CSLewisDoodle | The Four Loves ('Eros' or 'The Love Between the Sexes') by C.S. Lewis Doodle @CSLewisDoodle | Uploaded November 2017 | Updated October 2024, 4 days ago.
This is an illustration of C.S. Lewis’ radio talk about the third of the four loves – ‘Eros’ or ‘The Love Between the Sexes’. Notes below...
When Lewis made these Four Loves recordings, he was very happily married and very much in love with his wife, Joy. Her cancer had been in remission almost a year at this point. The best description of Lewis’ transition to Eros is in a letter he wrote to a friend, where he said: “It is nice to have arrived at all this by something which began in Agape, proceeded to Philia, then became Pity [as to her plight], and only after that, Eros. As if the highest of these, Agape, had successfully undergone the sweet humiliation of an incarnation.”
Originally 'The Four Loves' series was recorded by Lewis in London in 1958, prepared as 10 talks to air on the ‘Protestant Hour’ on American radio in 1959. I believe this third love of 'Eros' was split into three broadcasts. The second talk begins at 12:00 and the third at 18:47 if you need smaller, bite-sized segments.
You can find my transcript of 'Eros' here: drive.google.com/file/d/1oFJLv_EfZuvIFUA-y3XObFyEt5ffqqvK/view?usp=sharing
You can purchase Lewis' original radio broadcasts here: amazon.com/The-Four-Loves/dp/B0007OB5QM
These talks were later turned into a larger book published in March 1960 with more detail (with quite different examples), which you can find here: amazon.com/Four-Loves-C-S-Lewis/dp/0156329301
(0:34) The definitions/diagram section of this broadcast is probably best summarised in the book version. "That sexual experience can occur without Eros, without being 'in love', and that Eros includes other things beside sexual activity, I take for granted."
(2:21) The lover "is 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.” ('The Four Loves', Lewis).
(8:01) Eros, "far from aggravating, he reduces the nagging and addictive character of mere appetite. And that not simply by satisfying it. Eros, without diminishing desire, makes abstinence easier." ('The Four Loves', Lewis).
(8:47) “Venus” is a very bright planet that appears from earth's perspective as linked to the sun, because of its orbit inside earth’s orbit. As such it became known as the “Morning star” or “Dawn star”. Due to its stunning addition to beautiful dawn scenes, Venus became known in the ancient world as ‘the beautiful planet’ and therefore became symbolic of woman, the most beautiful creature in creation to man. Essentially Venus became a symbol of all things to do with women, reproduction, sex, romance, fertility, growth, and even the colour green. The particular glory God gave this planet was then personified and worshiped as a goddess by ancient pagans, but old writers used the word in a symbolic way.
(18:05) Lewis refers to the King Cophetua story as noted in his book version, a legendary king who fell in love with a beggar woman and made her his queen. This story was combined with the modern re-telling of the Pygmalion myth (the man who falls in love with his own creation), especially in its treatment by George Bernard Shaw in the play 'Pygmalion' (or the musical version ‘My Fair Lady’).
(22:13) 'The Superman' - Fascism supports the creation of a 'New Man' who is a figure of action, violence, and masculinity, committed as a component of a disciplined mass that has shorn itself of individualism. Communism's 'New Man' was to make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman. The Soviet era writer, Aleksandr Zinovyev, described what the superman, the ‘New Soviet Man’, really looked like (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus).
[22:55] “The strange religion of love’ – ‘Courtly Love’ – "was love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim..." (Lewis, 'The Allegory of Love').
(32:24) ‘Anna Karenina’ is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and is the tragic story of a married aristocrat/socialite in imperial Russia and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. Despite Vronsky's reassurances to marry her after she divorces, she grows increasingly possessive and paranoid about his imagined infidelity, fearing that he will give in to his mother's plans to marry him off to a rich society woman.
This is an illustration of C.S. Lewis’ radio talk about the third of the four loves – ‘Eros’ or ‘The Love Between the Sexes’. Notes below...
When Lewis made these Four Loves recordings, he was very happily married and very much in love with his wife, Joy. Her cancer had been in remission almost a year at this point. The best description of Lewis’ transition to Eros is in a letter he wrote to a friend, where he said: “It is nice to have arrived at all this by something which began in Agape, proceeded to Philia, then became Pity [as to her plight], and only after that, Eros. As if the highest of these, Agape, had successfully undergone the sweet humiliation of an incarnation.”
Originally 'The Four Loves' series was recorded by Lewis in London in 1958, prepared as 10 talks to air on the ‘Protestant Hour’ on American radio in 1959. I believe this third love of 'Eros' was split into three broadcasts. The second talk begins at 12:00 and the third at 18:47 if you need smaller, bite-sized segments.
You can find my transcript of 'Eros' here: drive.google.com/file/d/1oFJLv_EfZuvIFUA-y3XObFyEt5ffqqvK/view?usp=sharing
You can purchase Lewis' original radio broadcasts here: amazon.com/The-Four-Loves/dp/B0007OB5QM
These talks were later turned into a larger book published in March 1960 with more detail (with quite different examples), which you can find here: amazon.com/Four-Loves-C-S-Lewis/dp/0156329301
(0:34) The definitions/diagram section of this broadcast is probably best summarised in the book version. "That sexual experience can occur without Eros, without being 'in love', and that Eros includes other things beside sexual activity, I take for granted."
(2:21) The lover "is 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.” ('The Four Loves', Lewis).
(8:01) Eros, "far from aggravating, he reduces the nagging and addictive character of mere appetite. And that not simply by satisfying it. Eros, without diminishing desire, makes abstinence easier." ('The Four Loves', Lewis).
(8:47) “Venus” is a very bright planet that appears from earth's perspective as linked to the sun, because of its orbit inside earth’s orbit. As such it became known as the “Morning star” or “Dawn star”. Due to its stunning addition to beautiful dawn scenes, Venus became known in the ancient world as ‘the beautiful planet’ and therefore became symbolic of woman, the most beautiful creature in creation to man. Essentially Venus became a symbol of all things to do with women, reproduction, sex, romance, fertility, growth, and even the colour green. The particular glory God gave this planet was then personified and worshiped as a goddess by ancient pagans, but old writers used the word in a symbolic way.
(18:05) Lewis refers to the King Cophetua story as noted in his book version, a legendary king who fell in love with a beggar woman and made her his queen. This story was combined with the modern re-telling of the Pygmalion myth (the man who falls in love with his own creation), especially in its treatment by George Bernard Shaw in the play 'Pygmalion' (or the musical version ‘My Fair Lady’).
(22:13) 'The Superman' - Fascism supports the creation of a 'New Man' who is a figure of action, violence, and masculinity, committed as a component of a disciplined mass that has shorn itself of individualism. Communism's 'New Man' was to make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman. The Soviet era writer, Aleksandr Zinovyev, described what the superman, the ‘New Soviet Man’, really looked like (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus).
[22:55] “The strange religion of love’ – ‘Courtly Love’ – "was love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery, and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim..." (Lewis, 'The Allegory of Love').
(32:24) ‘Anna Karenina’ is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and is the tragic story of a married aristocrat/socialite in imperial Russia and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. Despite Vronsky's reassurances to marry her after she divorces, she grows increasingly possessive and paranoid about his imagined infidelity, fearing that he will give in to his mother's plans to marry him off to a rich society woman.
