The Four Loves

In early 1958 C.S. Lewis was approached by the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia to tape some recordings for broadcast in the US. He was free to select his own topic. Lewis responded:

The subject I want to say something about in the near future in some form or other is the four loves – Storge, Philia, Eros and Agape. This seems to bring in nearly the whole of Christian ethics.

Lewis wrote scripts for the project and then recorded the talks in London in August 1958. The scripts served as a basis for the book titled The Four Loves, published in 1960.  

Themes from The Four Loves appear in Lewis’s other works. His best-known academic book is The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Some of the vignettes in The Great Divorce illustrate distorted love. And all four of the loves are portrayed in Lewis’s final novel, Till We Have Faces.  

If you wish to hear Lewis reading “The Four Loves” as recorded for the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation, they may be found on YouTube.