The Four Loves
First edition
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| Author | C. S. Lewis |
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| Cover artist | Michael Harvey |
| Country | Northern Ireland |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Philosophy |
| Publisher | Geoffrey Bles |
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Publication date
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1960 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 160 |
| OCLC | 30879763 |
The Four Loves is a book by C. S. Lewis which explores the nature of love from a Christian and philosophical perspective through thought experiments. The book was based on a set of radio talks from 1958, criticised in the US at the time for their frankness about sex.
Taking his start from St. John's words "God is Love", Lewis initially thought to contrast "Need-love" (such as the love of a child for its mother) and "Gift-love" (epitomized by God's love for humanity), to the disparagement of the former. However he swiftly happened on the insight that the natures of even these basic categorizations of love are more complicated than they at first seemed: a child's need for parental comfort is a necessity, not a selfish indulgence, while conversely parental Gift-love in excessive form can be a perversion of its own.
Lewis continued his examination by exploring the nature of pleasure, distinguishing Need-pleasures (such as water for the thirsty) from Pleasures of Appreciation, such as the love of nature. From the latter, he developed what he called "a third element in love...Appreciative love", to go along with Need-love and Gift-love.
Throughout the rest of the book, Lewis would go on to counterpart that three-fold, qualitative distinction against the four broad types of loves indicated in his title.
In his remaining four chapters, Lewis treats of love under four categories ("the highest does not stand without the lowest"), based in part on the four Greek words for love: affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Lewis states that just as Lucifer (a former archangel) perverted himself by pride and fell into depravity, so too can love—commonly held to be the arch-emotion—become corrupt by presuming itself to be what it is not.
A fictional treatment of these loves is the main theme of Lewis's novel Till We Have Faces.
Storge (storgē, Greek: ) is liking someone through the fondness of familiarity, family members or people who relate in familiar ways that have otherwise found themselves bonded by chance. An example is the natural love and affection of a parent for their child. It is described as the most natural, emotive, and widely diffused of loves: natural in that it is present without coercion; emotive because it is the result of fondness due to familiarity; and most widely diffused because it pays the least attention to those characteristics deemed "valuable" or worthy of love and, as a result, is able to transcend most discriminating factors. Lewis describes it as a dependency-based love which risks extinction if the needs cease to be met.
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