C. S.

Lewis The Four Loves

1960

(What is love? Lewis embarks on a personal and insightful exploration of affection, friendship, romance, and charity.)

Reflection
How can so many millions of us believe that love is the best thing in the world, and yet there be so little emphasis in our popular culture on what love is, as distinct from finding someone to love and to be loved by? John Lennon was quicker to say All you need is love, than he was to explain what he means by love. Popular songs sometimes take a stab at it, but are better at phrasing questions than providing answers: What is this thing called love?, Is this love?, I want to know what love is, How will I know when its love?. The voluminous self-help books are focused on practicality rather than explanation, and the works of psychologists and philosophers (for good reasons) often confine their analyses to those aspects of love that result from a study of behavior and are amenable to quantification.

C. S. Lewiss book, on the other hand, is devoted entirely to an explanation of love that descends into our animal nature, but ascends also into the realm of religion and spirituality whence (Lewis believes) true love comes, and where it reaches its highest and most meaningful fulfillment. In so doing, he incidentally provides an answer to my initial question, why we as a culture dont seem to have a good handle on what love is: Lewis would say that we wont ever share an understanding of love unless we share an understanding of God. This is the provocative vision that underlies the book. The Four Loves deserves classic status precisely because it presents this vision so candidly, so insightfully, and with such intuitive appeal. The books parochialism stands out, in that Lewis does not attempt to hide the fact that he is generalizing from his experience, and also more broadly in his unabashed Christian perspective. However, this parochialism is the very point, the heart of the book. Lewis believes that one of mans most enduring questions (What is

love?) is answerable only in connection with a personal world-view. If Lewis is right about this, apart from the question of which religion or world-view we are talking about, this should be enough to convince us that a popular consensus on the nature of love will never be had. Science will tell us of its biological basis and psychological and behavioral manifestations, but it is our beliefs on controversial metaphysical and religious matters that will provide our deepest and most meaningful understanding of love.

Lewis endorses and explains the Christian doctrine that God is love. The fact that this statement is not immediately absurd (whether or not we understand or believe it) shows that the concept of love must extend beyond our knowledge in the same way that the concept of God does. Both are mysteries, in the medieval sense. If, on the other hand, we had a sufficient handle on either concept, the claim would no longer be provocative. Given the mystery of love, then, it is not surprising that a religious person, and a Christian in particular, should have written one of the most valuable twentieth century works on the subject of love.

Summary
The book is not intended to be a complete survey of love, but a selective outline of the main kinds of love and how they are best organized. Lewis admits that this is a personal account, and thus is necessarily biased towards his experience, especially (since love often highlights sex differences) as a male.

Introduction Lewis starts by distinguishing between Need-love and Gift-love. Need-love is not bad, and is truly a love, although it can lead to an idolatry of love. When love is deep and real it is liable to invite worship, even though a worship of love will corrupt or destroy it. Our aim should be to neither overestimate nor underestimate love.

Likings and Loves for the Sub-human Love is distinguished from liking. Liking can be divided into Need-pleasures (those things which, once they satisfy us, are no longer so pleasurable or desirable) and Pleasures of Appreciation (which are inherently pleasurable things and always deserve our liking of them). There is no clear line between the sensual and the

aestheticthe two grade into each other. Appreciative-love is a third aspect of love besides Need-love and Gift-love. Love for the natural world can come in many forms. It is mistaken if it idolizes nature or seeks truths in nature in the way the Romantics did, for nature will teach whatever we want to learn; however, nature does clothe or fill our beliefs. Love of ones country is also morally ambivalent, having both worthwhile and misleading aspects to it. Patriotism can be seen as having 5 possible ingredients, ranging from a wonderful love of home which is a prototype for charity, to the fatally dangerous belief that our country (or any other group) is superior to all others and so bestows special rights and duties, and warrants our love because of that superiority.

Affection (storge) Affection is the most indiscriminate, the humblest and most widely diffused of loves, originating as parentoffspring, and possible among any two individuals, including animals. It requires nothing but familiarity for its growth, though it can blend with other loves. Baby-talk and kissing are common manifestations of it. Affection facilitates appreciation and breadth. However, it is not the Love, not God. In fact, it can be corrupted, both in its Need-love and Gift-love form. A ravenous Need-love affection can produce the opposite in others. This occurs, for instance, in the rudeness of parents towards their children, or when someone (Rudesby) takes liberties in the name of affection, without actually having the affection that would excuse his actions. There can also be jealousy, or a resentment towards change. Affections Gift-love aspect can be tyrannical, as when one (Mrs. Fidget) gives in order to be needed (whereas a proper Gift-love works to end the others need). Another example is a teacher (Dr. Quartz) who cannot stand students thinking independently. Even love for pets can be corrupted into a tyranny of affection for those who are selfish and insecure. All of us have these problems, these corruptions of affection, to some extent. Incidentally, speaking of psychological maladjustment, perfection is not, as many psychologists assume, adjustment to this world. Rather, perfection is adherence to something beyond or above the world. Accordingly, affection produces happiness in us only if we have a reason for it, a higher love. The corrupted affection works from wrong, or lesser, motives.

Friendship (philia)

This is an underappreciated love in our time, possibly because it is the least natural, least emotional of loves. Many in our day are so egalitarian that they distrust it. Some either disparage it as unnecessary or confuse it with homosexuality as if all philia must be reducible to eros. (Here Lewis uses a good illustrative argument against the dictatorial strategy of argument). In fact friendship exhibits a glorious nearness by resemblance to Heaven itself. In its basic form it was important in prehistory as a tendency towards cooperation (incidentally, saying cooperation is an instinct is a misleading aspect of behavioral science and merely betrays our ignorance). True friendship, we might imagine, grew out of this prototypical cooperative disposition. Romantic love can blend nicely with it today, and is enriched by it. Friendship can have an important societal impact, which is why authority frowns on it, although tying friendship to a social goal tends to reduce its significance. Friendship tends to be relatively uninquisitiveit seeks the naked personality whereas Eros seeks the naked body. At its best, friendship contains a large dose of Appreciativelove. Cultivating intersex friendships can be difficult, perhaps largely due to differences in educational experiences between men and women. In fact, many women (perhaps of lesser education) either do not fit into a circle of male friends, or destroy that friendship. These women have played a (sometimes unconscious, sometimes conscious) role in modernitys disparagement of friendship. Friendship is spiritual; this does not mean that it is necessarily good. It can be corrupted, for instance into an indifference towards outsiders, or a superiority attitude. Others flaunt their pseudo-friendships for personal gain. Friendship is not a good symbol of divine Love, precisely because it is too spiritual already, so too dangerous to use in that way. However, it is of course used for divine purposes.

Romantic Love (eros) This can be distinguished from Venus, or sexuality. Whereas historically, Venus led to Eros, in our consciousness Eros tends to lead to Venus. Incidentally, whether sex is sinful has little to do with whether we are in love. One of the most curious aspects of Eros is the fact that people speak of it as a desire for another person per se, as distinct from any particular thing about that person, or something that the person could give. Venus, or sexuality, is often seen in connection with Eros, and in fact the medieval theologians thought that the chief danger of Eros was sex, even within marriage. Lewis is firmly opposed to this idea, and claims with St. Paul that it is rather preoccupation or distraction that is the danger in it. There is a danger

in taking sex too seriously, too gravely and sacramentally. Sex is serious in many ways, but in other ways it is very unserious. It reminds us of our middle state, not exactly angels but not just animals either. The act of love is a Pagan sacrament, as Sky-Father and Earth-Mother. One aspect of marriage that needs stressing today is the mans responsibility in it. In neither the Pagan sacrament of sex nor the Christian fulfillment in marriage is the crown the man wears capable of being lorded over the woman: in the pagan sacrament it is as a crown of paper, like a party hat. In the Christian institution of marriage it is more like a crown of thorns. The danger of Eros, again, is its tendency to become a god. Both Plato and Shaw to some extent developed an erotic transcendentalism, to which the Christian alternative is Eros as a paradigm or example of Charity, a higher love. Eros has a paradoxical transience yet seeming permanence, and it images (yet fails to embody) paradise. Often, when marriages fall apart, the participants had idolized Eros, such that when it lapses, they are disillusioned.

Charity (agape) Our natural loves (those described heretofore) can be likened to a garden that needs tending. They cannot be their beautiful selves without allegiance to God. Contrary to Augustine, who exhorted apathy to everything except God (in a fit of grief), Lewis sticks to the recommendation of Jesus and Paul that we love others, even if it means suffering for it. We should accept all loves, and offer them to God. Our loves can be inordinate, or out of proportion; they need ordering. The way to order them is to relate them to the Love that is God. Of course, our knowledge of God is at best a collection of metaphors or extrapolations. But as an experimental assay into the nature of God and love, we might look at charity, or unconditional love, as a combination of Gift-love for God and others, Need-love for God and others, and Appreciative love. (An aside here is an exegesis of the Judgment Day passage, where Lewis interestingly interprets the separation of the sheep and goats as the judgment of the heathen, rather than believers). God transforms all of our natural loves towards perfection or the ideal. This results in their unification. Charity is to our natural loves as God is to man in the Incarnation. Charity brings with it the notion of forgiveness, which is unemphatic and deep, not showy and deliberating. Our natural loves, again, are inadequatethe defects we see in them (at least in other people) should be enough to assure us of thisso we should crucify or transmute them into the heavenly love. An open question is to what degree our loves transcend time, or are eternal.

Central themes in the book: Much of our love is natural, in the sense that it is animal, and rooted in our biological nature. Love, as many things, can exhibit a nearness of resemblance to God, as distinct from a nearness of approach (it is not a channel or path to God). Making lesser things, such as natural loves, gods, makes them demons, which destroy the love and corrupt the person. Our natural loves tend towards corruption. We need a higher lovenot to replace them, but to fulfill and order them, even to give them a reason for existence.

Tidbits of Significance
St. Johns saying that God is love has long been balanced in my mind against the remark of a modern author (M. Denis de Rougemont) that love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god; which of course can be re-stated in the form begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god. This balance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God. -ch.1 (Introduction).

Our loves do not make their claim to divinity until the claim becomes plausible. It does not become plausible until there is in them a real resemblance to God, to Love Himself. -ch.1 (Introduction).

Idolatry both of erotic love and of the domestic affections was the great error of nineteenth century literature. -ch.1 (Introduction).

The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to

make every distinction a distinction of value. -ch.2 (Likings and Loves for the Sub-human).

It is impossible to draw a line below which such pleasures are sensual and above which they are aesthetic. -ch.2 (Likings and Loves for the Sub-human).

If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lessons you had already decided to learn; this is only another way of saying that nature does not teach. The tendency to take her as a teacher is obviously very easily grafted on to the experience we call love of nature. But it is only a graft. While we are actually subjected to them, the moods and spirits of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, somber desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, Look. Listen. Attend. -ch.2 (Likings and Loves for the Sub-human).

A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means. -ch.2 (Likings and Loves for the Sub-human).

All natural affections can become rivals to spiritual love: but they can also be preparatory imitations of it, training (so to speak) of the spiritual muscles which Grace may later put to a higher service; as women nurse dolls in childhood and later nurse children. -ch.2 (Likings and Loves for the Sub-human).

the Heavenly Society is also an earthly society. Our (merely natural) patriotism towards the latter can very easily borrow the transcendent claims of the former and use them to justify the most abominable actions. If ever the book which I am not going to write is written it must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendoms specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. Large areas of the World will not hear us till we have publicly disowned much of our past. Why should they? We have shouted the

name of Christ and enacted the service of Moloch. -ch.2 (Likings and Loves for the Sub-human).

the humblest and most widely diffused of loves, the love in which our experience seems to differ least from that of the animals. -of affection, ch.3 (Affection).

Nothing in Man is either worse or better for being shared with the beasts. When we blame a man for being a mere animal, we mean not that he displays animal characteristics (we all do) but that he displays these, and only these, on occasions where the specifically human was demanded. -ch.3 (Affection).

I doubt if we ever catch Affection beginning. To become aware of it is to become aware that it has already been going on for some time. -ch.3 (Affection).

the short but seemingly immemorial always of childhood. -ch.3 (Affection).

If people are already unlovable a continual demand on their part (as of right) to be lovedtheir manifest sense of injury, their reproaches, whether loud and clamorous or merely implicit in every look and gesture of resentful self-pityproduce in us a sense of guilt (they are intended to do so) for a fault we could not have avoided and cannot cease to commit. They seal up the very fountain for which they are thirsty. -ch.3 (Affection).

I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents. -ch.3 (Affection).

The more intimate the occasion, the less the formalisation; but not therefore the less need of courtesy. -ch.3 (Affection).

that nationally suicidal type of education which keeps back the promising child because the idlers and dunces might be hurt if it were undemocratically moved into a higher class than themselves. -ch.3 (Affection).

We feed children in order that they may soon be able to feed themselves; we teach them in order that they may soon not need our teaching. Thus a heavy task is laid upon this Gift-love. It must work towards its own abdication. We must aim at making ourselves superfluous. The hour when we can say They need me no longer should be our reward. -ch.3 (Affection).

the higher and domesticated animal is, so to speak, a bridge between us and the rest of nature. We all at times feel somewhat painfully our human isolation from the sub-human worldthe atrophy of instinct which our intelligence entails, our excessive self-consciousness, the innumerable complexities of our situation, our inability to live in the present. -ch.3 (Affection).

If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. -in criticism of the neurosis of some pet owners, ch.3 (Affection).

It was of erotic love that the Roman poet said I love and hate, but other kinds of love admit the same mixture. They carry in them the seeds of hatred. If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon. -ch.3 (Affection).

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. -ch.4 (Friendship).

Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, Here comes one who will augment our loves. -ch.4 (Friendship).

We can imagine that among those early hunters and warriors single individualsone in a century? One in a thousand years?saw what others did not; saw that the deer was beautiful as well as edible, that hunting was fun as well as necessary, dreamed that his gods might be not only powerful but holy. -ch.4 (Friendship).

Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead. That is why those pathetic people who simply want friends can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be I see nothing and I dont care about the truth; I only want a Friend, no Friendship can arisethough Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers. -ch.4 (Friendship).

Those are the golden sessions; when four or five of us after a hard days walking have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same

time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Lifenatural lifehas no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it? -ch.4 (Friendship).

Talk, by all means; the more of it the better; unceasing cascades of the human voice; but not, please, a subject. The talk must not be about anything. -on the attitude of some women who seek to undermine male friendship, ch. 4 (Friendship).

No one ever really appreciated the other sexjust as no one really appreciates children or animalswithout at times feeling them to be funny. For both sexes are. -ch.4 (Friendship).

It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists against accepted good sense; of real artists against popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilised taste; of good men against the badness of society or of bad men against its goodness. Whichever it is, it will be unwelcome to Top People. -ch.4 (Friendship).

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse. -ch.4 (Friendship).

Wewho are they to themdo not exist as persons at all. We are specimens; specimens of various Age Groups, Types, Climates of Opinion, or Interests, to be exterminated. Deprived of one weapon, they coolly take up another. They are not, in the ordinary human sense, meeting us at all; they are merely doing a job of workspraying (I have heard one use that image) insecticide. -of a vicious attitude of superiority over others that some friendships can inspire, ch.4 (Friendship).

The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. -ch.4 (Friendship).

Very often what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloveda general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality. A man in this state really hasnt leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself. He is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned. -ch.5 (Eros).

Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved. -ch.5 (Eros).

If we had not experienced this, if we were mere logicians, we might boggle at the conception of desiring a human being, as distinct from desiring any pleasure, comfort, or service that human being can give. And it is certainly hard to explain. Lovers themselves are trying to express part of it (not much) when they say they would like to eat one another. Milton has expressed more when he fancies angelic creatures with bodies made of light who can achieve total interpenetration instead of our mere embraces. Charles Williams has said something of it in the words, Love you? I am you. -ch.5 (Eros).

one of the first things Eros does is to obliterate the distinction between giving and receiving. -ch.5 (Eros).

And the psychologists have so bedevilled us with the infinite importance of complete sexual adjustment and the all but impossibility of achieving it, that I could believe some young couples now go to it with the complete works of Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis and Dr. Stopes spread out on bed-tables all round them.

-ch.5 (Eros).

I can hardly help regarding it as one of Gods 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. -ch.5 (Eros).

The longing for a union which only the flesh can mediate while the flesh, our mutually excluding bodies, renders it forever unattainable can have the grandeur of a metaphysical pursuit. -ch.5 (Eros).

When natural things look most divine, the demoniac is just round the corner. -ch.5 (Eros).

But in the act of love we are not merely ourselves. We are also representatives. It is here no impoverishment but an enrichment to be aware that forces older and less personal than we work through us. In us all the masculinity and femininity of the world, all that is assailant and responsive, are momentarily focused. The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman the Earth-Mother; he does play Form, and she Matter. But we must give full value to the word play. Of course neither plays a part in the sense of being a hypocrite. But each plays a part or role inwell, in something which is comparable to a mystery-play or ritual (at one extreme) and to a masque or even a charade (at the other). -ch.5 (Eros).

Nothing is falser than the idea that mockery is necessarily hostile. Until they have a baby to laugh at, lovers are always laughing at each other. -ch.5 (Eros).

It is in the grandeur of Eros that the seeds of danger are concealed. He has spoken like a god. His total commitment, his reckless disregard of happiness, his transcendence of self-regard, sound like a message from the eternal world. -ch.5 (Eros).

Of all loves he is, at his height, most god-like; therefore most prone to demand our worship. Of himself he always tends to turn being in love into a sort of religion. -of Eros, ch.5 (Eros).

He needs help; therefore needs to be ruled. The god dies or becomes a demon unless he obeys God. -of Eros, ch.5 (Eros).

when the garden is in its full glory the gardeners contributions to that glory will still have been in a sense paltry compared with those of nature. -ch.6 (Charity).

When God planted a garden He set a man over it and set the man under Himself. When He planted the garden of our nature and caused the flowering, fruiting loves to grow there, He set our will to dress them. -ch.6 (Charity).

It is dangerous to press upon a man the duty of getting beyond earthly love when his real difficulty lies in getting so far. -ch.6 (Charity).

If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases Him less. -ch.6 (Charity).

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casketsafe, dark, motionless, airlessit will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. -ch.6 (Charity).

The humblest of us, in a state of Grace, can have some knowledge-by-acquaintance (connatre), some tasting, of Love Himself; but man even at his highest sanctity and intelligence has no direct knowledge about (savoir) the ultimate Beingonly analogies. We cannot see light, though by light we can see things. Statements about God are extrapolations from the knowledge of other things which the divine illumination enables us to know. -ch.6 (Charity).

God is a host who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and take advantage of Him. Herein is love. -ch.6 (Charity).

The consequences of parting with our last claim to intrinsic freedom, power, or worth, are real freedom, power and worth, really ours just because God gives them and because we know them to be (in another sense) not ours. -ch.6 (Charity).

The natural loves are summoned to become modes of Charity while also remaining the natural loves they were. -ch.6 (Charity).

Natural loves can hope for eternity only in so far as they have allowed themselves to be taken into the eternity of Charity. -ch.6 (Charity).

We find thus by experience that there is no good applying to Heaven for earthly comfort. Heaven can give heavenly comfort; no other kind. And earth cannot give earthly comfort either. There is no earthly comfort in the long run. -ch.6 (Charity).

When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. -ch.6 (Charity).

We are then compelled to try to believe, what we cannot yet feel, that God is our true Beloved. -ch.6 (Charity).

Those like myself whose imagination far exceeds their obedience are subject to a just penalty; we easily imagine conditions far higher than any we have really reached. -ch.6 (Charity).

If we cannot practice the presence of God, it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness -ch.6 (Charity).

Read this when...

you want a unified perspective on the various kinds of love we experience; or, you are in a spiritual frame of mind and wish to follow one persons understanding of the relationship between God, love, and humanity.

If you like this, youd also like...

(for the thoughtful lover): -Ovid, Art of Love (1 BC) -Petrarch, Canzoniere, or Sonnets (1327f). -Michel de Montaigne, On Friendship (1580). -Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1665). -Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850).

(for the enjoyer of Lewiss religious essays): -C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1947). -C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952). -C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1962). -C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (1940-1963).