Sermon given by Aiden McMahon, February 11, 2024.
At some point in my second year of seminary, I stumbled upon a book entitled “The Bible and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Intrigued, I grabbed it off the shelf, wondering if it was some kind of Chicken Soup for the Soul-esque collection, and if so, how it ended up in the seminary library. Opening it up to the introduction, I was struck by the epigraph on the first page, which was this dialogue:
And don’t some people fall in love with their heart’s desire,
Marry, and live reasonably happy lives?
Some. For a while. Maybe. I can’t say.
Don’t you believe in love?
Yes, but the word has been polluted. Beware of people who go
Around talking about loving and caring.
Harsh. Clearly a different genre from “Chicken Soup.”
That quote comes from a 1983 book called “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book” by Walker Percy. The Editor of “Pursuit of Happiness,” Brent Strawn, wrote that he chose that quote because “Love,” like “Happiness,” has a long history of being ill-defined. Somehow, he notes, we’ve reached the point where we can use the same word to describe our feelings towards our spouse and our favorite cereal. And that threatens to strip it of any meaning at all. High minded ideals with nothing to ground them are easily swayed and easily corrupted.
So, to avoid such a fate, I feel like we need to revive the conversation on the nature and varieties of love. We'll do so today with C. S. Lewis as our guide.
Now, no group has shaped our conceptions of love in the West more than the Greeks, and for that reason, Lewis tends to make use of their Greek names:
Storge, Philia, Eros, and Agape
I will not be such a stickler.
Affection, Friendship, Romance, and Charity are how these are typically rendered in English, though there has been a push in recent years to leave that last one, agape, untranslated. I suspect this has much to do with the ways in which the word “charity” has itself evolved.
Now, I could walk you through the history of the Ancient Greek debate over which love was the preeminent virtue, the Summum Bonum, the Greatest Good, but that is not a sermon, my friends, that is a lecture. And you are not here for a lecture.
Besides, it’s pretty clear that the Apostle Paul won that debate, because no one has managed to budge public sentiment away from Charity, or Agape, for two millennia. When we light that chalice and say “Love is the doctrine of this church,” we are not promising anybody romance.
But I know you know that. We are committing to the kind of love laid out in 1 Corinthians. A love that is patient, kind, free from envy or arrogance, and willing to forgive. And this is no easy feat. Fortunately for us, the “natural loves” of Affection, Friendship, and Romance all have things to teach us about that Higher Love
Loving is, in fact, something we are constantly learning how to do better. I’ve actually been fascinated for a long while now by the Greek concept of virtue, which says that virtues and their corresponding vices are actually the same things, just in or out of balance. For example, cowardice, courage, and foolhardiness are all conditions of the same energy, and the Loves work in a similar way.
This is important because, on some level, I think we’re all aware of the fact that people can love badly, but I’m worried that part of our modern problem is a fear of saying so. Once it goes bad, our inclination is to say it’s no longer love.
In several books I’ve read, “The Four Loves” included, I’ve encountered a peculiar idea, repeated almost verbatim.
“God is Love” and “Love is God” are not the same thing.
And what they all seem to mean by this is that we have, in the last two hundred years or so, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the romanticism of the early 1800’s, started to attribute to Love the qualities once ascribed to God.
Love is beyond reproach or criticism.
Love is all-encompassing.
Love is the source of all good things.
Love can do anything.
Love is ethereal and often inscrutable.
The way we encounter and experience Love is entirely subjective.
We are not better for this understanding of Love. Some of it may be true for some Loves. But if Love is to be our Doctrine, our God, our Guiding Principle, whatever it is to each of us, we must be able to articulate it, lest it become meaningless, or worse, co-opted. If Love is what grounds us, then we must have an anchorpoint. So let’s dive in
We begin with Affection, the love born out of comfort and familiarity. Both Lewis and the Greek philosophers believed that this love is first learned in the bond between a child and its caregiver. For the child, at first, it is what he calls a “Need-love.” I need to be fed, burped, changed, and snuggled, and I grow attached to whoever provides this for me. Parents, too, feel Affection for their children, but it is also, if we are so fortunate, mixed with Charity - here manifested as deep devotion and willingness to sacrifice. It says “you are here, and that’s all I need to love you.”
And since Affection is the love of the familiar, it is also the love we have for things and places. It is the most diffuse and least demanding of the loves. It ignores many of the barriers that would otherwise keep us separate because, as Brené Brown says, “it’s hard to hate up close.”
But it does still make demands, sometimes. Since it is born out of familiarity, Affection struggles with change - even change for the better.
Lewis says that at its very best, Affection liberates us from our prejudices and idiosyncrasies. It allows us to appreciate people for who they are in themselves, not because they suit some preference we hold. Healthy affection says “you don’t need to change a thing about yourself.” This is its divine aspect.
At its worst, however, Affection is concerned not with the person themselves but the circumstances to which one has grown accustomed. Unhealthy affection says, “don’t you dare change.” You might say that though it remains a Love, it has managed to become unloving.
Friendship comes next. To many of the Greek philosophers, Friendship, not Charity, was chief amongst the Loves, because in their minds it was the one that set us apart from animals. “But wait!” you might say, “I’ve seen lots of videos online of cute animals being friends!”
Lewis, and the Philosophers as well, would not call this friendship. Indeed, most of what we call friendships today would not meet their criteria. Those with whom you keep company are not necessarily your friends - friendship goes beyond proximity. Friendship, they believed, was about Some Thing, a shared passion or belief.
There is no richer soil for personal and societal change than a group of Friends. Each addition to the group brings something new out of each member, something born only out of the school of virtue that is a Friendship. This is both its power and its danger. Friendship naturally creates an in-group and an out-group, where the opinions and attitudes of those within outweigh those without, what Lewis calls a “partial deafness” to the wider world.
It may be completely innocuous. Lewis uses the example of stamp collecting, even in 1960 something of a niche hobby. A lone child may be convinced to give up their unpopular hobby by schoolyard bullies. Find another philatelist, however, and together they become unstoppable.
But in the seedbed of shared passion and shared value, the best and worst of humanity is born. Friendship insulates itself from attack, whether or not it’s merited. Every cause, every movement, every protest and counter-protest succeeds, Lewis claims, because it was built on the back of Friendships. It collects, protects, and empowers. This is Friendship’s divine trait.
As distasteful a thought as it may be to our modern sensibilities, however, Friendship can be born of shared hatred or exclusion as much as it can be born out of a shared sense of justice or mercy. Bigots can be remarkably good to other bigots.
Remember that phrase from earlier, about Love not being God? Lewis goes even another step further. “When Love becomes a God,” he writes, “it becomes a demon.” And nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to Romance. That we have in our lexicon the phrase “Crime of Passion” is proof enough of that. Humans are remarkably good at coming up with reasons for their bad behavior, but “I did it for love” is always a justification - never an excuse. It becomes a law unto itself.
Now, Lewis was a bachelor until quite late in life, so it’s perhaps understandable that his chapter on Eros is the briefest. It contains few surprises as I read it. I will just say that he saw the divine trait of romance as being fidelity, as evidenced in the marriage vows we’re likely all familiar with - For better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, ‘til death do us part.
And so we come now to Charity.
All the best parts of the other three, and infinitely more besides.
Charity is that which allows us to Love when the other three loves are not stirred up in us. When we are faced with those unfamiliar or opposed to us. Those in which we find nothing attractive or appealing. Charity dispels a common misconception - the opposite of Love is not hate, problematic though it may be - it is selfishness.
As Lewis approaches the close of his book, he unleashes a fierce repudiation of Augustine, who said we should love nothing but God, lest we bring suffering upon ourselves. “To love at all is to be vulnerable,” Lewis writes. “If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one…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. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.”
Lewis actually has a remarkably progressive theology of the afterlife, so this is at least partially a metaphor. The important part, I think, is acknowledging the risk that comes with Loving well.
And a big part of that risk is opening ourselves up to being told when we aren’t loving well. Of being confronted with our misconceptions. Of learning our blindspots and all the ways of loving we had never before considered.
This Valentine’s Day, and every day besides, when you tell someone “I love you,” tell them what that means. Tell them why and tell them how.
Because if Love is in some way infinite, if it does have some Godlike quality, then the conversation is never truly over.