The experience of love serves as one of the oldest mysteries of human existence. The loves of a friend for a friend, a parent for a child, a husband for a wife, man for God and God for man have been described as being at once both the most natural reactions of the body and most divine feelings of the soul. The love between a husband and a wife most clearly displays this natural and divine duality of the true loves. A marriage must embody both eros, romantic and sexual love, and agape, the self-sacrificing love evident in the person of God, in order to achieve true unity and life-long endurance. In the novel That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis uses the example of a married couple, initially distanced from each other and from God, in order to illuminate the relationship necessary between eros and agape for the complete fulfillment of both marital relationships and an individual’s relationship with God. Through the characters of Mark and Jane, Lewis not only shows that eros itself can be the means by which an individual approaches an understanding of agape, but that an understanding of God’s love is necessary for a full realization of all the blessings of eros.
The experience of eros as a means of approaching an understanding agape can be seen primarily in the progression of Jane’s conversion. Through the words of the Director and the response of Jane, Lewis reveals his view of marriage as a relationship with complete unity, but not complete equality, and how that perspective leads to an understanding of the love of God. The character of Jane longs for a world and a marriage in which she is valued, not for qualities inherent to her femininity, but for her equally intelligent and independent status. She believes that in all marriages people have equality “in their souls” (“Strength” 148) and that therefore she should be considered completely equal with her husband in all ways. The Director corrects her by introducing a new perspective concerning her relationship with her husband: “That [marriage] is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of income—that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it” (“Strength” 148). Lewis reiterates this view in his book The Four Loves, referring to a husband and wife as “a god and goddess between whom there is no equality—whose relations are asymmetrical” (“Strength” 104). For Lewis, unity does not exist when the parts of the whole are equal, but rather when the parts remain distinct and assume their proper places within a greater hierarchy. The wife, as the distinctive feminine part of the marriage relationship, submits to her husband, while the husband, as the distinctive masculine part, lives sacrificially for her just as Christ gave his life for the church (“Loves” 105-106).
As she begins to realize this necessity of difference and hierarchy in her marriage, Jane also begins to recognize her marriage as an image of a greater, universal hierarchy:
But she had been conceiving this world as ‘spiritual’ in the negative sense—as some neutral, or democratic, vacuum where differences disappeared, where sex and sense were not transcended but simply taken away. Now the suspicion dawned upon her that there might be differences and contrasts all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer, at every rung of the ascent. How if this invasion of her own being in marriage from which she had recoiled, often in the very teeth of instinct, were not, as she had supposed, merely a relic of animal life or patriarchal barbarism, but rather the lowest, the first, and the easiest form of some shocking contact with reality which would have to be repeated—but in ever larger and more disturbing modes—on the highest levels of all? (“Strength” 315)
In this way, Jane eventually connects the idea of unity through hierarchy to her understanding of the spiritual world. Though it seems at first to her to be “nonsensical” and “indecent and irreverent” to relate her marriage to Mark with “religion,” Jane comes to understand that religion is not the issue, but rather her unwillingness to give up her independence and equality for a personal relationship with both her husband and God (“Strength” 317-318). For Jane, this realization not only means a sacrifice of her belief in independence and equality with Mark, but also a submission to a God with whom she could never consider herself an equal. One can never know the agape of God unless one has acknowledged dependence on and inequality with God, a recognition that Jane is only able to reach as she begins to understand true unity in her relationship with her husband.
This ability of eros to lead to agape by means of similarity is addressed by Lewis in The Four Loves: “This love [eros] is really and truly like Love Himself…His [eros] total commitment is a paradigm or example, built into our natures, of the love we ought to exercise towards God and Man” (109-110). Through Jane’s gradual understanding of this paradigm, commitment without the expectation of equality, one can see the small-scale example of agape that eros provides through its representation of necessary sacrifice within a unified relationship. The marriage relationship, in its small part of the hierarchy of the universe, becomes “the whole Christian life seen from one particular angle,” a miniature of the sacrifice of independence required and the unity desired by God in a relationship with Him (“Loves” 115). In the words of Lewis, romantic love becomes “a sort of explosion that starts up the engine” but remains “the pie-crust, not the pie” (“Behavior” 32). The “pie” is that the top of the hierarchy himself revealed agape to the world by relinquishing his throne in heaven and coming to earth to die even for those who mocked him, not to grasp equality with God, but to show His love for humanity (Philippians 2:6-7, NIV). Jesus died so that we could have unity with Him, a magnification of the hierarchy of service visualized within human marriage. In the words of Lewis’ Screwtape the demon, “the Enemy [God] wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct” (“Letters” 46). Though she finds a small example in her marriage to Mark, Jane realizes fully the nature of true unity only when she grasps this infinitely radical picture, accomplishing Lewis’ goal of asserting the ability of eros to be a means of approach for agape.
To examine the reverse relationship between the loves, C. S. Lewis demonstrates his belief in the necessary subjection of eros to agape through the change in Mark and Jane’s understanding of their sexual relationship. Jane becomes the first to begin the change when she encounters Perelandra or Venus, the goddess of sexuality, in the garden of St. Anne’s (“Strength” 304-305). Later hearing her account of the experience, the Director explains the intensity of the meeting as a result of Jane having “rejected” the goddess and because she saw Venus separate from the hierarchy, the rule of God, to which Jane had not yet surrendered. Venus, figurative of eros, remains “raw,” “untransformed,” and “demoniac” when she serves as a deity without subjugation to the control of agape (“Strength” 314). Jane’s experience epitomizes Lewis’ understanding of the relationship between natural and divine loves: “when natural things look divine, the demoniac is just around the corner” (“Loves” 102). Here Jane’s encounter with raw eros shows that though eros can speak “like a god…it cannot, just as it stands, be the voice of God Himself. For Eros, speaking with that very grandeur and displaying that very transcendence of self, may urge to evil as well as good” (“Loves” 108). Through Jane’s example Lewis asserts the fact that romantic relationships, even marriages, fail to know complete love if eros is the only type of love present. It is the presence of the authority of agape over eros, tempering and transforming it, that directs it into what it was created to be.
When agape takes control of eros, lovers understand their obligation to give up individual pride in order to love the other person selflessly, as can be seen most vividly in the transformation of Mark. As he makes his way to see Jane after their long separation and his final defiance against N.I.C.E., Mark considers the “clumsy importunity” with which he has handled the gift of Jane’s love during in their marriage:
…all the lout and clown and clod-hopper in him was revealed to his own reluctant inspection…How had he dared? Her driven snow, her music, her sacrosanctity, the very style of all her movements…how had he dared? And dared too with no sense of daring, nonchalantly, in careless stupidity! The very thoughts that crossed her face from moment to moment, all of them beyond his reach, made (had he but had the wit to see it) a hedge about her which such as he should never have had the temerity to pass. (“Strength” 380-381)
Here Lewis gives the reader a picture of a lover who has been humbled to a newly-discovered understanding of his beloved’s virtues by an experience with agape, which Mark describes as “the normal” or “that which is sweet and straight” (“Strength” 299). When he decides to desire the good more than he desires acceptance, Mark finally understands the fearful gift of eros that Jane has given to him and appreciates it for the first time, demolishing his previous pride. In Mark, one sees that “God, admitted to the human heart, transforms…not only our Need-love of Him, but our Need-love of one another” (“Loves” 133). Agape shows Mark how he should view eros in his marriage. Through Mark’s example Lewis also asserts, however, that “the Divine Love does not substitute itself for the natural—as if we had to throw away our silver to make room for the gold. The natural loves are summoned to become modes of Charity while also remaining the natural loves they were” (“Loves” 133). The natural love of eros becomes the love through which Mark expresses his new humility towards Jane and demonstrates the new agape love present in their redeemed relationship (“Strength” 382).
Jane also experiences a change toward humility in eros through her encounter with agape. Her pride first becomes revealed to her through the words of the Director when he relates her grip on independence to both her marriage and her relationship with God:
…your trouble has been what old poets called Daungier. We call it Pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: that loud, irruptive, possessive thing…which breaks through hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness…The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. (“Strength” 315-316)
This passage depicts the Director exposing Jane’s unwillingness to submit her independence to either eros or agape and names her pride as the cause. Concerning her sexual relationship with her husband, the Director even asserts that “obedience—humility—is an erotic necessity” (“Strength” 148). If she is to love either her husband or God, Jane must find humility. This humility only comes after she realizes she was “made to please Another and in Him to please all others,” an epiphany after which “the height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called me dropped down and vanished, unfluttering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in a space without air” (“Strength” 319). Through the transformation of Jane, Lewis demonstrates his view that even “the most lawless and inordinate lovers are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness…Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness” (“Loves” 122). Jane would be closer to an understanding of true eros if she had idolized it instead of repressing it completely out of the fear that she will have to give up her pride. The example of agape in Christ shows that though humility can lead to suffering for love, eros must attain the humility of agape and shed self-protectiveness for care of the other if it is to be true and complete.
Not only does the sovereignty of agape bring about humility within eros, but it also allows for the flourishing of the beauty and pleasure of eros. In the view of Lewis, those opposed to God and His love “always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable” (“Letters” 49). This is evidenced in the example of N.I.C.E., which believes in the eradication of all things sexual in order to purify humanity (“Strength” 173). On the other hand, under agape, eros finds its full celebration and fulfillment. Jane observes and resents this fact during the beginning of her stay at St. Anne’s:
Hers ought to have been the vivid, perilous world brought against their grey formalized one; hers the quick, vital movements and theirs the stained glass attitudes. That was the antithesis she was used to. This time, in a sudden flash of purple and crimson, she remembered what stained glass was really like. (“Strength” 316)
Jane recognizes at St. Anne’s the beauty offered by romantic love when “formalized” i.e. placed under the authority of, and therefore enhanced by, agape. Mark also comes to recognize this beauty of eros submitted to agape, though he is bitter that he has not understood earlier: “He was discovering the hedge after he had plucked the rose, and not only plucked it but torn it all to pieces and crumpled it with hot, thumb-like, greedy fingers” (“Strength” 381). Jane’s love, previously of no meaningful value to Mark, now becomes related in his mind to a beautiful flower crushed by his lack of proper appreciation. This change in the perspectives of Mark and Jane portray clearly the views of Lewis on the nature of eros, sexual love, within Christianity, the lifestyle of agape: “Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once” (“Behavior” 27). Romantic and sexual love, Lewis asserts, was created by God and therefore should be celebrated by Christians like all other good gifts from the Creator. As instituted by God, the restrictions placed upon it are not to make it less enjoyable, but rather to place it within a context where it can reveal its full beauty, because “Eros, of himself, will never be enough—will indeed survive only in so far as he is continually chastened and corroborated by higher principles” (“Loves” 110). As Jane and Mark both come to understand, agape does not demonize eros but rather allows it to come into its full power without becoming a demon, the key to the true fulfillment of its nature. The Creator of both eros and agape reveals Himself to be “a hedonist at heart…He has filled His world full of pleasures” (“Letters” 122). The story of That Hideous Strength ends with a celebration of a redeemed marriage and two individual relationships with God through the consummation of eros by the couple (“Strength” 382). Through the changed perspectives of Mark and Jane, Lewis proclaims the redemption of the rose that was crumpled and celebrates the beauty of stained glass windows.
Through the characters Mark and Jane in That Hideous Strength, the perspectives of C. S. Lewis concerning the relationship between eros and agape loves gain new clarity as the reader follows the growth of the couple’s marriage relationship. By detailing the changes of the ideas of Mark and Jane, Lewis asserts the indispensability of the connectedness of these two powerful love experiences. Eros can provide a vivid example of the type of love demonstrated by God through agape, though eros cannot function or be made into a god on its own without running the risk of becoming a demon that destroys all true love. Eros, placed under the control of agape, can be a love that flourishes and continues to grow as agape encourages the humility of the lovers and reveals the beautiful and pleasurable nature of eros as it was created to be. Above all, That Hideous Strength demonstrates clearly Lewis’ belief in God’s sovereignty over all things, most especially the loves. The relationship between eros and agape, while still mysterious, becomes less mysterious when one recognizes their common source in the Creator of the universe. Like Mark and Jane, one can see they must submit all of themselves to God, both in the natural reactions of the body and the divine feelings of the soul, in order to understand any part of love. All love only becomes true love when it remains in Love Himself.
Works Cited
Lewis, C. S. . Christian Behavior. 5. Binghamton, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1945.
---. That Hideous Strength. 1st Scribner Paperback Fiction Ed.. New York,
NY: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1996.
---. The Four Loves. Reprint. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1991.
---. The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast. Reprint. New York, NY: The
Macmillan Company, 1961.
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