“Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. “To love at all is to be vulnerable,” he says. Among them is the risk we take in loving. In 1958, when Lewis does have his thoughts fully down in The Four Loves, he offers helpful insights into love. Jesus says in John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” It is this agape love that we are called to participate in, but as with Aslan, our safety is not promised, not as the world defines it. To give up ourselves is perhaps the most difficult. “ Giving money is only one way of showing charity: to give time & toil is far better and (for most of us) harder.” “Agape is all giving, not getting,” Lewis says. He goes on to mention Paul’s passage in I Corinthians and how Jesus said that what we do for the least among us, we do for him. So there are 4 kinds of ‘love’, all good in their proper place, but Agape is the best because it is the kind God has for us and is good in all circumstances… I can practise Agape to God, Angels, Man & Beast, to the good & the bad, the old & the young, the far and the near.” to distinguish it from Eros (sexual love), Storge (family affection) and Philia (friendship). 19, 1954, Lewis says, “ Charity means love. Before there was Lewis’ radio talk on four different kinds of love, produced by the BBC in 1958 (the only audio that we have still remaining of Lewis himself), and the subsequent publishing of The Four Loves in 1960, we have a reference in his letters about his thoughts on love, based in the Scriptures.

Cs lewis types of love