When Lewis first set out to write about love, his thesis was “God is love” (as St. John writes in the Bible). Therefore, he divided natural human loves into two types—Gift-love (which is God-like, because God is self-giving) and Need-love (which is unlike God, because God lacks nothing). Based on this distinction, Lewis planned to praise Gift-love and criticize Need-love. However, he soon realized that things are more complicated. For one thing, human beings never lose their need for God, and this is the way God intends it to be.
Lewis expands on the ideas of likeness and nearness to God—they aren’t the same thing. “Likeness” to God is something given, by virtue of the fact that human beings are God’s creatures. “Nearness” to God, on the other hand, is a spiritual quality that a person must actively seek. This distinction is important because human Gift-loves (those that already resemble God) can come to be mistaken for divine love. When that happens, those loves become “demonic,” self-destructive, and damaging to others. Thus, loves that are “like” God can encourage “nearness” to God as well, but they can also hinder it.
Before discussing “higher” loves, Lewis begins with likings, or pleasures. Pleasures can be divided into Need-pleasures (like a drink of water for someone who’s thirsty) and Pleasures of Appreciation (like the sudden smell of flowers). The first must be preceded by a need, while the second doesn’t require preparation. A Need-pleasure loses its appeal once it’s satisfied, while the object of an Appreciative pleasure is enjoyed for its own sake, separate from the person enjoying it. Pleasures of Appreciation foreshadow Appreciative Love, which simply delights in a beloved person. Need-love, Gift-love, and Appreciative Love generally mix together.
After discussing these three elements of love, Lewis begins to discuss four broader types of love. The first is Affection—for example, the natural bond between mother and child. Affection also applies to the humble, familiar bond between members of families, schools, and other environments where very different people are “thrown together.” But Affection has its dangers. People can be insatiable in their need for others’ affection; they can also use familiarity as an excuse for cruelty. Even when Affection is offered as a Gift-love, it can be perverted if a person wants the object of their love to receive only the good that they can give. When a person tries to live on Affection in this way, the Affection itself fuels only grievance, resentment, and even hate. It will eventually “go bad.”
The second broad type of love Lewis discusses is Friendship. Though the ancients prized Friendship, Lewis argues that it’s largely disregarded today. This is partly because people in past centuries valued Friendship’s transcendent aspect (it lacks the “worldly” instincts of Affection or Eros). Today, however, Romanticism has sentimentalized Friendship and allowed Eros to push it to the margins of most people’s lives. Yet in Lewis’s view, Friendship is distinct from Eros because Friends focus on a shared interest (instead of focusing on each other), and because Friendship flourishes more, not less, as more people join a circle of Friends. This is because no single Friend can bring out every facet of another person, so we treasure a friend more as we share that person with a greater number of people. Appreciative Love develops as Friends pursue common goals or interests together over time, and mutual trust and admiration deepen. Friendship’s major danger is pride. Friends can begin to overlook and even scorn outsiders, and a friendship can become nothing more than a “mutual admiration society” that cares about nothing but its own exclusivity.
Next Lewis discusses Eros, the state of being in love. Eros is more than physical sexuality (what Lewis calls “Venus”), though that’s part of it. At its best, Eros transforms a Need-pleasure (for sex) into an Appreciative Pleasure (seeing the beloved as intrinsically desirable, beyond anything they give). However, Lewis doesn’t downplay “Venus”—in fact, he argues that the Bible sees neglect of Venus as a greater danger than its enjoyment. In his view, modern people have a joyless attitude about sex, failing to see that in addition to its spiritual meanings and emotional gravity, there’s also something playful about sex. If the playful element is missed, people risk viewing the symbolism of sex in a blasphemous way (that is, interpreting the different roles of male and female too inflexibly). At its best, Eros exemplifies the free generosity we should offer to God and others. When it becomes “demonic,” however, Eros justifies all kinds of evil behavior, as people rationalize that anything is permissible “for love’s sake.” Clearly, like Affection and Friendship, Eros must be ruled by a higher form of love.
The whole point of The Four Loves is that natural human loves are not enough—they point to a higher glory. And without the help of God’s grace, they even fall short of that function. In past ages, people worried more about human loves as potential rivals to the love of God. That is, it was viewed as unsafe to give one’s heart to anything less than God. But Lewis suggests that love is never safe. The only way to avoid heartbreak is to never love at all.
Moreover, the risk of love isn’t loving another person “too much,” but of loving God too little. And it’s not a matter of intensity of feeling—it’s a matter of what a person chooses to put first. In other words, if another person presents an obstacle to obeying God, then that person must be rejected.
Lewis’s last point about love is how human loves relate to divine loves. God, who is Love, puts both Gift-love and Need-love into people. In addition to these natural loves, God can also give two supernatural gifts. The first is a share of his own Gift-love, which always wants what’s best for the beloved and can even love those who aren’t naturally loveable. The second is a Gift-love toward Himself. Such supernatural love is called Charity. God can also turn our Need-love for Him and others into a supernatural form. Supernatural Need-love makes human beings realize their worth through dependence on God; it also enables them to receive Gift-love from others, even though they aren’t naturally loveable.
Sometimes, people are called to renounce natural loves. But more often, God allows natural loves to continue while continually transforming them into Charity, instruments of divine love. This happens through the daily practice of virtues—like tolerating and forgiving petty annoyances. Only loves that have been transformed like this—loves that have, in a sense, shared in Christ’s death and resurrection—can make it into the Kingdom of Heaven. Ultimately, turning away from natural loves to divine love isn’t turning to something new and strange. Lewis suggests that all that’s good and true about earthly loves is from God. So, when a human being finally sees God, they’ll realize they’ve been loving God all along. There’s also a third supernatural gift that falls under the heading of Charity—supernatural Appreciative Love for God. This love, the “true centre of all […] life,” is so lofty that Lewis doesn’t dare try to describe it, and so ends his book here.
