The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Four Loves
Book Review: Lewis Contributes to Love Scholarship
Summary: 3 Stars
The author is one of the most important theologians of the 20th century, although his scholarly discipline was literature. He examines four main types of love, with special concentration on two types of love he calls "Gift-love" and "Need-love."
Early in the book, Lewis identifies the humblest and most widely diffused of the loves, that is, the loves and likings at the sub-human level. Following an examination of sub-human love, he addresses a love that he calls "affection." Affection comes from the Greek love word storge.
The third chapter is devoted to friendship love, from the Greek work philia. This friendship love is the least of the natural loves, "the least instinctive organic, biological, gregarious, and necessary" (58). Friendship should be distinguished from community love, because communities require cooperation. Friendship love by contrast is free from instinct, free from duty, and free from the need to be needed. Following an examination of friendship, Lewis addresses eros. By eros Lewis refers to "the love in which lovers are in," i.e., romantic love.
In the book's final chapter Lewis addresses charity. Charity is `Gift-love' and the primal `Gift-love' comes from the divine energy. While Lewis claims that "to love at all is to be vulnerable" (121), he also claims that God is self-sufficient. "In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give. The doctrine that God was under no necessity to create is not a piece of dry scholastic speculation. It is essential" (126). Also, "God, who needs nothing, loves into existence, holy, superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them" (127).
After God loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures, God implants in those creatures both Gift-loves and Need-loves. Gift-love comes by grace and we call it charity. God also gives a supernatural Need-love of God and a supernatural Need-love of other creatures. It is through these two gifts that creatures have a longing for God and a love for others.
Book Review: Loves are beautiful, but 'the greatest of these is charity'
Summary: 4 Stars
An illuminating view on affection, the so-called 'the most humble', friendship, 'the least natural and the most independent', eros, 'the most natural' and charity, 'the noblest' of all loves, treated in terms of the so-called 'need love', 'gift love' and 'appreciative love'. The beauty and potential danger of distortion and abuse of each love is also covered excellently. C.S. Lewis is both a psychologist and a philosopher, a brilliant one. His treatment on this subject of love is important for every one to know; some that I personally learn and thought to be beautiful, are:
- That we ought to love with decency and common sense;
- The reward of the accomplishment of a gift-love is its abdication, when it is no longer needed.
- When love becomes a god, it turns into a demon;
- The calculating love is no love at all which leads to the beauty and mark of eros, where calculations are irrelevant, and when it is in us, we "had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms", and finally...
- The excellence of charity, confirmed in the Scriptures, something Jonathan Edwards calls 'the sum of all virtues', where Lewis exhorted to love God who will never pass away, "Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away."
- The gracious call to risk and forego for the greatest good. Speaking of Christ, Lewis says, "... His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities... And who could conceivably begin to love God on such a prudential ground -- because the security is better? ...Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become ... more careful of our own happiness... We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent to all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it."
Get this book, friends, and learn that "loves" are beautiful, when handled properly, but 'the greatest of these is charity'.
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.
Book Review: Relationships ARE Destiny
Summary: 5 Stars
Even more than most works by C.S. Lewis, "The Four Loves" spans diverse life stages, offering golden wisdom not only to mature singles and married couples, but even to teenagers sorting out keys to friendship and romance.
Three themes are especially powerful tools for shaping rich, reliable, safe and empowering relationships, whether in friendship, in romance or in the family: 1) Relationships are destiny; 2) Extreme conformity is no act of love; and, 3) Controlling personalities eviscerate themselves and others.
1) RELATIONSHIPS ARE DESTINY: Lewis notes that friendships can be schools of virtue or schools of vice, as life companions tend to pipe into our lives their strongest traits and block out qualities alien to their nature. Thus we absorb wisdom, love for truth, courage and faith from virtuous friends, who also buffer us against self-inflicted wounds, corruption and spiritual inertia. What marital grief is saved for those who absorb this Lewis tip before locking in for life!
2) EXTREME CONFORMITY, SUBMISSION OR CAPITULATION IS NO ACT OF LOVE. Mindless self-surrender, notes Lewis, can amount to idolatry for those who relinquish control a mere human that should only be yielded to God. A woman who is to a man as a child is to an adult, adds the author, destroys hope even of genuine friendship. Furthermore, "a man would have to be...indeed a blasphemer," charges Lewis, if he accepts for himself such sovereignty over another person's life.
3) CONTROLLING PERSONALITIES EVISERATE THEMSELVES AND OTHERS. At extremes, both "need love" and "gift love" are used by covert-controllers. A "tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection," notes Lewis, consumes not only the object of love but also the ravenous heart searching to be fed, rather than to love. Equally treacherous, notes Lewis, are those who exploit "gift love," such as "Mrs. Fidget" who slaved away for her family day and night. By giving them so much that they did not need, indeed, did not want, she put them in her debt, so they could hardly rest for jumping to please this woman who "lives for her family." Such a family colludes to sustain an illusion of warmth, while secret resentment simmers against those whose "love" leaves others impoverished emotionally. After her death, there were "astonishing" changes in the family, reports Lewis, as the husband could laugh, the children enjoyed staying home, and "even the dog, who was never allowed out except on a lead is now a well-known member of the Lamp-post Club."
Lewis notes that more overt controllers may seek to isolate partners from other relationships, clinging to "love" in ways that excludes others. But a wife who alienates her husband's male friends may create a spouse not "very well worth having; she has emasculated him," warns Lewis. Such a partner may accept this fate or go underground, adds the author, creating a secret life beyond spouse control. As a family counselor, I note that marital affairs commonly evolve out of desperate but treacherous attempts to salvage personal identity and escape a controlling partner. As Lewis observes, controllers inevitably lose what they seek to control, as those they strive to master are spiritually annihilated or driven away.
Through "The Four Loves," C.S. Lewis has given us a remarkable roadmap for safe, empowering, destiny-shaping relationships. In an era of disposable spouses, children and friends, we more than ever need such wisdom for relationship radar, spiritual protection, and at times, for survival.
REVIEWER: Beverly Hubble Tauke, LCSW, is author of "Overcoming Sins of the Family" and is a Virginia-based family counselor and lecturer.
Book Review: Stunning
Summary: 5 Stars
This has to be one of the most thought-provoking books that has ever been written. Absolutely breathtaking! Using the logic Lewis is so famous for and written with the same intelligence as "Mere Christianity", this book is not to be discounted simply because it is about love. Lewis is regarded as one the best Christian theologians of modern times, and it is no mistake that he wrote about this subject, the different types of love, and the importance of it.I went on a spiritaul search for true love--the love of God--at the same time I read this book. "The Four Loves" made everything about love that is cloudy much more clear. From Lewis, you can't get an better than this!