Love

We might stop and note here, again, how little importance Austen attributes to love. We think love is all you need.

If Frank's story were a Hollywood movie, the central question would be, "Is Frank really in love?" because Hollywood always takes it that two people who are really in love are good persons. Love, we think, is a good and pure thing that guarantees the goodness of everything it touches. The lover in a movie might hurt the one he loves but, again because he is in love, he will do what it takes to fix the situation. In Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen blows that illusion to smithereens. As we will see, Willoughby really is in love and that is not enough.

So what's wrong with Four Loves?

That's a long answer. A short introduction to the long answer might go like this:

Lewis says the Greeks have four words for love and we have only one. That's sort of but not really true. We have other words such as Friendship to mean something pretty close to (close enough to) philia.

And come at the telescope from the other end and we might say, the Greeks have these four words but none of them and even all four put together don't quite mean what we mean by love. Our word may well be better and it may be—I'd argue that it certainly is the case—that we can get a much better understanding of what agape means if we begin with the meanings of the modern English word love than we will ever get of love by starting with agape.

CS Lewis's Four loves

Okay, let me begin by admitting that Iwas raised by liberal Christians and was, consequently, fed a steady diet of CS Lewis from an early age. Even though I resisted reading any of the many Lewis books in the house, I was being fed the stuff indirectly as he, along with Thomas Merton and a liberal reading of Thomas Aquinas, was such a huge influence on my parents thinking that almost everything they believed was coloured by something Lewis wrote. Even now I will sometimes say something that I honestly believe to be my own thought and be told that I am in fact quoting some Lewis book I have never read.

Lately, I have begun to read some of his stuff and find it all familiar and harmless for the most part.

With one exception. The Four Loves strikes me as a painfully shallow, self righteous and wrong-headed piece of writing. I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it (following Jane Austen's example, I advocate reading promiscuously). I just think it's wrong. And I have at least one significant ally in this.

Deirdre McCloskey bases a lot of her thinking on Christian love but, like my parents, she is strongly influenced by Lewis to the detriment of her thinking.