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Forms of Love

is god. Only in recognizing the sovereignty of the Creator over His creation, love included, can we understand it.

In the second chapter Lewis describes a love one may have missed in the first chapter: "appreciative love." This is our appreciation of nature, art, and God, and it is how we worship. It is, thus, an important capacity for any human. However, there is the human who appreciates what he sees and as worships God, and the human who tries to retain what he sees (by painting, discussing, studying) and analyzes God into theology. This is an important disctinction: one is the knowledge demons have without appreciation (or worship) and the other is akin to faith (James 2).

Lewis also exposes the root of "love of country" in quoting Chesterton's analogy between not wanting a foreign ruler and not wanting one's house burned down: "he 'could not even begin' to enumerate all the things he would miss" (41). In other words, patriotism is a form of Need-love. It is the collection of memories that makes one comfortable, and losing them means losing the reminders of those comforts. This is, I think, the most important insight amidst his section on patriotism and love become a demon.

Much is made of patriotism, but in the end it is little more than a want for familiarity and a fear of what change might remove. He also notes that this patriotism "may shade off into that popular Racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid" (45). This cannot be said enough times to enough people. Those who adhere to "Racialism" also need this book because they love naught but themselves, and hate all others. "When the natural loves become lawless they do not merely do harm to other loves; they themselves cease to be the loves they were -- to be loves at all" (47).

In writing about The Four Loves, in fact, one is tempted to repeat many of the lines that neatly summarize the truths Lewis gives here. Thirty-six years later when the ...

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Forms of Love. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:50, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682397.html