The Four Loves, Chapter 4

The Four Loves

Chapter 4: Eros (“In love”)

I. Definitions:

A. Eros–romantic love (91), that is, the feeling of being in love

B. Venus—sexual or carnal desire and expression.

II. Relationship of Eros and Venus

A. Venus is part of Eros BUT, Lewis stresses, may operate without Eros (92). (See Diagram A) No moral implications to the separation. “I am not at all subscribing to the popular idea that it is the absence or presence of Eros which makes the sexual act ‘impure’ or ‘pure,’ degraded or fine, unlawful or unlawful.” (92) He is not discussing “mere sexuality without Eros.” (93) Compare to JPII’s treatment in L&R: Lust is not love.

B. In contrast with “the evolutionist” and the ancients, Lewis believes that Eros does not grow out of Venus. A man in love “really hasn’t the leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of the person” “in her totality” (93). Discuss John’s response in draft outline: True enough, but a feeling can originate in biology without being reducible to biology. Recall your Greek mythology: Cupid/Eros was the son of Venus/Aphrodite, cf. the so-called “Rape of the Sabines ” as described by Plutarch. Here Lewis seems to have taken to an extreme the independence of the spiritual from the corporeal? In counterpoint, is Lewis just being consistent with his discussion of attraction as desiring the good? How does this relate to JPII’s discussion of attraction and desire as a positive good?

C. For a lustful man “strictly speaking a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus.” (94, cf. LR: “use”)

D. “Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious… fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself.” ( 93) Like Dante and Beatrice? Cf. Janet E. Smith’s statement on uniqueness partner for meaningful lovemaking. Cf. the Dark Night of the Soul.

E. Eros transforms need pleasure into an appreciative pleasure (“It is the nature of a Need-pleasure to show us the object solely in relation to our need, even our momentary need.”): Eros “sees the object most intensely as a thing admirable in herself, important far beyond her relation to the lover’s need.” (95)

F. Eros regards pleasure as a by-product. Eros obliterates “the distinction between giving and receiving.” (96) JPII might say as embodied souls, we express love with our bodies. We pray with our bodies and marital love is sacramental within the sacrament of marriage, a sign of God’s grace. See Fulton Sheen in Three to Get Married (p. 38).

G. “Eros, without diminishing desire, makes abstinence easier.” (97) Cf. JP2 on need for selfless love in periodic continence.

III. Venus: serious? or playful?…Attitudes towards the body

A. Venus-love is serious (98)…

1. Mystical image of the union between God and Man (or Christ and His Church).

Read “The Dark Night…Songs of the soul, which rejoices at having reached that lofty state of perfection: union with God by the way of spiritual negation” by St. John of the Cross.

2. A “participation in, and exposition of, the natural forces of life and fertility—the marriage of Sky-Father and Earth-Mother.”

Lewis later goes on at length at 103-104, but he contrasts this natural mystery with the “Christian mystery” of marriage with the husband as “the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church.” (105). “For the Church has no beauty but what the Bride-groom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely. The chrism of this terrible coronation [as head] is to be seen not in the joys of any man’s marriage but in its sorrows…”

...