Which 1960 book by C.S. Lewis examines affection, friendship, erotic love, and charity?

The Four Loves is C.S. Lewis’s 1960 book about affection, friendship, erotic love, and charity.

The book developed from a series of BBC radio talks and presents four Greek terms as a framework for discussing human love. Storge refers to natural affection, philia to friendship, eros to sexual or romantic love, and agape to self-giving love; Lewis uses “charity” for the highest, divinely grounded form.

Lewis does not treat the categories as sealed compartments. Real relationships can involve several kinds of love, and each human form can become distorted when treated as self-sufficient. His discussion therefore combines literary examples, Christian theology, and observations about everyday relationships.

The Four Loves is sometimes mistaken for a novel because of Lewis’s many fictional works, but it is nonfiction. It also differs from The Allegory of Love, his academic study of medieval and Renaissance literature, published in 1936.