“The Four Loves” - 5 - Eros

Defining Venus vs. Eros

• Most animalistic?
• Sexuality is only an ingredient to the complex state of “being in love”
• Definition: Venus is the carnal element within Eros
• Claim: Absence/presence of Eros, does not affect the purity/impurity of Venus
  • and, mere sexuality is not enough

True Eros seems to come before Venus

The fact that she is a person is far less important than the fact that she is herself.

He is far more likely to feel that the incoming tide of Eros, having demolished many sand-castles and made islands of many rocks, has now at last with a triumphant seventh wave flooded this part of his nature also—the little pool of ordinary sexuality which was there on his beach before the tide came in.

Eros enters in like an invader, taking over and reorganising, one by one, the institutions of a conquered country. It may have taken over many others before it reaches the sex in him; and it will reorganise that too.

Eros desires the particular Beloved, not by the pleasure given, that can be given by others

• Venus wants the thing
• Eros wants the Beloved

Page 87-88 are just bangers after bangers

We say [that “a lustful man wants a woman]”. Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants pleasure for which a woman happens to be a necessary piece of apparatus.

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

Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. […] not the pleasure she can give.

(pp) No [true] lover calculates that their beloved is more pleasurable than others. If the question was raised, the answer is expected. But to even raise the question is to step out of Eros altogether.

Eros transforms (par excellence) a Need-pleasure into the most Appreciative-pleasure. Appreciating by desiring a human being, distinct from any pleasure they can give.

Eros seems objective, out of our subjective lens. Eros […] regards pleasure as a by-product. To think about it would “plunge us back” in our fleshly animalistic instincts.

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

Eros needs Venus to be authentically carnal and clumsy

The highest spiritual danger of Eros is not its Venus-carnality

In the past, Eros is viewed dangerous because of its carnality, and so purest and noblest when Venus is reduced to the minimum.

But Paul does not say that, only [[1 Cor 7]] (broken link, note not found), that it is actually marriage itself, not the marriage bed, that can hinder our spirituality. Small decisions are greater distractions.

The great, permanent temptation of marriage is not to sensuality but (quite bluntly) to avarice.

The real spiritual danger of Eros is when we take Venus too seriously

All my life a ludicrous and portentous solemnisation of sex has been going on.

The thing is serious, “yes; quadruply so”:

1. marriage’s mystical image of the union between God and Man
2. a natural “sacrament” of gender roles (the pagans saw this as Sky-Father and Earth-Mother)
3. resulting obligations and momentousness
4. emotional seriousness in the participants’ minds

But eating is also serious (LOL)

1. theologically — eucharist sacrament
2. ethically — feed the hungry
3. socially — table to talk
4. medically — what is a dyspeptic???

(pp) Yet we do not bring work-books to dinner, nor behave like in church. And it is gourmets, not saints, who come nearest to doing so.

Animals are always serious about food.

We must not be totally serious about Venus.

“It would do violence to our humanity.”

Every language and literature is full of jokes about sex. Many of them may be dull or disgusting and nearly all of them are old.

But even that is still “less dangerous” to the Christian than “reverential gravity”.

Banish play and laughter from the bed of love and you may let in a false goddess. She will be even falser than Aphrodite of the Greeks; […]

Venus herself will have a terrible revenge if we take her (occasional) seriousness at its face value.

When too serious, even cheeky glances can’t be exchanged across the room, then “she” may withdraw from both — or perhaps only from one of them.

Eros and Venus are incongruently symbiotic

Eros is designed to be so transcendent and soaring — but it’s linked in “incongruous symbiosis” with a mundane bodily appetite (temperature, balance, digestion).

In Eros at times we seem to be flying; Venus gives us the sudden twitch that reminds us we are really captive balloons.

It is a bad thing not to be able to take a joke. Worse, not to take a divine joke ; made, I grant you, at our expense, but also (who doubts it?) for our endless benefit.

The body is “Brother Ass” — a clumsy beauty

Man’s three views on the body:

ONE. To the Ascetic pagans: prison/tomb. Christians like Fisher: a sack of dung, food for worms, “Temptation for bad men, humiliation to good ones”.

TWO. Neo-Pagans, the nudists, to whom the body is glorious.

THREE. St. Francis: The body is “Brother Ass”.

No one can revere (too highly) or hate (too lowly) a donkey.

It is useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot. Both pathetically and absurdly beautiful.

The body’s purpose is to play the part of the buffoon.

Until some theory has sophisticated them, every [person] in the world knows this. The fact that we have bodies is the oldest joke there is.

Eros (like death, figure-drawing and the study of medicine) may at moments cause us to take it with total seriousness. The error consists in concluding that Eros should always do so and permanently abolish the joke.

Venus must have levity to avoid idolatry

Lovers should feel play and comedy, about Venus, the body’s (comedic, awkward, fleshly) expression of Eros.

And the body would frustrate us if this were not so.

It would be too clumsy an instrument to render love’s music, unless its very clumsiness could be felt as adding to the total experience its own grotesque charm […]

The highest does not stand without the lowest.

There are indeed moments of high poetry in the flesh itself. But […] an irreducible element of obstinate and ludicrous un-poetry. If it does not make itself felt on one occasion, it will on another. Far better to plant it foursquare on the within the drama of Eros as comic relief, than pretend you haven’t noticed it.

Yeah worshipping Venus will only leave you disappointed of the false goddess.

Our clumsy-bodies require this relief (as per the symbiotic nature above).

• poetry / un-poetry
• gravity / levity

The longing for a union which only the flesh can mediate while the flesh, our mutually excluding bodies, renders it forever unattainable, can have the grandeur of a metaphysical pursuit.

A pure seriousness to Venus, a refusal to be surrender to levity, may cause us to have a pagan sacrament of sex (where we become the gods).

Venus offers humans to cosplay

In Friendship, each participant stands precisely himself. But in Eros, we play as representatives of the Male and Female. (Not as an impoverishment but an enrichment to be aware of the forces older and less personal)

But we “play” a role. And the woman should not offer to man the submission that should only be given to God. The man should not name himself a god with the claim that Venus, for a moment, exalts him with sovereignty.

Is there a masquerade play within the most real unmasked sheerly genuine act?

“Naked” was originally a past participle, the act of “naking”. Which suggests that our default natural state is “clothed”, and that the abnormal human has somehow become nude.

Nudity emphasises common humanity and strips away the individual. In that way we are “more ourselves” when clothed.

By nudity the lovers cease to be John and Mary; the universal He and She are emphasised. You could almost say they put on nakedness as a ceremonial robe—or as the costume for a charade.

(pp) Thus we should not be serious in the wrong way. The pagan Sky-Father is but a dream of One far greater than Zeus and is far more masculine than the male.

A mortal man at most can only wear a tinselled imitation crown. But Lewis does not call it this in contempt; he likes ritual and private theatricals and even charades.

Paper crowns have their legitimate, and (in the proper context) their serious, uses.

LOL when i came up with the section heading

The “Male” bears a crown of paper and thorns

We may not take Christian view of Eros seriously enough.

(pp) Christian law crowns the man permanently bestowing—or should I say, inflicting?—a certain “headship” on him. This is a very different coronation.

This [[Eph 5#25]] (broken link, note not found) headship is most fully embodied not in the “best husband we can be”. The marriage closest definitionally, is most like a crucifixion. Whose wife receives the most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is—in her nature—least lovable.

The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man’s marriage, but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence.

(pp) Disclaimer, that there is no virtue nor wisdom in seeking such a miserable marriage. Just like unnecessary martyrdom or deliberately courting persecution. But, none the less, it is that person in whom the pattern of the Master is most unambiguously realised.

The sternest feminist need not grudge [the males about] the crown offered to it either in the Pagan or in the Christian mystery. For the one is of paper, and the other of thorns.

The real danger is not that the husband may grasp the latter too eagerly; but that they will allow or compel their wives to ursup it.

Eros claims deity

Eros can demand absolute sacrifice

Eros brutally/calculatedly prefers to be miserable together than joyous apart.

Eros: “Better this than parting. Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together.” If the voice within does not say this, it is not the voice of Eros.

Caleb’s reflections: I dunno if this is absolute, or needs to be nuanced, or else dependant on our definitions. Lewis goes on to describe this “total commitment” as Eros’ characteristic flaw. But surely a non-ravenous impure Eros would release their Beloved if it is objectively better to be apart from the mere paper-crown? Of course, within marriage it would betray the should-be-permanent contract, but what of outside marriage?

Eros speaks like a god, in total commitment and disregard of happiness.

The love which leads to cruel and perjured unions, even to suicide-pacts and murder, is not likely to be wandering lust or idle sentiment…

We idolise Eros itself, not the clumsy Beloved

Schools of thought about the transcendence of Eros. But embarrassing consequence: Eros unites the most (predictably) unsuitable yoke-fellows.

Shavian Romanticism on a “Life Force” guiding the eventual production of the perfect superman. But intensity of Eros between a couple is no evidence that their offspring will be satisfactory (or any at all). Two good “DNA strains”, not two good lovers, would be the recipe for better children.

Eros does have 🪞 “nearness in likeness” but not necessarily 🏃 “nearness in approach”. But Eros’ “total commitment” can be a good expression of nearness-in-approach—or become a demon.

People in love cannot be moved by kindness, And opposition makes them feel like martyrs (some poet)

Eros is powerful, we call it “religion of love”.

Do theologians fear that lovers idolise each other? But marriage is so prose and business-like. Does anyone who had felt thirst for the Uncreated, really suppose that the created Beloved could ever satisfy it? Relevant, yes, but object? Ridiculous.

The real danger, is that lovers idolise not each other, but Eros itself.

Eros justifies, extenuates—almost sanctions and sanctifies—ANY actions it leads to.

We want to blame lovers, they say “Love made me do it”, versus a “Anger made me do it”, or “Fear made me do it”. With an unapologetic, devout, boastful appeal to higher authority. They “feel like martyrs”. Confessing allegiance to the god of Eros-love.

Lovers have their own “law”, religion and god. Resistance is apostasy, and true temptation is just pious duty. Not just acts of unchastity, but injustice too. “It is for Love’s sake that I neglected my parents, left my children, cheated my partner, failed my friend at his greatest need.” One may even feel religious merit in sacrificing the great cost of one’s conscience.

Eros is the most mortal of the loves (yet claiming the highest seat)

For all his boast of transcendence, Eros is the most obviously temporary and fickle. What is baffling is the combination of his fickleness with his protests of permanency.

To be in love is to both to intend and promise lifelong fidelity—vowing unasked, implicitly and necessarily. “I will ever be true”, not hypocritically but sincerely.

No experience will ever cure him of the delusion.

We all have heard of people who are “in love” again every few years; each time sincerely convinced that “this time it’s the real thing”, that their wanderings are over, that they have found their true love and will themselves be true till death.

And yet Eros is in a sense right to make this promise. We are right to reject the intolerable idea that “falling in love” should be transitory, by instinct of its nature.

In one high bound it has overleaped the wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being.

“Spontaneously and without effort” we fulfil “loving our neighbour as ourselves” to one person. It is a foretaste of Love Himself, with no rival. It is even preparation.

Simply to relapse from it, merely to “fall out of” love again […] is a sort of dis-redemption.

We must upkeep the promise that Eros gives

Can we be in this selfless liberation for a lifetime? Hardly for a week.

(pp) The old self turns out not so dead as pretended—as after religious conversion. Knocked out, but he’ll be back again, roaring or just grumbling. And Venus will often slip back into mere sexuality.

But these lapses do not destroy marriages between “decent and sensible” people. If it did, then they idolised Eros, expecting that mere feeling had the power and truthfulness of a god to permanently sustain “love”. They blame Eros (or more usually each other).

(pp) Eros just makes a gigantic promise, showing glimpses what its performance would be like. He, like a godparent, makes the vows; it is we who must keep them, and must labour in the monotony and hardships of daily life to 🏃 approach nearer to what glimpses has revealed.

It takes humility, charity, and divine grace; the whole Christian life seen from one particular angle.

Eros, like the other loves, but more strikingly because if its strength, sweetness, terror and hight post, reveals its true status. He cannot of himself be what, nevertheless, he must be if he is to remain Eros. He needs help; therefore needs to be ruled. The god dies or becomes a demon unless he obeys God.

Eros may mercilessly chain two mutual tormentors, living on in said glimpses of splendour.

The lovers’ old hyperbole of “eating” each other can come horribly near to the truth.