The Four Loves

“Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority.”

By “at its height” (7), Lewis refers to the unchecked expression of a love. Eros, in particular, has potentially damaging ways in which to express itself. One of these is that the love can become of such importance to the person experiencing it that it may begin to take precedence over the love of God.

“Affection has its own criteria. Its objects have to be familiar. We can sometimes point to the very day and hour when we fell in love or began a new friendship, but I doubt if we ever catch Affection beginning.”

Lewis maintains that the other loves—Friendship, Eros, and Charity—have a starting point that is likely to be known to the person experiencing them, but Affection is an accumulative love that may be present without even being noticed.

“Affection has a very homely face. So have many of those for whom we feel it. It is no proof of our refinement or perceptiveness that we love them; nor that they love us.”

Lewis explains that Affection requires neither physical attraction nor emotionally appealing qualities, asmere familiarity can be enough to produce it. Affection is not proof of anything except that a routine set of feelings towards another person has formed.

"The rivalry between all natural loves and the love of God is something a Christian dare not forget. God is the great Rival, the ultimate object of human jealousy, which may steal from me—or so it seems like stealing to me—my wife’s or husband’s or daughter’s heart.”

A Christian’s love of God can look detrimental to one who does not share the faith. For the true believer, however, all loves and relationships are petty in comparison to the love of God because everything is petty in comparison to the salvation of one’s soul.

“Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.”

Every Christian’s first loyalty is to God. When a love other than love of God takes precedence in the believer’s heart, the love takes on demonic properties, as does any temptation that leads away from focus on and obedience to God’s will. Anything that is not God but can draw attention away from God can be as destructive as a demonic influence.

“Friendship is—in a sense not at all derogatory to it—the least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious, and necessary.”

Friendship appears to be the most superfluous of the loves because it does not have an obvious, immediate use. This is a modern viewpoint, and Lewis takes care to show that the Greeks from whom he takes his definition of Friendship treated it as essential.

“The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”

For Lewis, Friendship is not mere companionship; it is the recognition between two people that they share a common view of the world, of faith, or of truth.

“Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not.”

Friendships enforce a sense of otherness on the friends. By linking themselves together in the definition of Friendship, they necessarily set themselves apart from those who do not yet—or may never—share their bond.

“Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers.”

Because every human being has something—a soul, made in God’s image—he or she always has something to share with others. A large part of Lewis’s argument is an appeal to showing Christians that they do have something to share, even if they do not realize it.

“Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive. You become a man’s Friend without knowing or caring whether he is single or married or how he earns his living. What have all these “unconcerning things, matters of fact” to do with the real question, Do you see the same truth?”

Friendships can sometimes be strengthened as friends learn more about each other, but the new, undiscovered knowledge is not necessary to the friendship. The core component of any friendship—a shared “truth” (70)—is already in place before the friends meet each other.

“Every real friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion.”

For Lewis, friendships resist membership to a larger collective. For instance, he posits that in an authoritarian state, friendship cannot comfortably exist from the perspective of a dictator because two people speaking freely in private as friends may offer opportunities for subversion and free thinking.

“Without Eros, sexual desire, like every other desire, is a fact about ourselves. Within Eros it is rather about the Beloved. It becomes almost a mode of perception, entirely a mode of expression. It feels objective; something outside us, in the real world.”

Lewis describes Eros as the love that has the most direct expression in physical sensation. When physical desire is true Eros, rather than mere lust, the loved one becomes the focus of the physical sensation, which itself takes on a character that is suddenly more than physical.

“We must not be totally serious about Venus. Indeed we can’t be totally serious without doing violence to our humanity.”

The sexual codes of Christian sects tend to treat sex as a grave matter. However, Lewis sees a greater danger to Christianity in the inability to laugh at sexual foibles, rather than to be able to speak about sex lightly and frankly.

“The natural loves are not self-sufficient.”

Without the influence of Charity, the other loves—Friendship, Eros, and Affection—are mere feelings that cannot sustain themselves. However, they all have the potential to become Charity and to flourish with Charity’s help.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.”

In a passage on heartbreak and grief, Lewis discusses the temptation to avoid love in order to avoid pain. Love of anyone but God contains the possibility of rejection, and to love anything that is not eternal is to love something that will eventually die.

“The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

Lewis describes Heaven as being a realm of pure love in its highest form. Hell is the absence of any kind of love. While on earth, the person who avoids love in order to spare himself suffering is living closer to Hell than to Heaven.

“To hate is to reject, to set one’s face against, to make no concession to, the Beloved when the Beloved utters, however sweetly and however pitiably, the suggestions of the Devil.”

Lewis does not intend for the word “hate” to mean the opposite of love, particularly when directed at “the Beloved”(123). However, anything that leads away from God must be rejected, which is the sense in which he uses the word.

“God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them.”

Because God did not need to create humans, Lewis believes he must have done so out of love. Lewis maintains that the highest expression of God’s love is to perfect his creations.

“This illusion to which nature clings as her last treasure, this pretence that we have anything of our own or could for one hour retain by our own strength any goodness that God may pour into us, has kept us from being happy.”

Lewis emphasizes that anything but the happiness brought about by God’s love is an illusion masquerading as happiness. It is not the things of the earth in and of themselves alone that make a person happy because the things of the earth are from God. For Lewis, there is no real happiness without God.

“The invitation to turn our natural loves into Charity is never lacking.”

The proper nurturing of the “natural loves” (135) can lead to Charity. This is another injunction against avoiding love in order to spare oneself the pain of heartbreak or grief.

“All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”

Lewis contends that anything temporary deserves only temporary focus, highlighting the premise thatevery love except Charity is fleeting.

“Only be being in some respect like Him, only be being a manifestation of His beauty, loving-kindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love.”

Even though the ideas of falling in love, having friends, or feeling affection seem like they have to do with other people, Lewis’s view is that those feelings are all manifestations of God’s love.

“‘Is it easy to love God?’ asks an old author. ‘It is easy’ he replies, ‘to those who do it.’”

Truly loving God is an easy feat, but learning how to love God above all others is, for Lewis, the continual work of each Christian. In Lewis’s theory, once the pure love of God has been experienced, it is obvious and makes obedience easy.