The Four Loves Quote #49

From Chapter Five, Charity.

We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. [...]

The natural loves are summoned to become modes of Charity while also remaining the natural loves they were. [...]

How this can happen, most Christians know. All the activities (sins only excepted) of the natural loves can in a favoured hour become works of the glad and shameless and grateful Need-love or of the selfless, unofficious Gift-love, which are both Charity. Nothing is either too trivial or too animal to be thus transformed. A game, a joke, a drink together, idle chat, a walk, the act of Venus -- all these can be modes in which we forgive or accept forgiveness, in which we "seek not our own." Thus in our very instincts, appetites and recreations, Love has prepared for Himself "a body."

The Four Loves Quote #22

From Chapter Three, Friendship.

When either Affection or Eros is one's theme, one finds a prepared audience. The importance and beauty of both have been stressed and almost exaggerated again and again. [...] But very few modern people think of Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all. [...] To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, by comparison, ignores it. [...]

Friendship is -- in a sense not at all derogatory to it -- the least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious and necessary. It has least commerce with our nerves; there is nothing throaty about it; nothing that quickens the pulse or turns you red and pale. [...]

This (so to call it) "non-natural" quality in Friendship goes far to explain why it was exalted in ancient and medieval times and has come to be made light of in our own. The deepest and most permanent thought of those ages was ascetic and world-renouncing. Nature and emotion and the body were feared as dangers to our souls, or despised as degradations of our human status.