The Four Loves summary

C. S. Lewis is probably most famous for his children’s book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lewis was a close friend of author J. R. R. Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings. They met while they were working in the English faculty at Oxford University and were two of the founding members of Inklings – a renowned literary discussion group.

Tolkien was deeply religious and his faith inspired Lewis to renew his relationship with God after he’d abandoned Christianity in his teens. This return to the church had a huge impact on Lewis’s writing. If you’ve read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and you’re familiar with Christianity, you won’t need anyone to point out how allegorical the story is.

But Lewis didn’t just explore his faith through novels about magical wardrobes and lions that rise from the dead. He used writing as a way to meditate on and explore different aspects of Christianity.

One subject that fascinated him was love.

When Lewis set out to explore love in his work, he figured it’d be fairly straightforward. After all, the Gospel according to John says that God is love. Simple, right?

Well, not really.

As soon as Lewis started unpacking that three-word explanation of love, he realized that love in its different forms could be categorized into one of two groups, depending on what was motivating it.

Lewis called the first group Gift-love.

Gift-loves are generous, boundless, and self-renewing. They’re what inspires you to care for the people that are important to you without expecting anything in return. You see Gift-love in action when a parent tends to their child every single day, when a partner comforts or supports their beloved, or when a stranger reaches out to help someone in need. Gift-loves also help you forgive someone who’s hurt you.

This category of love reflects Divine Love – the love God has for us. God is complete and abundant. He gives his love to us endlessly. Even when we turn our backs on him, his love is still there, waiting for us to receive it, if we open our hearts to him.

But while we can emulate God by practicing Gift-love in different ways, we’re far from complete and abundant. We’re riddled with yearnings that span all aspects of our being – from our minds and bodies to our emotions. And this leads to the second classification group, which Lewis called Need-love.

Need-loves arise from a place of lack or longing. They can be greedy, desperate, and demanding, or motivated by fear. For instance, when a child is scared, they’ll rush into the arms of their parent. The need for comfort motivates them to seek out someone who makes them feel safe.

Now, you’re probably thinking that this category of love sounds pretty substandard compared to God-like Gift-love, and that’s totally reasonable. But Need-loves play an important role not only in our relationships with others but in our relationship with God. We’re going to explore that in more detail, but for now, let’s focus on why Need-loves are so important.

Think about a time when you were hungry. What did you do? Headed to the kitchen and made yourself a sandwich? Or grabbed a bite in a local cafe? You ate your meal. Your hunger went away. You satisfied your need. 

Need-loves operate in the same way by motivating us to seek each other out when we’re in need of comfort or advice. The frightened child runs to its parent. Or in a moment of crisis, we ask God for his help. Or even if there isn’t a crisis, we seek out God’s wisdom and guidance, so that we can better understand how we should live.

Need-loves stop us from drifting through the world, disconnected from each other and any source of knowledge. In that way, they create a foundation that Gift-loves can then sit on, a bit like the way the roots of a tree support its trunk. And when we meditate on how different types of love evolve, we can start to trace how Need-loves often grow into Gift-loves, ultimately inviting Divine Love into our hearts.