The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Four Loves
Book Review: A Must Read
Summary: 5 Stars
It Is One of those books that should be sitting on a coffee table. It defines the various types of pure love: agape, venus, and storge to name some. It truly defines where the 'heart' is and perhaps defining the brotherly love, the parental love, or the true love...
Susan Saige
Book Review: A Wonderful Overview
Summary: 5 Stars
This is in my opinion C.S. Lewis's best nonfiction work. The premise has been done before, but rarely with the sort of insight given here. His overviews of Affection and Friendship are much too often overlooked and glossed over as unimportant, but here they're given a status they really deserve.
The section on friendship, and the idea that people are bonded through mutual passions, and his grim statement that people who are just looking for a friend will never find one, was spot on. Friendships are formed as an extension of a passion for something bigger than the individual. A mutual cause drives people, whether they be sports fanatics, a tribe pining for survival, or art critics.
The pitfalls he explains for the loves such as lust, bigotry, elitism, etc. are self explanatory, but it's also practical. Friendships are exclusive by their very nature, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with such a thing. Eros is most certainly exclusive. He emphasizes that we can't be friends with everyone, love everyone with Eros, but we can love everyone with Charity, the final section of the book.
One could write a book three times longer and not come close to the depth portrayed in this little book. Strongly recommended.
Book Review: A fascinating study of the various types of love
Summary: 5 Stars
Everything from the love of a mother for her children to the love of husbands and wives is covered in this book. Lewis ponders the ways in which we show affection and brotherly love, etc. A deeply rewarding read!Book Review: A great examination of Christian love and its misuses
Summary: 5 Stars
The Four Loves describes the increasing complexity and nature of love of men toward things than themselves. From the simplest types of love that center on mere feelings and general liking, to ones with a deep sense of sacrificial giving, Lewis explains the nature of the types love so that the reader can understand the appropriate love in the right situation, and understand how to express love more consistently.
By describing definitive types of love, Lewis argues that knowledge of love, particularly for believing Christians, will lead to a better experience in exercising the types of love in their right context. Lewis illustrates his teaching by using concrete examples for each of his definitive four types of love, while giving special note to loves directed towards sub-human things. Affection, friendship, eros, and charity are what Lewis lists as his types of loves going from leastt to greatest in significance.
Lewis, especially when examining love for things subhuman and eros, deeply attacked the sentimentality and nostalgia that mistakes pride for love for sacrifice. The modern split to love either the rational man or a pantheon of natural things is shown to be a deep misunderstandings of what love really is. Ultimately, man makes the mistake of trying to assign love to things that have value in them and to treat things that have no value in themselves, like a nation-state, with unnatural love. For eros, Lewis shows that since many modern men have rejected the call of the One who is love, erotic love has become a very serious, selfish thing. We would only have to look at the so-called sexual revolution to note than man has taken the most playful and needful type of love and turned it into something that is serious and that is treated as if it can be rejected as easily as if it were never needed in the first place.
For today's church, the four different types of loves call all believers to reexamine their feelings of love in their homes, ideas, families, communities and marriages in the light not only of the love of Christ, but of Christ as love.
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.