Four Loves: An Exploration in Art and Theology
There is a familiar German saying that one is what one eats: “Man ist was Man esst.” This afternoon I propose to reflect on the thought, instead, that one is what one loves. Alternatively, we could say that our loves are our lives. That is to say, our lives are shaped in a fundamental way by what we love, by whom we love, and by how we love. It’s not a new idea, as everyone in this room must know. Fifteen hundred years ago, Augustine observed that we are constituted by love, and above all by our love of God. Even when our lives go wrong, he suggested, it’s because our loves go wrong; they become turned in on themselves, turned away from God, or otherwise distorted. Again, as Catherine of Siena said back in the fourteenth century, “People become like what they love.”
Scripture tells us, of course, that we are to love God. We are to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind—and love our neighbor as ourselves (Luke 10:27; cf. the Shema, Deut. 6:4-9 combined with Lev. 19:18b).
But do I love you, strangers and friends, in exactly the same way that I love God? Is it really the same kind of love in each case? How are these loves related? And aren’t there different forms even of loving one another? I’m going to reflect further on these questions, with the assistance of the late Christian scholar and writer C. S. Lewis. But because the arts play an important part in the experience and expression of love, I don’t want to rely on words alone. I will also be employing the resources of the visual arts as part of my presentation.
II. Four Loves
In 1960, near the end of his life, the Christian scholar, novelist, and essayist C. S. Lewis published his book The Four Loves. Building on terms and concepts that have been in circulation for at least a couple of thousand years, Lewis sorted out our loves into four different kinds: Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity.
The first three loves are particularly associated with what Lewis identifies as “need love”: love that grows out of trying to satisfy a lack, a deficiency, on our part. The final form of love, Charity, is truly a “gift love,” according to Lewis. That is love which is offered freely and self-sacrificially, and without regard to any special relation we may have with the ones we love in this way. Lewis affirms in The Four Loves that all our natural loves, in a favored hour, can be transformed by divine Caritas. By God’s grace, we can receive love freely and give love gladly. But, as Lewis acknowledges, it is something of a mystery how that conversion of our everyday loves takes place.
The first of the four loves is Affection. According to C. S. Lewis, this kind of love, which the Greeks called storge, is a humble love that cherishes the familiar. Affection often takes a liking for things and people for no particular reason; it is little concerned with evaluating or praising its objects. In this way Affection expands our horizons. Lewis supports that claim by quoting a whimsical and (it seems to me) very British observation: “Dogs and cats should always be brought up together; it broadens their minds so” (p. 233). Affection, Lewis observes, broadens our minds, because it is accorded to all sorts of people. I might add that affection can be both playful and tender. According to Lewis, Affection is at its most characteristic in the special relationship of parents to their children, and of children to their parents. Here need-love and gift-love blend. The parent gives, but also needs to give; the child at first only needs, but will learn to give back affectionately.
[SLIDE] This painting entitled The Child’s Bath, which the American-born artist Mary Cassatt painted in 1893, is a memorable depiction of a situation marked by affectionate intimacy. In this domestic scene, the child leans back into and onto the one bathing her, presumably her mother, who in turn reaches down to hold and clean the child’s foot in the cleansing water. The child’s left arm uses her mother’s knee for support. The length of her pale, young skin interrupts the stripes of the mother’s dress. We can see the security and care the child receives. The shallow space of the scene, and the way the floor tilts forward, pushes the figures gently toward our visual space, but without self-consciousness and without violating any sense of privacy. It is a painting utterly unsentimental in its restraint, yet all the more tender and affectionate for that reason.
To share human affection with each other “in the Lord,” as Paul would say, is itself a gift, a natural blessing. Affection can also, at its height, image and partake of divine love, particularly as we experience it in relation to what some theologians have called the “humanity of God.” [RUBENS] Perhaps that is most fully visible in the wide range of images that Catholic artists in particular have given us of the Holy Family or of the Madonna and Child. Without commenting on these individually, I would like for us to visit several examples briefly with our eyes: Here, in a painting by Rubens, we see the Holy Family with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist, with the child Jesus reaching up affectionately to his smiling mother while his young relative John looks on. By contrast, [JAPANESE HOLY FAMILY] this modern silk painting from Japan implies a kind of affection through the familial harmony of the Holy Family seen working together. [CHINESE] Here the Chinese artist Luke Chen paints a Madonna and child who seem to look at us, the viewers, with affectionate regard. [MADONNA AS GUAN-YIN] In another Chinese painting, Mary appears in the beneficent manner of the Buddhist female Bodhisattva of compassion, Guan-yin, who blesses and protects women in childbirth. [JOSEPH AND CHILD] The next painting looks not in the least Chinese; but it is seen today in the South Cathedral in Beijing, the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. This Joseph and Child—while artistically unremarkable—may appear somewhat unusual from our point of view because it features the kindly Joseph with Jesus; this subject is far more commonly seen in China today than in the West. [OUR LADY OF VLADIMIR] Even icons, with their stylized remoteness, make themselves available for reverent kissing and affectionate veneration. Here is the famous 12th century “Our Lady of Vladimir” or “Our Lady of Mercies,” which I was able to see two summers ago in Moscow. [WEST AFRICA] Equally stylized is this sculpture of a Madonna with Child, which comes from West Africa—notice how tenderly the mother’s arm support’s the child’s head. [BERYL COOK] Finally, this spunky and playful nativity scene by the modern British artist Beryl Cook brings out a rather amusing side of divinely human Affection. [BLANK]
The second form of love, Friendship, is something that Lewis thinks we modern people experience all too rarely. Friendship is too often ignored, he says, in modern literature and other arts. I would note, however, that in recent fiction and film, friendship among women is an especially important theme, going back, perhaps, to the movie Thelma and Louise. Be that as it may, Lewis points out that, in classical Greece, Aristotle celebrated philia, or friendship, praising it as what Lewis terms “a main course at life’s banquet.” Unlike parental affection or sexually charged Eros, Friendship is not powerfully instinctual. It is not biologically necessary. And it is highly selective. Compared with other forms of love, friendship is not so overtly emotional; it doesn’t often wear its heart on its sleeve. While we picture lovers face to face, Lewis says, we tend to picture friends side by side. Friendship registers a spiritual connection and shared values. For that very reason we must choose our friends wisely.
In true friendship, Lewis observes, there is something about ourselves that only our friend can bring out. When we lose a particular friend, we may lose part of ourselves. The bond formed in this way is not just the general sense of group identity that goes with sports and clubs. Friendship normally involves twos or threes, not crowds and assemblies. Friendship is a matter of shared vision, not just of shared adventure or comradeship. And yet, Lewis declares, Friendship does not depend on intimate knowledge of the details of the other person’s life and psyche—an opinion that may reflect Lewis’s British reticence. Interestingly, Lewis also seems quite sure that friendship is almost always between people of the same sex—a judgment that may strikes some of us as highly culturally conditioned, since he supports that judgment by saying that women and men will rarely meet each other in common enterprises in which they stand on the same footing: in the workplace, for instance. I presume that is no longer so true as it was in mid twentieth century.
One last point about friendship, and it is again something Lewis says that puzzles me a little. Lewis writes: “Friendship is very rarely the image under which Scripture represents the love between God and Man.” While that may be so, I find it odd that Lewis never mentions the important passage in John 15:12-15, where Jesus addresses his disciples: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” Perhaps Lewis sees that kind of friendship as far from typical, being based primarily on charitable, self-sacrificing love; but surely the friendship to which Jesus refers is also a product of shared vision and spiritual alliance. I find it pertinent, also, that in the Islamic Sufi or mystical tradition the saints are known as friends of God.
It is possible, of course, to have companionship without friendship—[GRANT WOOD] as we see in Grant Wood’s American Gothic, painted in 1930. Or perhaps those two people are just very very reserved in their friendship! [HOPPER] In a more subtle way, Edward Hopper likewise shows us people who occupy the same space but without spiritual connection or friendship. The original scene of alienation is of course the expulsion from Eden, [MASACCIO] where misery does not seem to love company. By contrast, [VISITATION, Chartres sculpture] as we see in this medieval sculpture from Chartres Cathedral, the cousins Mary and Elizabeth in their visit seem to experience a friendship that burgeons through their respective pregnancies with Jesus and John. [LEONARDO] That such friendship can be imbued with spiritual and indeed physical intimacy is perhaps more visible in this exquisite drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, in the National Gallery in London. Some art historians have decided that the two adults here are Mary with her Mother Anne, rather than Mary and her cousin Elizabeth; but I am not persuaded.
The disciples are so often clueless that it is a special moment when Jesus eventually declares them his friends. Whether they would always recognize that friendship and its meaning is another matter. [SUPPER AT EMMAUS] Is it too much to say that at the Supper at Emmaus, depicted here in Caravaggio’s painting from 1601, the disciples discover in the breaking of the bread not only the identity of Christ but something more about their own identity and friendship with Christ? He is the one who had talked with them as a stranger on the road to Emmaus; but now, in the shared meal, the truth of his identity bursts forth: this same Christ is both stranger and friend, both the crucified and the one made alive as an undying companion. [SUPPER 2] His hands both bless what is and proclaim what is to be.
For a time, when I was a child, I had a very different image of Jesus on my wall. I think my grandmother gave it to me. [JESUS AS PILOT] Protestants have their own images, you see. By the popular artist Warner Sallman, this rather meek and stereotypical image, which we might rightly judge to be rather sentimental, nevertheless functioned in modest ways to help form a kind of friendship between Jesus and me. It shows Jesus as pilot of the ship of life. But it also shows Jesus as kind and friendly, with his hand on the young man’s shoulder. Sallman is better known for [HEAD OF CHRIST] this picture of the head of Christ, which looks kind and accessible—but I think this Jesus looks just a tad too holy to be your close friend. You might contrast that Jesus with this outgoing and super-friendly Jesus. [RICHARD HOOK, 1964] Painted in 1964 by Richard Hook, and reproduced extensively in the 1970s, this portrayal makes Jesus look a lot like the local youth evangelist or campus minister on college campuses of the time.
Moving to the very different culture of India, we observe that Hindu gods can consort together in a most friendly and convivial way—[HINDU GODS] Ganesha, the elephant headed son of Shiva and Parvati; Lakshmi, Goddess of blessing and good fortune (and spouse of Vishnu); and Saraswati, playing the stringed instrument called the vina, patron of the arts of music and of learning, (and spouse of Brahma). All in a most friendly ensemble.[BLANK]
Our next love, Eros, is undeniably among the most powerful forces in human life. It is also the form of love that runs the greatest danger of making itself an idol, a rival to the one true God. Eros, as C. S. Lewis explains, is the kind of love we refer to when we say, “Those two are in love.” This is not the same as sexual experience per se. One can be in love without being sexually preoccupied. And one can experience physical gratification without being in love. Truly erotic love, Lewis observes, wants not just pleasure itself but the Beloved person as source and object of love. The lover may indeed express and experience that love physically—but in a mysterious way that goes beyond wanting merely the feeling of pleasure as such. Eros therefore transforms an intense need pleasure into an intensely appreciative enjoyment of the other person’s being. I would add that Eros entails a yearning that is never fully satisfied on earth. Eros at its highest discovers a foretaste of, and a still greater yearning for, communion or even union with God.
Eros is surely part of the human scene from the moment of the very creation of Adam, at least in Michelangelo’s view. [SISTINE 1] [SISTINE 2] [SISTINE 3] God’s arm extends around a female figure who peers around to look at Adam with something more than mere idle curiosity. [SISTINE 4] She is doubtless Eve, though in being Eve she may also be Mary, the new Eve who will comes to undo the harm that first one will initiate, just as Christ, the New Adam, will restore the life and love that Adam destroyed, and make it better than before.
In the Christian tradition, the most famous erotically-charged religious sculpture is doubtless Bernini’s 17th-century sculpture of St. Theresa in Ecstasy. [BERNINI] The angelic thrust of the spear and the shuddering ecstasy of the saint’s body in mystical rapture remind us that religious eroticism, or erotic religiosity, is a possibility known by a good many mystical lovers of God. Anyone familiar with the poetry of Rumi, the renowned Sufi poet, knows how the language of erotic love can interfuse almost completely with the language of divine love. Is this strictly a matter of analogy? Or is there not some truly erotic element possible in the divine embrace? David Bentley Hart, in his recent book The Beauty of the Infinite, argues that Eros does indeed have a legitimate religious role to play and that the theologian Anders Nygren and others have distorted the concept of Christian love out of all recognition by creating a chasm between Eros and Agape.
From quite another perspective, and a very different religious tradition, it is no secret that in Hinduism the religious imagination includes the sense of a divine sexual polarity. Ultimately, the gods are all one divine reality, for most Hindus. [SHIVA AND PARVATI] Yet, when envisioned separately, the gods almost all have spouses. Here Shiva is with his wife Parvati. When depicted alone, [ARDHANARISHVARA] Shiva can represent that polarity within his own being. Here we see him as Shiva Ardhanarishvara—with a male side and a female side united in one indivisible being—which, to be sure, cannot ultimately be expressed in any polarity, sexual or otherwise. [SCULPTURE] This sculpture brings out those two different sexual sides of Lord Shiva still more vividly. [KRISHNA WITH GOPI GIRLS] And then there is Lord Krishna, who as an avatar of Vishnu can show his divine love in such a way that every woman (gopi girl), every soul, within the circle of his dance can feel that he is gazing at her alone. To each soul it seems that the god Krishna loves her, and her entirely. So God’s love comes to each of us, as though devoted only to us alone, and yet shared by all. Again, we see also the intimate connection, however analogical, between erotic desire and Caritas, or generously giving and joyfully receptive love. [BLANK SLIDE]
The final love on Lewis’s list and ours is what he calls charity, or Caritas—which is more-or-less the Latin equivalent of the Greek Agape. Lewis refers to the usual forms of the other loves as “natural loves.” That is not to belittle them, he says, but to honor them for what they are—created good in themselves and, at their best, images of divine love. Those loves require God’s help; they are not self-sustaining. And they need to be rightly ordered. But God’s own love, by contrast, is primal and primary; God is love, and that love is sheer gift, in that God has no inner desires that need to be satisfied, nor emptiness to be filled. In Lewis’s words, “God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them” (281).
The sheer graciousness of Caritas is manifest in Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son, which (again) I had a chance to view in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. [PRODIGAL 1] Many of us are familiar with this painting, at least through reproductions—especially since the publication of Henri Nouwen’s moving meditations on this work. There is much that could be said about this painting, and much that can’t be decided for sure. But it is clear that, in this work from 1668-69, at the very end of Rembrandt’s life, the son is utterly destitute when he returns to his father after squandering his fortune; he can claim nothing; and he can give nothing. [PRODIGAL 2] The father, with eyes closed to everyday realities, takes him into his bosom, folding him into his body, into his very being, while placing his hands on his son’s shoulders—one hand more vigorous, which holds on to the son; one more gentle, more feminine, which rests against the son’s back. And both father and son are bathed in the same light of Caritas, a love that accepts completely.
Caritas is the least common-sensical love, and the most divine. It shows itself painfully in God’s self-emptying on the Cross, as in this famous painting by Grunewald [SLIDE] from the Isenheim Altarpiece—a work for the chapel of a monastic hospital that treated deadly skin diseases. We see it also in Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta, which he left unfinished at the time of his death in 1564. [SLIDE] Here the body of Christ, after the deposition from the cross, returns, as it were, to the womb of his mother; yet now, the son bears the mother on his back in his sacrificial love, just as she once bore him, and both are now carried, if at all, only by grace. [VATICAN PIETA] This is no longer the artist eager to demonstrate his artistic prowess and delighting in his craft, which is evident in the exquisite but more accessible beauty of Vatican Pieta. Instead, the sheer, vulnerable compassion of the later Pieta reminds me somehow of the sculptures of an unknown artist of the 12th century, who worked on the North portal of Chartres Cathedral. [CHARTRES SCULPTURE CREATION OF ADAM] Here we see the creation of Adam. The one creating may well be the divine Logos, or Christ as the Word of God. But this is not verbal or cognitive activity, merely. Look how tenderly he holds and molds Adam’s head. Look at Adam resting his head, like a child, on the divinely parental knee. [CHARTRES CREATION OF ADAM 2]
We have come full circle, as human beings so like to do. Divine Caritas meets Divine Affection, and interfuses with it. Indeed, all our loves, when blessed and graced, are at once rooted in the soil of everyday reality and yet taken up into a love we can hardly know, it is so full and beyond fullness. [DANTE AND BEATRICE] This is the transforming, converting love that, in Dante’s words, moves the sun and the other stars. It is the circle of all being, the dance at the center of all things. [CHARTRES SOUTH ROSE WINDOW] This love is the mystic rose that grows within the human heart and within the heart of God. It is the heavenly light, the circling and flowering of light, into which we are called—the light for which we are made, in all our loves.
--FBB
As presented on April 24, 2006, at Georgetown College, Kentucky