(mellow rock music)
- Hello, my name is Lou Markos,
and I am a professor in English
and scholar-in-residence at
Houston Baptist University,
where I've taught for 29 years,
including courses on C.S.
Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
And also apologetics.
I have spoken many times
for the Colson Fellows
over the years,
and I'm happy to be back
speaking for the Colson Fellows
on one of my favorite topics,
The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis.
The Four Loves is one of the
later books that Lewis wrote.
And they're often considered to have been
partly inspired by his wife, Joy.
They include Reflections On The Psalms,
Til We Have Faces,
A Grief Observed,
and of course, The Four Loves.
And in this book, Lewis discusses
the four different Greek
words that mean love.
Now, if you're thinking to yourself,
wait a minute,
I thought there were only
three Greek words for love,
then I'm very happy.
Because it means you've heard
the same sermon I've heard,
many times about the three
different Greek words
that all mean love.
Those words are Eros, philia, and agape.
Eros is where we get our word, erotic.
Eros is the Greek equivalent of Cupid,
the God of Love,
and Eros is physical, erotic, sexual love.
And it's often described as
an "I love you if..." kind of love.
Philia is the Greek word for friendship.
As in Philadelphia or philanthropy.
And friendship love is more of
an "I love you because".
Agape is God's self-giving love.
And agape translates into the Latin,
as caritas, and then in English,
King James' English, becomes charity.
Today charity tends to mean only
giving money to the poor,
but charity, when used in the King James,
faith, hope and charity is in
fact that Greek word, agape.
Now you've all heard those three words,
and most of those sermons are influenced
in one way or another,
by Lewis' book, The Four Loves.
But as we all know, pastors
love to have three points,
and only three points in their sermons.
But in Lewis' book, he adds a fourth,
and the fourth Greek
word for love, is storge.
And storge means affection love.
It's the affection we feel towards family,
the affection we feel towards children,
includes the affection
we feel for animals,
the supreme example of storge
would be maternal love.
The love the mother has for her child.
Now all four of these loves are good.
Actually, anything that's
good was created by God.
The devil can only pervert things, right?
So all four of those loves are good.
As Lewis explains, if it wasn't for Eros,
none of us would've ever
been conceived and born.
If it wasn't for storge, affection,
none of us would've been
reared by our parents,
and brought to adulthood.
If it wasn't for friendship,
most of us would find life very very dull.
We'd feel isolated, we'd feel lonely.
So all three of those loves are good,
but Lewis wants us to remember,
they are finally Earthly loves.
The only divine love is agape,
God's self-giving love,
which he showed first
in creating the world,
cause God had to move out of
himself to create the world,
and then supremely, in sending his Son
into the world himself,
entering human history,
dying and raising again.
Now even though Lewis spends a lot of time
in The Four Loves,
describing those three Earthly loves,
and talking good things about them,
at the core of his book, is a warning.
And that warning is,
that whenever we take
one of the Earthly loves,
Eros, affection or friendship,
and try to make it into a divine love,
it will grow perverse.
Probably the most important
sentence in the book,
that we need to understand is,
"Love, when it becomes a God,
becomes a demon."
When we take an Earthly
love and try to lift it up
to a divine status,
make it angelic,
all we will do is make a demon,
that will turn us away from God,
away from our neighbor,
and ultimately, it will
turn us away from ourselves.
So we need to have,
what the Medieval Catholics called,
a right ordering of our loves.
The supreme is agape.
The other loves, though good,
must take their place
vis-a-vis, agape love.
Now to help us understand
how each of these three Earthly loves
can go bad, sour,
I want to give you some examples.
The second two examples,
as you would expect,
will be from C.S. Lewis,
but the first one is what I
think Lewis would use himself,
if he was speaking.
I want to look at an example
from Dante's Inferno.
One of the books that had
a profound influence on C.S. Lewis.
Because in the fifth canto of The Inferno,
we get a perfect,
almost a case study or clinical example,
of what happens when we take Eros,
and try to make it into the higher love,
try to make it in fact, into God.
Well Dante and Virgil are
going through the inferno,
they come to the level of lust,
which is the least bad sin,
but it's still a sin.
And there, Dante meets Francesca,
and hears her story of great pathos.
Now Francesca and Paolo
had been adulterous lovers,
who had been caught in the act and killed,
by the evil husband of Francesca.
Francesca was a very unhappy wife,
but she still did commit adultery.
When she tells her story,
these are the words she uses.
She says, "love, which in gentlest hearts
will soonest bloom,
seize my lover with passion
for that sweet body,
from which I was torn
unshriven to my doom.
Love which permits no
loved one not to love,
took me so strongly with delighted hymn,
that we are one in Hell,
as we were above.
Love led us to one death."
Notice that she says love three times.
In the poem, each stanza of
three succeeding stanzas,
begins with the word, love.
She has made love into
her own personal trinity.
Now according to First John,
God is love.
What Francesca is basically seeing here,
is that love is God.
Now grammatically
speaking, those two things
should mean the same thing.
God is love, love is God.
But they couldn't be more different.
When believing Christians
say, God is love,
we mean one of the
qualities of God is love.
The way he moves towards his creation,
even self-sacrificially,
showing forth his agape love.
But when we say, love is God,
we are taking one aspect of God,
and turning that into God.
And that's exactly what
Francesca has done.
She has taken her Eros,
her physical attraction towards Paolo,
and she has made that her God,
and she even says,
love which permits no
loved one not to love,
as if to say, love made me do it.
That anything that this
love asks, must be okay.
But again, it's not.
You can't take Eros,
and make it into agape.
It's an Earthly love,
and cannot be made into a Heavenly love.
Later in the canto, she explains
how the adultery happened.
She says that she and
Paolo were home one day,
and reading together.
If they were lovers,
they'd be watching a romantic video today,
but they were reading the story
of Lancelot and Guinevere.
And when Francesca saw how
wonderful Lancelot was,
and how he attracted Guinevere,
she fell into sin with Paolo,
and was caught and killed.
Now what's amazing about this story,
is that I'm calling it
Francesca and Paolo,
but Paolo's name is never
mentioned in the book.
Francesca never says his name.
She calls him, he who is one with me,
in death as we were in life.
We know his name because
these are historical people.
But it's important that Francesca
never mentions his name.
If we look at her story carefully,
we'll realize that what
she's in love with Paolo,
is not really Paolo.
What she's in love with is Lancelot.
That's who she wants.
And Paolo is a good substitute.
Actually, if you read closely,
you'll find out that what
she's really in love with,
is romance itself.
The whole idea of Eros.
The romance today from
movies and things like that.
And ultimately, what
she's really in love with,
is herself.
Because Francesca, like all
the sinners in Dante's Inferno,
is finally and utterly narcissistic.
By making Eros into a God,
she has turned everything inward,
cutting herself off from
God and her neighbor,
and literally imprisoning herself
within her own narcissism.
So Eros is a good thing,
in its proper time and proper place,
with the proper person, it is good.
It's God's system of procreating.
It is also a metaphor in Ephesians,
for the great marriage
of Christ and the church.
So Eros is good,
but in its proper place.
When we try to make it into God,
it becomes a demon,
and will destroy us.
What about philia?
I told you that one of the books he wrote,
influenced by Joy,
was called Till We Have Faces.
Lewis considered it his best novel.
It is a beautiful, wonderful novel,
but it's also very difficult.
I hope someday you'll take
the challenge and read it.
But our central character
is a woman named Orual,
who is living in the country of Glome,
some two or three hundred
years before Christ.
So she's a pagan, her world
knows nothing of Christ.
She has no knowledge of the Old Testament.
And she's a very unhappy child,
she's very ugly.
Her father does not love her,
he bosses her around.
But her life is made better
because her father gave her as a tutor,
a Greek stoic named The Fox.
And the Fox is her companion,
they speak together,
Orual treats him ultimately as an equal.
And he is the perfect example of a friend.
But when her father dies,
and Orual the princess,
becomes Orual the queen,
she now has the chance to give the Fox
what he has desired his whole life,
and that is his freedom,
so he can go back to Greece.
But she will not give him his freedom.
She feels like she cannot
survive without his friendship,
and so she manipulates him
and keeps him at her side.
She convinces herself she's doing it
in the name of friendship,
but her friendship is
actually manipulating
and hurting the very person
she claims to be friends with.
Finally, let's look at twisted storge,
by looking at my single
favorite C.S. Lewis book,
a book called The Great Divorce.
Lewis' miniature version
not only of The Inferno,
but of the entire Divine Comedy by Dante.
In this wonderful book,
Lewis has what he calls a supposal.
What if the people in
Hell, if they so choose,
could get in a bus,
and take the bus from Hell to Heaven,
or at least the sort of
grassy plain before Heaven.
And what if, when the
sinners got off the bus,
they were met by the souls of saints,
who were friends or
relatives of them in Earth,
during their life.
And what if those saints
could offer them, even now,
a chance to give up their sin,
give up their narcissism,
give up their self-centeredness.
And embrace the love and mercy
and forgiveness of Christ.
Well, every single one except
one actually willingly chooses
to go back to Hell.
Many of the conversations
between the saint and the sinner,
are painful to watch.
But the most painful one to watch,
is when, off the bus,
comes the damned soul of a mother.
She had a very good
family, she had siblings,
she had wonderful husband,
she had several children,
but when her youngest child, Michael died,
she began to ignore all the
rest of her family members,
and lived only for the
memory of her child.
It was something almost Egyptian.
She kept his room exactly the way it was.
She wouldn't allow them
to leave the house,
even though her husband and
daughter were miserable there.
They of course loved
Michael as much as she did,
but she convinced herself,
nobody loved Michael as much as I did,
and she held onto him,
and became a sort of parody
of her own mother love.
Now when she gets off the bus,
and arrives in Heaven,
she is met by the saved soul,
the saint of her brother.
But when she sees her brother,
she does not run up to
him, and embrace him,
and kiss him,
she says, oh it's you.
I was hoping to meet someone else.
The one she wanted to meet
of course, was Michael.
She doesn't even care to be
reunited with anyone else.
And her brother tries to explain,
dear, you can't come here to see Michael,
you come here to see God, and to love God,
and to be one with him.
Once you truly learn to
love God, the true agape,
then you'll be strong
enough to have Michael back,
and put him in the proper relationship.
In the proper order of love.
But now you can't.
You can't have Michael.
You need to love God,
and she's infuriated.
What, she says, God is love.
And any God who would
keep me away from my son,
is a God I want nothing to do with.
You see, like Francesca,
she says God is love,
but what she means is, love is God.
She does not love the God who is love.
She has taken her mother love,
we might call it smother love,
and turned it into her God.
By the end of that interview,
she is ready to take Michael
back with her to Hell,
where she can take better care of him.
My friends, be afraid.
Any of us can become that mother.
And there is much nobility to her.
We need to shed tears when we read,
that dialogue and her inability
to let go of the storge,
that she's turned into agape.
But she won't let go.
She has defined herself by that.
And she doesn't even realize
how much she hurt Michael himself,
by her almost animalistic affection.
Now if there's one thing
I've learned from Lewis,
and I've learned many,
if there's one thing that
has put me in good stead,
and helped me in my
Christian life, it is this.
Lewis helped me to understand that,
it is more often the good things
that keep us away from God,
than the bad things.
That sounds counter-intuitive.
But it explains why, when Jesus came,
the prostitutes and tax
collectors gathered around him,
whereas the Pharisees and
so-called good people,
turned away from him,
and eventually plotted
against him to kill him.
Why is that?
Jesus explains.
It is not the people who
are well, who need a doctor.
But the people who are sick.
It's only when we recognize our need,
that we go to the doctor.
Only when we know we need
to be saved from something,
that we seek out Jesus the Savior.
Let me explain it this way.
Let's think of some bad things.
Promiscuity, drug addiction,
alcoholism, abuse,
all of these things are bad things.
And they're so bad,
that most people are not going
to be able to fool themselves
into thinking, oh yeah,
if this is what life is all about,
I don't need anything else.
Now they might stay in that lifestyle,
they might refuse to come out.
But I think they will know
that they were created for
something better than this.
And they might, like those
prostitutes and tax collectors,
seek after the Lord,
and seek after the higher agape love.
But what about the good
things, my friends?
What about mother love?
Patriotism?
The arts, good works,
religion itself,
these are all good things.
But they're so good,
they often make good substitutes.
As Lewis puts it in The Four Loves,
brass is more often mistaken
for gold, than clay is.
If we see clay,
stuck in a lifestyle
of serial promiscuity,
I think we're gonna realize
that that's not gold.
But those good things,
what's better than mother love?
We think of the virgin Mary and Jesus.
What's better than mother love?
But it is such a good thing,
that once again, it
makes a good substitute.
We can think yes,
this is the be-all and end-all of life,
this is what I was made for.
This is love.
A lot of philanthropists feel that way.
And in one sense, it's good.
But it's not an ultimate good.
As Lewis says, I think it's
in The Problem Of Pain,
that when we say, I'm content,
but that contentment
doesn't include Christ,
then we are in sorry shape.
So again, the Earthly loves are good
in and of themselves,
if we surrender them to God,
they will become wonderful
tools on the side of God.
But if we cling to them,
if we make them our religion,
if we make them our agape,
they will force us to turn inward,
we will stagnate.
We will become narcissistic,
and in the end, we will lose ourselves.
We will become a parody of ourselves.
Now, in the last ten minutes,
I would like to shift slightly,
and focus on just one
section of The Four Loves.
What I think is the
most important section,
and I kinda think if Lewis was here,
he might agree.
I want to focus on friendship.
Why, because C.S. Lewis and
his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien,
the author of The Lord Of The Rings,
a strong believer who partly
led C.S. Lewis to Christ,
those two men were, what I would call,
apologists for friendship.
They tried to hold up
friendship as a glorious thing.
In a modern age, that
has turned away from it.
Now when did this happen?
In the early days,
in the classical days, the early church,
the Middle Ages, even
into the Renaissance,
people understood that friendship
was a high and noble thing.
But things started to
change, Lewis explains,
in the 19th century.
In the 19th century, during what we call
the Victorian Age of England,
we start having the cult of domesticity.
Now I happen to think
domesticity's a good thing.
I'm glad I attend a church,
that puts a heavy emphasis on family,
parents, children,
the proper relationship
between a husband and wife,
father and mother and kids,
but folks, storge, affection
is not the same thing as agape.
We've got to be careful
we don't turn mother love
or even the love between
a husband and wife,
into an idol.
And that's kind of what
the Victorian Age did.
It was good, I'm glad it
emphasized parenthood.
And mothers nurturing their children.
But that is not the core
of the Christian religion.
The core is agape, God's self-giving love.
And so starting in the 19th century,
and especially how
sentimental we've gotten,
we're still living in the Victorian Age,
we're so sentimental.
And I like some sentimental movies.
But again, we need to be
careful we don't go astray.
Now, at the same time,
in the late 19th century,
storge was becoming almost Godlike.
At the same time, there was a
certain character in Vienna,
named Freud,
who was doing the same
thing for Eros, or sex,
who was basically telling us,
Eros was at the core of everything.
At the core of who we are,
at the core of our decisions,
at the core of our
relationships with other people.
He even sexualized infants,
that's probably what got
people the most mad at him.
Partly because they were still thinking of
the cult of domesticity.
So they weren't even right in some ways,
in their heart.
They themselves were idolaters,
attacking another form of idolatry.
Again, Eros is important.
But it is not the be-all and end-all.
A lot of people today think
there's no possibility
of happiness without Eros.
That if you live a celibate lifestyle,
you can't possibly be happy.
You must just be faking it.
Now partly because of
the rise and reputation
of storge and Eros,
philia or friendship sort
of fell to the wayside.
But there's another reason it did, okay?
The trouble is, is that
the 19th and 20th centuries
are the Ages of Totalitarianism.
It's obvious in Nazism or Communism,
or Socialism, that it's totalitarian.
But sometimes, the more
radical a democracy becomes,
the more totalitarian it can become.
What do I mean by that?
Whether you live in a radical democracy,
that wants to make everyone the same,
what's called radical egalitarianism,
whether you live in a democracy,
or you live in a tyranny,
where the tyrant insists
that everybody beneath him,
is exactly the same.
Whether you're in either
system of government,
friendship, especially male friendship
is going to be seen as a threat.
Because those friends will bind together,
and think there's something more important
than the State,
or something more
important than that desire
for everyone to be equal,
and everyone to be the same.
Now, why did the classical people,
people from Greece and Rome,
why did they consider
friendship such a high love?
And why did Lewis and Tolkien
consider it such a high love?
Well you know what?
Animals are capable of
both storge and Eros.
Even in our lives, our rational being,
it is much our instincts that drive us,
our maternal instinct,
our sexual instinct,
our sexual drive,
and oftentimes, those things control us.
But friendship?
Friendship, Lewis says, for the ancients,
was almost lifting us up to the angels.
It was a sort of disinterested love.
It was something we chose.
It wasn't a want love or a need love,
it wasn't driven by
the id or the superego,
as Freud would say,
it was something we willingly chose.
And it was something that
brought joy and happiness to us.
But it's something that
is only human, or angelic.
It's something that the
beasts know nothing about.
And so for Lewis,
friendship makes us better than we are.
Again, it can be perverted, as we've seen.
But it often makes us better than we are,
because it was, as the ancients said,
a school of virtue.
Friends call each other
to a higher level of virtuous behavior.
You can have friendship among thieves.
Anything can be perverted.
But friendship done
properly strengthens us.
Do you know that Aristotle wrote a book
called the Nicomachean Ethics,
the greatest work of ethics
that the pagan world produced.
Before the Bible and the
New Testament came along.
And Aristotle talks about what are called,
the Four Classical Loves,
courage, temperance, justice and wisdom.
And he speaks about them.
But he spends twice as long on friendship,
than all other four combined.
He doesn't call it one
of the four virtues.
But he considered it
absolutely essential to life.
Now, what's the difference
with friendship?
In Eros and storge,
we're looking face to
face with each other.
If friendship, we stand side to side.
We have something in common,
and we go at it together,
and we support each other.
Friendship is a great thing.
In fact, many of the greatest
movements in history,
came out of a friendship,
and usually a male friendship,
where friends had a strength
they gained from each other,
and it helped them overcome the odds,
overcome stereotypes and what not,
produce something new.
The birthplace of humanism
in the West is Athens.
Athens would've never been so great,
in drama and ethics, and
philosophy, and science,
and all these things,
if it wasn't for the friendship
of these Athenian citizens,
who worked together,
who had a higher vision,
and tried to bring it about.
Plato gave us the Academy.
Aristotle gave us the lyceum,
which is the early
foundation of the university,
but it came out of a
group of male friends,
sitting together and discussing together.
Our university as we know it,
comes out of the Middle Ages.
It comes out of monasteries
and friars and monks,
and people who gathered together,
to preserve wisdom.
There would be no university,
if it didn't come out of friendship.
The early church,
the friendship first of Paul and Barnabas,
and then Paul and Silas,
Jesus himself sat down
his disciples two by two.
We support one another to do things.
The Reformation, the Renaissance,
much of it comes out of friendships,
in places like Germany,
in Rome, in Florence,
we wouldn't have had the real explosion
of early modern science
if we didn't have a community of friends,
who were working together.
Think about our own founding fathers.
Their friendship
strengthened to do something
that was very dangerous.
Think of William
Wilburforce and abolition.
Think of the abolitionist
movement in America.
Think of the Civil Rights
movement in America.
These things came out of friendship.
Think of the inklings.
The friendship of Lewis and Tolkien,
together with Owen
Barfield, Charles William,
Lewis' brother.
Many others, Hugo Dyson,
and they strengthened each other,
not only to raise the
reputation of Christianity,
in the academic world,
but to raise the reputation of
fantasy and science fiction,
and children's literature,
that had been fallen out of favor,
and only their friendship gave
them the courage to do that.
Think about the Colson Fellows.
How we hold each other accountable.
I like to speak for
classical Christian schools.
Think of the Association
for Classical Literature.
Society for Classic (indistinct),
think of Summit Ministries.
A lot of these began as friendships
of people who wanted to stand against
bad things in the culture.
The whole home-schooling movement.
But why is friendship so hard?
Let me end with this.
Friendship, and I'm focusing particularly
on male friendship now,
because it is often the
spark that does these things.
Generally, people don't bother with it
when they have friends.
But male friendship is under attack
from the outside and the inside.
It's under attack from
the outside by feminism.
Feminism doesn't like men together.
It's an old boys' society.
No, one of the things I now
teach all of my students,
in college at my university is,
if you're like me,
you had this completely false notion
pushed upon evangelicals,
that if you can find the
right husband or wife,
that person will be the
only friend you need,
and you'll be a whole world together.
That is a lie, and a terrible lie.
If you're a husband, you need
to maintain your male friends.
If you're a wife, you need to
maintain your female friends.
We need friendship, it strengthens us.
It brings us back to our
wedding, our marriage,
to our family stronger.
So on the one side, again,
attacks of elitism, oh
this old boys' network.
But unfortunately and
insidiously, in our country,
male friendship is also under attack,
because of the whole gay agenda.
Nowadays, men who would
like to be close friends,
who want to support each other,
will not get that close,
for fear that people
will think they are gay.
This is a terrible thing, my friends.
One of the ways, we as men,
understand our own bodies,
our own sexuality,
the own limits,
is by messing around with other men.
Yeah, skinny dipping, smacking
each other on the butt,
this is how we understand
who we are as men.
But if we do that, people
will think we're gay.
And so we don't do it,
and because we don't do it,
we end up not understanding
our own sexuality,
and we might actually
become gay because of that.
It's almost a vicious cycle.
Let me end to explain to you,
the problem, especially of
male friendship in our country.
One of my very favorite
things in the world
is not only The Lord Of The Rings novel,
but the movie, the trilogy.
And the heart of that trilogy of movies,
is the wonderful close
friendship between Frodo and Sam.
Think about it if you've seen the movie.
If that movie had been made in America,
they never would've allowed
the intimate closeness.
Thank God it was made in
Australia and New Zealand.
Where there are real men,
who are actually understanding
of their own male sexuality.
And are not so threatened
as we are in America.
So please folks, be
like Lewis and Tolkien.
Be an apologist for friendship.
And be an apologist for male friendship.
And I speak to the women now.
You need to encourage
the men in your lives
to have strong male friendships.
It will make them a better husband.
A better father, a better
brother, a better son.
So please, we need to be
like Lewis and Tolkien.
Apologists for friendship.
But always ordering it properly.
Under God's agape, caritas.
Self-giving love.
Thank you.
(mellow rock music)
