Amy’s Reviews > The Four Loves > Status Update

“If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.”

“Affection produces happiness, if—and only if—there is common sense and give and take and ‘decency’. In other words, only if something more, and other, than Affection is added. The mere feeling is not enough… “That is the whole point. If we try to live by Affection alone, Affection with ‘go bad on us’.”

“…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 Gift-love and therefore regards itself as ‘unselfish’.”

“…something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity one has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy and finally to appreciate, the people who ‘happen to be there’. Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.”

I am underlining most of this book! So, so good!!

“Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word Glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one… And if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the ‘love’ of God would never, so far as I can see, have existed.”

“But where Need-love is left unaided we can hardly expect it not to ‘die on us’ once the need is no more. That is why the world rings with complaints of mothers whose grown-up children neglect them and of forsaken mistresses whose lovers’ love was pure need—which they have satisfied.”

“We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. Then they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.”

“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 it, the Divine life operating under human conditions.”