Book Review: The Four Loves by CS Lewis

Hello beloved readers of the CCF blog! I read this book and really wanted to share about it with all of you.

Let me begin by introducing one of my personal heroes, CS Lewis. There are few authors that are really awesome. CS Lewis is one of them. I am frequently saddened by the fact that he is no longer on this earth because I can’t meet him and he isn’t writing any more books.  He was born in England, somewhere. He was born in a Christian? home, but became an atheist through his school years. Then, he went to Oxford and realized that Jesus is awesome. For more on this, read another book of his entitled “Surprised by Joy.” (Fun fact! CS Lewis was buddies with JR Tolkien at Oxford)

His book The Four Loves introduces different kinds of love one at a time and contrasts them with other loves, and then explores both the ideal states of these loves and the ways they can be twisted. He mentions how each kind could become a sort of false god, and thus a demon, in our lives. I really encourage you all to read the book as it will be much more thorough and awesome than my attempt to summarize.

The four title loves are Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity. One thing to note is that the introduction (the part people usually skip) is actually really important for understanding this book.

The intro starts us out with a concept of Need-love and Gift-love. Gift-love, naturally, is the love expressed in giving when there is absolutely no need to give. The parallel to Christ is immediately obvious- Christ loves us such that He gives His life. The other love, Need-love, is the love that a child has for his mother who comforts him as he runs and cries into her arms. So, our love for God must be mostly a sort of Need-love because of what we are compared to Him (dust, of course).

Affection

Essentially, affection is a love of something familiar that may be in itself rather unlovable. A cranky old gardener, a bothersome coworker, a family member. Affection can be felt for someone that is most definitely not the type of person you would choose as your own friend but are forced to be around through circumstance. In some ways, affection is sort of a taking-for-granted love, but in the right way. In the way that you love the person as they are, I think.

There are a couple specifics I want to grab out of this chapter. The first is a quote which is adorable:

Affection, as I have said, is the humblest love. It gives itself no airs. People can be proud of being “in love,” or of friendship. Affection is modest – even furtive and shame-faced. Once when I remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my friends replied, “Yes, But I bet no dog would ever confess it to the other dogs.”

Lewis also says affection has a unique set of rules, not formal and ritualistic like behavior in public but far more sensitive and subtle. Yes, teasing is a part of affection, but that does not mean that the presence of teasing implies the presence of affection. In fact, affection has no desire to wound or humiliate and knows the boundaries, so it knows when to stop and when to speak, the tone and the moment necessary. But without affection, a person cannot rightly claim those same liberties of interaction because one doesn’t have the same understanding.

Friendship

This was a very interesting chapter. It discusses how friends come together because of common interests and how groups of friends may be tempted to become cliquish. They start to think they’re in on this group of amazing people and may become arrogant. Another interesting thing he talks about is how friendships bring out all these different parts of people, so that when the group is missing one person they’re missing that bit of the person in each of them that gets brought out when the missing member is present.

Of course, friends help one another. But Lewis tells us this is not the crux of a friendship at all; in fact it is like a little affair that must be dealt with before one can really get to the good stuff of being friends and just being with one another. He says that one initially is not all that interested in who the person is but rather the mutual interest that one shares.

 I’m not sure how I felt about this. Mutual support is of course a very important part of friendship, and I imagine most of you techers understand the importance of support. But sometimes trials last a very long time, so I felt he was a little dismissive of support. I would say that a friendship cannot possibly consist *only* of supporting one or the other. That is a very different relationship, and probably doesn’t really qualify as friendship.

Eros

This is the love of lovers. He distinguishes it from sex by using the term Venus for that. I thought this was cute, because people like to be so direct these days and Lewis is from ye olden times (You know, the 1950s).

I actually really liked this chapter, even though I haven’t much experience in relationships like this. I also found it reassuring- so much pressure is placed on individuals in our culture to be sexy and desirable that we almost have to worry if we won’t get left for a prettier or richer individual at any moment. Also, I have read in lots of different places that men only think about sex. But Lewis, my hero, tells me that when a man falls in love, he is usually too busy thinking about the person to think much about sex. In fact, what he really wants is to go on thinking about her.

Lewis tells us that when a man “wants a woman,” as they say when he is looking for a prostitute, what he really wants is not a woman but “a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary apparatus.” He also tells us that “Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman.”

This chapter is really interesting. You should read it. He talks about being serious about sex and being jovial. He also talks about the relationship of a man to a woman in comparison to the relationship between Christ and His Bride, the Church.

 Charity

This was also my favorite chapter. It talks about how we love like God, the Gift-love. (I like God, He’s cool)

Lewis addresses the idea of hating our family to follow God. It does not mean harboring hatred towards your older brother, but rejecting them in favor of God (essentially, loving God more). It’s not so much that we need to love others less than we do (In general, we need to love more. Pretty good rule of thumb), but God needs to win- we need to pick Him over the rest.

All the loves discussed before need to be submissive to the love of God, or they can’t remain. Only through the divine love are these other loves completely fulfilled. Lewis says “When God arrives (and only then) the half-gods may remain.” Basically, the lesser loves turn into demons without the proper care of the Love of God over them.

More quotes:

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.

Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in natural loves, more careful of our own happiness.