The Four Loves: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Lewis says that the “burden of this book” has been to demonstrate that the natural loves aren’t enough. At first, he vaguely spoke of “decency and common sense” as what’s needed to help love, then later revealed this to be “goodness,” and finally “the whole Christian life.” None of this is meant to denigrate the natural loves, but to show “where their real glory lies.”

Like a garden, love must be constantly tended. And like a garden, when the garden is gloriously in bloom, the gardener’s contributions will seem small compared to the work of nature. And they won’t be effective without the “rain” of God’s grace. But this contribution, even if it’s just weeding and pruning, is still indispensable.

Lewis has avoided talking about natural loves as rivals to the love of God. This is for two reasons. First, it’s not the point where most readers need to begin. For most, the rivalry is still between ourselves and the human Other. It’s dangerous to take on a more advanced duty too quickly. Secondly, it’s self-evident that natural loves can’t even remain themselves and do what they’re meant to do without God’s help.

In earlier periods, before the 19th century, the question of this rivalry would have been more prominent in a book like this one. Before the Victorians, there was less danger of idolatrously loving our fellow human beings. If anything, earlier Christians felt that love for others was likely to be too much. For example, Lewis is forced to reject the approach of St. Augustine, as much as he otherwise owes him. In Confessions, Augustine writes of his heartbreak after the death of his friend Nebridius. From this experience, Augustine drew the lesson that it’s wrong to give your heart to anything but God, because only God does not die.

There is good sense in Augustine’s view, especially to those with a cautious temperament. But Lewis maintains that it’s far from the attitude of Christ. He doesn’t believe that Christ’s teaching is meant to give us security in this life. In fact, he believes this part of Augustine is a holdover from the pagan philosophy of that time—it’s closer to Stoicism or Neoplatonism. In contrast, Christ wept over Jerusalem and Lazarus, and he had a disciple whom he especially loved. It’s clear that God doesn’t offer “insurances against heartbreak.”

When it comes to love, there’s no such thing as a “safe investment.” It’s impossible to love without being vulnerable; loving at all means that your heart will ache and probably be broken. If you want to avoid this, you have to avoid giving your heart to anyone, even a pet. Instead, you have to avoid all entanglements, enclosing your heart as if in a coffin. Your heart might remain unbroken there, but it will also become unbreakable. The only alternative to tragedy is damnation; the only place “safe” from the dangers of love, outside of Heaven, is Hell.

Lewis believes that even the most inordinate loves are closer to God than “self-protective lovelessness.” We can only draw near to God by accepting the sufferings that love brings and offering those sufferings to him, not by trying to avoid them.

In fact, Lewis argues that it’s probably impossible to love another human being “too much.” It’s certainly possible to love someone too much in proportion to our love for God; but the problem there is that our love for God is too small, not that our love for the other person is too big. And this isn’t ultimately a question of the intensity of our feelings. The real question is which love you choose to put first.

This is what Christ was getting at when he taught that if anyone followed him without hating father, mother, or wife, that person couldn’t be his disciple. But Christ didn’t mean what we normally think of when we think of “hate” (i.e., resentment or delighting in another’s pain). Rather, he means to make no concession to something, to set our face against its claims, no matter how sweet they sound.

In the end, as Jesus also taught, we can’t serve two masters; we’ll end up hating one and loving the other. In the end, we can’t let those closest to us come between us and obeying God—and when it comes to a choice like this, our rejection will certainly feel like “hatred” to the rejected. This is why it’s important to “order our loves” so that a situation like this never comes up.

In fact, a marriage or friendship should never go forward if there’s disagreement on this fundamental issue. The best love isn’t blind. If the person we love holds to the motto “All for love,” then their love isn’t worth having, because it’s not related to Love Himself in the right way.

This brings Lewis to his last “steep ascent” in the book—to relate human loves to Love (God) in a more precise way. Of course, even this can only be analogous, since human beings, even the humblest and holiest, can’t have a direct knowledge of God. Lewis encourages readers to take the following as a sort of myth, to use what’s useful, and to reject what isn’t.

It’s important to start with the belief that God is love. God’s love is all Gift-love, because he has no needs to be fulfilled. If we believe that God needed to create, then we essentially reduce God to a kind of school headmaster. Rather, God loves “into existence wholly superfluous creatures” so that he can love them and make them perfect.

As Creator, God puts both Gift-love and Need-love into people. The former reflects God’s likeness, though Gift-love isn’t necessarily, in all people, the same thing as nearness of approach to God. Need-loves, on the other hand, don’t resemble God’s love at all.

In addition to these natural loves, God can bestow two gifts. The first is a share of His own Gift-love (different from natural Gift-love in that it always simply wants what’s best for the beloved). Natural gift-love is always directed toward what we find inherently lovable. In contrast, Divine Gift-love enables us to love what’s unlovable, like enemies, outcasts, and others who don’t easily attract love.

Paradoxically, God also enables people to have a Gift-love toward himself. In a sense, it’s not possible for us to give anything to God that doesn’t already belong to Him. But since it’s possible for us to withhold our wills and hearts from God, He also makes these things in such a way that we can willingly offer them back to Him.

Everyone would agree that such love should be called Charity. But Lewis would add two other gifts to this—a supernatural Need-love of God and a supernatural Need-love of each other. The first isn’t the same thing as Appreciative love for God, or adoration. Rather, it’s a way that God turns our need for Him into Need-love. He likewise transforms our need for others into a supernatural receptivity.

In the first case, need exists in us already by virtue of the fact that we’re creatures, and it’s increased by the fact that we’re fallen creatures. But by grace, we recognize and gladly accept our need for God. Without this grace, our desires and our necessities would oppose each other. To outsiders, Christian prayers of unworthiness can sound insincere; but they’re really ways of constantly negating false notions of ourselves and renewing our awareness of our need for God (things that, by nature, we constantly forget).

This natural self-perception constantly tries to tell us that there’s something inherently attractive in us, instead of the fact that we’re mirrors reflecting the sun’s light. We need grace in order to fully and delightedly accept our need and take joy in that dependence on God. When we give up any pretense to intrinsic freedom or worth, that’s when we discover true freedom and worth because they’re given to us by God.

The second gift is Need-love for one another. We want to be loved by others because we are smart or beautiful or useful. The realization that somebody is offering us Gift-love, then, is a shock. It’s very difficult to receive love that doesn’t depend on our own attractiveness. An example is a husband who’s struck down shortly after marriage by an incurable disease that renders him utterly helpless. In such cases, it really can be harder to receive than to give. But this extreme case shows that we all receive Charity; there’s something in all of us that’s not naturally loveable.

Sometimes it’s easier to understand cases where a person is called to totally renounce natural loves (like Abraham leaving his family and homeland). It’s harder to understand those cases where a natural love is allowed to continue but must be continually transformed. In a case like this, God’s love doesn’t substitute itself for natural loves. Instead, those loves are “summoned to become modes of Charity” while also remaining what they are.

Lewis observes that there’s “a sort of echo” of the Incarnation in this. Christ is both God and man; so, too, the natural loves are called both to become Charity and to remain natural loves. The natural loves are taken up into Charity and made instruments of Love Himself. This can happen to any activities of the natural loves—games, jokes, conversations, a walk, or sex.

It’s easy to take a wrong turn at this point. People who imagine they’ve already arrived at this transformation can make an embarrassing show of their spirituality, constantly asking or offering forgiveness, for example. The real transformation more often happens in a subtle, even secret way, when we don’t realize it’s happening.

We are constantly invited by God to turn our natural loves into Charity. This happens in the very annoyances of everyday life—opportunities to practice tolerance and forgiveness. The practicing of these virtues is the process of turning love into Charity. Where annoyances are plentiful, it’s actually perhaps easier to practice these virtues than when there aren’t many.

God makes it clear that “flesh and blood” can’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven. This isn’t just true of human beings, but of our loves—only those into which God has entered can ascend to Heaven. And like with human beings, our loves can only be raised if they’ve in some way shared in Christ’s death. There’s no escaping this death, and it’s the only hope of being raised from the dead.

Theologians have often asked whether people will recognize each other in Heaven. Lewis speculates that it might depend on the nature of their love on Earth. It could be that merely natural loves won’t be very interesting in Heaven. After all, natural things will have passed away there.

Lewis also refuses to end by seeming to support the illusion that reunion with our dead loved ones is the goal of Christian life, as painful as this is. When we believe in Heaven for the sake of reuniting with a beloved, and in God for the sake of Heaven, it just doesn’t work—it’s ultimately fantasy. Heaven can only give heavenly comfort, not earthly comfort.

This is because, if the point of Heaven was to find human love there, the Christian faith is all wrong. Christianity teaches that human beings were made for God. And it’s only because our earthly beloved has reflected God in some way that we’ve loved them. So, it’s not that we’re asked to turn from those loves to loving a “Stranger.” Rather, when we see God, we’ll realize we’ve always known Him. All that’s true about earthly loves is really from Him, and it’s only ours because it was first his. In Heaven, we’ll turn from the “rivulets to the Fountain.” And by loving God more than them, we’ll love them more, too.

Of course, while still on Earth, we still experience bereavement and loss. It might be that the purpose of bereavement is to force us to try to believe that, even though we can’t feel it, God is our true Beloved.

Lewis lists a third grace that God gives under the heading of Charity: a supernatural Appreciative Love toward Himself. It’s the most desirable of God’s gifts and the “true centre of all human and angelic life.” While a better book would start with this love, he says, his must end here, because he doesn’t dare proceed further. It is hard for us to know if we’ve ever experienced this love, especially if we have good imaginations. Most often, we experience it more as a gap or absence—a growing awareness of our unawareness, like standing beside a waterfall and hearing no noise. “To know that one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep”—but to hear about the “fully waking world,” one should consult better authors.