Though Lewis argues that love always comes from God in some sense, the precise relationship between human and divine love is complicated. To explain this relationship, Lewis distinguishes “likeness to God” from “nearness to God.” All created things, especially humans, are “like” God in the sense that God made them. Nearness to God, on the other hand, has to do with growing closer to God spiritually, in one’s character. Likeness is given by God, while nearness must be actively sought. And while likeness to God might coincide with nearness to God, that’s not always the case—one can be like God but not near Him. The distinction is necessary because when people’s understanding of love gets off balance, they can begin to deify love itself instead of worshiping God as the source of love. When that happens, no matter how genuine these loves are otherwise, they become “demonic,” hindering nearness to God. When that happens, only God’s grace can overcome the divide. Using this distinction between likeness to God and nearness of approach, Lewis argues that while natural loves can promote nearness of approach to God, they can also hinder that approach. And because of this, natural loves aren’t, by themselves, enough to achieve nearness to God—both human effort and divine grace must transform natural loves.
Mistaking “likeness” to God for “nearness” actually hinders a person’s nearness to God. When natural human loves resemble God’s love the most, people can mistakenly assume that this “likeness” is also “nearness.” In other words, people assume that when love looks Godlike, that means the lover really is near God spiritually. For example, a wife and mother who untiringly serves her family might seem to be near God, since God, too, is self-giving in His character. However, even though such love does resemble God in a sense, it doesn’t mean the lover is necessarily near God—her motivations might be deeply selfish (for example, she might be gratifying her own need to feel needed). The same could be said of a romantic lover who gives up everything to be with his beloved; such self-sacrifice can appear God-like, but it might also result in the betrayal or neglect of others in his life. In both cases, the person loving is actually moving farther away from God, even though their actions superficially resemble Him.
When a person’s nearness to God is hindered in this way, their understanding of love is further distorted as that love deteriorates into a “demonic” state—that is, a state completely opposed to God. When people give their loves the devotion they really owe to God, those loves become “demonic” instead of Godlike. That is, these loves become distortions of themselves that conceal God, or give a false view of God, instead of drawing people closer to Him. To give an extreme example, a pair of thwarted lovers could make a suicide pact because they don’t want to live without each other. Though the lovers might feel they’re sacrificing everything for love, they’ve actually let love become a cruel tyrant in their lives instead of a means of approaching God. So even the loves that appear to be outwardly Godlike can end up hindering nearness to God. By leading people into destructive actions, they can even push people farther away from God.
Unless aided by divine grace, natural loves will always tend to unravel in this way, showing that by themselves, they aren’t enough to bring a person near God. To resist that demonic tendency, they require not just human effort, but divine grace. Because God created human beings for Himself and wants them to be near Him, He gives grace (the gift of divine help) to transform their distorted loves into divine love. Lewis uses the symbol of a garden to illustrate this cooperation between human effort and divine grace. He explains that “without rain, light, and heat descending from the sky, [the gardener] could do nothing […] he has merely encouraged here and discouraged there […] But his share, though small, is indispensable and laborious.” In other words, God’s grace (the heaven-sent rain and light) empower human efforts and make them effective. Yet if the human gardener didn’t “encourage and discourage” (by “pruning” and “weeding” his loves), the garden would still grow wild. But when grace and human effort work together, with God’s grace fueling the person’s small, daily efforts at taming and directing his natural loves toward God, the garden is gloriously transformed over time. The transformed garden symbolizes the person whose loves don’t just resemble God outwardly, but truly reflect God’s nearness.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Humanity’s Relationship with God ThemeTracker
Humanity’s Relationship with God Quotes in The Four Loves
‘God is love,’ says St John. When I first tried to write this book I thought that his maxim would provide me with a very plain highroad through the whole subject. I thought I should be able to say that human loves deserved to be called loves at all just in so far as they resembled that Love which is God. The first distinction I made was therefore between what I called Gift-love and Need-love. The typical example of Gift-love would be that love which moves a man to work and plan and save for the future well-being of his family which he will die without sharing or seeing; of the second, that which sends a lonely or frightened child to its mother’s arms.
Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God. But man’s love for God, from the very nature of the case, must always be very largely and must often be entirely, a Need-love. This is obvious when we implore forgiveness for our sins or support in our tribulations. But in the long run it is perhaps even more apparent in our growing—for it ought to be growing—awareness that our whole being by its very nature is one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose. […] He addresses our Need-love: ‘Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy-laden,’ or, in the Old Testament, ‘Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.’
What is near Him by likeness is never, by that fact alone, going to be any nearer. But nearness of approach is, by definition, increasing nearness. And whereas the likeness is given to us—and can be received with or without thanks, can be used or abused—the approach, however initiated and supported by Grace, is something we must do. […] Hence […] our imitation of God in this life—that is, our willed imitation as distinct from any of the likenesses which He has impressed upon our natures or states—must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions.
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.
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.
The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the Church—read on—and gave his life for her (Eph. 5:25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least […] The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man’s marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness[.]
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.
We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom, or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love. It is not that we have loved them too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving. It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a Stranger. When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it.
