Scan barcode
A review by maggiedoodlez
The Four Loves: Featuring the vintage BBC recordings of C.S. Lewis by C.S. Lewis
4.0
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even 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.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, my favorite of these essays is agape. Lewis just makes it all accessible.
My least favorite was on philia because I felt its construction of the sexes and its commentary on sexuality to be frustrating. Never has it been clearer that Lewis lived within a wildly different framework of expectations for humanity. I did think it shed further light on Susan’s character arc in Narnia, though, and I would love to have read this before I wrote my analysis for Medieval Lit.
Lewis’s analysis on a shared interest between friends was also amusing to me because it’s fun to trace this philosophy through Donald Hall and ultimately to John Green’s “third thing” (though, forgive me, I can’t remember which essay you can find it in). The biggest difference for me, though, was how staunchly separate Lewis keeps this function of love from eros, placing it solidly and solely within the realm of philia. I think I like Green’s analysis better. Or, at the very least, I disagree with Lewis on the improbability of a couple’s capability to have a braided version of both.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, my favorite of these essays is agape. Lewis just makes it all accessible.
My least favorite was on philia because I felt its construction of the sexes and its commentary on sexuality to be frustrating. Never has it been clearer that Lewis lived within a wildly different framework of expectations for humanity. I did think it shed further light on Susan’s character arc in Narnia, though, and I would love to have read this before I wrote my analysis for Medieval Lit.
Lewis’s analysis on a shared interest between friends was also amusing to me because it’s fun to trace this philosophy through Donald Hall and ultimately to John Green’s “third thing” (though, forgive me, I can’t remember which essay you can find it in). The biggest difference for me, though, was how staunchly separate Lewis keeps this function of love from eros, placing it solidly and solely within the realm of philia. I think I like Green’s analysis better. Or, at the very least, I disagree with Lewis on the improbability of a couple’s capability to have a braided version of both.