31 pages • 1 hour read
The Four Loves
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Introduction
Lewis begins with the scriptural quote: “God is love” (1). Because Lewis is a Christian with a belief in a literal, embodied God, his discussion of the four types of love will be viewed from a Christian perspective. To begin with, he distinguishes between what he calls “Gift-love” and “Need-love” (1). He uses the example of a man working and saving so that his family will be provided for in the future—a fortune he will never see—as Gift-love. To demonstrate Need-love, he describes an upset child running into its mother’s arms.
If“God is love” (1), then God must have elements of both Gift-love and Need-love. Lewis initially sees this as a philosophical problem. God can participate in Gift-love because He can bestow gifts. But for Lewis, to suggest that God might be involved in Need-love is problematic because an omniscient, omnipotent being cannot need anything or lacking anything.
Lewis sees a “paradox” (4): the times when a man is most likely to approach God are the times when he is the least like God. Meaning, he is full of need and crying for help, two things which God cannot experience. For Lewis, there are two types of “nearness to God” (4). Man is more like God than an animal is because man is rational. One type of nearness is what Lewis calls “nearness of approach” (5).
He uses the analogy of a man who has walked to the top of a cliff that is overlooking a village. The village is his home, but there is no convenient road going straight down to the village. His only choice is to walk the path, which will seemingly take him five miles out of his way. However, although he is seemingly walking away from the village, he is drawing ever nearer, given that there is only one path that leads to the village. Nearness to God has a similar quality. However circuitous the route may appear to a traveler seeking Heaven, if he is on the correct path, he will always be reducing the distance between himself and God.
Lewis concludes the Introduction with a quote from M. Denis de Rougemont, to which he will return many times: “Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god” (6). Lewis balances this statement against the apostle John’s maxim that “God is love” (1). The noble qualities of the loves that Lewis will examine in the coming pages can be corrupted if they are prioritized over the love of God.
Introduction Analysis
In the Introduction, Lewis makes it clear that he is a Christian, that he believes in God, and that he wrote The Four Loves as an exploration of what he considers to be literal truths. When he says that “God is love” (1), he means that God is real, that He is the ultimate manifestation of love, and that if the qualities of love can be determined, something about the character of God can be determined as well. The more in-depth the examination of love is, the more potential discoveries about God there are.
The Introduction is written with a nostalgic quality. There is a sense that Lewis is longing for home, evidenced by the tenderness with which he writes the analogy of the man on the cliff, looking down at the village. The Introduction serves primarily as a crystallization of the rules with which the book will be written. The scripture “God is love” (1) means to Lewis that love is both a noun and a verb since God demonstrates his love through action, and is, Himself, the perfect example of love.
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By C. S. Lewis
