When I don’t find a book especially illuminating or enjoyable, I recognize that the fault may well be with the reader and not the writer. I’m fully prepared to accept that as the case with a book I just finished reading with my Third Stage book group. My friends all found portions of this work meaningful and illuminating, and in our discussions they helped me uncover truths I had missed. However, I found it a slog to read, in part because it is such a piece “of its time.” I have recently written a positive review of another work by this writer, and I reference his quotes on occasion. But this particular work is one I don’t expect to pick up again.

The Four Loves (1960) by C.S. Lewis is sometimes described as a “classic” of the British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author. In this work, Lewis takes the reader through a description of four different types of love: “affection, the most basic form; friendship, the rarest and perhaps most insightful; Eros, passionate love; charity, the greatest and least selfish.” There was something of value in each, but for a short, 190-page work, it certainly seemed to take forever to read.

While it has very little to do with Christian or God-like love, I very much appreciated his perspective in the early chapter entitled “Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human.” Here Lewis considers things such as a “love of home” or a “love of country.” The latter brought forth for me some of his most direct and useful — in the context of today’s battles over history — observations.

The actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings. The heroic stories, if taken to be typical, give a false impression of it and are often themselves open to serious historical criticism.

“I think it is possible,” he writes, “to be strengthened by the image of the past without being either deceived or puffed up . . . The stories are best when they are handed on and accepted as stories.” And perhaps there is a relationship to the divine when he scolds those who have a firm belief that their own nation “has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others.” He relates a story about an old clergyman who. when told that all nations felt this way, responded with “Yes, but in England it’s true.” He isn’t a villain, Lewis asserts, only an “extremely lovable old ass.” But he warns that the lunatic fringe can take this approach to a radicalism “which Christianity and science equally forbid.” We are seeing that in today’s so-called “Christian nationalism.”

Lewis also notes that there needs to be “a full confession by Christendom of Christendom’s specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery.”

I am not going to delve into the four different loves. There are a multitude of reviews by writers who engage much more thoughtfully with this work — from both a positive and negative perspective — that are easily found online. But in the final chapter on “Charity,” Lewis reminds us that God is love, and that love is the divine energy. But because none of us has direct knowledge about the ultimate Being, we are forced to use analogies. “We cannot see light, though by light we see things.” So is it with love.

No one can describe with certainty that divine energy. It is similar to death, in that no one still alive has fully experienced it. No one can say what happens to the dead but, as Madeleine L’Engle notes in words that could just as easily apply to Charity, “The important thing is that we do not know. It is not in the realm of proof. It is in the realm of love.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Picture of sunset in Maine by DJB