The Four Loves
by C.S. Lewis
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Book Summary Information
Author: C.S. LewisEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1971-09-29
ISBN: 0156329301
Number of pages: 156
Publisher: Harvest Books
Book Reviews of The Four Loves
Book Review: A great examination of Christian love and its misuses
Summary: 5 Stars
The Four Loves describes the increasing complexity and nature of love of men toward things than themselves. From the simplest types of love that center on mere feelings and general liking, to ones with a deep sense of sacrificial giving, Lewis explains the nature of the types love so that the reader can understand the appropriate love in the right situation, and understand how to express love more consistently.
By describing definitive types of love, Lewis argues that knowledge of love, particularly for believing Christians, will lead to a better experience in exercising the types of love in their right context. Lewis illustrates his teaching by using concrete examples for each of his definitive four types of love, while giving special note to loves directed towards sub-human things. Affection, friendship, eros, and charity are what Lewis lists as his types of loves going from leastt to greatest in significance.
Lewis, especially when examining love for things subhuman and eros, deeply attacked the sentimentality and nostalgia that mistakes pride for love for sacrifice. The modern split to love either the rational man or a pantheon of natural things is shown to be a deep misunderstandings of what love really is. Ultimately, man makes the mistake of trying to assign love to things that have value in them and to treat things that have no value in themselves, like a nation-state, with unnatural love. For eros, Lewis shows that since many modern men have rejected the call of the One who is love, erotic love has become a very serious, selfish thing. We would only have to look at the so-called sexual revolution to note than man has taken the most playful and needful type of love and turned it into something that is serious and that is treated as if it can be rejected as easily as if it were never needed in the first place.
For today's church, the four different types of loves call all believers to reexamine their feelings of love in their homes, ideas, families, communities and marriages in the light not only of the love of Christ, but of Christ as love.
Summary of The Four Loves
A candid, wise, and warmly personal book in which Lewis explores the possibilities and problems of the four basic kinds of human love- affection, friendship, erotic love, and the love of God. ?"Immensely worthwhile for its simplicity...a rare and memorable book?" (Sydney J. Harris).The Four Loves summarizes four kinds of human love--affection, friendship, erotic love, and the love of God. Masterful without being magisterial, this book's wise, gentle, candid reflections on the virtues and dangers of love draw on sources from Jane Austen to St. Augustine. The chapter on charity (love of God) may be the best thing Lewis ever wrote about Christianity. Consider his reflection on Augustine's teaching that one must love only God, because only God is eternal, and all earthly love will someday pass away:
Who could conceivably begin to love God on such a prudential ground--because the security (so to speak) is better? Who could even include it among the grounds for loving? Would you choose a wife or a Friend--if it comes to that, would you choose a dog--in this spirit? One must be outside the world of love, of all loves, before one thus calculates.His description of Christianity here is no less forceful and opinionated than in Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain, but it is far less anxious about its reader's response--and therefore more persuasive than any of his apologetics. When he begins to describe the nature of faith, Lewis writes: "Take it as one man's reverie, almost one man's myth. If anything in it is useful to you, use it; if anything is not, never give it a second thought." --Michael Joseph Gross
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