The Nonny Enticement revisited

Things were more interesting around here once, and a long time ago now I wrote a few posts on the topic of dating a non-Christian guy (those being known here as a "nonny"). They were: The Nonny Enticement Pt 1 - A Story, The Nonny Enticement Pt 2 - Why Not and The resolution of Jane.

As you know I have been reading some of CS Lewis lately, the most recent being The Four Loves. The thing about reading CS Lewis is that you find little gems in places you wouldn't necessarily expect them on that topic. (And read this great article by John Piper on the theological ups and downs with Lewis - I haven't ever signed off on everything he said, but neither has that stopped me reading.) So in reading through the chapter on Charity from The Four Loves, he has this to say, which relates to those three earlier posts (and it's a recurring issue for me, so maybe it is for you too):

It remains certainly true that all natural loves can be inordinate. Inordinate does not mean ‘insufficiently cautious’. Nor does it mean ‘too big’. It is not a quantitative term. It is probably impossible to love any human being simply ‘too much’. We may love him too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the man, that constitutes the inordinacy. But even this must be refined upon. Otherwise we shall trouble some who are very much on the right road but alarmed because they cannot feel towards God so warm a sensible emotion as they feel for the earthly Beloved. It is much to be wished – at least I think so – that we all, at all times, could. We must pray that this gift should be given us. But the question whether we are loving God or the earthly Beloved ‘more’ is not, so far as concerns our Christian duty, a question about the comparative intensity of two feelings. The real question is, which (when the alternative comes) do you serve, or choose, or put first? To which claim does your will, in the last resort, yield?

As so often, Our Lord’s own words are both far fiercer and far more tolerable than those of the theologians. He says nothing about guarding against earthly loves for fear we might be hurt [he has earlier quoted Augustine along these lines]; He says something that cracks like a whip about trampling them all under foot the moment they hold us back from following Him. ‘If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife … and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14:26).

But how are we to understand the word hate? That Love Himself should be commanding what we ordinarily mean by hatred – commanding us to cherish resentment, to gloat over another’s misery, to delight in injuring him – is almost a contradiction in terms. I think Our Lord, in the sense here intended, ‘hated’ St Peter when he said ‘Get thee behind me.’ To hate is to reject, to set one’s face against, to make no concession to, the Beloved when the Beloved utters, however sweetly and however pitiably, the suggestions of the Devil. A man, said Jesus, who tries to serve two masters, will ‘hate’ the one and ‘love’ the other. It is not, surely, mere feelings of aversion and liking that are here in question. He will adhere to, consent to, work for, the one and not the other … So, in the last resort, we must turn down or disqualify our nearest and dearest when they come between us and our obedience to God. Heaven knows, it will seem to them sufficiently like hatred. We must not act on the pity we feel; we must be blind to tears and deaf to pleadings.

…

How this could come about we may see on a far lower level when the Cavalier poet, going to the wars, says to his mistress:

I could not love thee, dear, so much

Loved I not honour more.

There are women to whom the plea would be meaningless. Honour would be just one of those silly things that Men talk about; a verbal excuse for, therefore and aggravation of, the offence against ‘love’s law’ which the poet is about to commit. Lovelace can use it with confidence because his lady is a Cavalier lady who already admits, as he does, the claims of Honour. He does not need to ‘hate’ her, to set his face against her, because he and she acknowledge the same law. They have agreed and understood each other on this matter long before. The task of converting her to a belief in Honour is not now – now, when the decision is upon them – to be undertaken. It is this prior agreement which is so necessary when a far greater claim than that of Honour is at stake. It is too late, when the crisis comes, to begin telling a wife or husband or mother or friend, that your love all along had a secret reservation – ‘under God’ or ‘so far as a higher Love permits’. They ought to have been warned; not, to be sure, explicitly, but by the implication of a thousand talks, by the principle revealed in a hundred decisions upon small matters. Indeed, a real disagreement on this issue should make itself felt early enough to prevent a marriage or a Friendship from existing at all. The best love of either sort is not blind … If ‘All’ – quite seriously all – ‘for love’ is implicit in the Beloved’s attitude, his or her love is not worth having. It is not related in the right way to Love Himself.