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C. S. Lewis's Famous Disagreement with Augustine on Love

Speaker(s): Jason Lepojarvi
Date: Fall 2016
Length: 58m
Product ID: RGDL4602AG

Description

Augustine recounts a heart-breaking story of the loss of his unnamed friend in the fourth book of the Confessions. In The Four Loves, Lewis hesitantly but firmly rejects what he took to be the moral of the story: that vulnerability is a sign of misplaced or distorted love. This is the only time Lewis publicly disagrees with Augustine whom he calls 'a great saint and a great thinker to whom my own glad debts are incalculable' on an important issue concerning love. Lewis poem 'Scazons' serves as a literary backdrop for a more systematic analysis of this rare disagreement and possible misunderstanding.

Dr. Jason Lepojarvi is a scholar-in-residence at Regent College for the 2016-17 academic year. His current work is a Post-Doctoral research project on the theology of love, titled Idolatry: Catholic and Protestant Perspectives. Jason, his wife, and their two daughters moved to Vancouver in July 2016. Prior to this, they lived in Oxford, where Jason worked as the Junior Research Fellow in Theology at St Benet's Hall. His doctoral thesis God Is Love but Love Is Not God: C. S. Lewis's Theology of Love (2015) critically analyzed C. S. Lewis's position in and contribution to the debate on love ('agape vs. eros') that preoccupied much of twentieth century Protestant and Roman Catholic thought.

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