Millions upon millions of words have already been shared on the topics found in my four-word title. Yet one can never stop speaking about these glorious truths, and there will never be enough words to get even close to covering this sufficiently. It all comes down to this: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the ultimate display of God’s love.
Given that today is Resurrection Sunday, and given that it is always appropriate to run with the wisdom and brilliance of C. S. Lewis, it is well worth featuring some quotes from one chapter of one of his books. Many of you would know that in his 1960 classic work The Four Loves Lewis examines the different Greek words for love. Thus he has chapters on storge (affection), philia (friendship), eros (romantic love), and agape (charity).
Here I will simply feature some of what he has to say in his chapter on charity. There are now numerous editions of this book that are available, but my page numbering comes from the 1960 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition. He begins the chapter with these words:
William Morris wrote a poem called “Love Is Enough” and someone is said to have reviewed it briefly in the words “It isn’t.” Such has been the burden of this book. The natural loves are not self-sufficient. Something else, at first vaguely described as “decency and common sense,” but later revealed as goodness, and finally as the whole Christian life in one particular relation, must come to the help of the mere feeling if the feeling is to be kept sweet. (p. 163)
He speaks of how all the other loves can only exist because of divine love, and their meaning and worth only come from the supreme love of God. He says “we must try to relate the human activities called ‘loves’ to that Love which is God”. (p. 174) He goes on to say this
God is love. Again, “Herein is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us” (I John 4:10). We must not begin with mysticism, with the creature’s love for God, or with the wonderful forestates of the fruition of God vouchsafed to some in their earthly life. We begin at the real beginning, with love as the Divine energy. This primal love is Gift-love. In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give. The doctrine that God was under no necessity to create is not a piece of dry scholastic speculation. It is essential. Without it we can hardly avoid the conception of what I can only call a ‘managerial’ God; a Being whose function or nature is to “run” the universe, who stands to it as a headmaster to a school or a hotelier to a hotel. But to be sovereign of the universe is no great matter to God. In Himself, at home in ‘the land of the Trinity’, he is Sovereign of a far greater realm. We must keep always before our eyes that vision of Lady Julian’s in which God carried in His hand a little object like a nut, and that nut was “all that is made”. 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 – or should we say “seeing”? there are no tenses in God – the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the medial 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. (pp. 175-176)
He then distinguishes between Gift-loves (heavenly loves) and Need-loves (human loves). He writes:
Divine Gift-love—Love Himself working in a man—is wholly disinterested and desires what is simply best for the beloved. Again, natural Gift-love is always directed to objects which the lover finds in some way intrinsically lovable—objects to which Affection or Eros or a shared point of view attracts him, or, failing that, to the grateful and the deserving, or perhaps to those whose helplessness is of a winning and appealing kind. But Divine Gift-love in the man enables him to love what is not naturally lovable; lepers, criminals, enemies, morons, the sulky, the superior and the sneering. Finally, by a high paradox, God enables men to have a Gift-love towards Himself. There is of course a sense in which no one can give to God anything which is not already His; and if it is already His, what have you given? But since it is only too obvious that we can withhold ourselves, our wills and hearts, from God, we can, in that sense, also give them. What is His by right and would not exist for a moment if it ceased to be His (as the song is the singer’s), He has nevertheless made ours in such a way that we can freely offer it back to Him. “Our wills are ours to make them Thine.” (pp. 177-178)
The contrast with the way we love could not be greater:
We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness, usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering us the highest love of all is a terrible shock. This is so well recognised that spiteful people will pretend to be loving us with Charity precisely because they know that it will wound us. To say to one who expects a renewal of Affection, Friendship, or Eros, “I forgive you as a Christian” is merely a way of continuing the quarrel. Those who say it are of course lying. But the thing would not be falsely said in order to wound unless, if it were true, it would be wounding. (pp. 181-182)
The Four Lovesby Lewis, C. S. (Author)
He then goes on to give a powerful illustration of this:
How difficult it is to receive, and to go on receiving, from others a love that does not depend on our own attraction, can be seen from an extreme case. Suppose yourself a man struck down shortly after marriage by an incurable disease which may not kill you for many years; useless, impotent, hideous, disgusting dependent on your wife’s earnings; impoverishing where you hoped to enrich; impaired even in intellect and shaken by gusts of uncontrollable temper, full of unavoidable demands. And suppose your wife’s care and pity to be inexhaustible. The man who can take this sweetly, who can receive all and give nothing without resentment, who can abstain even from those tiresome self-depreciations which are really only a demand for petting and reassurance, is doing something which Need-love in its merely natural condition could not attain. (No doubt such a wife will also be doing something beyond the reach of a natural Gift-love, but that is not the point at present.) In such a case to receive is harder and perhaps more blessed than to give. But what the extreme example illustrates is universal. We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one’s fault if they do not so love it. Only the lovable can be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some times – and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit – they are receiving Charity, are not loved because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them. (pp. 182-183)
Since it is Easter, let me share a final quote. Lewis also speaks of the resurrection and what it might be like, in terms of our human loves:
We may hope that the resurrection of the body means also the resurrection of what may be called our “greater body”; the general fabric of our earthly life with its affections and relationships. But only on a condition; not a condition arbitrarily laid down by God, but one necessarily inherent in the character of Heaven nothing can enter there which cannot become heavenly. “Flesh and blood,” mere nature, cannot inherit that Kingdom. Man can ascend to Heaven only because the Christ, who died and ascended to Heaven, is “formed in him”. Must we not suppose that the same is true of a man’s loves? Only those into which Love Himself has entered will ascend to Love Himself. And these can be raised with Him only if they have, in some degree and fashion, shared His death; if the natural element in them has submitted—year after year, or in some sudden agony—to transmutation. The fashion of this world passes away. The very name of nature implies the transitory. Natural loves can hope for eternity only in so far as they have allowed themselves to be taken into the eternity of Charity; have at least allowed the process to begin here on earth, before the night comes when no man can work. And the process will always involve a kind of death. There is no escape. In my love for wife or friend the only eternal element is the transforming presence of Love Himself. By that presence, if at all, the other elements may hope, as our physical bodies hope, to be raised from the dead. For this only is holy in them, this only is the Lord.
Theologians have sometimes asked whether we shall “know one another” in Heaven, and whether the particular love-relations worked out on earth would then continue to have any significance. It seems reasonable to reply: “It may depend what kind of love it had become or was becoming, on earth.” For, surely, to meet in the eternal world someone for whom your love in this, however strong, had been merely natural, would not be (on that ground) even interesting. Would it not be like meeting in adult life someone who had seemed to be a great friend at your preparatory school solely because of common interests and occupations? If there was nothing more, if he was not a kindred soul, he will now be a total stranger. Neither of you now plays conkers. You no longer want to swop your help with his French exercise for his help with your arithmetic. In Heaven, I suspect, a love that had never embodied Love Himself would be equally irrelevant. For Nature has passed away. All that is not eternal is eternally out of date. (pp. 187-188)
Afterword
In the middle of writing this piece, a neighbour from a few houses down knocked on my door. He is Russian Orthodox, and he has cancer (both he and my wife were diagnosed with cancer around the same time over three years ago). He shook my hand, said “Christ is risen” and gave me a small chocolate egg. He mentioned that quite a few family members were coming around to celebrate Easter with him and his wife.
I said that I had family members over a few days ago, and maybe tomorrow as well, but today I am home alone. It was so very kind of him to think of me, come over briefly and share that famous Christian greeting with me – and the chocolate! It all so nicely ties in with this article.
Christos Anesti! (Christ is risen!) Alethos Anesti! (He is risen indeed!)
