"God is love.”
The opening line of the text is attributed to the gospel of St. John. This should not surprising since C.S. Lewis is widely recognized as a mainstream writer with a strong underlying sense of the Biblical themes and allegorical symbolism. The Four Loves was initiated as a series of radio lectures with the intent and purpose of analyzing the various natures and incarnations of human love from a Christian perspective, but one distinctly philosophical rather than dogmatic. Needless to say, the essays initiate from a point of origin in which all the various forms of love begin with God.
I begin with the humblest and most widely diffused of loves, the love in which our experience seems to differ least from that of the animals.
The section titled “Affection” commences with this description. As if sensing the inevitable outcry from animal lovers, he immediately makes it clear that that this does not mean affection exists at a lower level because beasts may be capable of manifesting it.
“If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it."
This odd quote is actually a rhetorical device used by Lewis as part of an extended section in which he feels called upon “to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.” The example of the invisible cat is his response to the convoluted logic of those supporting the above contention who propose that lack of evidence that all friendships are homosexual is itself proof that the evidence has been carefully hidden.
A young man to whom I had described as "pornographic" a novel that he much admired, replied with genuine bewilderment, "Pornographic? But how can it be? It treats the whole thing so seriously"--as if a long face were a sort of moral disinfectant.
The section on erotic love notably seeks to avoid becoming too explicit and focusing too specifically upon sexuality. The two quoted here are the only occasions throughout the entire book in which pornography is mentioned, for instance. It is perhaps indicative of the approach that Lewis takes to the more earthy delights associated with human love—and his assertively mature sense of humor—that in this anecdote he apparently does not necessarily equate pornography exclusively with explicit descriptions of eroticism and that he is attuned enough to the difference to closed with a genuinely comical metaphor separating the prude from the scholar.
