The Four Loves was C.S. Lewis’s 1960 book exploring affection, friendship, romantic love, and charity.
The book developed from a series of BBC radio talks and examines four Greek terms commonly used to distinguish kinds of love: storge, philia, eros, and agape. Lewis discusses them as forms of human experience while considering how they relate to Christian theology.
The English titles traditionally associated with the four categories are affection, friendship, romantic or sexual love, and charity. Lewis does not treat them as completely isolated emotions; instead, he considers how natural loves can be elevated or distorted and why they may need a larger moral framework.
The Four Loves is sometimes confused with The Allegory of Love, Lewis’s scholarly study of medieval love literature, published in 1936. The books have related subject matter but different purposes: The Allegory of Love is literary criticism, while The Four Loves is a popular philosophical and theological work.