Recently, I finished a reread of C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves, which as (as titled) Lewis’ discussion of the four different kinds of love - affection, friendship, eros, and charity. I recommend this book for any Christian, and Catholics especially, since Pope Benedict’s encyclical Deus Caritas Est contains many of the same ideas (if not developed in a more specifically Catholic direction).

To (hopefully) whet your appetite, here are a few excerpts dealing with each type of love:

1. Affection: “The dog barks at stranges who have never don it any harm and wags its tail for old acquaintances even if they never did it a good turn. The child will love a crusty old gardener who has hardly ever taken any notice of it and shrink from the visitor who is making every attempt to win its regard.”
2. Friendship: “The first and most obvious answer is that few value it because few experience it. And the possibility of going through life without the experience is rooted in that fact which separates Friendship so sharply from the other loves. Friendship is - in a sense not at all derogatory to it - the lease natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious, and necessary….In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? - or at least, “Do you care about the same truth?”
3. Eros: “Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved.”
4. Charity: “If the Victorians needed the reminder that love is not enough, older theologians were always saying very loudly that (natural) love is likely to be a great deal too much. The danger of loving our fellow-creatures too little was less present to their minds than loving them idolatrously. In every wife, mother, child and friend they saw a possible rival to God. So of course does Our Lord.”

In short, get it, read it. It is short and poignant, and well worth it.

–j.