Four Loves Chapter 3/6 ... notes on Affection

PDF for Four Loves

written by C. S. Lewis, first issued in 1958

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Likings and Loves for the sub-human 

Chapter 3 Affection

Chapter 4 Friendship
Chapter 5 Eros
Chapter 6 Charity 

 Chapter 3 

Affection

"affection, especially of parents to offspring"; but also of offspring to parents. (pg. 30)  
Lewis noted that this wasn't exclusively familial type love, but wanted to point out the ease of "affection".

The Need and Need-love of the young is obvious; so is the Gift-love of the mother. (pg.30)

Maybe because this book was written in the fifties ... idk ... parenting has certainly evolved over the last fifty plus years.  I think of the contributions that my husband has made towards our children as different, but similar to mine.  Surely the gift of provision ... shelter and substance ... all of the things that either parent contributes to the rearing of a family ... could be seen as Lewis describes Need-love/Gift-love.

It is a Need-love but what it needs is to give. It is a Gift-love but it needs to be needed. 

As I read this I think of appreciation ... gratitude ... building a mind/heart - set of thankfulness.  I think I like the old school "common courtesies" very much.  I'm going to work on practicing courtesy ... looking for opportunities to say thank-you (more often) for example.

This warm comfortableness, this satisfaction in being together, takes in all sorts of objects. It is indeed the least discriminating of loves. (pg. 30)  

Lewis writes that "affection" is like Gin ... in that it mixes well with so many various components.  

But almost anyone can become an object (pg. 31)

I think this is the less attractive flip side of the affection coin ... this is the familiar ... routine ... easily taken for granted type of love. I think what he was expressing here is that it's pretty easy to slip in to "roles" ... and take each other so for granted that one becomes almost invisible.  He gave an example of the mailman ... familiar, I do like him ... I don't really know him at all ... maybe I like seeing the little white jeep ... he brings the mail.  Some times we let the people in our lives who really should matter the most slip in to these type places where they are not "loved" as well as might be wished.  I think I can see places where I am guilty of that.

But Affection has its own criteria. Its objects have to be familiar. We can sometimes point to the very day and hour when we fell in love or began a new friendship. I doubt if we ever catch Affection beginning. To become aware of it is to become aware that it has already been going on for some time. (pg. 31)  Hmmm, idk ... thinking about this ... I have known, maybe over something as simple as a shared liking for a particular song, that a someone could be a friend.  I'm saying for me I don't understand how that friendship is more then affection (and I didn't understand what Lewis was getting at until I understood what he was expressing when he used the word charity ... 'cause ... a friendship may begin with something like affection, but it takes a lot more then affection to weather ones way to friendship ... real friendship ... that's what I think ... and it is in the true friendships that one finds shelter ... abiding shelter)

The especial glory of Affection is that it can unite those  who most emphatically, even comically, are not; people who, if they had not found themselves put down by fate in the same household or community, would have had nothing to do with each other. If Affection grows out of this - of course it often does not - their eyes begin to open. Growing fond of "old so-and- so", at first simply because he happens to be there, I presently begin to see that there is "something in him" after all. The moment when one first says, really meaning it, that though he is not "my sort of man" he is a very good man "in his own way" is one of liberation. It does not feel like that; we may feel only tolerant and indulgent. But really we have crossed a frontier. That "in his own way" means that we are getting beyond our own idiosyncracies, that we are learning to appreciate goodness or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence flavoured and served to suit our own palate. (pgs. 35-36)

I thought this was interesting.  Making room for people not exactly your flavor ... Two encourages her siblings to date alot of different kinds of people and learn cool interpersonal stuff from the time spent.  It's easy to be seduced by one's very own flavor ... but ... well, I think it's very important to bond with "your very own flavor" ... come home to that, but don't limit all your doings to just what's comfortable and easy ... . Be open to a range of personalities, love easily ... that's what I would say to my own children. As this next quote suggests ... 

The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the crosssection of humanity whom one has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who "happen to be there". Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed. (pg. 36)

Affection, we have seen, includes both Need-love and Gift-love. I begin with the Need - our craving for the Affection of others. (pg. 37)

between pages 37 and 50 he writes about our love for our pets and our love of nature, and he makes the point that our domesticated animals my provide a bridge back to the wildness of nature.

Selfish or neurotic people can twist anything even love, into some sort of misery or exploitation (pg. 50)

Firstly, as to neurotic. I do not think we shall see things more clearly by classifying all these maleficial states of Affection as pathological. No doubt there are really pathological conditions which make the temptation these states abnormally hard or even impossible to resist for particular people. Send those people to the doctors by all means. But I believe that everyone who is honest with himself will admit that he has felt these temptations. Their occurrence is not a disease; or if it is, the name of that disease is Being a Fallen Man. In ordinary people the yieldings to them - and who does not sometimes yield? - is not disease, but sin. Spiritual direction will here help us more than medical treatment. (pgs. 50 & 51)

Affection produces happiness if - and only if - there is common sense and give and take and "decency". In other words, only if something more, and other, than Affection is added. The mere feeling is not enough. You need "common sense”, that is, reason. You need “give and take”; that is, you need justice, continually stimulating mere Affection when it fades and restraining it when it forgets or would defy the art of love. You need "decency". There is no disguising the fact that this means goodness; patience, selfdenial, humility, and the continual intervention of a far higher sort of love than Affection, in itself, can ever be. That is the whole Point. If we try to live by Affection alone, Affection will "go bad on us". (pg. 51 with my additions of bold and underlined)

The unappreciativeness of the others, those terrible, wounding words - anything will "wound" a Mrs. Fidget - in which they begged her to send the washing out, enabled her to feel ill-used, therefore, to have a continual grievance, to enjoy the pleasures of resentment. If anyone says he does not know those pleasures, he is a liar or a saint. It is true that they are pleasures only to those who hate. But then a love like Mrs. Fidget's contains a good deal of hatred. It was of erotic love that the Roman poet said, "I love and hate," but other kinds of love admit the same mixture. They carry in them the seeds of hatred. If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon. (pg. 52)