The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

116 chapter 6Lewis offers a ladder of love. The four loves human and divine are,climbing upward: affection, human sexual desiring (eros), human friendship(philia), and finally charity, that is, agape. The lowest is one’s love fornonhumans, such as a dog or a thing. The highest includes, Aquinas says,a sacred version of friendship, the astonishing friendship between unequalsof humans and God. Agape is God’s gift, notes Lewis, following orthodoxysince Augustine, for God “can awaken in man, towards Himself, a supernaturalAppreciative love.” The proud blasphemy that we are loved for our evidentmerits dissolves into “a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of ourNeed....We become ‘jolly beggars.’”The other three loves for humans, and I suppose also the best love fornonhumans, Lewis would group under “natural loves.” These are not to bedisdained. But they need to have that touch of transcendent agape, transcendent“charity,” if love “is to be kept sweet.” 26 “Whatsoever love elects tobless,” says Richard Wilbur, “Brims to a sweet excess / That can withoutdepletion overflow.” 27 The overflow gives a point to a virtuous life, whethermedieval or socialist or bourgeois.