In may latest article for the Imaginative Conservative, I have the temerity and some might say foolhardiness to argue with the great C. S. Lewis about the meaning of love. Am I mad, or merely arrogant, or do I perhaps have a point?
Read on:
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/10/how-many-loves-arguing-with-cs-lewis.html
I agree. I’ve often wondered at what point in Lewis’ life he wrote that, before or after Joy Davidman. I’d guess it was after. I’ve also wondered if he would have spoken differently after A Grief Observed.
Actually, I’d like to defend Lewis a bit here, and also suggest that Pope Benedict XVI was following a somewhat similar analysis of love in “Deus Caritas Est”. Here’s the comment I left at the Imaginative Conservative …
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Lewis is describing four “aspects” of love, and Benedict XVI’s encyclical “Deus Caritas Est” insists that Eros and Agape are indeed two of love’s aspects, which, though they seem contradictory, must always be united, for Love is one, as God is one. Benedict argues that while Eros without Agape tends to become mere lust, Agape without Eros becomes a kind of clinical, disinterested benevolence that ultimately does not value the other. If Lewis’ work helps redeem Eros for Christians (as Michael W. Perry implies it does in his comment above), it is doing a great deal of good. I’ve written more about this here – http://thwordinc.blogspot.com/search/label/EROS