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Book Review: The Four Loves
Nov. 27th, 2009 10:08 amNewest entry in the Reading British Classics project: C. S. Lewis's The Four Loves.
I like C. S. Lewis's non-fiction books. My favorite is still The Screwtape Letters, which is insightful and hilarious and something everyone should read, but The Four Loves is nevertheless interesting and well-written too. Philip Pullman still has a long way to go if he wants to compete.
My favorite parts of this book are the first two chapters, "Likings and Loves for the Sub-human" (sub-human meaning inanimate objects) and Affection - simply because no one writes about Affection anymore, and C. S. Lewis does it quite well, the way that one can have affection for someone one does not particularly like, merely because they're there. (Authors would do well to remember this. I really dislike scenes where a minor character dies, and the major characters are all "Not my one true love. What's for dinner?" No. The death of acquaintances doesn't usually sink people into storms of grief, but it isn't shrugged off so lightly either. Even at a distance death casts a pall.)
Lewis also comments on the human tendency to start ranking things whenever we're presented with a list or even just a dyad: somehow it isn't complete till one is Best and the other is Worst. But it's neither necessary nor helpful to rank the types of love; they aren't separate platonic ideals, but necessary to each other. Erotic love may be delicious, but it won't survive long if the parties aren't affectionate towards each other, and friendship - Lewis has a rather restricted definition of friendship here; friendship is the meeting of minds - may not be strictly necessary, but life is gray without it.
It's kind of amusing that Lewis felt the need, a mere four pages into his chapter on friendship, to offer a smack-down to the Freudian proto-slashers who think that all friendships are really just repressed homosexuality. Ignoring the homophobia with which the argument is expressed - Lewis is a man of his times - there is a legitimate criticism here: try to reduce all human experience to the sexual, and you end up leaving out a lot.
He also leaves women's friendships out of the friendship chapter, but he has the sense to state specifically that he is doing so, and to say further that he's leaving them out because he really doesn't know what women's friendships with each other are like. This is perhaps not ideal, but it seems fair.
This digression brings us to the big problem with essentially everything Lewis wrote, especially his non-fiction. He's really at his worst when he talks about women or gay people, and when he does I usually start skimming.
Now you may ask - surely that's a pretty big caveat? Lewis is great as long as he doesn't speak about approximately sixty percent of the population? But that isn't what I mean. Most of the time he's talking about humanity generally, because the soul has no sex and virtues and vices are ultimately the same for everyone. It's the rare passages where he ceases to speak about humans and starts to speak speak specifically about groups of humans he is perhaps less familiar with - women and homosexuals - that he gets muddled.
But again - those passages are rare, and they are for me overshadowed by the clarity, economy, and elegance of his writing. His books are entertaining and enlightening to read; even when I disagree (and I often disagree) he makes me think and he makes me laugh, and I couldn't ask for more than that.
I like C. S. Lewis's non-fiction books. My favorite is still The Screwtape Letters, which is insightful and hilarious and something everyone should read, but The Four Loves is nevertheless interesting and well-written too. Philip Pullman still has a long way to go if he wants to compete.
My favorite parts of this book are the first two chapters, "Likings and Loves for the Sub-human" (sub-human meaning inanimate objects) and Affection - simply because no one writes about Affection anymore, and C. S. Lewis does it quite well, the way that one can have affection for someone one does not particularly like, merely because they're there. (Authors would do well to remember this. I really dislike scenes where a minor character dies, and the major characters are all "Not my one true love. What's for dinner?" No. The death of acquaintances doesn't usually sink people into storms of grief, but it isn't shrugged off so lightly either. Even at a distance death casts a pall.)
Lewis also comments on the human tendency to start ranking things whenever we're presented with a list or even just a dyad: somehow it isn't complete till one is Best and the other is Worst. But it's neither necessary nor helpful to rank the types of love; they aren't separate platonic ideals, but necessary to each other. Erotic love may be delicious, but it won't survive long if the parties aren't affectionate towards each other, and friendship - Lewis has a rather restricted definition of friendship here; friendship is the meeting of minds - may not be strictly necessary, but life is gray without it.
It's kind of amusing that Lewis felt the need, a mere four pages into his chapter on friendship, to offer a smack-down to the Freudian proto-slashers who think that all friendships are really just repressed homosexuality. Ignoring the homophobia with which the argument is expressed - Lewis is a man of his times - there is a legitimate criticism here: try to reduce all human experience to the sexual, and you end up leaving out a lot.
He also leaves women's friendships out of the friendship chapter, but he has the sense to state specifically that he is doing so, and to say further that he's leaving them out because he really doesn't know what women's friendships with each other are like. This is perhaps not ideal, but it seems fair.
This digression brings us to the big problem with essentially everything Lewis wrote, especially his non-fiction. He's really at his worst when he talks about women or gay people, and when he does I usually start skimming.
Now you may ask - surely that's a pretty big caveat? Lewis is great as long as he doesn't speak about approximately sixty percent of the population? But that isn't what I mean. Most of the time he's talking about humanity generally, because the soul has no sex and virtues and vices are ultimately the same for everyone. It's the rare passages where he ceases to speak about humans and starts to speak speak specifically about groups of humans he is perhaps less familiar with - women and homosexuals - that he gets muddled.
But again - those passages are rare, and they are for me overshadowed by the clarity, economy, and elegance of his writing. His books are entertaining and enlightening to read; even when I disagree (and I often disagree) he makes me think and he makes me laugh, and I couldn't ask for more than that.
