Part three

One last thing.

Again in the intro of The Four Loves, Lewis touches on something discussed later in depth, and this something resonated with me at that particular point in my life. I suppose this is why I first found him brilliant; he takes ideas I've felt (by experience) to be true all along, and articulates them, validates them. Validates me, I guess.

Drawing on M. Denis de Rougemont's remark that "love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god," Lewis proposes the opposite corollary: "Love begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god."

He writes: "This balance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God."

"I suppose that everyone who has thought about the matter will see what M. de Rougemont meant. Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself. It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done 'for love's sake' is thereby lawful and even meritorious."

Further down the page: "Now it must be noticed that the natural loves make this blasphemous claim not when they are in their worst, but when they are in their best, natural condition; when they are what our grandfathers called 'pure' or 'noble.'"

And then: "Our loves do not make their claim to divinity until the claim becomes plausible. It does not become plausible until there is in them a real resemblance to God, to Love Himself. Let us here make no mistake. Our Gift-loves are really God-like; and among our Gift-loves those are most God-like which are most boundless and unwearied in giving. All the things the poets say about them are true. Their joy, their energy, their patience, their readiness to forgive, their desire for the good of the beloved--all this is a real and all but adorable image of the Divine life....Meanwhile, however, the likeness is a splendour. That is why we may mistake Like for Same. 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."

This, I suppose, was what I needed to face at that moment. The thing I thought I'd left at home had tagged along five thousand miles and was right there, in print, staring at me. Unblinking.

But that's quite enough on that.

I've shared pieces only from the introduction so I can then say this: Read the rest.

Buy the book. Or borrow it. Or beg it off a friend, but whatever you must do, get a hold of a copy in your hands and read the thing. (Even you, Dad. Skip the convoluted, old-fashioned words and you'll find it reads like a dream.)

Really.

Read it.