The Four Loves
by C. S. Lewis · first published 1960
12mentions
6recommended by
11HN commenters
2012–2025first – last mentioned
55% recommend36% neutral9% critical
Why HN recommends it
Lewis distinguishes kinds of love, with eros and agape as central ideas, to help readers think about love beyond feeling. It is suited to anyone puzzling over unconditional or self-giving love.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
The novel based on the The Four Loves radio talks by C. S. Lewis.
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…to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." - C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves Yeah, you can get hurt. For sure, be wise about who you become emotionally dependent on. But not having your emotions entangled with another's is to miss one of the great joys of being alive.
on “Crying” ↗OP should read The Four Loves by CS Lewis. Unconditional love seems irrational if love is mainly a kind of feeling, but that's not the highest kind of love.
on “Unconditional Love” ↗Ah, but people do occasionally do seemingly-altruistic things, and by long experience, some of those are worth encouraging. "Love" in English wears too many hats. C.S. Lewis' Four Loves does a good job explaining how the highest and best use of eros (which can be selfish) is to encourage agape (selfless love). "The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true…
on “What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn” ↗Someone here recommended The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed, and I would add Mere Christianity and The Four Loves.
on “Ask HN: Best books on the psychology of religion?” ↗…through at the moment, that I increasingly understand as a consequence of both personal and societal-level abuse.) Since you are wondering about the healthiness of that emotion, try to read C.S. Lewis "The Four Loves": the Need love/Gift love opposition may have answers for you.
on “The game designer playing through his own psyche” ↗…^These three are probably the most important books I ever read, they probably changed the trajectory of my life more than any others on the list. Midnight's Children. Rushdie Roberts Rules of Order. The four loves Love languages A once popular anti catholic tract called "The Trail of Blood". Basically there is truth, falsehood, history, emotion and understanding in all these works, synthesizing these particular…
on “Ask HN: Life Changing Books?” ↗The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis [1] is about four different Greek words that are usually translated as "love" in English: storge, philia, eros, and agape. The self-sacrificing love, agape, is what the GP is talking about.…
on “Spinoza’s philosophy of freedom” ↗C.S. Lewis wrote about unconditional love in The Four Loves. “God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing - or should we say "seeing"? there…
on “The Gift” ↗…enlightening to look at another culture's words and see how they divide the world up differently from ours, and direct attention to things ours might miss. But I get the impression that ever since C S Lewis's "Four Loves" many people think that the ancient Greeks had a richer variety of understanding of human affections than we do because they had four words for "love" and we have only one, and I think that's all wrong.)
on “Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language” ↗…saying is that everyone should be considered based on their own individual choices. “We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
on “He Married a Sociopath: Me” ↗…sometimes the action motivates the feeling. It's weird. How can you love someone you don't even like? I just remembered that C. S. Lewis addressed this in one of his books (was it Mere Christianity or The Four Loves?). He said, there is one person you have been loving your whole life even when you don't like them, and that is yourself. Often we do things that we detest, and we berate ourselves over how terrible a…
on “Unconditional Love” ↗My immediate reaction was that the appropriate word is "eros". A variant of the Greek divisions is the one in CS Lewis's book "The Four Loves": affection, friendship, eros and charity.
on “Remembering a Medieval Polymath Who Paved the Way for the Renaissance” ↗