C. S. Lewis on Eros.

1. Venus may be animal-like.  But not Eros.

2. Eros and Venus are separable, and each is permissible without the latter.  Otherwise, many past marriages were immoral.  (Were they?  Were they really lacking in Eros?  Were they lacking in love?  Is CSL assuming Eros is a kind of feeling?)

3. Morality of sex is like other morality—loyalty, justice, etc.

4. Eros is a desire for another person.  This is difficult to understand.  What is it that one wants to do with the other person?  Merge?  Become them?  Eat them up?

• Focus on one’s own pleasure destroys Eros, because it re-focuses one on oneself.
• "No lover in the world ever sought the embraces of the woman he loved as the result of a calculation, however unconscious, that they would be more pleasurable than those of any other woman.  If he raised the question he would, no doubt, expect that this would be so.  Bt to raise it would be to step outside the world of Eros altogether." (p. 95)

· Within Eros, sexual desire is a “mode of perception”.  Normally, our desires tell us facts about ourselves.  Hunger tells us we need food—that we have an empty stomach.  But sexual desire, within Eros, does not tell us something about ourselves, such as that we desire a pleasure.  It speaks of something outside us: it tells us that the beloved is desirable.  Sure, one can talk of sexual desire as being inside oneself—just as one can talk of visual images being inside the retina.  But if we talk in this way, we miss something.  We miss the fact that that the visual images speak of something outside us, as does sexual desire.  Sexual desire tells us something about the beloved.  (Besides, the pleasure is shared: it is not just a desire solely inside oneself.  At least not when one is dealing with Eros, rather than just lust.)

· This is as in Appreciative pleasure.  Appreciative pleasure—affection—makes one love the way something is.  The nice whiff of fresh air.  But there is a difference.  Appreciation does not mind sharing.  Indeed, if I appreciate a nice whiff of fresh air, I’d like others to share in this joy.  But it is not so for Eros, obviously.  Why not?  Is it just selfishness?  (Some people thought so.)  Or is it that the kind of union that Eros seeks is a union that intrinsically can only exist between two humans?  When I like something, this can be quite disinterested.  But Eros is not disinterested—both the lover and the beloved are essential to it.

· It is also different from pure Gift-love.  When you are trying to give drink to the thirsty, you are trying to make yourself superfluous.  Obviously not so in the case of Eros! In Eros, giving and receiving are indistinguishable.

· Pope Benedict thinks that eros stands for the ascending aspect of love, love seeking something wonderful, while agape is the descending aspect where we give some of ourselves. He insists that in a truly human love, the two need to be intertwined. What Benedict calls eros and agape, CSL talks of as need-love and gift-love. Both agree that the two aspects must be intertwined.

· Both Benedict and CSL are worried that we will start worshipping Eros. CSL worries that then we will start using it as a justification for greed, lust, etc. Benedict is worried that if the focus is on Eros, then the beloved drops out of the picture and becomes a mere means to attainment of the divine madness.

· Eros, paradoxically, makes abstinence easier, CSL says.  Why?  Perhaps because it makes one love and respect the beloved?

5. Eros, like food, should not be treated too seriously.  It is important, sometimes very important, but is also a bit of a joke.  Try to see it from an alien point of view.

• It is the Venus aspect that brings Eros down to earth.  It is unpredictable, beyond our control.  And this, in turn, is the basis of jokes, like the one about the Frenchman and the oysters. 
• The body is funny.  It limits us and is awkward, and it is awkwardness and limitation that is the stuff of jokes.  Can one imagine a joke about an unlimited being?  Think of Aristophanes’ story—which is funny.

6. Venus does not aim at one’s own pleasure, and Eros does not aim at one’s own happiness.  One wants to be with the beloved, even in unhappiness.

7. Eros can lead to evil (unchastity and worse) as well as to good.  Cf. friendship.  Eros is not enough on its own.

• At the same time Eros lets one fulfill the commandment of loving one’s neighbor as oneself—in one case only.

8. We need Charity.  CSL sees all natural loves as becoming evil when idolized.  Eros, too, is one of these.  What is to be done?  For instance, it is difficult to love someone for life no matter what.  We know we may well fail.  Or worse, we might succeed, but at the cost of distorting this love into a god—or a demon, more precisely.  We might remain faithful to the person, but at the cost of being hateful to everybody else. 

· Without Charity, all the other loves die off, or worse.  There needs to be a sacrificial Gift-love for the other. 

· But how to have that?  How to love truly and purely?  How to make oneself into a truly good friend, or a truly good spouse, or a truly good son, or a truly good parent, or a truly good sister?  In each of these, nature tosses us into a certain kind of affection.  But the friendship will turn into a clique or dissolve;  the marriage will turn into hatred of everyone else or break apart;  one will grow to idolize one’s father or hate him;  one will “sacrifice” oneself for one’s children as Mrs. Fidget in a way that makes them hate one or else one will be cold and unloving;  etc.   Love is hemmed in with danger on all sides.  We see, in fact, that each of the natural loves satisfies Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean, according to which virtue always lies between two opposite vices.

· There is always selfishness (if only in the way Mrs. Fidget shows it).  But we do not want to be selfish.  So what are we to do?

· CSL points us to a fact about human nature that Aristotle seems to have missed.  We can try to achieve virtue, but surely we will always see that we have failed if we look at ourselves honestly.  We can see that we just don’t have the strength for it.  We can’t love as love tells us to.  This is a tragedy.  For we cannot be happy without loving truly.

· Is this true?

· What is CSL’s solution to this?  —  God’s grace.  We cannot do it on our own.  But God can use our natural loves to bring us closer to himself.   In doing this, the natural loves remain loves of the kind they are, but are transformed.  Only loves thus transformed will survive into the afterlife.

• Here an idea from Pope Benedict’s Deus Caritas Est might be helpful. Benedict insists that our love is a response to God’s love, rather than something simply initiated by us. Might not seeing it in this way guard one against idolizing our love? For then our love is not entirely ours—we love because we sense (intuitively?) that we are loved by God. The beloved is wonderful, but perfection need not be tyrannically expected, because our loving response is a response not just to the beloved, but to God’s love, and in loving the beloved, we are loving God, who does indeed have that perfection.

9. God doesn’t love us because we are lovable.  He loves us despite ourselves.