Lewis is consistent in arguing that greater things build from lesser, so affection, the first of the four human loves he considers, is basic but no less important for that (for an introduction to this project, see the prior post).
Affection for Lewis is shaped by persistence, familiarity, and roles. Childhood friends, family members, pets, schoolmates, and beloved nurses or teachers are all listed as examples.
This warm comfortableness, this satisfaction in being together, takes in all sorts of objects. It is indeed the least discriminating of loves. . . But almost anyone can become an object of Affection; the ugly; the stupid; even the exasperating. . . It ignores barriers of age, sex, class, and education.
He then proceeds to cite the four animal friends in the Wind in the Willows as examples of “the amazing heterogeneity of possible between those bound by affection.”
Co-reader Monica was charmed by one particular passage that notes how affection is enhanced by being different from the classic conception of soul mates or the like:
Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.
The familiarity that is its basis can also be its limitation. Affection can be tied to the person as we came to know them, good and ill, just as one’s sense of someone’s height may be set by how they stood out when we first met them and not their stature in maturity. Even a change for the better may be regretted. The gift-love of affection is what we can offer and not necessarily what the other person needs. In many cases, for parents and teachers in particular, “the proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift. . . Thus a heavy task is laid upon this Gift-Love. It must work towards its own abdication.”
Finally, the chapter makes an interesting distinction between spiritual health and mental health:
But, greed, ego-ism, self-deception, and self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal the man from whom these failings were wholly absent?
So, how can affection grow into something more dynamic? The next love, friendship, will explore that, but its definitions are far thornier. Nonetheless, I was intrigued by Lewis’s strengths and failings and this next chapter is also the one that justifies the critique.
Image Source: Nisa yeh on Flickr, used under a creative commons language.
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