The Four Loves.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket---safe, dark, motionless, airless--- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.                                              C.S. Lewis.

I just finished reading The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. I can't say that I've been more blessed by a book (other than the Bible) than I was by this one. Lewis is able to dissect the human heart in such a careful and intimate manner that I feel like he actually knows me and my tendencies. 


The Four Loves mainly describes the different types of love that humans have: Affection, Friendship, and Eros. Yes. The name of the book is The Four Loves, and I only mentioned three. I know. You see after reading his arguments and definitions of these different types of human loves, he has convinced me that the final type of love is actually the Love that the other three must flow from. This love he calls Charity, but he means the supernatural love that GOD gives us and what GOD is.


Affection is the most natural of all the loves in that we see it instinctively more often than the other loves. It is the natural desire that parents have for their offspring or even the appreciation that one has for a certain acquaintance or friend. Lewis puts it this way:

In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate the people who "happen to be there." Made for us? Thank GOD, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

Friendship love actually is the most unnatural. We think having a close knit friend is natural, but many times it is easy to remember that this whole idea runs contrary to our human depravity. We are always looking out for ourselves, and when we choose to stick with a friend through "thick and thin" it takes a lot of guts to stay on that course.

Eros, the love between a man and a woman. This love does not mean sex, but it is that desire or attraction which brings a man and a woman together. Lewis sees the passion and joy to constantly make the other happy as an example of our relationship with JESUS and our brothers in HIM:

 It is as if CHRIST said to us thru Eros, "Thus---just like this---with this prodigality---not counting the cost---you are to love me and the rest of my brethren... The real danger seems to me not that lovers will idolise each other but that they will idolise Eros himself.

This all leads to Charity. Charity that love which comes straight from GOD HIMSELF. I'm going to let a string of Lewis quotes summarize this up:

The loves prove that they are unworthy to take the place of GOD by the fact that they cannot even remain themselves and do what they promise to do without GOD's help.

All humans beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you many lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only BELOVED who will never pass away.

We shall draw nearer to GOD, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent of all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to HIM; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if HE chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

They are biased in favour of those goods they can themselves bestow, or those which they would like best themselves, or those which fit in with a pre-conceived picture of the life they want the object to lead. But Divine Gift-Love --- LOVE HIMSELF working in a man--- is wholly disinterested and desires what is simply best for the beloved.

No sooner do we believe that GOD loves us than there is an impulse to believe that HE does so, not because HE is LOVE, but because we are intrinsically loveable... Far be it from us to think that we have virtues for which GOD could love us.

It is not that we have loved [any earthly Beloved] too much, but that we did not quite understand what we were loving. It is not that we shall be asked to turn from them, so dearly familiar, to a Stranger. When we see the face of GOD we shall know that we have always known it... By loving HIM more than them we shall love them more than we do now. 

I realize that were a lot of quotes there, but I believe they capture WHO true LOVE is. If we are to learn to love each other, we must first learn the Love of GOD.

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.               (1 John 4:7-12 ESV)

GOD, YOU are truly love. Without YOU all of my love is worthless and dust. Teach me to love you more because it is only through YOU that my love has meaning. YOU are love, and for me to love others, I must have more of YOU. Amen.