S5E19 – TFL 5 – “Eros” (Part I)

The team begin talking about the third of the four loves, Eros.

S5E19: “Eros” – Part I (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

A man in this state [of eros] really hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself… If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, “To go on thinking of her.” He is love’s contemplative.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

Chit-Chat

Matt’s Updates

• Fertility Prayers
• Alcoholism Prayers
• GR Catholic Community Building Prayers

Andrew’s Updates

• Conversation with Norbert Feinendegen about Conversion Date
• Pastoral future…
• OXBRIDGE!

David’s Updates

• Joe and Kylie Wedding
• In preparing for this episode on Eros, I’ve been looking at Theology of the Body, the teachings of Pope St. John-Paul II, but in so doing I came across the late Pontiff’s definition of friendship:
  • “Friendship, as has been said, consists in a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person’s good.” ― Pope John Paul II, Love and Responsibility
• I don’t have a whole lot to add, except to share this iTunes review from M.Keeley:
  • I love the wit and the fun you guys have in going through the works of CS Lewis. I just started listening to this podcast a couple of months ago and go between this and White Horse Inn in the mornings as a form of devotions. Thank you so much!

Beverage and Toast

• Andrew
  • Guinness

• Matt
  • Water

• David
  • Inchmurrin – Madeira  Wood Finish

We toasted Patreon supporters Bill & Joanna Martel.

Recap & Summary

Recap

In the introduction, we heard that when love becomes a god, it becomes a demon. We also learned about Gift-love and Need-love.

Then in the next chapter, we read about the love of nature and country, as well as hearing about Appreciative-love.

Then we read about the first of the four loves… Affection, storge, the love of the familiar which goes bad when it’s assumed or becomes consuming or obnoxious.

We then spent all of last month talking about philia, Friendship, and since this was the most recent chapter, I’ll re-cap in more detail. Earlier in the month, we read how it was prized in antiquity but mostly ignored today We distinguished Friendship from Eros, Companionship, and Allyship. We said that it is uninquisitive, humbling and not very jealous. We considered whether Friendship is beneficial to society or the individual, and said that it can exist between the sexes, but only where there is companionship already. Then, last week we wrapped up the chapter by looking at some of the objections offered against Philia and in so doing examined it more deeply We saw that friendship is emboldening (for good or ill) We saw it causes a deafness to outsiders (again, for good or ill) and, unfortunately, that it can ultimately lead to different kinds of pride We considered Lewis’ claim that it is rarely used in Scripture to describe the relationship between God and Man (and why that might be) And we wrapped things up by considering the role of Divine Providence in the selection of our friends, and hinted at what might be needed in order to save Friendship from its various perversions.

Summary

Lewis introduces the Greek word “Eros” to describe romantic love and distinguishes it from its carnal element which he calls “Venus”. Jack says that the presence of Eros is not necessary for Venus and does not make Venus automatically moral. He notes that Venus may precede or follow Eros, but he thinks it’s usually the latter, with Eros transforming a need-pleasure into the most Appreciative of loves and even becoming a mode of perception. Venus by itself seeks pleasure, but Eros seeks the person. Lewis ends by rejecting the common assumption that Eros’ chief danger lies in its carnal element…

S5E18 Episode Summary

Discussion

1. “Eros and Venus”

This is the material which managed to get Lewis in trouble with the Episcopal bishops!

Okay! Lewis begins this chapter by describing and defining! What is Eros? He says it’s romantic love – the state of “being in love”. He distinguishes this from sexuality, saying that sexual experience can take place with  Eros or without Eros. Also, while sexuality is an element of Eros, it isn’t the only element. He calls the carnal element, “Venus”. In his essay on Edmund Spenser, he says that in medieval allegory Cupid was typically used for Love, but Cupid’s mother, Venus, for mere sexual appetite. Jack is making these distinctions between Eros and Venus in order to limit the scope of the chapter. He’s not going to talk about “mere sexuality”, because what he cares about in this chapter is Eros.

One can’t talk about Eros or Venus without bringing up the issue of morality. Lewis affirms:

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 lawful.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

He notes that, in the past, many marriages were arranged by the parents and had little to do with Eros. Powered only by Christian duty and “animal desire”, husbands and wives came together in the marital embrace and raised their families. He points out that unions which have “soaring and iridescent Eros” and even those which care little about the sense experience can actually be morally reprehensible! They can involve deception, betrayal, and adultery. He says:

It has not pleased God that the distinction between a sin and a duty should turn on fine feelings. This act, like any other, is justified (or not) by far more prosaic and definable criteria; by the keeping or breaking of promises, by justice or injustice, by charity or selfishness, by obedience or disobedience.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

He says something similar in the marriage chapter of Mere Christianity

2. “The difference Eros makes”

Lewis assumes that the evolutionist would say that Eros in humans grows out of Venus, human romance grows out of animal sexulity: 

…a late complication and development of the immemorial biological impulse

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

However, he says that we can’t assume that this is also true for each individual person. While a man may feel sexual attraction towards a woman and later fall in love with her (like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman), it might instead be the other way around, and Jack actually thinks the latter is more common. 

If, at times, Lewis can come across as a little clinical, what he says here is well worth remembering:

Very often what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved – a general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality. A man in this state really hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself… If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, “To go on thinking of her.” He is love’s contemplative. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

Even when the sexual element later awakes in him, Jack says he’s not then going to conclude that this is what it was all always about. 

3. “Isolated Venus”

Lewis then considers what happens when Eros is not present. After reviewing some lines of dialogue from George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, he concludes:

Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself [the sensory pleasure]; Eros wants the Beloved.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

He then speaks about how we describe a lustful man on the prowl. We say he “wants a woman” but what he doesn’t so much want a woman but pleasure, and a woman is “the necessary piece of apparatus” for that pleasure. In a brutal line, he says:

How much [the man] cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

Jack says that Eros doesn’t make a man choose a mate based on a thought-out calculation of what pleasure he’ll receive from her. The Roman Poet Lucretius thought this way, but he was by all accounts something of a deviant who actually thought love impairs sexual pleasure!

“A person’s rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.”

Pope John Paul II, Love and Responsibility

“Treating a person as a means to an end, and an end moreover which in this case is pleasure, the maximization of pleasure, will always stand in the way of love.”

John Paul II, Love and Responsibility

I’m reminded of 2 Samuel 13, with Amnon and Tamar:

Then Amnon hated her with intense hatred. In fact, he hated her more than he had loved her. Amnon said to her, “Get up and get out!”

2 Samuel 13:15

4. “The Power of Love”

So now that we’ve seen what Venus is like on its own we can clearly see the transforming power of Eros:

…[it] wonderfully transforms…a Need-pleasure into the most Appreciative of all pleasures… in Eros, a Need, at its most intense, sees the object most intensely as a thing admirable in herself, important far beyond her relation to the lover’s need.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

Jack says that this really needs to be experienced in order to be believed. I mean, why desire a person rather than simply what that person can give? He notes that it’s hard to explain but that loves are trying to express it when they say they want to “eat” each other. 

5. “Looking along Eros”

I’m sure Andrew is going to have something to say about the next next section and these lines in particular:

Without Eros sexual desire, like every other desire, is a fact about ourselves. Within Eros it is rather about the Beloved.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

This looking outward becomes almost a mode of perception. Jack says:

[Eros] becomes almost a mode of perception, entirely a mode of expression. It feels objective; something outside us, in the real world. That is why Eros, though the king of pleasures, always (at his height) has the air of regarding pleasure as a by-product. To think about it would plunge us back in ourselves, in our own nervous system. It would kill Eros, as you can “kill” the finest mountain prospect by locating it all in your own retina and optic nerves.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

This is very reminiscent of Samuel Alexander.

For one of the first things Eros does is to obliterate the distinction between giving and receiving.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

6. “Carnal Danger”

So we’ve spent most of this episode defining and describing, but as we wrap up today, Lewis wants to submit his responses to certain moral questions, all the while being open, as he says, …

…to correction by better men, better lovers and better Christians.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

Jack considers the view that the chief spiritual danger of Eros comes from its carnal element… He says that this view was widely held in the past, as well as today by many “unsophisticated” people. Under such a view, Eros is “noblest” and “purest” where Venus is minimized. However, St. Paul doesn’t seem to think that the chief danger of marriage is “a soul-destroying surrender to the senses”! The only thing he says about Venus in marriage is in 1 Corinthians 7:5 where he discourages prolonged abstinence. 

With regards to dangers, he instead speaks about the distractions of domesticity:

The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried woman is anxious about the affairs of the Lord… but the married woman is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please her husband.

1 Corinthians 7:32-34

…and Lewis concurs with this. He says:

The gnat-like cloud of petty anxieties and decisions about the conduct of the next hour have interfered with my prayers more often than any passion or appetite whatever.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

While Lewis dives deference to the medievals but notes that they were all celibates:

…and probably did not know what Eros does to our sexuality; how, far from aggravating, he reduces the nagging and addictive character of mere appetite.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 5)

So what does Lewis think is the chief spiritual danger in Eros? Well, we’ll have to talk about that in our next episode…

Wrap-Up

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