Love Makes Sense: The Four Loves by CS Lewis

 

On Friday, I hope to join the monthly discussion of the New York CS Lewis Society.  The topic is The Four Loves.  I love this book and am hoping to participate, but even retirees have schedule conflicts and I will be on the way to Minneapolis to see two of my six kids.  

I have read and re-read this book since the mid-1980s.  From then to now, the four loves are and have been the frame through which I see relationships, my own and those around me.  To begin where Lewis did, there are four words for love in Greek. Most languages have just one. In French and Hebrew and many other languages, like and love are the same word.  In popular usage, like and love are hard to tell apart in English.  

In Greek: 

Storge στοργη, means affection, the love in families.

Philia φιλια, is friendship, not just acquaintance.

Eros εροϲ is romantic love.

Agape aγαπη is charity.

I used the grid (above) in a talk I gave in a Russian literature class about how the characters in a novel related to each other--both good and bad. 

From my first reading of The Four Loves, I was interested in the relationship of the loves to each other. If you look across the grid, the top row are the "natural" loves, those shared with animals. The bottom row are "spiritual" loves, shared with spirits (for those who believe in a spiritual world) and people who are spiritual.  

The natural loves are always best when embodied.  We can maintain a family relationship at a distance, but a happy family wants to be together.  There are too many jokes for me to repeat about the difference between romance in person and on line.  

In the columns, the loves are merited, and unmerited.  Storge and Agape are alike in that they do not (or should not) depend on how good or bad the loved person is.  Parents love children whether they are beautiful, or not.  When Mother Teresa went to Calcutta, she helped those considered the worst: those of the lowest caste with leprosy.  

But we choose our friends and lovers based on merit.  The lover is dazzled by the beloved. The friend finds another who shares the same deep interest and says, "What! You too?" Romance and friendship can continue through hardship and grief, but they begin with merit. 

Friendship and romance, while similar in being based on merit, have opposite expression because one is spiritual and the other natural.  The posture of friendship is side by side sharing an activity or idea.  Lovers are face to face. They want each other. English idiom says this best.  If two friends become lovers, we say the friendship "turned into" love. 

The book is full of example, detail and clear explanation of the best and the worst of each kind of love.  I could (and have) recommend this book to anyone except a cave dwelling hermit--and maybe seeing what she is missing this book would lure her out of the cave.  

In a world so suffused with hate and manipulation it can be difficult to believe love is at the center of life, the universe and everything.  But reading this book, seeing how love is part of everything that is good in our lives, The Four Loves might be the most hopeful book I ever read.  

By the way, a decade ago, I wrote about a fellow soldier choosing between Eros and Philia.

First Book of 2022: Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

My first book of 2022 was in the category graphic novel. But the book in question is not a novel. It is a philosophy book that is written with words and drawings.  

But graphic novel is the category according to Wikipedia, so I will go with it:

A graphic novel is a book made up of comics content. Although the word "novel" normally refers to long fictional works, the term "graphic novel" is applied broadly and includes fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work. It is, at least in the United States, typically distinct from the term "comic book", which is generally used for comics periodicals and trade paperbacks.

Before I read Unflattening, I heard Nick Sousanis talk about how his book came to be and what he was trying to do with his use of graphics.  I loved hearing him talk about how our eyes follow images and graphical cues and how he used that knowledge to create the book.

I liked this review by comicsgrid.com

Over eight chapters, Unflattening follows an anonymous, sleepwalking figure as they step out of a regimented life and take flight to explore new worlds. Sousanis draws the imagery of these worlds from TV, movies, the classical canon of art, and scientific diagrams. Unflattening embraces visual references from Paleolithic cave prints to James Bond films, and verbal ones from Bruno Latour to Wallace Stevens. The protagonist bears at one time Hermes’ sandals and at others wings of its own; it is incarnated as a Pinocchio-like puppet confounded by a centipede’s existential challenge, ‘Who are you?’, before finally being reborn as a child reminiscent of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The comic’s final image is of that newborn’s eye opening to see the world as if for the first time.

In the course of this journey, Sousanis dethrones the primacy of the word in a kind of Copernican revolution. He argues that image is not mere illustration, subordinate to words, but an equal partner and component in thinking. He explores stereoscopic vision and the principles of astronomical observation as metaphors in order to define ‘unflattening’ as ‘a simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing.’ (Sousanis 2015: 32).

An extended sequence takes us through the world of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, in which two-dimensional ‘A. Square’ encounters a three-dimensional sphere who exposes him to previously unimagined perspectives. We need each other’s points of view, Sousanis tells us, to avoid become constrained in set modes of thinking and blinkered perspectives, just as A. Square must be enlightened by his encounter with the sphere. Words and images together free us from the limitations presented by either the purely visual or purely verbal. 

And here are a few pages.  

I hesitated to read the book for a long time, but now I am reading two other graphic novels (both biographies of scientists).  Unflattening will take your mind places it has never been before.

Enjoy!

My books of 2021:

Fiction

Non fiction 

Favorite

Books of 2022

January 6, 2021, the End of Democracy in America

 

Trump horde ending democracy in America

From the beginning of my military service nearly 50 years ago, until the last my last day in the Army in May 2016, I attended dozens of change of command ceremonies. After the flag is passed the new and out-going commanders often make a speech.  Probably one in three of those speeches made a sincere nod to the American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.  

For the mostly conservative officers taking or relinquishing authority, they linked themselves to a 200-plus year American tradition--a hallmark of American exceptionalism.  

But that ended one year ago today when the 45th President sent a mob to overturn the election he just lost.  The coup d'etat was mere minutes from success.  Hundreds of Trump supporters were screaming to kill Mike Pence.  If they had managed to stop the vote, the election could have been thrown into the House of Representatives. That is the last possible place in which a disputed election can be decided according to the Constitution.  

With one vote per state, Trump would have taken the election.  

All of my adult life I had an implicit belief in progress in America: more rights for more people.  The racist rednecks would recede, I believed.  

With Trump's nomination and election, my belief cracked.  After Charlottesville it was shattered. With January 6, it was gone. The end of democracy was only a matter of when.  

America no longer has a tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.  I voted for Joe Biden and hoped normal order could be restored in America.  One year later, the democratic party is fighting about infrastructure and social programs and has done nothing to fix the electoral count act or secure voting.  The Republicans are running MAGA candidates all over the country to get control of election counting.  How much does voting really matter if the Republicans are in charge of counting.  

In 2016, 63 million Americans voted for a failed casino owner who played a business man on a game show.  In 2020, 74 million Americans watched a lying buffoon for four years and said they would like four more.  The people who claim most publicly to be followers of Jesus (Love your neighbor; Love your enemies; turn the other cheek) worship Trump much more fervently than they follow anything Christ ever said or did. I have read and re-read the New Testament. Few people who have ever lived are less like Jesus than Donald Trump.

January 6, 2021, was a dress rehearsal.  The command performance is three years away. In 2025, there will be no need for a mob to attack.  The criminals will be in the building. They will use the power entrusted to them by the Constitution to end democracy. 

The Roman poet Horace fought to preserve the Republic during the Civil War after Julius Caesar took power and was murdered.  The Republicans lost. Horace was wounded and lost everything.  When he recovered, he knew the Republic was gone, so he made peace with his circumstances and became a poet, living the best life he could. 

I hope to be like Horace, to do my best to preserve the Republic, and when that fails, to protect my family and live as well as possible.