Summary: The Four Loves: Contemplations on Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity by C.S. Lewis

• “The Four Loves” by C.S. Lewis is a timeless exploration of love in its various forms. Lewis’s wisdom and insight are on full display as he examines affection, friendship, eros, and charity. This book provides valuable insights into the complexities of human relationships and the role that different kinds of love play in our lives. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in philosophy, theology, or the human experience.
• Discover the profound wisdom of C.S. Lewis as he dissects the intricacies of love in “The Four Loves.” This book will challenge your understanding of affection, friendship, eros, and charity, leaving you with a deeper appreciation of the complexities of human relationships.

The Four Loves (1960) is an exploration of love in its different forms. By tracing how each form is motivated, author C. S. Lewis identifies love’s gifts and shortcomings, and reveals how God’s Divine Love can beautify all our relationships.

Who is it for?

• Christians seeking to deepen their connection with God
• Bighearted folk who want to improve their relationships
• Scholars of humanity who want to understand the nature of love

Understand the nature of love so you can grow closer to God

Love – it’s a word we throw around a lot. We might say we love pizza or swimming when what we mean is that we really like them. And in some languages, like French, the word for like and love is the same.

So what do we actually mean by love? And is the love we feel for others the same as the love God has for us?

These are the questions author and theologian C. S. Lewis set out to answer by sliding love under the microscope, teasing out its various forms, and then exploring them in the context of Divine Love.

In these summary, we’ll look at the distinct types of love that Lewis identified and how they can help us foster our relationship with God. But even if you’re not especially religious, unpacking the different types of love in your life can still help you gain a deeper understanding of them.

Different types of love can be categorized into two distinct groups, according to what motivates them

C. S. Lewis is probably most famous for his children’s book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lewis was a close friend of author J. R. R. Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings. They met while they were working in the English faculty at Oxford University and were two of the founding members of Inklings – a renowned literary discussion group.

Tolkien was deeply religious and his faith inspired Lewis to renew his relationship with God after he’d abandoned Christianity in his teens. This return to the church had a huge impact on Lewis’s writing. If you’ve read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and you’re familiar with Christianity, you won’t need anyone to point out how allegorical the story is.

But Lewis didn’t just explore his faith through novels about magical wardrobes and lions that rise from the dead. He used writing as a way to meditate on and explore different aspects of Christianity.

One subject that fascinated him was love.

When Lewis set out to explore love in his work, he figured it’d be fairly straightforward. After all, the Gospel according to John says that God is love. Simple, right?

Well, not really.

As soon as Lewis started unpacking that three-word explanation of love, he realized that love in its different forms could be categorized into one of two groups, depending on what was motivating it.

Lewis called the first group Gift-love.

Gift-loves are generous, boundless, and self-renewing. They’re what inspires you to care for the people that are important to you without expecting anything in return. You see Gift-love in action when a parent tends to their child every single day, when a partner comforts or supports their beloved, or when a stranger reaches out to help someone in need. Gift-loves also help you forgive someone who’s hurt you.

This category of love reflects Divine Love – the love God has for us. God is complete and abundant. He gives his love to us endlessly. Even when we turn our backs on him, his love is still there, waiting for us to receive it, if we open our hearts to him.

But while we can emulate God by practicing Gift-love in different ways, we’re far from complete and abundant. We’re riddled with yearnings that span all aspects of our being – from our minds and bodies to our emotions. And this leads to the second classification group, which Lewis called Need-love.

Need-loves arise from a place of lack or longing. They can be greedy, desperate, and demanding, or motivated by fear. For instance, when a child is scared, they’ll rush into the arms of their parent. The need for comfort motivates them to seek out someone who makes them feel safe.

Now, you’re probably thinking that this category of love sounds pretty substandard compared to God-like Gift-love, and that’s totally reasonable. But Need-loves play an important role not only in our relationships with others but in our relationship with God. We’re going to explore that in more detail, but for now, let’s focus on why Need-loves are so important.

Think about a time when you were hungry. What did you do? Headed to the kitchen and made yourself a sandwich? Or grabbed a bite in a local cafe? You ate your meal. Your hunger went away. You satisfied your need.

Need-loves operate in the same way by motivating us to seek each other out when we’re in need of comfort or advice. The frightened child runs to its parent. Or in a moment of crisis, we ask God for his help. Or even if there isn’t a crisis, we seek out God’s wisdom and guidance, so that we can better understand how we should live.

Need-loves stop us from drifting through the world, disconnected from each other and any source of knowledge. In that way, they create a foundation that Gift-loves can then sit on, a bit like the way the roots of a tree support its trunk. And when we meditate on how different types of love evolve, we can start to trace how Need-loves often grow into Gift-loves, ultimately inviting Divine Love into our hearts.

Familiarity creates Affection – the first type of love

If you take a moment to think about the people in your life, you’ll notice that you don’t feel the same way about each of them. Some of them you may not like at all, but let’s stick to people you feel positive about so that we can untangle the nature of love.

If you’re lucky, there’ll be a few core people you feel deep love for – your partner or lover perhaps, your immediate family members, the children in your life. Then there’ll be other people who are dear to you – like your friends.

But it might not end there. You could have colleagues or mentors that are important to you and a swag of other people who may not play a huge role in your life but who you appreciate for the small moments of joy they bring.

So at this point, it’s probably pretty obvious to you that not all the iterations of love you feel are the same. And distinguishing one from the other was what Lewis set out to do.

Lewis posited that there were four distinct types of love. We’re going to take a look at each one in turn.

Let’s begin with the first type, which Lewis called Affection. It’s often the earliest form of love we know when we’re babies and relying on our parents for survival. Because of this, Affection falls firmly in the category of Need-love, that classification we explored earlier.

Affection is the most common type of love you’ll experience because it doesn’t discriminate in the way that other loves do. You can feel it for people you don’t have much in common with – like the neighbor in your apartment building that you never socialize with but still like to chat to when you bump into each other in the hallway. Or you can feel Affection toward someone who’s completely different to you – the kind of person who’d drive you up the wall if you were in a close relationship but who you have a fondness for anyway, maybe even because they’re so different to you.

You can feel Affection toward animals too, and animals of different species can feel it for each other. Most of us have squealed with joy over YouTube clips of chickens snuggling up to their dog buddies, or cats who like hanging out with sheep.

Familiarity is the basis of Affection. It grows between people who see each other regularly. But unlike when we love a friend or partner we see all the time, Affection isn’t based on shared interests or heady passion. The key difference is that we choose our friends and lovers, but the people we feel Affection for have randomly entered our lives.

This is what makes Affection special. It brings together people who wouldn’t otherwise be close. Say, for instance, you move into a share house, and you don’t know any of your housemates. They might be wildly different from you – people you’d never normally cross paths with. But over time, you start appreciating their quirks and, after a while, you realize you’re quite attached to them.

Because of this, Affection plays an important role in broadening our minds. Being thrown together with people you haven’t chosen gives you the chance to learn about other perspectives and experiences. That’s why it’s important not to view Affection as a lesser type of love. The fact that it doesn’t discriminate the way friendships and romantic relationships do is precisely what makes it so valuable.

The problem with not choosing people means that sometimes we end up taking them for granted. Even if you haven’t specifically chosen someone in your life, you still need to put the effort in. Just like any other relationship, Affection relies on kindness, patience, and ongoing nurturing. Without that – well, we all know how quickly things go sour when someone feels taken for granted.

Friendship – the second love – unites us with kindred spirits

Friendship – Lewis’s second love – also needs nurturing if it’s going to survive. But it couldn’t be more different from Affection. Where Affection brings random strangers together, Friendship is like a magnet that attracts like-minded people.

Think about the people you’re friends with. Can you pinpoint a shared passion or interest that drew you to each of them? Perhaps you both shared a love for stamp collecting, or you met because your interest in singing led you to join a choir. Or maybe you were both volunteering for a cause you feel deeply about and you connected that way.

But Friendship in the sense of Lewis’s loves is more than just companionship. True friends are on a journey of some kind – pursuing that shared hobby or sport, fighting for that cause, or practicing a shared faith or profession. A key element of Friendship is that friends support each other on this journey. They’re both invested in making the journey because they see the value in it and they want to help their friend on that journey too.

This makes Friendship sit squarely in the Gift-love category. True friendship isn’t driven by a need to be needed, it’s motivated by that shared passion. We don’t need our friends for survival in the way that we might need someone to feed us when we’re young. It also doesn’t involve sexual need, which is part of Eros – the love we’ll look at next. And so, free from the needs that hound other types of love, friends can just get on with being friends, working alongside each other as they pursue their mutual passion.

Friendship doesn’t just free us from that sense of need, it also frees us from the labels that other types of love stick on us. Think back to a time when you discovered someone shared your passion. In that moment, you didn’t care about how old that person was, their personal history or how much money they made. Next to your shared passion, all of your new friend’s other characteristics became incidental. Over time, you learned more about this person, but none of those details were fundamental to forming – or maintaining – your friendship.

This means that when we’re with our true friends, we can shake off other labels that we might carry around, like boss or parent or colleague or spouse. And once we’ve done this, what remains is simply who we are. In that raw essence, we can set off on our journey with our true friends. And with them at our sides to cheer, support, and guide us, we can become truer and truer to ourselves. Because of this, Friendship brings out the best in us. Among a group of true friends, you’ll probably be humbled and amazed, wondering how you managed to find such an incredible group of people who share something you love. But in truth, they’ll be thinking the exact same thing about you.

Sadly, there’s a fly in this otherwise fabulous ointment. When we’re surrounded by like-minded people, we run the risk of living inturning into an echo chamber, where our views are constantly affirmed by people who think the same way as us. This means we’re more likely to dismiss other points of view – for better or for worse. It’s one thing to ignore people who tell you that stamp collecting is dead boring and a complete waste of time. But what if you ignored people who were offering you important new information, like those brave, early meteorologists who were trying to convince others that storms weren’t made by witches?

That’s why Affection is an important way to temper the side effects of Friendship. When the two work in tandem, we can simultaneously foster our passions while keeping our minds open.

Eros – or romantic love – teaches us how to love God

Now, you probably know a few couples who started out as friends and then fell in love. People who experience this transformation are truly lucky. They get to pursue their shared passion with someone who adores them. And the icing on the cake of course is sex.

When Lewis started meditating on the third love – romantic love or Eros – he needed to think about sex as well. For many people, sex will be a component of Eros. But since you can have sex with people you’re not in love with, sex itself doesn’t necessarily indicate the presence of Eros.

Sexual desire in its purest form seeks out sensual pleasure. But Eros wants more. It wants the beloved completely, and it wants the beloved specifically. No one else will do. The sensual pleasure that the beloved might offer the lover in return during sex is almost incidental. The lover’s desire to admire, celebrate, and please the beloved outweighs their own yearning for sexual pleasure.

Just a short aside here that might interest you, given Lewis’s deep faith and the conservative time he was living in. Lewis believed that British society and the church took sex far too seriously, to the point where people were either bewildered by it or just plain terrified. He didn’t see sex as a great impediment to spirituality – a view that was touted from many pulpits. In his view, it was more likely to be the minutiae of married life – like the daily chores and obligations – and not sex itself, that stood in the way of prayer.

So, back to the matter at hand. After mulling over sex in its various contexts, Lewis decided to set aside purely sexual relationships from his study, not on a moral basis but because his goal was to examine love.

Lewis described the act of falling in love as becoming completely and delightfully preoccupied with another person – and not just because of physical attraction but because of who that person is. The lover will spend their time thinking about all the wonderful qualities they’ve discovered in their beloved and will be ready and willing to turn their life upside down to please them. Because of this, Eros is anchored firmly in the Gift-love category.

This doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness though. Western society has been trying to sell us the notion that love leads to happiness for who knows how long. But Lewis didn’t think Eros could care less about happiness. He saw Eros as the reason that people stayed together through tough and miserable times. And this is both the triumph and terror of Eros.

Because, in fact, Eros has the power to drive us to do terrible things. Some people exalt Eros so much that they’d rather suffer deeply or even commit terrible crimes than part ways with their beloved. Don’t be mistaken; a love that drives people to murder in its name isn’t a passing crush or a sexual fixation, it’s Eros at its most potent. That’s why we must always remember that Eros isn’t some elevated, spiritual state – which is the message that poetry, music, and TV shows often try to sell us. Eros well and truly lives in the domain of humankind.

But it’s not all bad news. Paradoxically, Eros also offers us a way to grow closer to God. If we love God with the same devotion and abandon that we do our beloved when we’re falling in love, then our relationship with him will deepen immeasurably. We’ll no doubt fall short from time to time, just as we do with our beloved. But we can recommit ourselves again and again. Like a couple whose relationship is strong enough not to break up over daily squabbles, we can find our way back to loving God, knowing that he will never turn his back on us.

Charity – the fourth love – is Divine Love working inside us

So, as we’ve seen in the summary about the first three loves, each of them has the potential to go sour. The randomness and familiarity of Affection means we can take people for granted. Friendship can turn into an echo chamber and narrow our views. And Eros – well, most of us know how its potency can make us behave terribly.

There is an antidote to this though. We can stop these loves from going sour by holding onto God’s Divine Love and actively nurturing all our relationships, no matter what type of love they are. It’s a bit like if you had a garden and your loves were the plants growing there. They might thrive at first, flowers bursting out in every color, attracting birds and butterflies. But if you don’t tend to the garden by weeding it, fertilizing it, and even doing a bit of pruning now and then, your plants will suffer. Over time, they’ll stop flowering and might even die. But if you tend to the garden consistently, it’ll flourish.

But there is one love that doesn’t go sour, Lewis’s fourth love – Charity.

Charity happens when humans practice the purest form of Gift-love. Just a reminder – Gift-love is the kind of love that’s based in generosity. You desire only what’s best for someone else, without any self-interest or hidden agenda. It’s the kind of deep love you might feel toward someone very dear to you.

But Charity takes Gift-love a step further. It’s the kind of love that motivates you to care about people who aren’t actually very lovable. That could be someone who’s ill or hostile or infirm. It could be someone who infuriates you or even your enemy. Or it might be a stranger that you help, and in doing so, you serve Christ.

Charity is also what helps us love the people in our lives when they’re behaving badly, like when a child is throwing a huge tantrum in the middle of a mall. They might be pressing every button their mother has, but she still loves them. Or when our partner is being obnoxious, Charity helps us look beyond their behavior to see how tired and stressed they are, and what they really need in that moment is tenderness.

This is an important gift Charity offers us – it’s the love that’s given to us when we’re unlovable. And this makes it the love that we all need most.

Ironically, most of us crave a different type of love. We want to be loved because we’re attractive or brilliant or talented. Because of this, we’re often shocked and humbled when someone offers us Charity.

For instance, imagine you fell terribly ill not long after your wedding. You and your spouse were faced with an awful new reality – that your health would never fully return and that you’d need care for the rest of your life – which might be decades.

You’re both devastated, but your spouse takes this all in their stride, caring for you without complaint. This act of selfless love affects you deeply. You can’t understand why your spouse would choose to embrace this new life for your sake. You just can’t believe that they’d love you that much.

This example is extreme but the truth is that we all have unlovable characteristics. We’re human, after all. The great blessing of Charity is that we can be loved – and are loved – in spite of what makes us unlovable. God’s Divine Love – working inside us – is what makes this possible.

We can decide to infuse all the other loves with Charity – that’s what will make them flourish like our metaphorical garden. Sharing a joke with an acquaintance to brighten their day, playing a game with our kids, making love in the truest sense to our partner – these are all Charity in action. When we console or forgive others, we invite Charity into our hearts. And it’s in these moments that we deepen our connection with God by manifesting him in the way we love.

Conclusion

When it comes to love, it’s clear that no two loves are the same. The love we feel for our neighbor might seem far less valuable than the love we have for our spouse. But the truth is that all forms of love have worth because they’re an opportunity to offer Charity to others. And when we do this, we become a conduit for the greatest love – the Divine Love of God.

Genres

Religion, Spirituality, Christianity, Literature and the Arts, Christian Life, Spiritual Growth

About the author

C. S. Lewis was a renowned British author and theologian. He wrote over 30 books, including The Chronicles of Narnia series which has sold over 100 million copies, and nonfiction books such as Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain.

Table of Contents

I. INTRODUCTION
II. LIKINGS AND LOVES FOR THE SUB-HUMAN
III. AFFECTION
IV. FRIENDSHIP
V. EROS
VI. CHARITY

Review

“The Four Loves: Contemplations on Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity” by C.S. Lewis is a thought-provoking exploration of the various dimensions of love, dissected with Lewis’s characteristic wisdom and insight. In this book, the author examines four distinct types of love, delving into their nature, characteristics, and impact on our lives.

Lewis starts by discussing “Affection,” a love that is rooted in familiarity and comfort. He describes how this love often forms the foundation of our relationships with family and close friends, providing a sense of security and belonging.

The second love Lewis examines is “Friendship,” which he considers as the least natural but most spiritual of the loves. He beautifully illustrates the essence of true friendship, its selflessness, and the unique bond it forges between individuals.

“Eros,” the third love, is depicted as the romantic and passionate love that drives individuals towards one another. Lewis explores the complexities of human desire and the significance of physical attraction in relationships, all while emphasizing the need for a transcendent element in romantic love.

Finally, Lewis presents “Charity” or “Agape,” which he argues is the highest form of love. This is a selfless, unconditional love that extends to all humanity. Lewis underscores the Christian perspective on this love, emphasizing its divine origin and its capacity to transform human lives.

Throughout the book, Lewis blends personal anecdotes, philosophical reflections, and Christian theology to provide a comprehensive understanding of these four loves. He offers a profound analysis of how these loves intersect, complement, and sometimes conflict with one another, enriching our human experience.

In summary, “The Four Loves” is a brilliant work that not only deepens our comprehension of love but also challenges us to reflect on our own relationships and affections. C.S. Lewis’s eloquent writing and philosophical insights make this book a timeless classic.