31 pages • 1 hour read
The Four Loves
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Themes
“Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god”
This is a quote from M. Denis de Rougemont, and Lewis returns to it many times over the course of The Four Loves. “Demon” (6) can be defined in the book as a love—other than Charity—that has taken supreme importance in the life of the person experiencing it. Eros can be healthy, but not if it has inordinate influence—when it is a “god”(6), as de Rougemont suggests—over someone. The same can be said of Affection and Friendship. This is one of Lewis’s primary aims in The Four Loves: to help Christians see that their loves can in fact be detrimental to their spiritual development unless they are balanced and below Charity. As long as a love is a distraction, it is a demon.
Giving and Sacrifice
Lewis presents the forms of love between people as a series of give and take relationships. It seems indisputable to him that people frequently give gifts—or time, or work—to those they love. But this is challenging when applying that a relationship with God can have a give and take aspect: how can a mortal give anything to an omnipotent being? The answer is nearly a “paradox” (128): the greatest gift—or the closest thing to a gift—that a person can give to God is to practice Charity towards other creatures and to sacrifice one’s life to God’s glory. This is not to mean a literal sacrifice of existence on the side of human beings. Rather, they sacrifice their efforts and appetites in the furtherance of God’s plan because God made a literal sacrifice of his son, in the form of Christ. This results in an unpayable debt, but the life’s work of a devout Christian is to strive to repay it to the extent possible, by helping to perfect all of God’s creations through the practice of his love.
“God is Love”
At the outset of The Four Loves, Lewis quotes the gospel of John: “God is love” (1). The rest of the book is an interrogation of what this phrase might actually mean. The point is that the word “love” can mean many things at first glance. People say that they “love” their spouse, that they “love” a delicious piece of fruit or a glass of wine, and that they “love” their God or church. But how can the same word be applied to objects as mundane as food and omnipotent entities like God? Surely, Lewis believes, it is because greater care must be taken with clear language on behalf of clear thinking. To this end, he defines likes, dislikes, loves of appreciation, Need-loves, Gift-loves, and then applies them all to Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity, in order to see how they resemble God’s character and in which ways they do not. For Lewis, if God is indeed love, then love must look like certain things when in practice and produce certain outcomes about which he attempts to generalize. He is clear at the end of the book that he is unsure if he has achieved his aims, but that he feels he has made his best attempt at defining love as a word interchangeable with God.
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By C. S. Lewis
