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Clive Staples Lewis, better known as C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), was an English novelist and thinker. Although he is best known for his fantasies and science fiction novels, such as The Chronicles of Narnia, he was also a philosophy and English professor at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He was a close friend of the writer J.R.R. Tolkien, and the thinker Owen Barfield, and these three had a deep intellectual and literary relationship. In his early 30s Lewis renewed his Christian faith, and some of his literary and philosophical works are religious. He died of kidney disease at the age of 64.

Lewis wrote dozens of philosophical essays and books, but perhaps the best known is book THE FOUR LOVES (1960), in which he discusses the unique characteristics of Storge (affection), Philia (friendship), Eros (erotic love), and Agape (charity love).

Lewis’ book The Four Loves (1960) is divided into four essays, each one dealing with a different kind of love: affection (Storge), friendship (Philia), Erotic love (Eros), and charity love (Agape).

The following passages are slightly adapted from the chapter on Eros. According to Lewis, one characteristic of erotic love is that lovers adore not only each other, but also their love itself. They are proud of their love, cherish their love, and use it as a justification for their extreme behavior.

Another characteristic of erotic love is that it feels as if it will remain forever, and lovers vow eternal love to each other. Yet, Eros is unreliable and usually ends quite quickly. Nevertheless, as long as it lasts it motivates the lovers to go beyond their self-interest and give themselves to the beloved. In this sense, erotic love gives us a glimpse of what selfless love can be. Although it is destined to end soon, it leaves us the task to work on the vision of selfless love and develop it.

Of all loves, Eros, at his height, is the most god-like, and therefore most inclined to demand our worship. He always tends to turn “being in love” into a sort of religion.

  Theologians have often feared, in this love, a danger of idolatry. I think they meant that the lovers might idolize one another. That does not seem to me to be the real danger, certainly not in marriage. The ordinary prose and business-like intimacy of married life make it absurd. […] The real danger seems to me not that the lovers will idolize each other, but that they will idolize Eros himself. […]

  When lovers say about their behavior which we might blame, “Love made us do it,” notice the tone [of speech]. A man saying, “I did it because I was frightened,” or “I did it because I was angry”, speaks quite differently. He is giving an excuse for what he feels to require excusing. But the lovers are rarely doing that.

  Notice how tremulously, how almost devoutly, they say the word “love,” not so much begging to be excused as appealing to an authority. The confession can be almost a boast. There can be a shade of defiance in it. They feel like martyrs. In extreme cases, what their words really express is a modest, yet unshakable, loyalty to the god of love.

  […] Eros seems to permit all sorts of actions which the lovers would not otherwise have dared. I do not mean only, or mainly, acts that violate chastity, but also acts of injustice or uncharity against the outer world. These acts will seem like proofs of devotion and zeal towards Eros. The couple can say to one another in an almost sacrificial spirit, “It is for love’s sake that I have neglected my parents, left my children, cheated my partner, failed my friend at his greatest need.” In the law of love, these reasons are regarded as good. The devotees may even come to feel a special value in such sacrifices: what costlier offering can be laid on love’s altar than one’s conscience?

  And all the time, the grim joke is that this Eros, whose voice seems to speak from the eternal realm, is not necessarily permanent. He is notoriously the most mortal of our loves. The world resonates with complaints about his changeability. What is baffling is the combination of this changeability with his declarations of permanence. To be in love is both to intend and to promise lifelong faithfulness. Love makes vows that are unasked – it can’t be stopped from making them. “I will be always faithful,” are almost the first words he utters. Not hypocritically but sincerely. No experience will cure the lover of the delusion. We have all heard of people who are in love again every few years, each time sincerely convinced that “this time it’s the real thing”, that their wanderings are over, that they have found their true love and will be true till death.

  And yet, Eros is, in a sense, right to make this promise. The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it would be transitory. In one high jump it has leaped over the massive wall of our selfhood. It has made desire itself altruistic, thrown aside as triviality personal happiness, and planted the interests of another person in the center of our being. Spontaneously and without effort, we have fulfilled (towards one person) the Biblical law of “Love your neighbor as yourself.” […] Eros is driven to promise what Eros by himself cannot perform.

  Can we be in this selfless liberation for a lifetime? Hardly for a week. Between the best possible lovers, this high condition is discontinuous. The old self soon turns out to be not so dead as he pretended – like after a religious conversion. In both of them he may be momentarily knocked flat; he will soon be up again; if not on his feet, at least on his elbow, if not roaring, at least back to his rude grumbling or his begging complaints. And Venus will often slide back into mere sexuality.

  But these pauses will not destroy a marriage between two “decent and sensible” people. The couple whose marriage will be endangered by them, and possibly ruined, are those who have idolized Eros. They thought he had the power and truthfulness of a god. They expected that mere feeling would do for them all that was necessary, and permanently so. When this expectation is disappointed, they throw the blame on Eros or, more usually, on their partners.

  In reality, however, Eros, after making his gigantic promise and showing you in glimpses what its performance would be like, has “done his stuff”. He, like a godparent, makes the vows; it is we who must keep them. It is we who must labor to bring our daily life into always closer agreement with what the glimpses have revealed. We must do the works of Eros when Eros is not present.

  […] Eros cannot be by himself what, nevertheless, he must be if he is to remain Eros. He needs help; therefore he needs to be ruled. The god dies or becomes a demon unless he obeys God. It would be better if, in such case, he always died. But he may live on, mercilessly chaining together two mutual tormentors, each one full with the poison of hate-in-love, each greedy to receive and mercilessly refusing to give, jealous, suspicious, resentful, struggling for the upper hand, determined to be free and to allow no freedom, living on “making a scene.”

The following text is adapted from Lewis’ book The Four Loves (1960). Here he explains that affection is a “small” or “modest” kind of love that we feel towards people we know around us: towards the cleaning woman we see every morning, towards the waiter in our favorite restaurant, towards the neighbor. These people are not our friends, and their lives may be very different from ours. In fact, we may have very little in common, and very little to talk about. Still, we feel a sense of warmth and intimacy towards them. In this sense, affection can open our eyes to the goodness in people which we would otherwise not notice.

  Affection is the least discriminating kind of love. […] Almost anyone can become an object of Affection: the ugly, the stupid, even the annoying. There need not be any apparent similarity between those whom Affection unites. […] It ignores the barriers of age, sex, class and education. It can exist between a clever young man from the university and an old nanny, though their minds inhabit different worlds. It ignores even the barriers of species. We see it not only between dog and man but, more surprisingly, between dog and cat.

[…]

Affection is the humblest kind of love. It does not show off. People can be proud of being in love, or of friendship. Affection is modest, even secretive and shy. […] Now, Affection has a very homely [not elegant] face. So have many of those for whom we feel it. It is no proof of our refinement or perceptiveness that we love them; nor that they love us. […] Affection would not be affection if it was expressed loudly and frequently. To present it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tasteless or grotesque in the sunshine. Affection almost sneaks or seeps through our lives. It lives with humble, non-elegant, private things: soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog's tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing-machine.

[…]

Affection is not primarily an Appreciative kind of love. It is not discriminating. It can get along with the most unpromising people. Yet, oddly enough, this very fact means that it ends up making appreciations possible which, without it, might never have existed. […] Friends and lovers feel that they were "made for one another." The special glory of Affection is that it can unite those who most definitely, even comically, are not; people who, if they had not found themselves by coincidence in the same home or community, would have had nothing to do with each other.

If Affection grows out of this – of course, it often does not – their eyes begin to open. When I grow fond of "old so-and-so," at first simply because he happens to be there, I now begin to see that there is "something in him" after all. The moment when one first says, really meaning it, that although he is not "my sort of man" he is a very good man "in his own way" is a moment of liberation. It does not feel like that; we may feel only tolerant and indulgent. But really we have crossed a frontier. This "in his own way" means that we are getting beyond our own idiosyncrasies, that we are learning to appreciate goodness or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence flavored and served to suit our own taste.

[…] Affection broadens our minds. Of all natural loves, it is the most catholic, the least choosy, the broadest. The people with whom you are thrown together in the family, the college, the military unit, the ship, the religious house, are from this point of view a wider circle than your friends […] The truly wide taste in reading enables a man to find something for his needs on the six-penny shelf outside any second-hand bookshop. The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who "happen to be there." Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, stranger than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

[…] Affection does not expect too much, it turns a blind eye to faults, it comes back to life easily after quarrels. Like charity, it suffers long and is kind and forgives. Affection opens our eyes to goodness we could not have seen, or would not have appreciated without it.