The Four Loves examines affection, friendship, eros, and charity. C.S. Lewis developed the book from a 1958 BBC radio series and published it in book form in 1960.
Lewis uses different Greek terms to distinguish kinds of love that English often groups under one word. Storge describes natural affection, philia describes friendship, eros concerns romantic or sexual love, and agape—translated in the book as charity—refers to self-giving divine love.
The book is not simply a classification chart. Lewis explores how each form of love can be generous and life-giving, yet also become possessive or distorted when treated as absolute. His discussion combines Christian theology, literary examples, personal observation, and philosophical argument.
A common mix-up is to confuse The Four Loves with Lewis’s radio talks that became Mere Christianity. The two projects are related to his public Christian communication but are separate works. The Four Loves focuses specifically on human affections and their relationship to Christian charity.