C. S. Lewis – “The four loves”

—Affection—

The laws of affection

What is the meaning of affection and what are its foundations? How is affection different from the other loves and what makes it special? ... And, besides all these considerations, how people can feed and grow this specific kind of love? C. S. Lewis answered these questions in his book, “The four loves”. What I have chosen to approach is the matter of laws in affection, as Lewis wrote about them. “Love knows no rules”, one might say, but there are certain situations when affection can appear, remain or increase its intensity.

C. S. Lewis noticed that affection breaks the barriers of personal taste, “age, sex, class and education”, resemblance or even species. One feels affection for the other beneath their common activities or personal traits; it comes natural from the principle of the bond between mother ship and offspring and reduces the effect the unattractive aspect or the lack of sympathy that would hinder the establishing of any other relationship (in friendship, erotic loves). C. S. Lewis mentions the situation when people feel affection for “the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating”, due to the charitable, non-discriminating side of affection, which gathers together humans and crosses the stages when people are only strangers to each other, moreover, strangers that have nothing in common, nor reasons to like each other. With affection, people learn and discover the beauty in humans around them, as it defines them, not as it suits the personal preferences (“we are getting beyond our own idiosyncrasies, that we are learning to appreciate goodness or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence flavoured and served to suit our own palate”). Affection can do that, indeed!

Considering the natural principle of affection, one should not claim to request affection and to act egotistic and egoistic when given. It is necessary but not obligatory that a person one knows or even loves to respond the same way to his or her feelings. Also, there is no “right” to have this kind of love from the others when there are no merits for it. There may be, however, the “reasonable expectation” as Lewis writes, of one from its friends, to whom he had been together for a while. But definitely, no one should claim and crave for affection as a right of themselves, because this makes the bond tense and cause to break. It comes in conflict with the affection inner laws!

One important law, as I noticed in “The four loves”, was familiarity. It seems that it needs time for affection to rise and grow. People feel attached to others who had become “old”: they got used to gestures, actions, responses, they come to know them so well, and the process of acceptance is completed and mutual. Old things, old friends become “dear with familiarity”; this means that affection is that particular feeling that becomes stronger in time and needs permanence and stability. Nor the less, it needs refreshment from people that surround us. Similarly to rules above, the man or women who needs and gives affection should respect the feeling itself, not the result or the effects of it! Familiarity should not be turned into a right, a state of fact, or, worse, into an artificial condition for affection to be maintained. Affection does not stand for “Company Manners” and formalisation but the

courtesy must not be excluded, in any situation. Affection caresses the familiarity and tolerates the unlovable, but should be not abused of.

Another important rule or law of affection comes from the definition of affection: the bond between parents and offspring, the relation between need-love and gift-love. Affection follows to construct the autonomy of its object; no matter it would be an animal, flower of human. In order to keep this feeling alive and protected from perversion, Lewis notices that should be avoided cases when the one who loves satisfies the needs his love’s object doesn’t have. Affection “must work towards its own abdication”, Lewis says, meaning that one shall fight against his “need to be needed” and focus on something more abstract, higher and complete.

To conclude, beside decency, reason, humility, justice and self-denial, I would write down the major law of affection: the aim for another kind of feeling, for “a higher sort of love”. For affection cannot live by itself (by giving or pretending love), it should be distributed to another channels and used as the base of human structure, and portrayed in every relation one would ever establish, no matter its principles, characteristics or boundaries.

Marin Maria-Andreea, PPS, an I, grupa 2