The Four Loves
1960
(What is
love? Lewis embarks on a personal and insightful exploration of
affection,
friendship, romance, and charity.)
How can so many millions of us
believe that love is the best thing in the world, and yet there be so little
emphasis in our popular culture on what love is, as distinct from
finding someone to love and to be loved by? John Lennon was quicker to say “All you need is love”, than
he was to explain what he means by love. Popular songs sometimes take a stab at it, but are better at
phrasing questions than providing answers: “What is this thing called love?”, “Is
this love?”, “I want to know what love is”, “How will I know when it’s love?”. The voluminous self-help books are
focused on practicality rather than explanation, and the works of psychologists
and philosophers (for good reasons) often confine their analyses to those
aspects of love that result from a study of behavior and are amenable to
quantification.
C. S. Lewis’s book, on the other
hand, is devoted entirely to an explanation of love that descends into our
animal nature, but ascends also into the realm of religion and spirituality
whence (Lewis believes) true love comes, and where it reaches its highest and
most meaningful fulfillment. In so
doing, he incidentally provides an answer to my initial question, why we as a
culture don’t seem to have a good handle on what love is: Lewis would say that
we won’t ever share an understanding of love unless we share an understanding
of God. This is the provocative
vision that underlies the book. The
Four Loves deserves classic status precisely because it presents this
vision so candidly, so insightfully, and with such intuitive appeal. The book’s parochialism stands out, in
that Lewis does not attempt to hide the fact that he is generalizing from his
experience, and also more broadly in his unabashed Christian perspective. However, this parochialism is the very
point, the heart of the book. Lewis
believes that one of man’s most enduring questions (“What is love?”) is
answerable only in connection with a personal world-view. If Lewis is right about this, apart from
the question of which religion or world-view we are talking about, this should
be enough to convince us that a popular consensus on the nature of love will
never be had. Science will tell us
of its biological basis and psychological and behavioral manifestations, but it
is our beliefs on controversial metaphysical and religious matters that will
provide our deepest and most meaningful understanding of love.
Lewis endorses and explains the
Christian doctrine that “God is love”. The fact that this statement is not immediately absurd
(whether or not we understand or believe it) shows that the concept of love
must extend beyond our knowledge in the same way that the concept of God does. Both are mysteries, in the medieval
sense. If, on the other hand, we
had a sufficient handle on either concept, the claim would no longer be
provocative. Given the mystery of
love, then, it is not surprising that a religious person, and a Christian in
particular, should have written one of the most valuable twentieth century
works on the subject of love.
The book is not intended to be a
complete survey of love, but a selective outline of the main kinds of love and
how they are best organized. Lewis admits that this is a personal account, and
thus is necessarily biased towards his experience, especially (since love often
highlights sex differences) as a male.
“Introduction”
Lewis starts by distinguishing
between Need-love and Gift-love. Need-love
is not bad, and is truly a love, although it can lead to an idolatry of love. When love is deep and real it is liable
to invite worship, even though a worship of love will corrupt or destroy it. Our aim should be to neither
overestimate nor underestimate love.
“Likings and Loves for the
Sub-human”
Love is distinguished from
liking. Liking can be divided into
Need-pleasures (those things which, once they satisfy us, are no longer so
pleasurable or desirable) and Pleasures of Appreciation (which are inherently
pleasurable things and always deserve our liking of them). There is no clear line between the
sensual and the aesthetic—the two grade into each other. Appreciative-love is a third aspect of
love besides Need-love and Gift-love. Love for the natural world can come in many forms. It is mistaken if it idolizes nature or
seeks truths in nature in the way the Romantics did, for nature will teach
whatever we want to learn; however, nature does clothe or fill our beliefs. Love of one’s country is also morally
ambivalent, having both worthwhile and misleading aspects to it. Patriotism can be seen as having 5
possible ingredients, ranging from a wonderful love of home which is a
prototype for charity, to the fatally dangerous belief that our country (or any
other group) is superior to all others and so bestows special rights and
duties, and warrants our love because of that superiority.
“Affection (storge)”
Affection is the most
indiscriminate, “the humblest and most widely diffused of loves”, originating
as parent-offspring, and possible among any two individuals, including animals.
It requires nothing but
familiarity for its growth, though it can blend with other loves. Baby-talk and kissing are common
manifestations of it. Affection
facilitates appreciation and breadth. However, it is not the Love, not God. In fact, it can be corrupted, both in
its Need-love and Gift-love form. A
ravenous Need-love affection can produce the opposite in others. This occurs, for instance, in the
rudeness of parents towards their children, or when someone (“Rudesby”) takes
liberties in the name of affection, without actually having the affection that
would excuse his actions. There
can also be jealousy, or a resentment towards change. Affection’s Gift-love aspect can be
tyrannical, as when one (“Mrs. Fidget”) gives in order to be needed (whereas a
proper Gift-love works to end the other’s need). Another example is a teacher (“Dr. Quartz”) who cannot stand
students thinking independently. Even
love for pets can be corrupted into a tyranny of affection for those who are
selfish and insecure. All of us
have these problems, these corruptions of affection, to some extent. Incidentally, speaking of psychological
maladjustment, perfection is not, as many psychologists assume, adjustment to
this world. Rather, perfection is
adherence to something beyond or above the world. Accordingly, affection produces happiness in us only if we
have a reason for it, a higher love. The corrupted affection works from wrong, or lesser, motives.
“Friendship (philia)”
This is an underappreciated love
in our time, possibly because it is the least “natural”, least emotional of
loves. Many in our day are so
egalitarian that they distrust it. Some either disparage it as unnecessary or confuse it with
homosexuality as if all philia must be reducible to eros. (Here
Lewis uses a good illustrative argument against the “dictatorial strategy” of
argument). In fact friendship “exhibits
a glorious ‘nearness by resemblance’ to Heaven itself”. In its basic form it
was important in prehistory as a tendency towards cooperation (incidentally,
saying cooperation is an “instinct” is a misleading aspect of behavioral
science and merely betrays our ignorance). True friendship, we might imagine, grew out of this
prototypical cooperative disposition. Romantic love can blend nicely with it today, and is enriched
by it. Friendship can have an important
societal impact, which is why authority frowns on it, although tying friendship
to a social goal tends to reduce its significance. Friendship tends to be relatively uninquisitive—it seeks the
naked personality whereas Eros seeks the naked body. At its best, friendship contains a large dose of
Appreciative-love. Cultivating
intersex friendships can be difficult, perhaps largely due to differences in
educational experiences between men and women. In fact, many women (perhaps of lesser education) either do
not fit into a circle of male friends, or destroy that friendship. These women have played a (sometimes
unconscious, sometimes conscious) role in modernity’s disparagement of
friendship. Friendship is
spiritual; this does not mean that it is necessarily good. It can be corrupted, for instance into
an indifference towards “outsiders”, or a superiority attitude. Others flaunt their pseudo-friendships
for personal gain. Friendship is
not a good symbol of divine Love, precisely because it is too spiritual
already, so too dangerous to use in that way. However, it is of course used for divine purposes.
“Romantic Love (eros)”
This can be distinguished from
Venus, or sexuality. Whereas
historically, Venus led to Eros, in our consciousness Eros tends to lead to
Venus. Incidentally, whether sex
is sinful has little to do with whether we are “in love”. One of the most curious aspects of Eros
is the fact that people speak of it as a desire for another person per se,
as distinct from any particular thing about that person, or something that the
person could give. Venus, or
sexuality, is often seen in connection with Eros, and in fact the medieval
theologians thought that the chief danger of Eros was sex, even within
marriage. Lewis is firmly opposed
to this idea, and claims with St. Paul that it is rather preoccupation or
distraction that is the danger in it. There is a danger in taking sex too seriously, too gravely
and sacramentally. Sex is
serious in many ways, but in other ways it is very unserious. It reminds us of our middle state, not
exactly angels but not just animals either. The act of love is a “Pagan sacrament”, as Sky-Father and
Earth-Mother. One aspect of
marriage that needs stressing today is the man’s responsibility in it. In neither the “Pagan sacrament” of sex
nor the Christian fulfillment in marriage is the crown the man wears capable of
being lorded over the woman: in the pagan sacrament it is as a crown of paper,
like a party hat. In the Christian
institution of marriage it is more like a crown of thorns. The danger of Eros, again, is its
tendency to become a god. Both
Plato and Shaw to some extent developed an “erotic transcendentalism”, to which
the Christian alternative is Eros as a paradigm or example of Charity, a higher
love. Eros has a paradoxical
transience yet seeming permanence, and it images (yet fails to embody)
paradise. Often, when marriages
fall apart, the participants had idolized Eros, such that when it lapses, they
are disillusioned.
“Charity (agape)”
Our natural loves (those described
heretofore) can be likened to a garden that needs tending. They cannot be their
beautiful selves without allegiance to God. Contrary to Augustine, who exhorted apathy to everything
except God (in a fit of grief), Lewis sticks to the recommendation of Jesus and
Paul that we love others, even if it means suffering for it. We should accept all loves, and offer
them to God. Our loves can be inordinate,
or out of proportion; they need ordering. The way to order them is to relate them to the Love that is
God. Of course, our knowledge of
God is at best a collection of metaphors or extrapolations. But as an experimental assay into the
nature of God and love, we might look at charity, or unconditional love, as a
combination of Gift-love for God and others, Need-love for God and others, and
Appreciative love. (An aside here
is an exegesis of the Judgment Day passage, where Lewis interestingly
interprets the separation of the sheep and goats as the judgment of the
heathen, rather than believers). God
transforms all of our natural loves towards perfection or the ideal. This results in their unification. Charity is to our natural loves as God
is to man in the Incarnation. Charity
brings with it the notion of forgiveness, which is unemphatic and deep, not
showy and deliberating. Our
natural loves, again, are inadequate—the defects we see in them (at least in
other people) should be enough to assure us of this—so we should crucify or
transmute them into the heavenly love. An open question is to what degree our loves transcend time,
or are eternal.
Central themes in the book:
·
Much
of our love is natural, in the sense that it is animal, and rooted in our
biological nature.
·
Love,
as many things, can exhibit a nearness of resemblance to God, as distinct from
a nearness of approach (it is not a channel or path to God).
·
Making
lesser things, such as natural loves, gods, makes them demons, which destroy
the love and corrupt the person.
·
Our
natural loves tend towards corruption. We need a higher love—not to replace them,
but to fulfill and order them, even to give them a reason for existence.
St. John’s saying that God is
love has long been balanced in my mind against the remark of a modern author
(M. Denis de Rougemont) that “love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to
be a god”; which of course can be re-stated in the form “begins to be a demon the
moment he begins to be a god”. This
balance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to
mean for us the converse, that love is God.
-ch.1 (Introduction).
Our loves do not make their claim
to divinity until the claim becomes plausible. It does not become plausible until there is in them a real
resemblance to God, to Love Himself.
-ch.1 (Introduction).
Idolatry both of erotic love and
of “the domestic affections” was the great error of nineteenth century
literature.
-ch.1 (Introduction).
The human mind is generally far
more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to
make every distinction a distinction of value.
-ch.2 (Likings and Loves for the
Sub-human).
It is impossible to draw a line
below which such pleasures are ‘sensual’ and above which they are ‘aesthetic’.
-ch.2 (Likings and Loves for the
Sub-human).
If you take nature as a teacher
she will teach you exactly the lessons you had already decided to learn; this
is only another way of saying that nature does not teach. The tendency to take her as a teacher is
obviously very easily grafted on to the experience we call ‘love of nature’. But it is only a graft. While we are actually subjected to them,
the ‘moods’ and ‘spirits’ of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, somber
desolation are flung at you. Make
what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, “Look. Listen.
Attend.”
-ch.2 (Likings and Loves for the
Sub-human).
A true philosophy may sometimes
validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a
philosophy. Nature will not verify
any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now
considering); she will help to show what it means.
-ch.2 (Likings and Loves for the
Sub-human).
All natural affections… can
become rivals to spiritual love: but they can also be preparatory imitations of
it, training (so to speak) of the spiritual muscles which Grace may later put
to a higher service; as women nurse dolls in childhood and later nurse
children.
-ch.2 (Likings and Loves for the
Sub-human).
…the Heavenly Society is also an
earthly society. Our (merely
natural) patriotism towards the latter can very easily borrow the transcendent
claims of the former and use them to justify the most abominable actions. If ever the book which I am not going to
write is written it must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom’s
specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. Large areas of ‘the World’ will not hear
us till we have publicly disowned much of our past. Why should they? We have shouted the name of Christ and enacted the service of
Moloch.
-ch.2 (Likings and Loves for the
Sub-human).
…the humblest and most widely
diffused of loves, the love in which our experience seems to differ least from
that of the animals.
-of affection, ch.3 (Affection).
Nothing in Man is either worse or
better for being shared with the beasts. When we blame a man for being “a mere animal”, we mean not
that he displays animal characteristics (we all do) but that he displays these,
and only these, on occasions where the specifically human was demanded.
-ch.3 (Affection).
I doubt if we ever catch
Affection beginning. To become
aware of it is to become aware that it has already been going on for some time.
-ch.3 (Affection).
…the short but seemingly
immemorial ‘always’ of childhood.
-ch.3 (Affection).
If people are already unlovable a
continual demand on their part (as of right) to be loved—their manifest sense
of injury, their reproaches, whether loud and clamorous or merely implicit in
every look and gesture of resentful self-pity—produce in us a sense of guilt
(they are intended to do so) for a fault we could not have avoided and cannot
cease to commit. They seal up the very fountain for which they are thirsty.
-ch.3 (Affection).
…I have been far more impressed
by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.
-ch.3 (Affection).
The more intimate the occasion,
the less the formalisation; but not therefore the less need of courtesy.
-ch.3 (Affection).
…that nationally suicidal type of
education which keeps back the promising child because the idlers and dunces
might be ‘hurt’ if it were undemocratically moved into a higher class than
themselves.
-ch.3 (Affection).
We feed children in order that
they may soon be able to feed themselves; we teach them in order that they may
soon not need our teaching. Thus a
heavy task is laid upon this Gift-love. It must work towards its own abdication. We must aim at making ourselves
superfluous. The hour when we can
say “They need me no longer” should be our reward.
-ch.3 (Affection).
…the higher and domesticated
animal is, so to speak, a ‘bridge’ between us and the rest of nature. We all at times feel somewhat painfully
our human isolation from the sub-human world—the atrophy of instinct which our
intelligence entails, our excessive self-consciousness, the innumerable
complexities of our situation, our inability to live in the present.
-ch.3 (Affection).
If you need to be needed and if
your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious
substitute. You can keep it all
its life in need of you.
-in criticism of the neurosis of
some pet owners, ch.3 (Affection).
It was of erotic love that the
Roman poet said “I love and hate,” but other kinds of love admit the same
mixture. They carry in them the
seeds of hatred. If Affection is
made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a
demon.
-ch.3 (Affection).
Those who cannot conceive
Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros
betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.
-ch.4 (Friendship).
Hence true Friendship is the
least jealous of loves. Two
friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the
newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, “Here
comes one who will augment our loves.”
-ch.4 (Friendship).
We can imagine that among those
early hunters and warriors single individuals—one in a century? One in a thousand years?—saw what others
did not; saw that the deer was beautiful as well as edible, that hunting was
fun as well as necessary, dreamed that his gods might be not only powerful but
holy.
-ch.4 (Friendship).
Hence we picture lovers face to
face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead. That is why those pathetic people who
simply “want friends” can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want
something else besides Friends. Where
the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be “I
see nothing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend,” no
Friendship can arise—though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about;
and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for
dominoes or white mice. Those who
have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no
fellow-travellers.
-ch.4 (Friendship).
Those are the golden sessions;
when four or five of us after a hard day’s walking have come to our inn; when
our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at
our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself
to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for
another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago,
while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life—natural life—has no better gift to
give. Who could have deserved it?
-ch.4 (Friendship).
Talk, by all means; the more of
it the better; unceasing cascades of the human voice; but not, please, a
subject. The talk must not be about anything.
-on the attitude of some women
who seek to undermine male friendship, ch. 4 (Friendship).
No one ever really appreciated
the other sex—just as no one really appreciates children or animals—without at
times feeling them to be funny. For
both sexes are.
-ch.4 (Friendship).
It is therefore easy to see why
Authority frowns on Friendship. Every
real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious
thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists against accepted good sense;
of real artists against popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilised
taste; of good men against the badness of society or of bad men against its
goodness. Whichever it is, it will
be unwelcome to Top People.
-ch.4 (Friendship).
Friendship (as the ancients saw)
can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men
worse.
-ch.4 (Friendship).
We—who are they to them—do
not exist as persons at all. We
are specimens; specimens of various Age Groups, Types, Climates of Opinion, or
Interests, to be exterminated. Deprived
of one weapon, they coolly take up another. They are not, in the ordinary human sense, meeting us at all;
they are merely doing a job of work—spraying (I have heard one use that image)
insecticide.
-of a vicious attitude of
superiority over others that some friendships can inspire, ch.4 (Friendship).
The Friendship is not a reward
for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God
reveals to each the beauties of all the others.
-ch.4 (Friendship).
-ch.5 (Eros).
Sexual desire, without Eros,
wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved.
-ch.5 (Eros).
If we had not experienced this,
if we were mere logicians, we might boggle at the conception of desiring a
human being, as distinct from desiring any pleasure, comfort, or service that
human being can give. And it is
certainly hard to explain. Lovers
themselves are trying to express part of it (not much) when they say they would
like to ‘eat’ one another. Milton
has expressed more when he fancies angelic creatures with bodies made of light
who can achieve total interpenetration instead of our mere embraces. Charles Williams has said something of
it in the words, “Love you? I am you.”
-ch.5 (Eros).
…one of the first things Eros
does is to obliterate the distinction between giving and receiving.
-ch.5 (Eros).
And the psychologists have so
bedevilled us with the infinite importance of complete sexual adjustment and
the all but impossibility of achieving it, that I could believe some young
couples now go to it with the complete works of Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, Havelock
Ellis and Dr. Stopes spread out on bed-tables all round them.
-ch.5 (Eros).
…I can hardly help regarding it
as one of God’s jokes that a passion so soaring, so apparently transcendent, as
Eros, should thus be linked in incongruous symbiosis with a bodily appetite
which, like any other appetite, tactlessly reveals its connections with such
mundane factors as weather, health, diet, circulation, and digestion.
-ch.5 (Eros).
The longing for a union which
only the flesh can mediate while the flesh, our mutually excluding bodies,
renders it forever unattainable can have the grandeur of a metaphysical
pursuit.
-ch.5 (Eros).
When natural things look most
divine, the demoniac is just round the corner.
-ch.5 (Eros).
But in the act of love we are not
merely ourselves. We are also
representatives. It is here no
impoverishment but an enrichment to be aware that forces older and less
personal than we work through us. In
us all the masculinity and femininity of the world, all that is assailant and
responsive, are momentarily focused. The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman the
Earth-Mother; he does play Form, and she Matter. But we must give full value to the word play. Of
course neither “plays a part” in the sense of being a hypocrite. But each plays a part or role in—well,
in something which is comparable to a mystery-play or ritual (at one extreme)
and to a masque or even a charade (at the other).
-ch.5 (Eros).
Nothing is falser than the idea
that mockery is necessarily hostile. Until they have a baby to laugh at, lovers are always
laughing at each other.
-ch.5 (Eros).
It is in the grandeur of Eros
that the seeds of danger are concealed. He has spoken like a god. His total commitment, his reckless disregard of happiness,
his transcendence of self-regard, sound like a message from the eternal world.
-ch.5 (Eros).
Of all loves he is, at his
height, most god-like; therefore most prone to demand our worship. Of himself he always tends to turn “being
in love” into a sort of religion.
-of Eros, ch.5 (Eros).
He needs help; therefore needs to
be ruled. The god dies or becomes
a demon unless he obeys God.
-of Eros, ch.5 (Eros).
…when the garden is in its full
glory the gardener’s contributions to that glory will still have been in a
sense paltry compared with those of nature.
-ch.6 (Charity).
When God planted a garden He set
a man over it and set the man under Himself. When He planted the garden of our nature and caused the
flowering, fruiting loves to grow there, He set our will to “dress” them.
-ch.6 (Charity).
It is dangerous to press upon a
man the duty of getting beyond earthly love when his real difficulty lies in
getting so far.
-ch.6 (Charity).
If I am sure of anything I am
sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for
safe investments and limited liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases Him
less.
-ch.6 (Charity).
To love at all is to be
vulnerable. Love anything, and
your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it
intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and
little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or
coffin of your selfishness. But in
that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become
unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of
tragedy, is damnation. The only
place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and
perturbations of love is Hell.
-ch.6 (Charity).
The humblest of us, in a state of
Grace, can have some “knowledge-by-acquaintance” (connaître), some “tasting”,
of Love Himself; but man even at his highest sanctity and intelligence has no
direct “knowledge about” (savoir) the ultimate Being—only analogies. We cannot see light, though by light we
can see things. Statements about
God are extrapolations from the knowledge of other things which the divine
illumination enables us to know.
-ch.6 (Charity).
God is a “host” who deliberately
creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and “take
advantage of” Him. Herein is love.
-ch.6 (Charity).
The consequences of parting with
our last claim to intrinsic freedom, power, or worth, are real freedom, power
and worth, really ours just because God gives them and because we know them to
be (in another sense) not “ours”.
-ch.6 (Charity).
The natural loves are summoned to
become modes of Charity while also remaining the natural loves they were.
-ch.6 (Charity).
Natural loves can hope for
eternity only in so far as they have allowed themselves to be taken into the
eternity of Charity.
-ch.6 (Charity).
We find thus by experience that
there is no good applying to Heaven for earthly comfort. Heaven can give heavenly comfort; no
other kind. And earth cannot give
earthly comfort either. There is
no earthly comfort in the long run.
-ch.6 (Charity).
When we see the face of God we
shall know that we have always known it.
-ch.6 (Charity).
We are then compelled to try to
believe, what we cannot yet feel, that God is our true Beloved.
-ch.6 (Charity).
Those like myself whose
imagination far exceeds their obedience are subject to a just penalty; we
easily imagine conditions far higher than any we have really reached.
-ch.6 (Charity).
If we cannot “practice the
presence of God,” it is something to practice the absence of God, to become
increasingly aware of our unawareness…
-ch.6 (Charity).
…you want a unified perspective
on the various kinds of love we experience; or, you are in a spiritual frame of
mind and wish to follow one person’s understanding of the relationship between
God, love, and humanity.
If you like
this, you’d also like...
(for the thoughtful lover):
-Ovid, Art of Love (1 BC)
-Petrarch, Canzoniere, or Sonnets (1327f).
-Michel de Montaigne, “On Friendship” (1580).
-Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1665).
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850).
(for the enjoyer of Lewis’s
religious essays):
-C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of
Man (1947).
-C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952).
-C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1962).
-C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (1940-1963).