CL 2, 616–617)
Natural loves are only springboards
To Mary Van Deusen July 23, 1953
I take it that in every marriage natural love sooner or later, in a high or a low degree, comes up against difficulties (if only the difficulty that the original state of “being in love” dies a natural death) which force it either to turn into dislike or else to turn into Christian charity. For all our natural feelings are, not resting places, but points d’appui [“props”], springboards. One has to go on from there, or fall back from there. The merely human pleasure in being loved must either go bad or become the divine joy of loving. . . . It’s all quite in the ordinary run of Christian life. See I Peter 4:12 “Think it not strange etc.”*
*I Peter 4:12, KJV: Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you.
(CL 3, 351)
The advantages of growing old
To Mary Willis Shelburne August 1, 1953
Yes, I too think there is lots to be said for being no longer young; and I do most heartily agree that it is just as well to be past the age when one expects or desires to attract the other sex. It’s natural enough in our species, as in others, that the young birds should show off their plumage—in the mating season. But the trouble in the modern world is that there’s a tendency to rush all the birds on to that age as soon as possible and then keep them there as late as possible, thus losing all the real value of the other parts of life in a senseless, pitiful attempt to prolong what, after all, is neither its wisest, its happiest, or most innocent period. I suspect merely commercial motives are behind it all: for it is at the showing-off age that birds of both sexes have least sales-resistance!
(CL 3, 352)
The four kinds of love
To Mrs. Johnson February 18, 1954
Of course taking in the poor illegitimate child is “charity.” Charity means love. It is called Agape in the New Testament to distinguish it from Eros (sexual love), Storge (family affection) and Philia (friendship). So there are four kinds of love, all good in their proper place, but Agape is the best because it is the kind God has for us and is good in all circumstances. There are people I mustn’t feel Eros towards, and people I can’t feel Storge or Philia for: but I can practice Agape to God, Angels, Man and Beast, to the good and the bad, the old and the young, the far and the near.
You see Agape is all giving, not getting. Read what St. Paul says about it in First Corinthians chap. 13. Then look at a picture of Charity (or Agape) in action in St. Luke, chap. 10, verses 30–35. And then, better still, look at Matthew chap. 25. verses 31–46: from which you see that Christ counts all that you do for this baby exactly as if you had done it for Him when He was a baby in the manger at Bethlehem: you are in a sense sharing in the things His mother did for Him. Giving money is only one way of showing charity: to give time and toil is far better and (for most of us) harder. And notice, tho’ it is all giving—you needn’t expect any reward—how you do gets rewarded almost at once.
(CL 3, 428–429)