What C. S. Lewis Says About Charity

Lewis’s overall conclusion about love comes in his examination of the final of the four loves, Charity, which we are calling the second ‘intellectual’ love:

The natural loves are not self-sufficient. Something else, at first vaguely described as ‘decency and common sense’ but later revealed as goodness, and finally as the whole Christian life in one particular relation, must come to the help of the mere feeling if the feeling is to be kept sweet.

As we have seen, Eros, Affection and Friendship are unreliable on their own. They ‘wobble’, in one way or another. They are all subject to either variable emotions or the dangerous intellectual trap of Pride. What, then, is reliable? Lewis has all along more than hinted that his chief concern was the love of human beings for Go