Eros can fall in love with itself and become short sighted jealousy is often a result of love as is possessiveness and distraction. Agape, that universal unconditional love, can become corrupted in that we love the world and the things within it more than God. Philia can lead people to band together against God, to reaffirm their positions. Indeed, parental affection can lead to possessiveness, as in Lewis’ Great Divorce where a woman loves her son so much, she really seeks to own him, ruining both his and her life. Lewis is, perhaps unexpectedly, most permissive of eros noting that despite talk and current horror at a radio series of his time that spoke frankly of sex, it was by far not the most dangerous of the love pitfalls. Lewis explains the pitfalls of each love and how, when corrupted, this love can lead to sin.

Philia, the most powerful love of humans in that it girds us together and can often cause us to love the human more than the divine is noted as being the only love which is never utilized to evoke our relationship with God.īut, as we all know, love is certainly not always pure, unselfish, painless, and wholly aligned to making the object of its desire a priority. Lewis notes how specific forms of love, specifically parental affection (storge) and eros (romantic love) are used in the Bible as symbols of the church’s relationship with God and hence our own relationship with our Heavenly Father.

Succinct and to the point, yet evocative and common-sense with images and metaphors that bring the most sublime theological conceptions to levels where we can instantly understand and relate, The Four Loves is divided into four complimentary sections each beginning with a definition of the love and showcasing how it appears and how we experience it in daily life. Lewis notes that each love interlays and over weaves for instance feeling philia and eros at the same time, showcasing how the loves complement one another. At times radical, at times stern, at others times this essay (commonly referred to as a book but easily read in one sitting) breaks love into four delineations based on ancient Greek perception: storge which is the love of affection, specifically parental love philia which is the rare and unique love of true friendship eros which is sexual love specifically associated with romance and finally agape which represents unconditional love and is the most God-like of loves. Lewis’ The Four Loves is a short discussion in Lewis’ own voice describing each type of love, its pitfalls, and its most sublime implementation.

Four loves