The Four Loves
by C.S. Lewis
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Book Reviews of The Four Loves
Book Review: Affection, Eros, Friendship, Charity: The Four Loves
Summary: 5 Stars
C.S. Lewis wrote this book late in his life after he had experienced love with a colleague in writing. He gives sound advice that I believe applies to a broader base than his usual Christian readership. The four loves are: Affection, Eros, Friendship, and Charity. Each type of love has a chapter dedicated to a fuller explanation.
My favorite section is the one he wrote on Friendship. I think he is honest about limitations we place on who becomes our friends. Many believe any two people can become good friends, when in reality, this is just not so. Friends are people who share some vision or passion in life. That vision or passion is the cement of the common bond. Lewis had deep friendships with interesting people, such as Tolkien. He even elaborates on his own experiences with such companions.
Charity is the true form of love. Charity is the deepest form of giving our feeling, freedom, and even our very selves, to each other and finally, to God, whom Lewis calls "Love Himself." There is wisdom in his admonition that love is not easy or cheap. Work, loss, and sacrifice often accompany the application of true love, which is charity.
Unlike other works, such as "Miracles" or "Mere Christianity" where logic sets the primary pace, "The Four Loves" is a book where Lewis brings much of his experience to light. This is not, however, to say that Lewis does not apply logic to experience. Rather, Lewis uses logic to makes sense of experiences in his past to try and uncover truths about love.
In writing about love, Lewis articulates some significant moral, social, and psychological truths. Most importantly, he shows that love itself is not God. Love exalted to divinity becomes a "demon," as he quotes one of his contemporaries. Love is only a part of the greatness of our complex lives, not the full of it. "The Four Loves" is another insightful masterpiece by C.S. Lewis.
Book Review: Enlightens Through Specificity
Summary: 5 Stars
While the English language includes the four types of love under the heading of one word, the original languages of the Bible are more specific in distinguishing between the particular kind of love discussed in the Scriptures. The four loves Lewis covers in this book are: affection, friendship, eros, and charity.In the early part of Genesis God tells us it is not good for the man to be alone. Eve was created to meet this need. Anyone who denies this reality is denying the truth of what God said. We are not just spiritual beings, we live in a body and we need other people.
Consider one's love for his or her home country. Lewis argues that this is a legitimate love. In citing Chesterton, he explains that a man not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners is similar to him not wanting his house to be burned down in that the reasons are too many to list.
Affection comes from the Greek word "storge" and refers to the kind of love found between a parent and child or child and parent.
Friendship, he says, is the least jealous of the four types of loves. He makes an observation worth noting, "those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travelers." Frienship strengthens us.
Eros is sensual love. The stimuli gains and sustains our attention. We become totally focused on the object drawing us toward it. He reminds us that St. Francis did not respect this part of his humanity, calling his body "Brother Ass."
Charity is selfless love. "We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a msnifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love," Lewis writes.
Jack Lewis helps us to gain a clearer understanding of the different ways we love. This book isn't just for the sake of acquiring more knowledge, it helps you to express your love more fully after having gained that understanding.
Book Review: Incredible reading, awesome to re-create, simple//profound
Summary: 5 Stars
Beginning the Intro with A newly found faith: "God is Love," says St John...We journey through these remarkable chapters with titles: "Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human; longer-AFFECTION; longest-FRIENDSHIP; EROS, shortest, yet succinctly put, CHARITY!
Early quotes/Bunyan, Coleridge, Chesterton, Kipling, St Francis, Milton, Wordsworth, then getting to William Morris who wrote the poem called "Love is Enough." One pointed-out in their briefly worded review, "It isn't!" Being the Master of Metaphor, Lewis contrasts CHARITY with gardens needing the care of tending and weeding. Either from notes or his awesome memory, he quotes judiciously many poets and writers until chapters of EROS & CHARITY. There he adds the spice of both Testaments: From giants Jacob and Esau and Isaiah to St. Luke, St. John, I Corinthians and Paul's words on Gift-love and Need-love.
Similiar to the "Weight of Glory," Lewis views his contrasting ideas, "addressed to our condition" as rivalry between the self and the human Other. Later the rivalry becomes "human Other to God." In 'oft reading these profoundly rooted ideas of Lewis, I am carried back to Seminary classrooms of John Claypool & Walter Brueggemann, remembering agreements of support in realistically based human and Divine relationships!
I noted in his first chapter "Likings and Loves...For 6 pages he employs 36 actively, moving adverbs so that his thoughts may be dramatically developed in-order to grasp and hold the reader's attention! As another review observed: This is one writer who can change profoundly my perceptions of Life thru the power of his words!
Within his total creative writing, this compacted 'dunamis' of 5 brief chapters, yet discovered in today's new-birth of C. S. Lewis, may hopefully double these 40+ reviews in quick time. From an older, yet expectant and Retired Chaplain Fred W Hood
Book Review: A primer on love
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this excellent little book misfiled in a used bookstore and felt immediately that I had to rescue it. I'm very glad I did! This short and utterly readable book is nothing less than an introduction to the subject of love as understood by one of the great Christian minds of the 20th century.
Following the Greeks, C. S. Lewis divides love into four categories: Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity. He goes through each of the first three natural loves, offering observations and describing the joys, dangers, and challenges inherent in each. The last and highest love, Charity, is the love of God. Lewis claims that with love always comes risks--the ultimate risk of loss of the beloved or that your heart will be crushed. However, if one chooses not to love at all for fear of this risk, he will become hard, cold, and ultimately irredeemable.
Lewis's conclusion is startling: "The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."
This book is littered with wise aphorisms and witty asides that are much too numerous to be listed here. If you need help understanding the role of love in your life, I encourage you to read this book. It will answer a lot of questions. That said, it is just a starting point for the subject as Lewis offers little in the way of practical advice. A further way station for folks who wish to continue exploring the role of love in the Christian life might be Philothea, or an Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales.
Book Review: Not my most favorite Lewis book
Summary: 3 Stars
I think most of the people who purchase Lewis' non-fiction do so because they are interested in his take on Christianity. One of the odd things about this book is that Lewis doesn't make it clear how he decided on these four Greek words. It turns out that the New Testament doesn't use the word eros or storge. This means that the New Testament usage is actually closer to colloquial English usage that you might guess from this book. I assume he chose these words because classical Greek philosophers classified love in this four-fold way.
When Lewis discusses friendship in this book, he gives it a rather odd definition that no longer seems appropriate in today's world, and probably even in his time almost no one except a university professor have. Lewis' concept is that a friend is someone with whom you share an arcane interest. It is an interest so rare that when you meet someone with a similar interest, your reaction is "What? You too?" Now that most people live in large cities and many have access to the internet, finding someone with an interest in say Wagnerian Opera isn't nearly so hard as it might have been for Lewis, who hated London and large cities. I think for most urban dwellers today, the people whom we consider friends are not so much those with whom we share a rare hobby, but people whose company we like and whose lives we are interested in hearing about.
If you are a hard core Lewis fan, you will probably enjoy this book, but if you are new to Lewis, you might have more fun reading something else like Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, or The Great Divorce.