Which C.S. Lewis book collects essays about affection, friendship, eros, and charity?

The Four Loves collects C.S. Lewis’s essays about affection, friendship, eros, and charity.

Published in book form in 1960, The Four Loves examines four traditional Greek categories of love: storge, philia, eros, and agape. Lewis translates or discusses them as Affection, Friendship, Romantic love, and Charity. The book grew from a BBC radio broadcast series, and its chapters combine literary examples, philosophical reflection, and Christian interpretation.

Lewis does not argue that these forms of love exist in completely separate compartments. Instead, he compares their strengths and weaknesses and considers how human loves can become possessive or distorted. He also presents divine love, or charity, as a perspective that can transform the other forms.

The title can be confused with a general collection of four unrelated essays, but the four categories provide the organizing structure of the entire work. The book is also separate from The Allegory of Love, Lewis’s earlier academic study of medieval literature, which was published in 1936.