A SMIDGEN OF RELIGION
There are two types of love: Gift-love and Need-love.
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“The typical example of Gift-love would be that love which moves a man to work and plan and save for the future well-being of his family which he will die without sharing or seeing; of the second, that which sends a lonely or frightened child to its mother’s arms” (743).
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“Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: ‘We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.’ Need-love says of a woman ‘I cannot live without her’; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection — if possible, wealth: (753).
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“God is love… God was under no necessity to create… God is a ‘host’ who deliberately creates His own parasite; causes us to be that we may exploit and ‘take advantage of’ Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves” (827).
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Needing others for emotional support, physical healing, or intellectual growth is natural and NOT necessarily selfish. Otherwise, people would be isolated.
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“No one calls a child selfish because it turns for comfort to its mother; nor an adult who turns to his fellow ‘for company’… Since we do in reality need one another (‘it is not good for man to be alone’), then the failure of this need to appear as Need-love in consciousness — in other words, the illusory feeling that it is good for us to be alone — is a bad spiritual symptom; just as lack of appetite is a bad medical symptom because men do really need food” (744).
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Just like how the Imitation stated that the highest does not stand without the lowest, there wouldn’t be higher/deeper forms of love if there weren’t lower forms of love.
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Regardless, in English, we use the same word for “love” for loving a card game and loving a person.
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There are two types of pleasures: Need-pleasures and Pleasures of Appreciation.
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Getting a free margarita could be something that you could do without (but be pleasurable when you have it). But if you become addicted to alcohol, it becomes a need.
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“Pleasures can be divided into two classes: those which would not be pleasures at all unless they were preceded by desire. And those which are pleasures in their own right and need no such preparation. An example of the first would be a drink of water. This is a pleasure if you are thirsty and a great one if you are very thirsty. But probably no one in the world, except in obedience to thirst or to a doctor’s orders, ever poured himself out a glass of water and drank it just for the fun of the thing. An example of the other class would be the unsought and unexpected pleasures of smell — the breath from a bean-field or a row of sweet-peas meeting you on your morning walk, You were in want of nothing, completely contented, before it; the pleasure, which may be very great, is an unsolicited, super-added gift” (749).
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“If you are given coffee or beer where you expected (and would have been satisfied with) water, then of course you get a pleasure of the first kind (allaying of thirst) and one of the second (a nice taste) at the same time. Again, an addiction may turn what was once a pleasure of the second kind into one of the first” (750).
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Need-loves only last as long as the need lasts.
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“The smell of frying food is very different before and after breakfast” (751).
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“The Need-love, like the Need-pleasure, will not last longer than the need… That is why the world rings with the complaints of mothers whose grown-up children neglect them and of forsaken mistresses whose lovers’ love was pure need — which they have satisfied. Our need-love for God is in a different position because our need of Him can never end either in this world or in any other. But our awareness of it can, and then the Need-love dies too” (752).
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TYPE 1: AFFECTION (AKA “STORGE” IN GREEK)
This love is commonly associated with the love between parents and offspring.
Affection requires familiarity (such as people we went to K-12 school with, whether we liked them or not).
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“The dog barks at strangers who have never done it any harm and wags it tail for old acquaintances even if they never did it a good turn. The child will love a crusty old gardener who has hardly ever taken any notice of it and shrink from the visitor who is making every attempt to win its regard. But it must be an old gardener, one who has ‘always’ been there — the short but seemingly immemorial ‘always’ of childhood” (764).
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Affection is the most humble form of love, not necessarily worth bragging about.
“Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine. Affection almost slinks or seeps through our lives. It lives with humble, un-dress-private things; soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing-machine, a gollywog left on the lawn” (765).
Affection can serve as a basis for / intertwine with other forms of love.
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“As gin is not only a drink in itself but also a base for many mixed drinks, so Affection, besides being a love itself, can enter into the other loves and colour them all through and become the very medium in which from day to day they operate” (765).
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Affection is liking the people/ things already around you anyways (and not just the people/things you sought out).
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“‘Dogs and cats should always be brought up together,’ said someone, ‘it broadens their minds so.’ Affection broadens ours; of all natural loves it is the most catholic, the least finical, the broadest. The people with whom you are thrown together in the family, the college, the mess, the ship, the religious house, are from this point of view a wider circle than the friends, however numerous, whom you have made for yourself in the outer world. By having a great many friends I do not prove that I have a wide appreciation for human excellence. You might as well say I prove the width of literary taste by being able to enjoy all the books in my own study. The answer is the same in both cases — ‘You chose those books. You chose those friends. Of course they suit you.’ The truly wide taste in reading is that it enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop. The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whim one has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching up first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who ‘happen to be there’” (767).
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Change disrupts familiarity and can thus disrupt old feelings of affection.
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If twins are born up doing everything together and then suddenly one becomes interested in poetry or science or a type of music or religion, the other one no longer shares everything with them and loses some feelings of affection for their sibling.
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If an atheist family is used to all its members being atheist but then one converts to Christianity (or for the opposite case, a church-going family has one of its members become atheist), the change forces them to leave the comfort of what is known and go into uncertain, uncharted territory that they’re not used to.
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TYPE 2: FRIENDSHIP
Friends are usually an exclusive circle of like-minded people who we get along with and grow with (whether with the friends as a good influence or a bad influence).
“To say ‘There are my friends’ implies ‘Those are not’” (782).
“Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travellers” (786).
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“Friendship (as the ancients saw it) can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse” (796).
“As I know that I should be an Outsider to a circle of golfers, mathematicians, or motorists, so I claim the equal right of regarding them as Outsiders to mine. People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often. // The danger is that this partial indifference or deafness to outside opinion, justified and necessary though it is, may lead to a wholesale indifference or deafness” (796).
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TYPE 3: EROS
Eros is the kind of love that lovers are in.
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“I suppose no one now believes that jealousy is especially connected with erotic love. If anyone does the behaviour of children, employees, and domestic animals ought soon to undeceive him. Every kind of love, almost every kind of association, is liable to it” (772).
“We must go back to our Bibles. The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the Church — read on –and give his life for her (Eph. 5:25)” (812).
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“Of himself he always tends to turn ‘being in love’ into a sort of religion. // Theologians have often feared, in this love, a danger of idolatry. I think they meant by this that the lovers might idolise one another. That does not seem to me to be the real danger; certainly not in marriage. …The real danger seems to me not that the lovers will idolise each other but that they will idolise Eros himself. // I do not of course mean that they will build altars or say prayers to him” (816).
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Don’t base your entire life/ happiness on things that won’t last forever.
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“In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St Augustine describes the desolation in which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him (Confessions IV, 10). Then he draws a moral. This is what comes, he says, of giving one’s heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away. Of course this is excellent sense. Don’t put your goods in a leaky vessel. Don’t spend too much on a house you may be turned out of” (822-823).
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Love requires vulnerability.
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“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable” (823).
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Don’t prioritize anyone or anything more than God.
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“As so often, Our Lord’s own words are both far fiercer and far more tolerable than those of the theologians. He says nothing about guarding against earthly loves for fear we might be hurt; He says something that cracks like a whip about trampling them all under foot the moment they hold us back from following Him. ‘If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife… and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14:26). // …I think Our Lord, in the sense here intended, ‘hated’ St Peter when he said, ‘Get thee behind me.’ … A man, said Jesus, who tries to serve two masters, will ‘hate’ the one and ‘love’ the other… Consider again, ‘I loved Jacob and I hated Esau’ (Mal. 1:2-3). …So, in the last resort, we must turn down or disqualify our nearest and dearest when they come between our obedience to God” (824-825).