The Four Loves

Lewis sets Charity apart from the “natural loves” because they are not “self-sufficient” (116). He uses the example of a beautiful garden. In its own right, the garden is a good thing, but it requires a gardener to nurture it and help it reach its potential. If left untended, the garden will become overrun with weeds and languish, and so it is with the “natural loves” (116). They are good in Lewis’s view, but they are not enough on their own. Unless they are nurtured by a higher love, they remain mere feelings.

The world that God created is compared to the garden, with God as the gardener. It is God’s grace that shapes Charity, and Charity is the love that helps the natural loves reach their potential, while mitigating their shortcomings. 

In the Confessions of Saint Augustine, Augustine mourns the death of a friend and reflects on his despair: “This is what comes of giving one’s heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away” (120).

Lewis describes his own temperament as being “safety-first” (120). He is interested in avoiding suffering, but his conscience does not allow him to avoid love, even though “[t]o love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken” (121). If “God is love” (1), as he has stated throughout, then love must be a regular practice in a Christian’s life. It cannot be willfully avoided, even for reasons of self-protection.

For Lewis, the withholding of love is similar to the Biblical maxim that cautions against hiding one’s talent in a bush. A talent—and the loves—are gifts from God. If they are hidden and unused, it is an act of ingratitude.

A problem may arise in the mind of the man who feels that he loves his “earthly” (123) family, or spouse, more than God, simply because of the intensity of his feelings towards them, and their physical nearness. Lewis cautions against weighing the love of God as a simple comparative intensity of feeling. It is more useful, rather, to ask oneself: “Who do you serve, or put first. To which claim does your will, in the last resort, yield?” (123). In this way, one’s ultimately loyalty can be determined despite the presence, or absence, of fleeting feelings of love.

Lewis quotes Christ from the book of Luke: “If any man come to me and hate not his own father and mother and wife, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (123). But in Lewis’s view, Christ is defining hate as rejection, not an intense feeling of aversion. For example, Jesus also said: “A man who tries to serve two masters will hate one and love the other” (123). When a man is sufficiently devoted to God, his divided loyalties may look like hate or indifference towards his “earthly loves” (123), unless they share his faith.

In the concluding pages, Lewis returns to the maxim “God is Love” (1) and attempts to define it more specifically than previously in the book. He begins with this point: “The doctrine that God was under no necessity to create is not a piece of dry scholastic speculation. It is essential” (126). Because God needs nothing, human beings can be seen as superfluous, unless God created them solely to love and perfect them. Lewis compares God to a “host,” and his human creations to benign “parasites” who may then “take advantage” of His ultimate power (127). In this sharing of ultimate power, Lewis sees “the diagram of love Himself, the inventor of all loves” (127).

The metaphor of Gift-love is extended in God’s case. What God possesses is what Lewis calls “Divine Gift-love” (128), and God instills a portion of it in each person. When a righteous Christian seeks to perfect himself, it is the closest he can come to giving a gift back to God, who needs nothing. And because part of the Christian mission is to care for others and also bring them to Christ, each Christian can, in effect, “give” (129) the gift of other souls to God. For Lewis, this is Charity in its purest form.

For people who want to be loved for their attractiveness, cleverness, wealth, or achievements, the Charity a Christian tries to bestow on them may not look like love at all: “We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot naturally be loved. It is no one’s fault if they do not love it. Only the lovable can be naturally loved” (133). This is what truly sets Charity apart from the natural loves. It allows people to love what is unlovable. Therefore, each person, however unlovable they may be, can always receive love—Charity—from another person who is acting as God instrument.

However, when Christian action becomes “too vocal” or “elaborate” or “showy” (134), it ceases to be Charity and is mere exhibitionism. These people are often “unnecessarily asking, or insufferably offering, forgiveness” (134). True Charity is uncalculating and largely unconscious. It is the difference between playing a game with a child to prove that the child is loved and assuage one’s conscience, versus playing with a child because it is a good thing to do and will make the child feel loved.

Lewis presents Charity as the antidote to life’s frustrations and fears: “The invitation to turn our natural loves into Charity is never lacking” (135). Everyone occasionally requires patience and forgiveness. This means that everyone also has the continual chance to practice these virtues, which are a hallmark of Charity.

The book closes as Lewis states that “reunion with the loved dead is not the goal of Christian life. The denial of this may sound harsh and unreal in the ears of the broken hearted, but it must be denied” (138). There is no guarantee in the Bible that loved ones will even recognize each other in Heaven, should they both get there. Living righteously in the hopes of seeing a deceased Beloved again is not the essence of true Christian belief, and therefore is not the pure practice of Charity and the other loves: “We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only be being a manifestation of His beauty, loving-kindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love” (139). Further, after a death, “[w]e are compelled to try to believe that God is our true Beloved” (140).

The loss itself may be what leads to the beginnings of true faith: “God can awake in man, towards Himself, a supernatural Appreciative love. This is of all gifts the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true centre [sic] of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible” (140).