C.S. Lewis on Sex

From The Four Loves:

I can hardly help regarding it as one of God’s jokes that a passion so soaring, so apparently transcendent, as Eros, should thus be linked in incongruous symbiosis with a bodily appetite which, like any other appetite, tactlessly reveals its connections with such mundane factors as weather, health, diet, circulation, and digestion…It is a continual demonstration of the truth that we are composite creatures, rational animals, akin on one side to the angels, on the other to tom-cats. It is a bad thing not to be able to take a joke. Worse, not to take a divine joke; made, I grant you, at our expense, but also (who doubts it?) for our endless benefit.

Lewis’s discussion of love and passion is the most perceptive I’ve ever read. That’s even before he agrees with the view of the human body expressed by St. Francis, who called his body ‘Brother Ass’. A good read indeed.