The Four Loves Study Guide

Clive Staples (C. S.) Lewis was born in Northern Ireland to Albert James Lewis, a solicitor, and Flora Lewis, the daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman. Growing up, Lewis—who adopted the nickname “Jack” as a young boy—lived with his parents and brother Warren in East Belfast, in a house called Little Lea.  Lewis loved spending time in his father’s massive library, and he lost his mother to cancer around the age of 10. Lewis entered Oxford University in 1916, but he was soon sent to France to fight in World War I. He was injured in 1918 and thereafter returned to Oxford, where he studied classics, philosophy, and English literature. From 1925–1954, he taught English literature in Oxford’s Magdalen College. Though Lewis had been a staunch atheist since his teen years, he became a Christian in 1931 and remained a committed member of the Church of England for the rest of his life. During World War II, he delivered a series of radio addresses that became the basis for his famous work of apologetics, Mere Christianity. In 1954, Lewis became Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University’s Magdalene College. Later in life, Lewis married Joy Davidman Gresham, an American woman with whom he had corresponded. She died just a few years later, in 1960, and Lewis followed her in 1963.

Lewis’s Christian background plays a central role The Four Loves. Lewis touches on a number of core Christian beliefs throughout the book, especially the Trinity (the Christian belief that God is eternally One in Three distinct Persons) and the Incarnation (the belief that Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, is both fully human and fully divine). These beliefs are key to his understanding of love, since he views God as eternally self-giving Love (in Trinitarian form) and Christ as the embodiment of Love (suggesting that human loves are themselves called to be both human and divine). Since Lewis’s ideas are steeped in earlier Christian thinkers dating back to the first century B.C.E., and he assumes a broadly Christian readership, this theological backdrop should be kept in mind when considering his ideas about love.

In The Four Loves, Lewis alludes to many classical writings, such as Plato’s Symposium (which includes an extended exploration of the nature of love), Cicero’s Amicitia (a treatise on friendship), and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (which discusses the pursuit of virtue, with friendship a key part of this). Dante’s Divine Comedy, which deeply influenced Lewis, is all about the soul’s journey to union with Divine Love. Lewis’s Mere Christianity explores the Christian life, including the practice of virtues like love, more broadly. His novel Till We Have Faces explores differences between earthly and divine love. A protégé of Lewis’s, Sheldon Vanauken, published an autobiographical book titled A Severe Mercy (1977), which describes how his love for his wife was transformed from a “pagan” love to a “Christian” one after their conversions, under Lewis’s influence.