As Lewis explains in his discussion of likeness versus nearness to God, loves can become perverted, hindering a person’s ability to actually approach God. When natural loves are properly balanced with love of God, they can continue to be enjoyed. But when love grows “inordinate,” or out of balance, that’s when it becomes demonic, and the original love ends up being lost in the process. For example, unchecked Affection can begin to suffocate those it serves, the exclusiveness of Friendship can degenerate into pride, and the self-giving of Eros, when feeling fades, can be reduced to just sex. These are all examples of ways that natural loves can become “demonic” and ultimately destroy themselves. Lewis argues that love is perverted not necessarily when someone loves “too much,” but when a natural love is too big in proportion to our love for God. That is, when love for God is smaller than natural loves, natural loves become distorted and finally destroy themselves. Natural loves must therefore be properly positioned in relation to God.
Lewis argues that any form of natural love can become “inordinate,” or out of balance. For example, when Affection is thrown out of balance, it can become stifling for its objects. If a professor is too giving to a student, it might actually harm the student by preventing them from gaining confidence and thinking independently. This shows that Affection can actually become “demonic.” In the case of Friendship, Lewis suggests that when a Friendship ceases to be “about” something else—a shared passion or pursuit—a group of friends can become pridefully exclusive, focused on keeping others out. Even if a group of friends bonds over common loyalty to a sports team, for instance, they can become more focused on hating fans of a rival team than enjoying their original interest. So, Friendship, too, can be fatally distorted, no longer fulfilling its potential to forge bonds between people. Another example is Eros, which becomes demonic when it becomes a justification for any kind of behavior. This occurs when romance is elevated so highly that a person abandons their obligations or even commits crimes for the beloved’s sake, believing love makes it all worth it. In reality, love has become destructive.
However, Lewis argues that in all such cases, the problem with inordinate love isn’t that the beloved is loved “too much.” Rather, God is loved too little in proportion to the lesser object. This point hasn’t always been clearly understood—in earlier writings, Christian theologians tended to see natural loves as risky because they easily become excessive. For example, St. Augustine wrote that when his best friend died, he learned that it’s wrong to give one’s heart to anything less than God. Lewis argues that this approach is wrong, however—it’s pagan, not Christian. For one thing, it doesn’t reflect the attitude of Christ Himself, who wept over the deaths of those he loved. For another, it’s not possible to love at all without becoming vulnerable to heartbreak. If you try, your heart will just become hard and incapable of love.
In fact, the problem with inordinate love isn’t that it’s somehow “too much”—it’s that such love is disproportionate. This means that, contrary to older views like Augustine’s, a person doesn’t need to love others less, but to love God more. And loving God “more” isn’t so much about the intensity of one’s feelings—it’s about what one chooses to put first. This is what Jesus meant in the Gospels when he said that if a person wants to follow Him, they must hate their family. He didn’t mean to literally despise them, but to turn away from anyone—no matter how beloved—who becomes an obstacle to one’s first allegiance to God. For example, if someone’s friend tries to persuade them to steal, or if a married person falls in love with someone else, the person must turn away from the loves in question and toward God. Though this is a kind of rejection of others, Lewis suggests that because the rejection is for the sake of loving God (“Love Himself”), it’s actually a way of loving others more. Ultimately, then, the solution to disproportionate love isn’t to love others less. Instead, a person must make sure that when it comes to a choice between a natural love (whether it’s for a child, a friend, or a spouse) and loving God by obeying what He commands, God comes first.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Disproportionate Love ThemeTracker
Disproportionate Love Quotes in The Four Loves
Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself. It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done ‘for love’s sake’ is thereby lawful and even meritorious. That erotic love and love of one’s country may thus attempt to ‘become gods’ is generally recognised. But family affection may do the same.
This love, when it sets up as a religion, is beginning to be a god—therefore to be a demon. And demons never keep their promises. Nature ‘dies’ on those who try to live for a love of nature. Coleridge ended by being insensible to her; Wordsworth, by lamenting that the glory had passed away. Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds, and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; Go there in order to be overwhelmed and […] nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you.
[Gift-love] must work towards its own abdication. We must aim at making ourselves superfluous. […] But the instinct, simply in its own nature, has no power to fulfil this law. The instinct desires the good of its object but not simply; only the good it can itself give. A much higher love—a love which desires the good of the object as such, from whatever source that good comes—must step in and help or tame the instinct before it can make the abdication. And of course it often does. But where it does not, the ravenous need to be needed will gratify itself either by keeping its objects needy or by inventing for them imaginary needs. It will do this all the more ruthlessly because it thinks (in one sense truly) that it is a Gift-love and therefore regards itself as ‘unselfish’.
A circle of friends cannot of course oppress the outer world as a powerful social class can. But it is subject, on its own scale, to the same danger. It can come to treat as ‘outsiders’ in a general (and derogatory) sense those who were quite properly outsiders for a particular purpose. Thus, like an aristocracy, it can create around it a vacuum across which no voice will carry. […] The partial and defensible deafness was based on some kind of superiority—even if it were only a superior knowledge about stamps. The sense of superiority will then get itself attached to the total deafness. The group will disdain as well as ignore those outside it.
By Eros I mean of course that state which we call ‘being in love’; or, if you prefer, that kind of love which lovers are ‘in’. Some readers may have been surprised when, in an earlier chapter, I described Affection as the love in which our experience seems to come closest to that of the animals. Surely, it might be asked, our sexual functions bring us equally close? This is quite true as regards human sexuality in general. But I am not going to be concerned with human sexuality simply as such. Sexuality makes part of our subject only when it becomes an ingredient in the complex state of ‘being in love’. That sexual experience can occur without Eros, without being ‘in love’, and that Eros includes other things besides sexual activity I take for granted.
It has been widely held in the past, and is perhaps held by many unsophisticated people today, that the spiritual danger of Eros arises almost entirely from the carnal element within it; that Eros is ‘nobler’ or ‘purer’ when Venus is reduced to the minimum. The older moral theologians certainly seem to have thought that the danger we chiefly had to guard against in marriage was that of a soul-destroying surrender to the senses. It will be noticed, however, that this is not the Scriptural approach. St Paul, dissuading his converts from marriage, says nothing about that side of the matter except to discourage prolonged abstinence from Venus (I Cor. 7:5). […] With all proper respect to the medieval guides, I cannot help remembering that they were all celibates, and probably did not know what Eros does to our sexuality; how, far from aggravating, [Eros] reduces the nagging and addictive character of mere appetite.
Where a true Eros is present, resistance to his commands feels like apostasy, and what are really (by the Christian standard) temptations speak with the voice of duties—quasi-religious duties, acts of pious zeal to Love. He builds his own religion round the lovers. […]
It seems to sanction all sorts of actions they would not otherwise have dared. I do not mean solely, or chiefly, acts that violate chastity. They are just as likely to be acts of injustice or uncharity against the outer world. They will seem like proofs of piety and zeal towards Eros. The pair can say to one another in an almost sacrificial spirit, ‘It is for love’s sake that I have neglected my parents—left my children—cheated my partner—failed my friend at his greatest need.’
And 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. Without life springing from the earth, without rain, light and heat descending from the sky, he could do nothing. When he has done all, he has merely encouraged here and discouraged there, powers and beauties that have a different source. But his share, though small, is indispensable and laborious. 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. Compared with them it is dry and cold. And unless His grace comes down, like the rain and the sunshine, we shall use this tool to little purpose. But its laborious—and largely negative—services are indispensable.
There is no escape along the lines St Augustine suggests. Nor along any other lines. There is no safe investment. 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.
But the question whether we are loving God or the earthly Beloved ‘more’ is nor, so far as concerns our Christian duty, a question about the comparative intensity of two feelings. The real question is, which (when the alternative comes) do you serve, or choose, or put first? To which claim does your will, in the last resort, yield?
As so often, Our Lord’s own words are both far fiercer and far more tolerable than those of the theologians. He says nothing about guarding against earthly loves for fear we might be hurt; He says something that cracks like a whip about trampling them all under foot the moment they hold us back from following Him.
