If you wanted to discuss everything that C. S. Lewis had to say about love, you would be engaging in a book-length enterprise. After all, he himself wrote book-length treatises on the topic, such as his 1960 volume The Four Loves. So trying to summarise his views is not going to happen in a short article like this.
But I can share a few bits and pieces by referring you to two shorter pieces that he wrote on love. The first one comes from his very familiar book Mere Christianity. In it he discusses love in various places. In Book 3, “Christian Behaviour,” Chapter 9 is titled “Charity”. That short chapter contains terrific wisdom and insight from Lewis.
He begins with a definition: “Charity means ‘Love, in the Christian sense.’ But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.”
He goes on to say this:
Natural liking or affection for people makes it easier to be ‘charitable’ towards them. It is, therefore, normally a duty to encourage our affections – to ‘like’ people as much as we can (just as it is often our duty to encourage our liking for exercise or wholesome food) – not because this liking is itself the virtue of charity, but because it is a help to it. On the other hand, it is also necessary to keep a very sharp look-out for fear our liking for some one person makes us uncharitable, or even unfair, to someone else. There are even cases where our liking conflicts with our charity towards the person we like. For example, a doting mother may be tempted by natural affection to ‘spoil’ her child; that is, to gratify her own affectionate impulses at the expense of the child’s real happiness later on.
But though natural likings should normally be encouraged, it would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings. Some people are ‘cold’ by temperament; that may be a misfortune for them, but it is no more a sin than having a bad digestion is a sin; and it does not cut them out from the chance, or excuse them from the duty, of learning charity. The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.
Lewis makes further important points:
Consequently, though Christian charity sounds a very cold thing to people whose heads are full of sentimentality, and though it is quite distinct from affection, yet it leads to affection. The difference between a Christian and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections or ‘likings’ and the Christian has only ‘charity’. The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on – including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.
This same spiritual law works terribly in the opposite direction. The Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them: afterwards they hated them much more because they had ill-treated them. The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become – and so on in a vicious circle for ever.
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or, anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.
He finishes by again reminding us about how feelings are not the main thing:
On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.
God in the Dockby Lewis, C. S. (Author)
The second piece of his that I wish to quote from is a somewhat obscure essay he penned for the Church of England Newspaper in 1945. You can find “The Sermon and the Lunch” in the book God in the Dock. In it he discusses home life and public Christian life. He says:
“If Christian teachers wish to recall Christian people to domesticity – and I, for one, believe that people must be recalled to it – the first necessity is to stop telling lies about home life and to substitute realistic teaching. Perhaps the fundamental principles would be something like this.”
He lists five points, only one of which I share here:
2. By the conversion or sanctification of family life we must be careful to mean something more than the preservation of ‘love’ in the sense of natural affection. Love (in that sense) is not enough. Affection, as distinct from charity, is not a cause of lasting happiness. Left to its natural bent affection becomes in the end greedy, naggingly solicitous, jealous, exacting, timorous. It suffers agony when its object is absent – but is not repaid by any long enjoyment when the object is present. Even at the Vicar’s lunch table affection was partly the cause of the quarrel. That son would have borne patiently and humorously from any other old man the silliness which enraged him in his father. It is because he still (in some fashion) ‘cares’ that he is impatient. The Vicar’s wife would not be quite that endless whimper of self-pity which she now is if she did not (in a sense) ‘love’ the family: the continued disappointment of her continued and ruthless demand for sympathy, for affection, for appreciation has helped to make her what she is. I do not think this aspect of affection is nearly enough noticed by most popular moralists. The greed to be loved is a fearful thing. Some of those who say (and almost with pride) that they live only for love come, at last, to live in incessant resentment.
Bonus quote
Since just yesterday I had to have my beloved Possum cat put down, I have again been reflecting quite a lot about loving someone or something, only to lose it. Some two years ago I lost my wife. Yesterday my cat. The two losses are not identical of course, but there are similarities.
Just as one might ask whether it is worthwhile to remarry, one can ask whether it is worthwhile to get another pet. This old line comes to mind: ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ But some folks, in order never to get hurt, will never love.
And that of course reminds us of another famous quote by Lewis – this one from The Four Loves:
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
