The Four Loves: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

When C.S. Lewis first set out to write this book, he planned for his thesis to be St. John’s statement that “God is love.” Based on this, he intended to say that human loves are only “loves” when they reflect the “Love which is God.” He therefore drew a distinction between what he called “Gift-love” and “Need-love.” “Gift-love” is the kind that moves someone to work hard for the well-being of a family who will outlive them. “Need-love” is the kind that sends a helpless child into a mother’s arms.

According to this scheme, Gift-love is obviously more like God. After all, God the Father gives Himself to the Son, and the Son gives Himself back to the Father and to the world. By contrast, Need-love cannot be like God, because God lacks nothing. On this basis, Lewis planned to write in praise of the first kind of love and to criticize the second.

In some ways, Lewis’s first intentions hold true. He still thinks that if love just means the desire to be loved, then we are in a “deplorable state.” However, he no longer agrees with his “master, MacDonald” (a Scottish fantasy author) that Need-love isn’t real love—it’s more complicated than that.

For one thing, if we avoid calling Need-love “love,” we distort language. For another, we should be careful about saying that Need-love is simply selfish. Of course, like anything else, Need-love can be indulged in a selfish way. But nobody would say that a child’s desire for comfort, or an adult’s desire for company, is selfish. In fact, those who never feel such desires—who always prefer to be alone—are usually egotists.

Thirdly, and more importantly, a Christian’s love for God is necessarily Need-love. A Christian has a growing awareness that being human is really “one vast need.” This doesn’t mean that a Christian can never bring anything besides Need-love to God, but that even the most “exalted souls” know that they never lose their need—and this is how God wants it. This fact leads to “a very strange corollary”: that a human being approaches God when they’re least like God. Fullness and emptiness are opposites, after all.

There are two ways of thinking about “nearness to God.” First, there’s likeness to God, which characterizes all created things—especially human beings—to some degree. Second, there’s what might be called “nearness of approach.” A person nearest to God in this sense is approaching union with God. This state may or may not coincide with likeness to God. It’s something like being on a cliff above a mountain village, unable to climb straight down. To get home to the village, it’s necessary to take a five-mile detour around the mountain. But that journey progresses nearer to the village even when it’s on a more roundabout path.

Furthermore, likeness to God is something given; nearness of approach is something the human being seeks. This “imitation” of God takes Jesus as its model, because Jesus—who didn’t just die for human sin, but lived, worked, traveled, dealt with hostility and interruptions—is “the Divine life operating under human conditions.”

Lewis explains why he finds this distinction—between likeness and nearness of approach—to be necessary. When we lose balance in our understanding of love, “God is love” can subtly turn into “love is God.” Human loves do tend to become all-consuming and to claim that anything done “for love’s sake” is not only acceptable but praiseworthy. This happens especially when loves are in their noblest, most self-sacrificing form. Temporary whims or lighthearted patriotism, for example, generally don’t run to such extremes.

Lewis says that love doesn’t become a god in people’s hearts until our loves really start to resemble God (“Love Himself”). And admittedly, there is something truly God-like about the most generous Gift-loves. People who love this way are indeed “near” to God in the sense of likeness. Such likeness has such “splendor” that we can come to give our loves the kind of devotion that’s only owed to God. Then, loves become “demonic,” destroying both us and themselves. In that way, natural loves can actually become “complicated forms of hatred.” (Need-loves won’t become demonic like this, because they aren’t God-like enough to begin with.)

Lewis believes we should neither idolize nor reject human love. He argues that 19th-century literature tended to idolize it, while more recent “debunkers” despise the “grubby roots” of love too much. It’s possible for human loves to be “glorious images of Divine love,” no less and no more. The God-likeness of such loves can promote nearness of approach, but it can also hinder it; sometimes they do neither.