Uncommon Common Sense

Love is a subject that calls forth eloquence from the poet and profundity from the philosopher, but what love almost never gets from anybody is good common sense. And during those rare moments when we do talk common sense about love we are always talking about somebody else’s love, a love of which we invariably disapprove. C. S. Lewis in his The Four Loves (Harcourt, $3.75) has done something extremely difficult: he has treated love lovingly within the context not only of Christian sanity but of Christian shrewdness. There is something canny—in the old-fashioned sense of the term— in the way in which Lewis handles the Divine Fire without getting burned. Sweeping away the cynics who deprecate the divine character of human love, Lewis locates love’s power and glory and danger precisely within its divinity. As a divinity, love is a possible rival to God, and lovers all too often convert St. John’s proposition that “God is love” into “Love is God.” Love is god-like and there-fore can ennoble; but since it is only god-like and not God it can debase and cripple the human heart.

Beginning his study with the humblest kind of love, love for the sub-human, the author has some fine things to say about our inability to derive our love of God from our love of the world. What we get from the world of nature is “an iconography, a language of images,” which can light up for us the darkness in which we stumble when we speak of the love and the fear of God. Thus the Christian seaman can sense the littleness of man and the omnipotence of God in a storm, but a man seeking the gods behind God might find in it a proof of the littleness of man and of the absurdity of human existence. We largely bring to nature what we already hold within our hearts. This book is a fine answer to much of the folly written about nature in the last century.

FW

About the Author

Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

Featured Tags

Love is a subject that calls forth eloquence from the poet and profundity from the philosopher, but what love almost never gets from anybody is good common sense. And during those rare moments when we do talk common sense about love we are always talking about somebody else’s love, a love of which we invariably disapprove. C. S. Lewis in his The Four Loves (Harcourt, $3.75) has done something extremely difficult: he has treated love lovingly within the context not only of Christian sanity but of Christian shrewdness. There is something canny—in the old-fashioned sense of the term— in the way in which Lewis handles the Divine Fire without getting burned. Sweeping away the cynics who deprecate the divine character of human love, Lewis locates love’s power and glory and danger precisely within its divinity. As a divinity, love is a possible rival to God, and lovers all too often convert St. John’s proposition that “God is love” into “Love is God.” Love is god-like and there-fore can ennoble; but since it is only god-like and not God it can debase and cripple the human heart.

Beginning his study with the humblest kind of love, love for the sub-human, the author has some fine things to say about our inability to derive our love of God from our love of the world. What we get from the world of nature is “an iconography, a language of images,” which can light up for us the darkness in which we stumble when we speak of the love and the fear of God. Thus the Christian seaman can sense the littleness of man and the omnipotence of God in a storm, but a man seeking the gods behind God might find in it a proof of the littleness of man and of the absurdity of human existence. We largely bring to nature what we already hold within our hearts. This book is a fine answer to much of the folly written about nature in the last century.