At their very best, natural human loves can become “glorious images of Divine love”—earthly reflections that show what God is like. But the ultimate point of Lewis’s book is to show that, by themselves, natural loves aren’t enough. People can sense that even their warmest Affection, most devoted Friendship, or most passionate Eros aren’t enough; they need something more than mere feeling in order to sustain them. In the end, this “something more” isn’t just common sense or human goodness; natural loves can only be transformed through divine grace. Sometimes a person is called to renounce a natural love once and for all (like the biblical Abraham leaving his homeland) in order to love God instead, but more typically, the transformation is gradual over the course of a person’s life. Lewis argues that rather than being wiped out, natural loves must be continually transformed by God’s grace—that is, taken up into God’s love and made instruments of that love (Charity). When natural loves are transformed in this way, human beings will discover that all their loves are, in a certain sense, love for God.
Lewis argues that the natural loves, while they have the potential to reflect God’s love, are not enough to actually bring people near to God. For example, Affection, when expressed as Need-love, will keep inventing more and more “needs” to fulfill for the beloved, pretending to be unselfish while actually satisfying the lover’s own need to feel useful. While this outwardly looks selfless, it actually demonstrates that natural Affection will devolve into selfishness unless it’s somehow transformed. Similarly, Eros can be an image of the totally generous love we should offer to God and other people. However, when passionate feelings fade, romance becomes difficult to sustain. These caveats aren’t meant to denigrate the natural loves. Natural loves are divine gifts, meant to bring people near to God—but they can’t accomplish this by themselves.
Ultimately, Lewis argues, no human effort can turn natural loves into supernatural loves—divine grace must do this. Occasionally, a person must totally renounce natural loves in order to draw near to God. For example, in the Book of Genesis, God calls Abraham to leave behind his family and homeland. Before the modern era, this was the more common understanding—that natural loves must be given up entirely, or else they risk becoming rivals to one’s love for God. However, most of the time, God doesn’t call people to give up natural loves or even substitute His own love for them. Instead, he calls on those natural loves to “become modes of Charity” (divine love) while simultaneously remaining themselves. This means that God lets people continue loving children or friends or spouses, but He puts circumstances in a person’s life that gradually purify that love, turning it into Charity.
Lewis argues that divine grace takes up natural loves and transforms them into Charity, or divine love. In other words, God changes natural loves from human to divine over the course of a person’s life, until those loves are suitable for Heaven (where only divine things can exist). Most of the time, this transformation of natural loves isn’t sudden or obvious, but subtle, gradual, and secret. It generally occurs by practicing virtue, which simply means responding to the events of everyday life—even petty annoyances—with patience, tolerance, and forgiveness. When a person develops virtues like these, they gradually purge their natural loves of self-indulgent, sinful, and worldly elements. These loves are accordingly changed and strengthened, with God’s help, into divine loves. For example, Affection will no longer wear itself out by self-indulgently giving what the lover wants to give. Instead, it will seek what’s truly good for its object—even if somebody else is better positioned to give that good thing. In this case, Affection has been made an instrument of Charity (the natural love becoming divine). The end result of this lifelong, plodding, often painful effort is that anything that remains natural in human love will fade away, leaving only divine love—or Charity. The parts of love that have been transformed into Charity will last for eternity in Heaven.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Transformation of Love ThemeTracker
Transformation of Love Quotes in The Four Loves
[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’.
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 in everyone, and of course in ourselves, there is that which requires forbearance, tolerance, forgiveness. The necessity of practising these virtues first sets us, forces us, upon the attempt to turn—more strictly, to let God turn—our love into Charity. These frets and rubs are beneficial. It may even be that where there are fewest of them the conversion of natural love is most difficult. When they are plentiful the necessity of rising above it is obvious. To rise above it when it is as fully satisfied and as little impeded as earthly conditions allow—to see that we must rise when all seems so well already—this may require a subtler conversion and a more delicate insight.
Man can ascend to Heaven only because the Christ, who died and ascended to Heaven, is [in him]. Must we not suppose that the same is true of a man’s loves? Only those into which Love Himself has entered will ascend to Love Himself. And these can be raised with Him only if they have, in some degree and fashion, shared His death; if the natural element in them has submitted—year after year, or in some sudden agony—to transmutation. […] Natural loves can hope for eternity only in so far as they have allowed themselves to be taken into the eternity of Charity […] And the process will always involve a kind of death. There is no escape.
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.
