The Four Loves explores affection, friendship, eros, and charity as four kinds of love. C.S. Lewis’s book was published in 1960 and developed from a 1958 BBC radio talk series.
Lewis uses Greek terms to distinguish the forms: storge for natural affection, philia for friendship, eros for romantic love, and agape for self-giving love. In the book, he commonly uses “charity” for agape, reflecting the language of older English translations of the Bible.
The categories are not presented as completely sealed compartments. Lewis discusses how the loves can overlap, become distorted, or be transformed when they are treated as ultimate ends. His argument is therefore more than a vocabulary lesson; it examines the strengths and dangers of human attachment.
A frequent mistake is to identify The Four Loves as a novel or as a retelling of classical mythology. It is a work of Christian reflection and popular philosophy, written in the accessible style associated with Lewis’s broadcast and apologetic works.